Humans On The Loop

This week’s guest is visionary artist Jake Kobrin, whose digital paintings explore a gorgeous, dark, evocative terrain of non-ordinary human experience and twist religious iconography into a metamorphic form well-suited to our psychedelic modern era.We discuss his painting “Black Madonna” and the return and healing of the repressed feminine – not just women, but the body, the psychological shadow, marginalized peoples, death, and transformation…We talk about Jake’s artistic intuition, nontraditional relationships, the reality of love, and my transformation from living in a haunted house to realizing the “ghost” was my own disowned soul…If you are, or love, a witch, you’ll dig this episode. Jake’s Website: http://kobrinart.com More Topics We Discuss:• The nonduality of the sacred and profane;• Intuition and the creative process, allowing the art to speak through you;• Eden & Apocalypse, with history in the middle;• Light & Dark, Good & Evil as “conceptual impositions” that don’t really exist “in nature”;• Mary Magdalene, Judas, and The Scapegoat;• The evolution of cell division as failed excretion and the relationship between sex and death;• James Hollis’ book The Eden Project: The Search for the Magical Other, and how we seek out lovers based on unconscious images of our idealized early childhood caregivers• Being a better partner to yourself first before relying on lovers• Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Mastery of Love• Hakim Bey’s book Temporary Autonomous Zone and ontological anarchy versus the social ego (as a function of wilderness)• B Catling’s book The Vorrh• “cis-relational” “cis-racial” and other “yes I am this thing” labels• Graphic Novel, The Wicked & The Divine, and japanese sun goddess AmaterasuAnd Jake reads his short piece about the spiritual authority of the Black Madonna.Here’s an AMAZING related piece by theologian Matthew Fox: http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-century “Understanding that my self is kind of alien to me, and a mystery, I can’t really judge…”“All things are inherently pure and it’s more like our projection onto that that is less than pure…The Christ saw The Magdalene in her essential purity.”“Our lives and our relationships are these formless, complex, infinite things, and I would rather exist in that framework than try to limit myself to conceptual boxes about the way I see things and how I project ideas of what my life is.”“What is considered manly – certainly, that projection within American culture – I don’t relate to that AT ALL, and it just makes me go, ‘ew.’”“I think we can just let our experiences exist without NEEDING to put them in a category as ‘real’ or ‘not-real’…” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on PatreonThis week’s guest is my friend Lindsay Loftin, a professional mermaid who uses her performances to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. She also boasts 60 pushups in two minutes and the ability to transform phone-addicted schoolchildren into avid gardeners.https://www.facebook.com/mermaidsforcleanwater/ We Discuss:• How mermaid performances can help us transform our relationship to nature;• Sea goats and other weird half-and-half creatures, and how the Capricorn’s ambitious in-between-ness was a prophesy of amphibians as an emblem of evolutionary “ascent”;• Remembering in our bodies the importance of the health of our environment and our right relationship to nature;• Ecology as a mystical experience or way of being awake;• The changing definition of nature once you think of the atmosphere as an artifact created by primordial ooze;• Epigenetics, landscape agency, cities as automatic outgrowths of the lithosphere, and the argument against free will from a planet’s point of view;• Plastics and endocrine disruption related sterility;• Activism!;• Whales;• David Pearce’s anti-species-ist manifesto;• Responsible tourist information about how to visit wild places respectfully;…and much more. I go off the deep end and talk about the possibility of ACTUALLY BECOMING mermaids with CRISPR, and the social consequences of the end of a common “human” body.Then we talk for another hour. Lindsay tells some AMAZING animal stories. She has never been injured. Lindsay Loftin:“I want to be the Bill Nye of mermaids.”“I think when little girls see me holding my breath for two minutes and swimming around Barton Springs, it blows their minds…they’re thinking, ‘Science is not what I thought it was.’”“It’s our time to return to the water. At least in our focus and our awareness. Because you know, the way our culture is going is so far removed from any sort of connection to nature as I’ve come to understand it. So that’s a systemic illness, in my opinion. My work…lies with healing that rift, that illness.”“No two people react to nature in the same way. The way I experience going out side is kind of like a landscape level. Which, as an ecologist, I’m mapping in my brain how energy is flowing from the air, into that tree, into me, into the soil – the water going across the landscape, where that’s going, what animals are here – I’m seeing all of that at the same time.”“I can pretty much guarantee you that you drank plastic within the last week…essentially, we are becoming plastic.”“As someone who works with other people’s children, I just cannot stand the thought of sitting here waiting [for plastic-eating bacteria to save the world].”“I don’t even have an Instagram. People hear that, and they’re like, ‘But you’re a mermaid!’”