Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Terence Mckenna: Earliest Lecture Recorded

Dennis Terence McKenna Photo 1957

From our friend Lorenzo 
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Podcast 267:
Exploring the Abyss
Download: Mp3 File

This is possibly the oldest Terence McKenna lecture in existence. Recorded November 1982. The workshop was titled New & Old Maps of Hyperspace: Dreams, Hallucinogens & UFO’s.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they’re metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.”

“What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.”

“Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright.”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“[UFOs are], in other words, something which in order not to alarm us has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche signaling a profound historical crisis.”

“A mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack.”

“Eternity does not have a temporal existence, even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed. It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity.”

“We are not primarily biology with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. And the shadow in matter is the body.”

“The whole purpose of shamanism, and of life correctly lived, is to strengthen the soul and strengthen the relationship to the soul, so that this passage [death] can be cleanly made.”

“Technology is the real skin of our species.”

“There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliacosoms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”

“An Aquarian science, or a science that places psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation, should move toward a practical realization of the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the overself.”

“This [psilocybin] is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.”

“We can release this thing once again. The logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenadies and Hericlitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people. And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.”

“But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens, is information, immense amounts of information.”

“Only through the medium of sight can the true modality of this logos be perceived.”

“This situation called ‘history’ is totally unique. It will only last for a moment. It began a moment ago. It will only last for a moment. But in that moment there is like this tremendous burst of static as the monkey goes to godhood.”

“We, and I, we are intellectuals trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good Act of Contrition. That won’t be sufficient. . . . Because to fear death is to not understand what’s going on. And to even see it as a big deal is to not understand what’s going on, although I don’t claim to have reached that exalted plane.”

www.EROCx1.com

San Francisco Gathering Sets

The Gathering Sets

These MP3 files are created from WAV files, which were generated from the DATs recorded from the mixing desk at each party.

The_Gathering_1

We started recording with audio tapes from 1992 to 1996, and with DAT from 1996 onwards. We intend to create MP3 files from the content of the audio tapes and post them here over the next few months.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Terence McKenna: The Final Interview

From my friend Lorenzo & Erik Davis / Wired Magazine

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Podcast 262 – “Terence McKenna’s Last Interview” Download Mp3
Podcast 263 – “Terence McKenna’s Last Interview” Download Mp3

Terence McKenna - EROCx1 

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“But I did [as a child] spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul, and the nature of sin, and all of these imponderables. And, of course, what you end up doing is you end up reading scholars of mysticism.”

“To me it’s the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience, it’s when you get the logos coming out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.”

“[Speaking about how to pursue a psychedelic culture.] Well, I’d say the wrongly-packaged version would be something like ‘Castenadaism’, a formulaic cult. Do these things, take these drugs, follow these instructions and moral obligation will flee from your kin. Nobody can be that foolish. If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff, grow the plants, try to understand it, try to revivify the rituals and figuring out what it’s all about, well, that’s an authentic push towards spirituality, a very authentic push towards spirituality, and probably fruitful.”
“It seems to me that ‘the shamanic drug of the month’ is not a very appealing idea.”

“The basic concept [of alchemy] is that somehow intuition and nature are reflective of each other. Until that hypothesis fails we should probably hang on to it, because look how far we’ve gotten. I mean it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.”

“[I'm hoping] that some lack of resource or vision doesn’t reveal that we can’t give enough people a bearable life. So we [would then] have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil, and struggle for resources. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“Now let’s see if information can liberate. That’s why I don’t want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate. And it will be settled in the next ten or fifteen years. Either they’ll get a handle on it, whoever ‘they’ are, whatever a ‘handle means. Or it will slip from their control, and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge, and that nothing can stop it, that some kind of Renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.”

“The trick to making the shamanic virtual world compelling is to fairly and truly convey it. You can’t cut corners. You can’t fake it. . . . So that this stuff really does blow people’s minds, so that people see, well, human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul. It doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re wearing too tight a pair of shoes.”

“We have no idea how strange the world we can create in the near term will be.”

“Given the circumstances as we find them, what rational momentum is there to think that life is unique and arose on this planet only?”

“I think that’s the question that remains unanswered, you know, that’s the grail of the thing. What is the nature of the Other, is basically what you’re asking. Is it a construct, a projection or a discovery? It’s not clear to me what it is.”
“ You can’t believe everything you hear. The are of many kind, ‘some are made of ions, some of mind, the ones of DMT, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.’”

“I think [ketamine] is an inter-uterine memory drug. I think there are things about it that cause you to recapture some kind of inter-uterine state.”

“The psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing. It isn’t just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed or something like that.”

“Mathematics is really what it’s all about when you finally get it sliced thin, I think.”

