Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence’s house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain.

» Continue reading “Podcast 231-Damer-McKenna: “Bruce, Terence, and Virtual Worlds””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]

“The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup.”

“[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists’ beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere.”

“Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life.”

“The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people’s minds more than on the streets. It’ll be in the minds first.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 220-Damer: “EvoGrid: The Ultimate Nerd Project””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences.”

“For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status.” (This was in response to a question about legal highs.)

“Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them.” (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.)

“Science fiction is the gateway drug.”

“I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.”

“Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 198 – “Terence McKenna on NPR – 1999″”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.]

“What  Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral.”

“So if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis.”

“If you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 184 – “The Boundaries of the Human Mind””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: The following quotes are by Bruce
Damer.]

“It seems as though the universe is a sort of self-contained thing, never looses any information.”

“A mechanism called ‘life’ was able to fight against all this crud, and entropy, and fires and brimstone and preserve this little piece of information [DNA] forward, and it’s called reproduction, it’s called life. And that process has outlived the life of most stars. It’s certainly older and tougher and more resilient than all the configuration of the continents.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 139 – “Is the Universe Waking Up””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Bruce Damer]

08:17 Bruce tells about the three-day white out that followed the 2002 Burning Man festival.

15:59 Bruce talks about the problem of dust on the moon.

18:46“We all grew up seeing buried lunar bases and happy astronauts running around mining and other things, it ain’t going to happen. I concluded, after a lifetime of believing this and two years of actually working on this problem, that we’re not going to do this. We don’t have the technology.”

21.52 “How rare are we in the universe? How rare a thing are we?”
» Continue reading “Podcast 106 – “The Ultimate Revelation: How Rare We Are in the Universe””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

05:29
Bruce tells the story of the first and only Terence McKenna workshop that was held in a virtual world in cyberspace.

07:00 The story of the bizarre dreams Terence McKenna was having in the weeks before his first major seizure.
» Continue reading “Podcast 085 – “The Great Project of the Universe””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer and Galen Brandt
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PROGRAM NOTES:

Terence McKenna once called Bruce Damer “a visionary’s visionary,” and Bruce certainly lived up to that reputation in his 2003 Burning Man presentation. Combining subjects as diverse as evolution, psychedelic experiences, and physics, he builds a mental construct to rival Olaf Stapleton’s classic workStarmaker.

In addition to Bruce’s ideas about a conscious universe, we were also treated to an inspiring rap by his wife, Galen Brandt, as she explains the lure of the Burning Man experience.