“Dangerous wildlife finds me, gets as close to me as possible, and then completely leaves me alone. I can’t really explain why, but that seems to be one of my gifts: that animals are A attracted to me, and B have no interest in eating me.”“If birds get really loud, or suddenly really quiet, both of those are times when you should pause and evaluate your surroundings.” MG:“Could plastic-eating bacteria be used to generate the electricity required to mine Bitcoin?” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In one of the most QUOTABLE episodes of Future Fossils yet, this week’s guest is Eliot Peper – a “novelist and strategist” writing fiction and consulting businesses about the social implications of disruptive technologies. In addition to writing a steady stream of sci-fi inflected techno-thrillers like True Blue and Cumulus, he’s an editor at Scout.AI (one of the cooler speculative fiction websites I’ve seen out there). http://www.eliotpeper.com/http://scout.ai/ We Discuss:• The power of science fiction to help us imagine future scenarios;• The possible social impact of radical life extension (gerontocratic radical conservatives vs. an emergent mature wisdom culture);• The Superstar Effect and how it might play out in the digital age;• The awesomeness of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway;• Eliot’s skepticism of mind uploading and conscious AI;• The specter of technological unemployment;• Science fiction’s growing significance to corporate think-tanks and creative labs in a future-facing society;• How science fiction is like traveling to a foreign country – and teaches us more about our own moment than it does about the future;• And More! Quotes:“We don’t call it ‘life extension,’ we just call it ‘healthcare.’”“I think there is a very misleading public discussion going on around these topics [mind uploading and conscious AI], for a very simple reason. And that is – and I know this as a storyteller – metaphors matter…the human mind is very poor at distinguishing metaphor from reality. That’s what makes art fun! That’s what makes novels entertaining. We experience them as if they are real. Money is that. It only exists because we can build these complex shared fictions. However, those fictions can come back and bite you in the ass. And one of the ways they do it is, we take the metaphor too far.”“[Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] takes the extension of the Industrial Revolution into the imagination of dystopia. And I think we’re doing that right now when we’re talking about uploading our minds, and about creating general AIs…I just think we’re taking the computer analogy too far.”“Technology is most useful to the extent that it is inhuman.”“The whole point of technology is that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish more effectively – or, said another way, we can do less of what sucks.”“Getting better at the skill of putting yourself in another person’s shoes is really important, and fiction is a great training ground for that. It can illuminate so much about why we do what we do that we can apply in our lives.”“I think what makes science fiction as a genre interesting is its insights about the PRESENT.”“I seek out discomfort. I seek out novel experiences that challenge me and that are not always fun. And I try to talk to people from different fields and learn from them, because I’ve learned that in my own life that having a really strange and somewhat random set of life experiences allows me to have a fresh perspective sometimes on a new problem.”“The most important things about the world and about what it means to be human are very obvious and very old. And I think it’s especially important to remember that when we feel like we’re in the midst of a whirlwind of change that we don’t understand. And that the world we want to build and the lives that we want to lead – either today in 2017, or in 2117 – is that we need to be kind to each other. We need to help our friends out. Even more important, to help out strangers. To pay things forward instead of trying to think about the benefits that accrue to us. To make sacrifices – meaningful, painful sacrifices – financial, emotional, or otherwise – to help each other out. I think that building a better world is just a thousand small acts of kindness.” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network.  Bloom Network:http://bloomnetwork.org Magenta’s Personal Website:http://www.imaginationhealer.com/ We discuss: - The adoption of regenerative culture practices;- Cultivating planetwide resiliency in an age of thousands of years of unprocessed grief and trauma;- Web native permaculture psychedelic anarchy;- Communicating across HUGE political gaps (esp. with family);- Cool Bloom Network community initiatives happening around the world;- What will it take to adapt our technological environment to suit a more humane and grounded ecological society?- The relationship between the Wood Wide Web of interspecies partnerships and the maturing World Wide Web of human making.- How can we be good ancestors?