“All doubt means is that ‘I’m shopping, thank you.’”

[Before I had cancer] I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind were naturally available to people, and non-lethal. In other words that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures and experience very bizarre states of body/mind dislocation and have it not kill you. So now I see that the spectrum of human experience is a lot broader than I previously imagined.”

“The mind can adjust to a great deal more than that which simply kills it.”

“Given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death. It’s bound to be mighty strange, life was mighty strange, and I’m curious. … It’s an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life left, because it composes your mind for you, wonderfully.”

“What psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises. I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle. The fact that that can happen to your mind. So it means that all kinds of things are possible.”

www.EROCx1.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death


History of Media in America
Education for your Edification

Peace Revolution Podcast #25

By: Neil Postman

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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
(1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman.

The book's origins lie in a talk Postman gave in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's 1984, where they were oppressed by state control.

Invitation link to the Tragedy and Hope online community

Neil Postman (1931 — 2003) was an American critic and educator. Postman received his B.S. from the State University of New York at Fredonia and his M.A. and Ed.D. from Columbia University. He was the Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology at New York University and chair of the Department of Culture and Communication. His pedagogical and scholarly interests included media and education, as can be seen in many of his seventeen books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), and End of Education (1995). Postman died in 2003.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

2012 Message of Hope: Global Meditation

We are arranging a monthly world meditation, visualization and prayer across the whole wide world to heal ourselves and the planet and lift the consciousness of every being. Join us in global meditation! You can meditate on the first Sunday or at the New Moon in every month, or both. We do this because the NEW MOON is an unbiased celestial event strongly linked to our psyche happening at the same global time all over the planet, unlike the calendar event that is bound to the western calendar. But now you can choose.

There is no time left to be complacent. The world is changing now. Not tomorrow. Be part of the change for good. The love. Not the fear. Let go your attachment to the old world and embrace the new.

Learn to meditate for free! Ten day course: www.dhamma.org/

The most important thing is that everyone is aware of the day being a World Meditation Day with people meditating all around the world at this day. Be it at the same global time, or different times during the 24 hour period. If you don’t sit in meditation you can spend the time sending love and positive feelings to your surroundings.

DATE 1: First Sunday of every month.

Anytime during the Sunday will be fine, but the core time is 7 – 8 in the evening, local time.

DATE 2: New Moon of every month.

Anytime during the New Moon day will be fine, but the core hour STARTS at the New Moon global time.

Use the New Moon calendar to find the next new moon or look at the list to the right.

Use the timezone converter to find your local time.

PLACE: Your home, a church, a mosque, a classroom, outside, wherever you are.

WITH: Your group, your self, friends, family, collegues, anyone.

HOW: Anyway you want. Check out our meditation page for a guided audio meditation, and links for how to meditate and different approaches to this.

Join the Choice Point Facebook community

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

UC Berkeley : Drugs and Behavior

berkeley_lg

University of California Berkeley
Psych 119 Drugs and Behavior
Instructor
David Presti, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer of Neurobiology, his areas of expertise include the chemistry of the human nervous system, the effects of drugs on the brain and mind, and the scientific study of mind and consciousness.

Course Syllabus for 2010

ASUC Lecture Notes Online

Psych 119: Drugs and the Brain. A survey course exploring the basic principles of psychopharmacology. The major focus of the course is on the relationship between behavior and the physiological actions of drugs. Emphasis will be placed on effects of pharmacological agents on complex mental processes such as attention, motivation, learning, and memory.

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Psych 119: Lecture 1


Psych 119: Lecture 2


Psych 119: Lecture 3


Psych 119: Lecture 4


Psych 119: Lecture 5


Psych 119: Lecture 6


Psych 119: Lecture 7


Psych 119: Lecture 8


Psych 119: Lecture 9


Psych 119 - Lecture 10


Psych 119: Lecture 11


Psych 119: Lecture 13


psych 119: Lecture 14


Psych 119: Lecture 15


Psych 119: Lecture 16


Psych 119: Lecture 17


Psych 119: Lecture 18


Psych119_Lecture 19


Psych 119: Lecture 20


Psych 119: Lecture 21


Psych 119: Lecture 22


Psych 119: Lecture 23


Psych 119: Lecture 25


Psych119: Lecture 27


Psych 119: Lecture 28


Psych 119: Lecture 29

David Presti

Quiz Answer Forms

New York City Marijuana Arrest Analysis 2008

"Letting Go: Smoking and non-smoking" by David Sedaris

Tips for Quitting Smoking

SAMHSA and NIDA Tobacco Use Data

SAMHSA Alcohol Use Data

Cannabis Prevalence Data

Some approximate caffeine contents


William James