Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:11Terence McKenna:"My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it’s an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances." 09:42 Terence McKenna: "This is a think-along lecture, by-the-way, and you’re free to think-along at any point that you feel so moved to do so." 11:53 Terence begins telling the story of how the Timewave Zero hypothesis came to him during a long meditation on the King Wen sequence of the I Ching. 20:36 Terence McKenna: "We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration." 27:33 Terence McKenna: "But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it." 32:29 Terence McKenna: "We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don’t matter. And that now doesn’t matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human." 41:50 Terence McKenna: "This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies." 35:41 Terence McKenna: "And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Seabrook Leaf Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:25 Lorenzo introduces Seabrook Leaf who then leads a playalogue titled "The Establishment of a Tribal Land Base" during the 2007 Burning Man festival. 06:44 Seabrook begins his rap. (See YouTube video beginning at 1:30) 11:30 Anonymous: "The coercive forces of control all work to keep people apart and separate, and so tribe is the healing medicine for that." 12:05Anonymous: "You can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your family." 14:47 Seabrook Leaf: "I think it’s clear that working together like we do at Burning Man is going to be a crucial part of surviving the shift. . . . And I think this is the crucial part of this kind of tribalism, whether it’s putting up a yurt or raising food in a garden, we’re going to have to get back to the basics." 16:59 Dale Pendell begins telling about a cooperative community on San Juan Ridge he was a part of in the 60s. 18:57 Dale Pendell begins telling about the May Day and Halloween festivals that the San Juan Ridge community created. 22:35 Anonymous: "We spend most of our time in a cyber-tribe, and I still feel connected. I feel like maybe the future of tribalism is going to reach beyond geographical locations, because we can’t really afford to travel everywhere and meet all these different people." 29:25 Anonymous: "How can we expand our acceptance of people as a whole, but recognize the reality of what we can manage in our day-to-day resources and things we have to do to provide for our community?" 36:22 Anonymous: "If it doesn’t grow out of the ground it came out of a mine." 40:53 Anonymous: "Bring a love-consciousness, always, as the focus of us being awake now. It has never been more urgent." 46:37 La: "And it just came up so big for me that we have to eliminate fear as our motivator. We have to use what we see around us clue us in, but not operate out of that distress. It’s so tricky, slippery." 49:39 Anonymous: "So in the best of situations you can pick an environment that has what you imagine to be the least potential for social corruption, but at the same time there’s a very big wild card that comes with saying ‘Let’s plant this here but we don’t know what all the rest of our neighbors are going to be doing in twenty years." 53:51 Dale Pendell: "It’s wonderful for a child to know where they came from, what their tribe is, and they have a place to come back to if what they rebelled against turns out to be better than they thought it was." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:11 Ralph begins with "Fractals on my mind, an epic in four parts." . . . Part one, the sandy beach. 13:54 Ralph Abraham: "It’s the fractal boundary, the sandy beach, which destroys determinism." 16:58 Ralph Abraham: "At the age of one, or two, or three, or something, when speech is beginning, what was going on before that? Presumably, that was what everyone was doing before speech came altogether if there ever was such a time. And that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced when the linguistic phase arrives." 23:36 Ralph begins his description of "a mathematical model for monogamy". 26:04 Ralph Abraham: "I’m not saying that order is always bad, but cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced. I wouldn’t elevate chaos above cosmos or vice versa, but systems, probably to be healthy, they need a certain balance." 33:08 Rupert Sheldrake: "Catholicism, in a sense, is a kind of polytheism. You have all the angels. You have all the saints. When you go into a cathedral there’s all those side chapels and shrines. It’s just like a Hindu temple." 40:34 Terence McKenna: "The form that I’ve probably fallen under the sway of is some kind of neo-Platonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypothesizations that lead into the One." 1:12:58 Ralph Abraham: "Science is not mathematical, and mathematics is not science. Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people. Mathematics is an inborn ability that everybody has, like breathing." 1:25:10 Terence McKenna: "Everyone knows that cannabis is trivial and harmless, but that doesn’t mean that we’re on the brink of changing the social taboos about it. It feels to me as though they will never change." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 10:50 Terence McKenna: "I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty, and the transcendental object is the novelty of novelty. . . . a tiny thing which has everything enfolded within it. And that means you’re in another dimension, where all points in this universe have been collapsed into co-tangency." 16:56 Terence McKenna: "Biology has a complete four dimensional, five dimensional map of the planet’s history."Ralph Abraham: "What the hell, the comet’s on its way. Let’s get it on." Terence McKenna: "The planet says, the comet’s on the way. Lets get these monkeys moving towards the production of sufficient complexity that when this impact event occurs it will have a transcendental rather than simply an …" Ralph Abraham: "Have an opportunity to escape into another dimension." Terence McKenna: "Yes." 21:02 Terence McKenna: "If you pursue these psychedelic, shamanic plants there is inevitably this conclusion scenario, or this apocalyptic intuition. And I think that shamans have always seen the end. That the human enterprise in three dimensional space has always been finite." 22:47 Terence McKenna: [discussing knowledge of life after death] "But in fact, I think this is probably the paradigm-shattering, world-condensing event that is bearing down on us." 25:04 Terence McKenna: "That’s what life is. It’s a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality." 28:52 Terence McKenna: "So even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics there are ways of tinker-toying the syntactical bits together to produce incredibly optimistic transcendental and psychedelic scenarios." 37:22 Terence describes his "simple way" of thinking about what may happen on December 21, 2012. 39:30 Terence McKenna: "But I’m telling you, Ralph, there’s something out there. There’s something out there, and I’ll know it when I see it." 40:06 Terence McKenna: "Believe it or not, I hate unanchored speculation. And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge in the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking." 43:33 Terence McKenna: "I think people should drive out and take a look at the Eschaton at the end of the road of history. And what that means is psychedelic self-experimentation. I don’t know of any other way to do it. But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the Eschaton and kick the tires and so forth, then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people." 53:56 Terence McKenna: "No one is directing or controlling the creative energies of this species. It’s being driven by thousands of micro-units called companies, all pursuing agendas they won’t discuss with anybody who hasn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement. So god knows what they’re doing out there, and they’re fiddling with life, and minds, and intelligence, and micro-dimensions, and you name it." 54:57 Terence McKenna: "It’s the future we’re living in, Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it until something better comes along, or until we get sick enough about that system to do something about it." 55:43 Terence McKenna: "I think here in the final moments in human history we should push the art peddle to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process as we possibly can." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:32 Terence McKenna: "But the fact of the matter is, there is no reason to believe that time is invariant, and experience argues the contrary." 12:39 Rupert Sheldrake: "Maybe, you see, that the bonds between pigeons and their home are comparable to the bonds between people and other people, and indeed they may be related to that which holds society together. When we say "the bonds between people", we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. It may be that there is an actual connection between them. . . . This kind of social bond, this kind of linkage, may be utterly fundamental." 17:28 Ralph Abraham: "Especially for people like Americans, who watch television for seven hours a day, there is somehow not enough time away from language." 17:37 Terence McKenna: "But notice that most prophetic episodes are dream episodes. I think that supports my point that we have lost connection with a kind of fourth dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given." 25:59 Terence McKenna: "Somehow language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world." 26:29 Terence McKenna: "The obsession with intellectual closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys, because nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality. I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries that are in principle insoluble. They’re not simply unsolved problems, they are in principle mysterious. All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence, but it’s the death of conversation." 30:57 Terence McKenna: "I question whether we actually think in words, or to what degree we do. What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools, such as psychoactive plants, is that as the intoxications deepen thought becomes vision, and one thinks in images. And I imagine that this is the aboriginal thought-style, and we must have thought in images for a long time before we downloaded into words." 35:48 Terence McKenna: "If a prophecy comes true, does that mean then that in principle all of the future is determined? You see, we have to avoid determinism here because a true determinism means thinking is pointless, because in a rigid determinism you think what you think because you couldn’t think anything else. So the concept of truth is utterly without meaning in a rigid determinism." 37:21 Terence McKenna: "I don’t think the meaning of human existence lies in culture. It lies in the individual. And to access that meaning a certain amount of deconditioning, i.e., alienation, has to take place from a culture. If you’re just a cheerful representative of your culture you’re a kind of mindless boor." 40:10 Rupert Sheldrake: "There are astonishing powers in the animal and the other realms of nature, which we have just simply been blind to. We’re blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science." 50:55 Terence introduces the topic of time into the discussion. 52:02 Terence McKenna: "Examine, or recall to yourself for a moment, what it is that orthodoxy teaches about time. It teaches that, for reasons impossible to conceive, the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment. Now whatever you might think about that idea, notice that it is the limit test for credulity. In other words, if you could believe that you could believe anything. It’s impossible to conceive of something more unlikely. Yet this is where science begins its supposedly rational tale of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe. It’s almost as if science is saying, ‘Give us one free miracle and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless casual explanation." 1:02:38 Terence McKenna: "When these curves [about population, climate, pollution, etc.] are extrapolated,