- A “relational, omnidirectional nowness where we embrace as our own body the other organisms on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of stuff through space”- Synchronicity & Diachronicity- An academic angle on decolonizing consciousness. :)- the inspiration for Intergenerational Psychedelic Dialogues Podcast Quotes: “Another key is coming to this conception of time that is relational and omnidirectional, and this nowness in which we embrace as our own body the other organisms that are on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of movement of stuff through space…” “We’ve disconnected from some of the fungal and soil networks and if we’re going to continue to survive, and that layer of machine-embodied intelligence is going to survive, we need to learn to be in symbiosis with the Earth that we’re on. If we’re going to make this leap to colonizing other planets, to star travel…” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is philosopher Kerri Welch, whose doctoral thesis from CIIS (and current book-in-progress) explore a fractal model of time. If you have ever wondered about time, this episode is for you. Instant classic. Kerri’s Academic Papers & Talks:https://ciis.academia.edu/KerriWelch Kerri’s Blog:https://textureoftime.wordpress.com We take a wild tour through the layers of the human brain and mind, examining the correlations between different brain waves and their correspondent states of consciousness – and speculate on our experience of time as an evolved response to a far more complex and awesome world than we can possibly conceive!Twenty minutes in and we’ve already covered the fractal nature of time and we’re on to explaining what happens to the modern self and its boundaries in the torrent of novelty that awaits un in a digital age. Then we go deep for another hour and a half… DISCUSSED:• Fate vs Free Will in light of Chaos Theory• The relationship between technology and our experience of time, overstimulated, interrupted• How Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness overlay on EEG data• The nature of synchronicity & time vs. timelessness• The effects of ayahuasca, illness, aging, and other time-warping events on the passage of time• Singularities and our asymptotic approach to transcendence• Narrative collapse, fake news, and the end of history• Relativity, scaling laws, and city time vs. country time• What was before TIME?• Pet telepathy as a matter of referential framing• The “future” causing the “past”…• …and the physics (and psychology!) of how to feel the future.• Schizophrenia as possibly a disorder of time perception• Dopamine levels and the experience of duration• Human chronobiology adapted to other planet’s days• Integrating the rational mind with transpersonal experience  QUOTES:“We actually can’t get precise enough to bring the level of predictability that physics once thought it could.”“Children have to be indoctrinated into time, right? They’re not born into linear time. They’re born in a timeless space, and that’s where they live, and then they live in this hypnagogic dream time, which is all present moment. You’ll hear kids say, like, ‘I remember when you were little’ to their parents.”“When we restrict ourselves to linear causal thinking, we are coarse-graining the present moment. We are glossing over the infinite depth of richness available within the present moment. And of course it’s paradoxical: we coarse-grain it by dividing it more finely.”“What we’re experiencing in our culture right now is the entrainment to the fast frequencies. We’re not letting the long slow frequencies have the greatest amplitude. What does that look like? It looks like hanging out with rocks and trees and elders. And that’s the integration that we need in order to nest our super-fast frequencies within, in order to give them direction…if we can nest within the natural structures of the long, slow frequencies that surround us, it will guide these fast frequencies in healthier directions.”“We REALLY just have to get better at holding multiple realities. AND recognizing what’s important about them.”“The dog comes and sits by the door half an hour before the owner comes home because to the dog, the owner’s already home. Their moment is big enough that it’s happening already. But we’re so finely dividing things that we’re like, ‘It’s half an hour away! It’s an eternity!’ But for the dog that’s been sitting bored at home all day…”“Free will comes from a future influence we can’t see. That’s one way I would interpret it.”“The definition of human experience is, to me, the limitation of infinity, in order to have experience.”     Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan, who regards his practice as a sacred act and tattoo as a kind of binding of time in the body.https://www.mountaintempletattoo.com/ We talk about:• how he became a tattoo artist and came into “transformational tattooing” as a way of communicating with and programming the subconscious mind;• other ways we bind time into matter with earthworks art and pre-Columbian mounds;• the difference between choosing your own tattoos and the more traditional style of having them chosen for you by the artist;• the virtue and value of The Ordeal in personal transformation;• seeing skin art as a transcultural phenomenon connecting us to other tribes and traditions across time and space;• and the future of tattoo as an art form and a culture, in which skin art merges with speech as part of a new, richer, more embodied language… “If you had to put something in your bathroom mirror…what would you want in your bathroom mirror FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? That feedback loop with the imagery with which we surround ourselves is TOTALLY game-changing and shifting.”“What identity do I want to imprint upon my life? What connection to something within me do I want to see empowered and enhanced? And the tattoo becomes this living reflection of that enhancement, that empowerment, that connection, alignment.”