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:18 Ralph begins by describing "Terence to himself". 05:46 Ralph Abraham: "So in our process of trialoging we find it very much enriched by Terence’s phenomenal knowledge of history, and not only that, but his special way of saying it is sort of a, you’re familiar with this here, a bardic skill. So that whatever he says will have [long pause]more effect than it actually deserves" [added with humor that was followed by laughter]. 08:36 Terence "shares his view" of Rupert. 09:12 Terence McKenna: "And my intellectual method has always been to seek out the heretical. And so when I heard that Nature had called for the burning of a book [insert title], I burned up my tires on the way to the store to see if I couldn’t obtain a copy." 16:38 Rupert introduces Ralph. 19:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "His [Ralph Abraham's] ability to visualize mathematics, I’m sure, is innate. But I think it was enhanced in the late 60s and early 70s by certain inner experiences, which would fall into the category of what Terence calls hands-on pharmacology." 22:54 Ralph begins his introduction of Rupert. 27:21 Rupert tells the story of his first meeting with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham. 32:00 Rupert Sheldrake: "Part of him [Terence McKenna] is a millenarian prophet. Part of him is a Dominican. He professes to be a pagan, but his Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning, and his experience as an altar boy have never left him." 34:16 Terence tells about when he first heard of Ralph. 36:43 Terence McKenna: [Speaking about Ralph Abraham]"It’s impossible not to fall in love with the man. He’s the teddy bear of advanced mathematics." 45:07 Rupert Sheldrake: "[In science,] if you can do things cheaply, you’re completely free, because the only control that they have is through money and giving out funds. And if you don’t need the funds you can do what you like." 1:13:39 Terence McKenna: "What do I think? Well, not that." 1:14:20 Terence McKenna: "I’ve always felt that what biology is is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macro-physical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language." 1:19:36 Terence McKenna: "The real question I’m raising is, to what degree does language create the assumption of an unknown future." 1:24:03 Terence McKenna: "We alone, I think, are tormented by the anxiety of the unknowable future. And it’s an artifact, I maintain, of culture and language." 1:28:28 Terence McKenna: "And I don’t believe that time is invariant. I didn’t intend to open this up as a general frontal attack on the epistemic methods of modern science, but, in fact, the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience, and it’s merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business." 1:29:36 Terence McKenna: "As a practical matter, I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer 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?" 24:02 "These solar systems are out there. They’ve been bathed by our radio waves. Are there any receivers? Is there anyone out there to pick up ‘I Love Lucy’? Probably not. Why? Because those solar systems have all the wrong properties for probably our kind of life or any kind of life." 29:39 "In this chunk of the galaxy we’re the only noisy solar system. . . . We may be extremely rare. We may be the only ones in our little quadrant. We may be the only ones in our galaxy, or the only one in our local group of galaxies. Life like ours is unbelievably difficult to create. And here we are, our concerns are can we get to the office on time. We don’t even think about the miracle each one of us is." 31:42 "What I’m trying to build up is a picture of why you don’t need religion. All you need, if you want to be awestruck, is to consider the improbability of you, the improbable miracle that is you." 35:05 [Commenting on a computer-generated depiction of an astrophysical zoom-out from Earth] "If the universe was at all attempting to find consciousness, for a split-second, a primate brain on Earth had in its little synaptic gaps a picture of the universe. The universe saw itself momentarily." 38:48 "What if the ultimate goal of life, of the universe, was to become fully conscious? And what I mean by that is the entire universe becomes, instead of this jumble of matter and quantum whatever, it becomes a single conscious being?" 42:02 "For life itself to have a chance to expand out into the universe, and populate and infuse the universe, we may be one of its only shots [at this], at least in our area. We’re one of the only chances to do this, and we have a very limited window." 46:52 Bruce talks about the possibilities ALife might explore should it ever be set free in a quantum computer. 51:18 Bruce tells the story about his vision (during the AlChemical Arts Conference in September 1999) of Terence McKenna’s ‘getaway car’. 1:03:57 Bruce begins a stream of consciousness riff about quantum reality that is packed with mind-blowing concepts and ends . . . "In the universe you are all participants. So if you think about it you change it. If you try to study it you change it." 1:08:39 "The next time you have a powerful dream consider that it may have come from the field." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Lorenzo’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival Bruce Damer’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival Matt Pallamary’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival

Guest speaker: Pablo Amaringo [NOTE: All quotations below are by Pablo Amaringo, as interpreted by Lorenzo from Zoe7's translation.] Pablo Amaringo was elected to the Global 500 Roll of Honor of the United Nations Environmental Program in recognition of outstanding practical achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment through the USKO-AYAR school. PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:23 Susan Blackmore introduces Pablo Amaringo 07:16 "I was born and raised Catholic, but I did not really subscribe to the way in which that religion interpreted existence and life, particularly life after death." 13:02 "From experience, I came to learn that ayahuasca bestows upon the user knowledge about a variety of topics, not only consciousness and perception, but also leads one to realize that what we perceive is an illusion." 17:57 "In 1968 I had a revelation that we live in a sort of organism, an organism somewhat like a ship in that it keeps us, and not just us humans, but every living thing in something like a cocoon. And I was told that this home of ours, this ship, is becoming endangered simply because people are not taking care of the environment." 22:30 "We should not think only about the immediate future for ourselves living on this planet, but also about the futures of our children and grandchildren. What are we going to leave for them? What are they going to find? Those are questions we should ask and resolve before it’s too late." 23:46 "One of the chief problems here is the lack of love, love for the environment and love for each other." 28:02 Pablo begins talking about the ayahuasca visions in his paintings. 47:36 "By going into the psychedelic experience, by going into the world of plants, one is able to first and foremost know about himself. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities in his eyes." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option;  Ayahuasca Visions by   Pablo Amaringo, Luis Luna, and Luis Eduardo Luna

Guest speaker: Susan Blackmore PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:30 Jon Hanna introduces Susan Blackmore 08:04 "A lot of people kind of think that scientists like myself are kind of pushing the problem [of what is consciousness] away, some are, but there’s a huge excitement about what we do with this mystery, and it’s a very strange mystery indeed." 09:22 "That’s what we mean by consciousness, in contemporary science, what it’s like for you." 09:38 Susan talks about ‘the great chasm’ between mind and brain, sometimes called the ‘fathomless abyss’ . . . "It’s the chasm between subjective, how it is to me, and objective, how we believe it must be in the real physical world. Don’t underestimate this problem." 11:48 "So that’s the sense in which I mean consciousness might be an illusion: not what it seems to be." 18:48 Susan begins her discussion about free will. 24:34 "You can see the readiness potential building up in someone’s brain a long time, a long time in brain terms, before they know they are spontaneously and freely act." 26:56 "We can believe that free will is an illusion. That’s my preferred solution. I don’t want to press it on you, but it seems this way: When you look at these results, and many other results too, consciousness just doesn’t seem to be the thing that starts things off." 51:07 "I suggest, that when you’re walking around in your ordinary life, just realize how much you are not seeing, but you are not seeing it all." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books discussed in this podcast            The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human by Susan Blackmore Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett Susan Blackmore’s books on Amazon.com

Guest speaker: Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Andrew Weil 04:41 "There are no good or bad drugs. Drugs are what we make of them. They have good and bad uses." 05:04 "I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances." 06:33 "Alcohol, any way you look at it, is the most toxic and most dangerous of all psychoactive drugs. In any sense, in terms of medical toxicity, behavioral toxicity, there is no other drug for which the association between crime and violence is so clear cut . . . and tobacco, in the form of cigarettes is THE most addictive of all drugs." 08:47 "What could be a more flagrant example of drug pushing than public support of that industry [tobacco and cigarettes]." 12:38 "I see a great failure in the world in general to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse." 16:25 "Another very common use, in all cultures, of psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences. To allow them to transcend their human and ego boundaries to feel greater contact with the supernatural, or with the spiritual, or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms." 17:54 "Drugs don’t have spiritual potential, human beings have spiritual potential. And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction, and the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people." 19:59 "Why is it that the human brain and plants should have the same chemicals in them?" 22:39 "The effects of drugs are as much dependent on expectation and setting, on set and setting, as they are on pharmacology. We shape the effects of drugs. All drugs do is make you feel temporarily different, physically and psychologically." 25:26 "The effects of drugs can be completely shaped by cultural expectations, by individual expectations, by setting as well." 28:22 "The manner of introducing a drug into the body is crucially determinant of the effects the people experience. And especially of its adverse effects, both short term and long term." 31:51 "I think it’s unfortunate that in this culture we have fallen so much into the habit of relying on refined, purified durative of plants, in highly concentrated form, both for recreational drugs and for medicine. And have formed the habit of thinking that this is somehow more scientific and effective, that botanical drugs are old-fashioned, unscientific, messy. In fact, they’re much safer, and sometimes the quality and effects are better." 32:55 "It’s we who determine whether drugs are destructive or whether they’re beneficial. It’s not any inherent property of drugs." 41:36 "The use of yage, or ayahuasca, in Amazonian Indian cultures is often credited with giving people visions that have valid content." 50:25 "But I think healing, like religious experience, is an innate potential of the body. It’s not something that comes in a drug. All a drug can do is give you a push in a certain direction, and I think that even there expectation plays a great role in that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs (Published 1983) From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (Published 2004)