“So much of our cultural perspective is about comfort and convenience – and to do something that is physically taxing, emotionally and mentally demanding on a level of momentary transcendence – it’s new for a lot of people.”“The tattoo artist and the machinery that they use are going to become more and more intuitive and integrated…kind of like when I oil paint, or even when I get into a flow with dot work and stippling, I don’t even feel like I’m doing it. I’m watching myself INTEND it.”  Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week we continue the special two-part conversation with historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson.  Author of dozens of sweeping works of synthetic insight, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community:  The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years.  In his latest and last book, Thinking Together at the Edge of History, Thompson looks back on the failures and successes of this project, which he regards as a “first crocus” budding up through the snow of our late-industrial dark age to herald the arrival of a planetary renaissance still yet to come.  This episode pivots from a contemplation of Lindisfarne’s history to our navigation of the turbulence between two world eras – how will we weather all this change, and what new life and worldview awaits us on the other side? We talk about surfing the “winds of creative destruction” in a highly volatile digital economy; the emergence of the elemental spirits of the land into our demon-haunted crystalline electronic infrastructure; the future of parenting in a world too fast and too complex for public schooling or the nuclear family; the tension between emergent new media and art forms and the traditional forms of novel/poem/painting/song/etc.; the relationship between improvisational speaking and spiritual channeling; and the experience of being an “entelechy,” a multitude of smaller agencies comprising an ecology of self, an endosymbiotic “Homo gestalt.” Bill speaks candidly and fluently about his unusual life history as a parent and living journey as an aging mystic, bringing erudite historic overview together with a surprisingly frank perspective on his transpersonal experiences.  It’s an honor to be able to share this discussion with you…     QUOTES: “Mysticism is relevant now because it’s a good description of the daily news; it’s just responsible journalism that there is this mystical quality to an ethereal economy that is electronically blipping wealth back and forth in this computerized online banking world.” “When you have an oxymoronic culture with the djinn inhabiting the computers and moving into the cognitive space symbiotically with human beings, the definition of the environment is changing and that which is invisible to the materialist or the industrialist is now recognized as an endosymbiont with us – so it becomes like the cell with the mitochondria.” “Depressions and catastrophes are transitions from one system to another in complex dynamical systems, so you have to step back and look at the big picture.  And if you try to keep the accounts in a small container, where you say, ‘Nothing is stable! Nothing can be held’  Well, why is Buddhism so popular?  Because that’s exactly what Buddhism is saying!  If you attach and you’re grasping, you’re going to suffer.” “We see [the change] but we always see it negatively.  We see the crash but not the imaginary future that’s emerging.” “When the family always lived together in the nuclear family, what do you have?  They were always arguing and fighting…compression isn’t necessarily a good thing.  It’s what Whitehead would call ’the fallacy of simple location.’  So I embrace that the environment is now planetary.  It’s person-planet.  And through Skype and things like this, I’m in constant communication with the family, and that’s okay.” “As you develop your subtle bodies through yoga…when you reach a certain point, you get what I call a ‘matching grant,’ like how a foundation gives matching grants, and if your evolutionary sheath reaches a certain point, then a being comes to cohabit-ate with you in your auric extended ecology.” “You don’t want to have a hungry ghost as a daemonic guide, so discrimination is definitely called for.” “Some [bacteria] you need in your stomach to digest, and if they get in the wrong place and they’re out of timing, they’re not so good.  If Godzilla tramps through Times Square, it’s not a good thing.  If he goes for a walk in the Jurassic, it’s okay.”   NOTE: Again, here are the links to the first two chats we had in 2011 and 2013, as well as to my video remix of one of Bill’s lectures with footage from Burning Man.  Enjoy and be sure to check out Bill’s awesome books, as well as his extensive lecture series archived online with the Lindisfarne Tapes! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

William Irwin Thompson, a historian, poet, and mythographer, shares his insights on the intersection of culture, technology, and society. He reflects on the Lindisfarne Association's legacy and its aspirations for a new planetary culture. Topics include the impact of technology on human connections, the transformative emergence of Christianity, and the political dynamics shaping America today. Thompson delves into the evolution of money, the importance of intergenerational wisdom, and the balance between science and spirituality in navigating modern complexities.

This week’s guest is the visionary painter Hannah Faith Yata, whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once. We talk about her new show “Dancing in Delirium,” the role and life of wilderness in the Anthropocene – weather control and fear porn (eerily prescient, given recent events; this talk was recorded in July) – the feeling of living through a time of massive change and chaos (and clocking out with cute pet videos) – art as rebellion and the party as a revolution – the pagan conjunction of human and animal revived in cosplay and furry culture – and the ways our ideas are literally making impressions on the land )yet, we are something that the land itself is doing)… “The city, to me – that’s like a virtual reality made out of brick and steel.” “Wildness for me, means: leave it the fuck alone.” “I like to think of my work as this strange awakening of a rebellion…” “I’m not fond of human faces, and I’ll tell you why. For me, seeing somebody’s face and having to analyze every single detail, every wrinkle, every little nuance, is just…if you think about painting and its historical significance, it’s like you’re immortalizing this person. You’re immortalizing their ego. To me, though, I think it’s all about more or less the abolishment of the ego and this realizing that we’re a part of nature, that we see ourselves in nature…I don’t want to shit on portraiture, because I think it’s beautiful, but that’s not my statement.” “I feel like everything today is this dance of trying to keep the ego so that it doesn’t fly off into space.” “It doesn’t have to be pretty…if you or I were thrown out in the wilderness tomorrow, it’s not like there’s some nature god that’s going to protect us. It’s wild out there! Actual wildness is wild!” “We have more moral codes when we go to war against other people than we do hacking through a rainforest. So to personify things and to think of them as these living personalities helps us to remember our respect for these things.” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is Andrew J. O’Keefe II – documentarian, archivist for Singularity University, devoted recordist of the emergent planetary culture, and a dear old friend I met back in the Dawn of Time when he was working as the personal assistant to Android Jones. http://www.andrewjokeefe.com/https://www.facebook.com/andrewjokeefehttps://twitter.com/andrewjokeefe?lang=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjokeefe/https://medium.com/@andrewjokeefe We talk about the motivations for preserving and reliving the significant (AND insignificant) moments of our lives. From the role of “tapers” in the success of The Grateful Dead & STS9, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson, and The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick…to how a donation of 600 books started Harvard University…to a vision of our artificial intelligence augmented descendants living in a world of totally recorded life and currently incomprehensible richness and insight…this is a conversation about why we “save” things, and why we should treat our record-keeping as the sacred task it truly is. “If we don’t preserve what’s important to us, then we run the risk of not sharing it ever again. Nobody might never even know that it happened.” “What exactly ARE our priorities?” “The control of where this stuff is headed is out of any one organization or individual’s hands. On the other hand, we have these central systems of control…if we don’t find a way to decentralize what humanity has developed up to this point, we’re probably going to lose it.” “If we let market forces run [the world]; if we let meaningless trends of shit, surface level culture that’s not even real culture, that’s like iterative loop culture, if we let that dictate things, then as everything gets increasingly out of control or asymmetrical, what the hell else do we have to fall back on?” “I think the paradoxes of living in society are only going to increase at an exponential rate. It’s going to terrify people; it’s going to cause mass chaos in unprecedented ways because we have these centuries-old resentments that technology is not going to erase. It’s only going to make further asymmetrical. The history of all borders: there’re losers. Those people are upset…have a right to be upset. Both psychedelics and the ancient modalities of healing…are going to be the most critical tool that we use to move forward.” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe