Podcasts about expanding mind

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis Week's GuestWhen, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts? After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.” I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis' Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I'd rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…LinksRichard Doyle's faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse my reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:03:36 – Episode Intro0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn't A Professional Service (??)1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of Science1:22:17 – AI-Enabled Extraction vs. AI-Enabled Abundance1:38:40 – Closing RemarksReflectionsMuch of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are “in the loop” or “out of the loop” — whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them, if we ever do…and yet evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the way that humans are always-already intertwingled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops — as focal points of conscious agency dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we've been people we have never really “called the shots” but rather cultivated our response-ability within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque…and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves.And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human. Like the telescope and microscope before them, language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. We do not need to leave our solar system to find “strange new worlds” awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation lately seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. “What can I do?” becomes “Who am I?” and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry. To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just “connected” but precipitate as aggregates, in fields of constellated data, prompts a figure-ground reversal in which selves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing “human” and “non-human” as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility: we find the opportunity to question what we're trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own “source code” and adjust our goals accordingly.If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh, distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity. Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask “What do we want to do, and why is that desire substantiated?”This kind of meaning-making isn't just a luxury but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn't working. It's time to ask if, maybe, this is due to “user error” and the answer doesn't lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world — and, this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well-adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful.In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are both Towers of Babel and fingers pointing to the Moon. They are weird, unprecedented, and sublime — and they are business as usual on Planet Earth, where we have always come awake in medias res amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity and the place from which we can, at last, engage the question of “What Now?” with discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face.Digital technologies are psychedelic. We've been on a bad trip. It's time for us wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the oars together in whatever novel wonders may arise — to neither “give way to astonishment” nor let our fears steer us into the rocks. Humans On The Loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be, right now, to fully give in to the paradox, and notice how its knots untie in hyperspace, and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding — and more lucid (dare I say, productive?) questions.One of those questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now found ourselves swirling. Maps of the World Wide Web look very much like brain scans of the amped-up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down — when every node has edges with each other node, and average path length drops to one — how do we prioritize? What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent “intertwingularity”? Which apparitions do we honor, and which do we ignore? (And how?) Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us: “test your drugs”, “get grounded”, “set and setting”, “integration counseling”…MentionsGenerated by NotebookLM. Please let me know if you notice any errors or omissions!* Richard Doyle* Michael Garfield * Gary Weber* Shankara* Trey Conner* Nora Pandoro* Erik Davis* Joshua DiCaglio* John Perry Barlow* Naomi Most* Nate Hagens* Daniel Schmachtenberger* Tyson Yunkaporta* Martin Luther King Jr.* Mahatma Gandhi* John Von Neumann* Subhash Kak* Iain McGilchrist* Timothy Morton* Stuart Kauffman* Dean Radin* Brian Josephson* Monica Gagliano* Christoph Koch* Gregory Bateson* Elon Musk* Robert Rosen* H.P. Lovecraft* Philip K. Dick* Herbert Simon* Douglas Rushkoff* Sri Aurobindo 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

Join Premium! Ready for an ad-free meditation experience? Join Premium now and get every episode from ALL of our podcasts completely ad-free now! Just a few clicks makes it easy for you to listen on your favorite podcast player.  Become a PREMIUM member today by going to --> https://WomensMeditationNetwork.com/premium Imagine stepping on top Of a mountain Full of greenery And reddish rocks. PAUSE And, on this mountain, See if you can imagine yourself Walking safely and securely To the edge So you can see. PAUSE You pause,  And breathe in  The fresh mountain air, Letting it expand you And fill you with its purity. PAUSE And, while breathing, You gaze at the mountains  All around– Mountains pushing up Through the clouds. PAUSE Now, imagine yourself Like the mountains, Pushing through And growing, Becoming more aware. Expanding. PAUSE Breathe in the awareness. Breathe in the expansion. Feel your soul expanding. PAUSE  Sit quietly on the mountain, And surrender. Surrender to letting your Mind, body and spirit expand. Feel yourself syncing with the mountain, Becoming one with it, Becoming one with expansion. PAUSE Now, give yourself permission To become one with clouds Drifting around you. One with the cerulean blue sky above. One with the wind beside you. Let yourself expand And become one With Nature. PAUSE Breathe. Breathe in the expansion. Breathe in the oneness To all around you. PAUSE Breathe. Breathe through your body. Breathe through your mind. Breathe through your spirit. And when you feel this energy  Of expansion At all levels, All through you, Imagine locking it in. And, take the key with you All through your day. NAMASTE, BEAUTIFUL  

In this episode, I have a conversation with Matt Cardin. We discuss Alan Watts's book Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship. We explore various themes including: the Creator/creature distinction, the philosophy of nonduality, "scientism", and spiritual disciplines that help us become more "accident prone" to receiving divine grace.  Matt Cardin is a writer and freelance editor living in North Central Arkansas. With a Ph.D. in leadership and a master's degree in religious studies, he writes frequently about the intersection of religion, horror, art, and creativity. He is also Vice President of Academic Affairs at North Arkansas College. His books include the weird and cosmic horror fiction collection “To Rouse Leviathan” and the nonfiction collection “What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy.” He has been a panelist, panel chair, and reader at The World Fantasy Convention, The World Horror Convention, MythosCon, and more. In 2014 he was an invited panelist at Baylor University's Faith and Film symposium. He has been a guest on Expanding Mind, Weird Studies, Darkness Radio, the Mancow Muller Show, This Is Horror, and many other radio shows and podcasts. He is also a longtime pianist with an especially extensive background in church music. Former careers include professor of English and religion, dissertation editor for doctoral students, high school teacher, piano salesman, college writing center instructor, corporate communications specialist, media producer for a large state university, and video director for country and pop music legend Glen Campbell. Website: https://mattcardin.com Blog: https://www.teemingbrain.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/_MattCardin

Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s; Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica; The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV. His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Erik hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network for a decade, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

Erik Davis and Julia Pond talk about psychedelic dance and the way altered states of mind and movement interact. Topics range from bone-dancing at Grateful Dead shows ("The bands were incidental to the dance"), the way movement resonates through time and generations, and the salvage rhythms of late capitalism (with thanks to Anna Tsing for the phrase). People: Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s (MIT Press/Strange Attractor Press); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner; and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and most recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books, including Suzanne Treister's HFT: The Gardener(Black Dog), Future Matters: the Persistence of Philip K. Dick (Palgrave), Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multimedia and Music Culture (MIT, 2008), AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico, 2005), Rave Ascension (Routledge, 2003), and Zig Zag Zen (Chronicle, 2002). In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals, including Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Slate, Salon, Gnosis, Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, Spin, Wired and the Village Voice.A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Rice University, as well as workshops at the New York Open Center and Esalen. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries, as well as in Craig Baldwin's underground film Specters of the Spectrum. He wrote the libretto for and performed in “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” a Burning Man-inspired rock opera. He hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network for a decade, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.Julia Pond is a dance artist, teacher and researcher interested in how embodied practices and dance interact with social and political themes. Julia has worked primarily in the UK, US and Italy, and is currently completing an MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional at Trinity Laban / Independent Dance, as well as podcasting, parenting, and teaching. Read More: Erik Davis: https://techgnosis.com/Burning Shore Substack Newsletter: https://www.burningshore.com/Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. (2017) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

“Adventure isn't hanging off a rope on the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude we must apply to the day to day obstacles of life.”– John Amat Do you find your daily routines boring. Do you feel frustrated or irritated with your regular life focus? The focus of adventure can be different for each person. When you approach a new focus as an adventure, it can be challenging but it can also result in a higher feeling of energy and seeing things from a different perspective. It is stepping out of your comfort zone and finding something you love as you do something that you have not focused on before. It can provide a positive attitude and help release stress as you experience a sense of excitement even if with things in your everyday life and happiness when you take on a new focus in the little things that you choose to see in a new way. Adventure can expand and broaden our minds as we take on challenges and learn new and unique things. Join us as we explore the essentials.

Episode 175 - Jennifer Dumpert Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Jennifer Dumpert. Jennifer Dumpert is a San Francisco-based writer and lecturer, and the founder of the Oneironauticum, an international organization that explores the phenomenological experience of dreams as a means of experimenting with mind. She also developed the concept and practice of Liminal Dreaming--surfing the edges of consciousness using hypnagogic and hypnopompic dream states. Dumpert has lectured and led workshops at festivals, conferences, and venues such as Summit at Sea, Lightning in a Bottle, Symbiosis, Breaking Convention in London, Entheogenesis in Melbourne, Australia, the Women's Visionary Congress, the Transformative Technology Conference, Esalen Institute, Ojai Institute, the New Living Expo, the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and Synergenesis. She has also taught online classes on Liminal Dreaming through the Evolver Network, and has appeared on radio shows and podcasts such as Expanding Mind, on the Progressive Radio Network, The Daily Beat, on BTR Today, C Realm, and the Dream Studies podcast. Website: https://urbandreamscape.com Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/liminaldreaming https://twitter.com/OneiroFer Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode. The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund. Please visit our website for more information: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/ The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/ Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/ Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language. The Public Service Announcement near the beginning of the episode solely represents the views of Tommy and Dan and not our guests or our listeners.

We’ve been overwhelmed with so many promos coming in this month & busy with other projects we’ve decided to do two 3 hour shows parts 1 & 2. Many new names to include in these, so, we will go without the formalities of giving you a short info on those musicians to Sequences. Everything you need to know about the music, go to our podcast page on our website www.sequencesmagazine.com, for the bio pages on those appearing, enjoy the double edition. Playlist no 184 part 2 00.59 Moonbooter ‘Zeittunnel’ (album Beyond The Neon Lights) www.MellowJet.de 06.38 Moonbooter ‘Don’t Cry My Young Boy’ 13.54 Argus ‘Battle On Holy Ground’ (album The Garden Of Grace) www.argus-music.bandcamp.com 21.25 Ian Boddy ‘Omicron’ (album Axiom) www.DiN.org.uk 27.29 Robert Scott Thompson ‘An Open Door For The Escapologist’ www.robert-scott-thompson.bandcamp.com 33.23 Dark Sparkler ‘2’ (album Are You Working With Me, Or Against Me?) www.darksparklemusic.com 37.42 Dark Sparkler ‘Call IIa’ 42.18 Stimulus Timbre ‘Masana’ (album Unfolding Cycles) https://www.txtrecordings.co.uk 51.07 Stimulus Timbre ‘Ambu’ 58.10 Michael Neil ‘Terra Incongnita’ www.michelneil.eu 01.04.46 Robert Fox ‘Glimmer Of Light’ (album House Of Chimes) www.admusicshop.com 01.12.24 Otarion ‘The Fall’ (album Prayer From The Deep) www.MellowJet.de 01.18.47 Otarion ‘The Refusal’ 01.25.36 Strange Telemetry ‘The Expanding Mind Part 3’ (album The Expanding Mind) *** www.strangetelemetry.bandcamp.com 01.37.11 Rapoon ’Salvation By A River’ (Call Fires To Cloud) www.winter-light.bandcamp.com 01.43.19 Rapoon ’Skies Close’ 01.49.08 Perceptual Defence & Syndromeda ‘Screams Of Help From Planet Earth’ (Album The Alien Arrival) www.syngate.bandcamp.com 01.57.03 Robert Schroeder ‘Dreamland Prologue/Epilogue’ (album Bochum Live 2011) http://www.news-music.de 02.04.49 Sine “Caught In Time’ (Single) www.sine-music.com 02.09.04 Deep Imagination ‘Burning Sun’ (album Silent Celebration) https://www.deep-imagination.com 02.22.09 Divine Matrix ‘Unknown Origins Of Floesam’ (album Beachcombe Soundscapes Vol 2) www.admusicshop.com 02.29.03 Gidge ‘Perimeter’ (album New Light) https://atomnation.bandcamp.com/album/new-light 02.38.59 Tom Moore & Tim Sadow ‘Just A Breath Away’ (album Peace In Every Moment) www.heartdancerecords.bandcamp.com 02.45.34 Tom Moore & Tim Sadow ‘Endless River’ *** 02.51.53 Catherine Watine ‘Still Waters Run Deep’ (album Intrications Quantiques) www.timereleasedsound.bandcamp.com Edit ***

“Adventure isn't hanging off a rope on the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude we must apply to the day to day obstacles of life.”– John Amat Do you find your daily routines boring. Do you feel frustrated or irritated with your regular life focus? The focus of adventure can be different for each person. When you approach a new focus as an adventure, it can be challenging but it can also result in a higher feeling of energy and seeing things from a different perspective. It is stepping out of your comfort zone and finding something you love as you do something that you have not focused on before. It can provide a positive attitude and help release stress as you experience a sense of excitement even if with things in your everyday life and happiness when you take on a new focus in the little things that you choose to see in a new way. Adventure can expand and broaden our minds as we take on challenges and learn new and unique things. Join us as we explore the essentials.

In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Erik Davis, Author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. In the show they cover topics on La Chorrera, uncertainty, synchronicities and more. 3 Key Points: Erik is the Author of High Weirdness, a study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. These 3 authors chart the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. Erik examines the published and unpublished writings of these thinkers as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Erik is America's leading scholar of high strangeness, and talks of synchronicities, uncertainty, and all things weird. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on iTunes Share us with your friends – favorite podcast, etc Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics Show Notes About Erik Erik went into the PhD program and always wanted to write about Phillip K Dick He got a sense that he didn't want to spend 3 years in Phillip’s head He looked into the works of Phillip K Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, The McKenna brothers, etc He wanted to find a way to take their experiences seriously, without taking them literally The Book Much like understanding religious experiences, unpacking psychedelic experiences involves clinical analysis, free-thinking, pragmatism, and skepticism. “Creative insecurity is one of the greatest gifts of these compounds.” People want an answer, but maybe there isn’t always an answer. “There’s something else that’s going on that's more cosmic, and difficult in a lot of ways. I want to invite that difficulty in.” A large reason people have difficulty with uncertainty is because often, there are many “answers” right there, likely from someone trying to sell them something. Studying religion made Davis more critical of these “sellers,” but gave him much more sympathy and patience for religious people because of the fact that they’re seeking something. Davis’ favorite image for the idea of courage in trying to understand the unknown is that of a tight-rope walker. The tight-rope walker steps away from solid ground, and the only way to survive is to maintain balance. “There is a way of continuing to be reasonable, asking questions, respecting balance and homeostasis, even as you enter into really difficult situations.”  He wanted to tell these stories because “that’s what the weird is. [Psychedelic experiences] are great- they can be holy, they can be integrative, they can be healing, they can be unifying, they can be restoring- all those things are true, and they’re totally weird! And what are you going to do with that? You’re going to pretend that’s not there?” The healing part of psychedelics is great, but viewing psychedelics as a learning tool is equally as important. La Chorrera Erik says that it's the great story He says that no one had taken it seriously, and he wanted people to recognize what their work was, which was their experiences Its half science, and half a ritual It was a theater of transformation and novel experience The purpose is to avoid the traps of blaming it on psychosis, and look at it as a creative venture “I think a lot of us wrestling with psychedelics and visionary experiences have our own challenge of, how do we put these pieces together?” - Erik Uncertainty “I want to invite that difficulty in, it's not always love and light” - Erik When someone is uncomfortable, people just turn away from it, and they just live in this lie  Erik says he blames the culture and capitalist scene Because of uncertainty, there are so many experts ready to sell you something “The people who are seeking, I have more sympathy for. The people that are selling, I have less sympathy for” - Erik “If you keep the balance, you can go pretty far and not fall in” - Erik A lot of conspiracy theorists hand over their sovereign-ness “I know” gives you an answer We have reasons to distrust institutions It's good to have a dose of skepticism Conspiracy "Conspiracy theory is a concept that is and has been used to obfuscate real questions” but why do we put our trust in one entity over another? While some of this obviously comes from a growing level of distrust of the media and mainstream authority figures, a lot of it comes from people wanting to avoid “not knowing.” “I see a lot of conspiracy theorists just handing over their own sovereign 'not knowingness' and they can gain a false power of ‘knowing.’" Believing conspiracies gives people an answer and story, makes them feel both knowledgeable and a part of something (they’re an insider vs. all the others who don’t know what's going on), and they’re marginalized because they’re going against the mainstream system- they thrive in an “us-against-them” conflict.   Synchronicities Research synchronicity: “A lot of the synchronicities are actually just books talking to each other in weird and unexpected ways.”   We are pattern recognition machines on a spectrum. Not recognizing enough can make us viewed as cold and unemotional, but if we see a lot of patterns, we’re more open to paranormal or occult ideas. If we see too many, we may have mental issues.   These experiences happen, but Davis doesn’t believe there’s much more to it than that, as we are living in a mystery. “I enjoy the feelings associated with them, but in the same way that we do not “believe” great works of art, I don’t leave with some sense that I have now seen something that requires me to revise my worldview. The take-home prize is mystery.” Cults Erik says he can't write off people like Osho or Crowley Even if they may have caused abuse or bad things, they have done a lot of great things for humanity While misogynistic, creepy and cruel, it is rude to not recognize Crowley's contributions. And “when he was on, he was a great writer. Visionary literature.” Genesis P-Orridge said that cults are actually important to the development of humanity. Davis feels that cults can be like theatre- a creative director sets a stage and usually they’re the only one who knows everything that’s going on, there are practiced, learned scripts, some people like it, while others get screwed and hate it, etc. Cults are more complicated than people give them credit for, and are often seen more negatively because they disrupt families, particularly the role of a parents vs. the parental-like roles of cult leaders. But often, while not a popular opinion, good things can come out of cults. What's a cult? Its a creative director who sets the ‘stage’ and script that people learn etc Links Website High Weirdness Book About Erik Davis Davis was born during the Summer of Love within a stone’s throw of San Francisco. He grew up in North County, Southern California, and spent a decade on the East Coast, where he studied literature and philosophy at Yale and spent six years in the freelance trenches of Brooklyn and Manhattan before moving to San Francisco, where he currently resides. He is the author of four books: Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner, and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books. In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals. A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Rice University, as well as workshops at the New York Open Center and Esalen. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries. He has hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network since 2010, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. Get a 30 day free audible trial at audibletrial.com/psychedelicstoday

Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, podcaster, and scholar based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, co-published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor, and recently on audiobook. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998). Erik's scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. For a decade, he explored the “cultures of consciousness” on his weekly podcast Expanding Mind, which is currently on hiatus. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and more recently earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. Connect with Erik Davis: www.techgnosis.com Get High Weirdness Twitter: @erik_davis Connect with Nick Holderbaum: Personal Health Coaching: https://www.primalosophy.com/ Nick Holderbaum's Weekly Newsletter: Sunday Goods (T): @primalosophy (IG): @primalosophy iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-primalosophy-podcast/id1462578947 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBn7jiHxx2jzXydzDqrJT2A The Unfucked Firefighter Challenge

First I talk little bit about the state of the world and my current feelings about it all.... Then I give a little overview of what this special segment is all about.   Many people probably don't know that The Cosmic Nod podcast began as some earnestly recorded conversations with friends and peers about their ayahuasca experiences as I prepared for my very first this past August.    Enter The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo.  A brilliant thinker, artist, musician, actor, podcaster, writer, and many other -ers that I became a fan of through podcasts like Future Fossils, The Rainbow Brainskull Podcast and Expanding Mind.   I gathered through his various pod appearances that he might have some tales/wisdom to share on the topic of Ayahuasca and decided to reach out to him via the rectangular digital interface we had become friendly through.  I spoke to him a few days before I left for the Peruvian amazon.   As you'll hear at the time of this recording I was still brainstorming on a name for the project, I hadn't fully committed to the idea of a regular podcast yet and beyond trying to get some perspective on what I was headed into, I didn't even really know what I was going to do with the very conversation we were recording.   I'm loosely and generically calling this series Ayahuasca Dialogues which is just going to be a mini-series I present through The Cosmic Nod.  If that sounds confusing don't worry it really isn't.  I spoke to roughly a dozen people that I knew or was introduced to seeking their thoughts, advice and stories about the Ayahuasca experience and that's all there is to it.  It is an extremely limited pool of people and extremely lacking in the diversity I would normally seek but this was not an attempt to add anything significant to the lexicon of Ayahuasca, just a quickly inspired personal project of exploration that occured over 7 days before my excursion.  Regardless of all these journalistic shortcomings I find the conversations extremely fascinating, informative and enjoyable.     My own ayahuasca experiences which occurred subsequently are well documented on my dear friend and interdimensional travel companion Michael Phillip's podcast, Third Eye Drops.  If you are interested in that, check out the first of a four episode saga.     I could excitedly listen to Michaelagelo talk about pretty much anything for endless hours.  If you took the energy of Terrence Mckenna, Michael WInslow, Salvador Dali and Robin Williams and put it through a blender it would probably taste a lot like him but yet it would still be missing the deeply unique thing that he is beneath his memetic masks.    He recently released a short companion piece to this episode (along with is own riffs on the pandemic) on his podcast 'Self Portraits as Other People' a few days ago and you should check it out!    At the tail of this episode I included the audio from Michaelangelo's 2014 appearance on a series called The Ayahuasca Monologues ( which I later drew some inspo from name wise ) .  He had shared it with me prior to our talk and I refer to it a few times early in the convo.  You can watch the video of the performance on youtube.     I highly encourage you to seek out his works of all medium through his website  and his instagram.     Check out his incredible podcast Self Portraits As Other People.    And of course you can also support him over on Patreon!       Join The Cosmic Nod's brand new Patreon! Donate To The Show  Would you please take a minute to give the show a rating and review on apple podcasts? Pretty Please? I love you.  Follow The Cosmic Nod on Instagram Follow The Cosmic Nod on Twitter Follow Colin on Instagram  Check out Colin's Art Store

Episode 134 - Erik Davis Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Erik Davis. Erik Davis is an author, podcaster, award-winning journalist, and scholar based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, co-published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998). Erik's scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. He explores the “cultures of consciousness” on his long-running podcast Expanding Mind. Davis has spoken widely at conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, public radio, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. You can follow him at: https://techgnosis.com https://twitter.com/erik_davis https://techgnosis.com/category/podcast/ Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode. The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund. Please visit our website for more information: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/ Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/ Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.

This week’s guest is author, culture critic, and philosopher of the weird Erik Davis, whose work has been one of my main inspirations for almost ten years. His latest work of epic scholarship, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, is an exploration of topics I presumed inaccessible to academic inquiry so masterful I’ve been evangelizing it for months and basically forced a copy on my boss (David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, who was a guest in Episode 75). In this episode we peer into the intersection of psychedelics, madness, systems science, postmodernism, and religious studies to ask about the truly other that refuses to allow us a clean answer to the questions, “What is the Real?” and “Did that just really happen?” Strap in for one of the headiest and most important conversations that we’ve ever had on Future Fossils…Join the Future Fossils Podcast Patreon for exclusive perks like an extra 10 minutes of this conversation, in which Erik & Michael discuss “black goo.”Visit Erik’s website to sign up for his email updates (always wonderful) and stay abreast of upcoming events, such as his talk at the SF Psychedelic Society on Thursday Dec 19.Get a copy of High Weirdness at MIT Press.Erik’s appearance on Future Fossils Episode 99 (a kind of prequel to this conversation).My 2011 and 2012 appearances on Erik’s podcast, Expanding Mind.Erik and I discuss over video chat (part 1, part 2) the revised and expanded third edition of his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.Shop through my Amazon storefront and support the show indirectly with your purchases:https://amazon.com/storefront/michaelgarfieldJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Discussion Grouphttps://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsShow music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfieldMentioned:Jacques Lacan. Mark Fisher. Carol Cusack. Eric Wargo. Timothy Morton. Graham Harman. Jeff Kripal. Emelie Gomar. Bruno Latour. Albert Hofmann. Sasha Shulgin. Richard Doyle. Williiam James. Phil Dick. Cesar Hidalgo. Rachel Armstrong. Edward Snowden. Daniel Paul Schraber. We Discuss:The abyss is close to home.“The real, by definition, is not amenable to symbolization. Whatever kind of yen we have to sustain the symbolic in the face of the real is going to fail. And in that sense, the real is fundamentally traumatic.”Perturbations of the reality field.Extimacy.“That’s not me…or if it is, I’m not me anymore.”Refusing to remain within the purely human. To lean out. To open a portal.The Weird vs. The Uncanny.Fiction vs. Religion.“In some sense Burning Man and the spirituality of Burning Man, if you want to call it that – the invention of new subjectivities, the development of an ecstatic culture at this end stage of capitalism and modern mythology – in a way is a kind of later iteration of the things I saw in the 70s.”Material agency in the practice of science. “Science is not practiced by humans alone.” “Drugs as active participants in the enactment of their effects.”“The thing about thinking is that sometimes it’s really clear the way you are actively putting things together, or actively exploring. But then sometimes it seems as if you are almost kind of taken over by an idea, and then the idea has stuff it wants to do, and you are just the connector or vehicle for it. What it means to think is to be in relationship to enigmas that have things to say.”“With reductionism in general, it’s very difficult to explain novelty.”“A psychedelic compound sitting on the shelf is not psychedelic. It’s in the interaction that you explore and discover its phenomenological features.”“There’s no way out of environmental effects in the psychedelic experience - both in the set and setting, and in terms of whatever mysterious multiplicities lie in the material itself. So there’s no way to do capital S Science with psychedelics, despite the fact that they are material molecules that reliably have a certain kind of metabolic arc and can be explained in terms of how they are broken down in the body and even light up certain regions or the brain, etc., etc. I think it’s kind of wonderful. But I think that’s where the weird is: the weird is in that. The weird is in the way you can’t get out of the loop.”Psychogenic Networks and Maximal Entropy Production.“If attention is the fuel, then everywhere we turn, we’re producing self-fulfilling prophecies.”Living Fictions.Weird Studies Episode 36.Lachmann et al. 1999 re: Optimal Encoding & Fermi’s Paradox & “The symbols of the divine first emerge in the trash stratum.”“The revelation is always relativized. Once we’re in this cybernetic situation, then not only do we not know, ‘Is that noise or is that signal?,’ but even when you do get a message, you don’t get to know. Because you’ve knocked out that realm of certainty that in the past said, ‘What you’re thinking is true.’”“Now we get to see what it looks like when the symbolic order, consensus reality, breaks down, melts, mutiplies, becomes weaponized, and we try to make our way through that. And it’s not so fun. It’s not so pretty. It’s not so groovy.”Psychonautics as preparation for the insane world we now live in, where the weird has mainstreamed. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

NOW IS THE WAY is available for PRE-ORDER!Pre-order NOW and instantly get exclusive bonuses:• The Five Points of Peace | Bonus Meditation Written Supplement• The Five Points of Peace Audiobook with Guided Meditations• Exclusive Binaural Beats for Meditation & Focus

Erik Davis is an author, scholar and connoisseur of the weird. He’s spent over 20 years exploring fringe movements, occult covens and liminal cyberspaces, finding some time in between to become one of the world’s leading authorities on West Coast American counter-culture, writing about everything from California’s alternative spiritual groups to Burning Man. Davis was born during the Summer of Love within a stone’s throw of San Francisco. He grew up in North County, Southern California, and spent a decade on the East Coast, where he studied literature and philosophy at Yale and spent six years in the freelance trenches of Brooklyn and Manhattan before moving to San Francisco, where he currently resides. He is the author of four books: Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner, and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books, including Suzanne Treister’s HFT: The Gardener(Black Dog), Future Matters: the Persistence of Philip K. Dick (Palgrave), Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multimedia and Music Culture (MIT, 2008), AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico, 2005), Rave Ascension (Routledge, 2003), and Zig Zag Zen (Chronicle, 2002). In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals, including Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Slate, Salon, Gnosis, Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, Spin, Wired and the Village Voice. A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Rice University, as well as workshops at the New York Open Center and Esalen. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries, as well as in Craig Baldwin’s underground film Specters of the Spectrum. He wrote the libretto for and performed in “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” a Burning Man-inspired rock opera. He has hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network since 2010, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. techgnosis.com eastforest.org/podcast

This week we surf the fun-gularity with the brilliant artist, standup comic, and podcaster Ramin Nazer! This episode is significantly less a heady philosophy-of-science discussion than usual and significantly more a wank-fest of two people who love each other’s shows going on about all the mind-blowing visionary notions contained therein. Kick back, light some incense, and prepare for a juicy conversation about where we stand in the Cosmic Order and what to do with all of our creative possibility…covering everything from universal basic income to celebrity schadenfruede, visionary art and science fiction to to the psychological impact of trying to stay original in the midst of a tech singularity. If you’re anything like I am, Ramin is going to inspire the hell out of you. Enjoy…Ramin’s Website:https://rainbowbrainskull.com/collections/printsMichael on Ramin’s podcast, Rainbow Brainskull:https://www.raminnazer.com/blogs/rainbow-brainskull-hour/michael-garfieldMentioned:Archan Nair, The Teafaerie, Nikola Tesla, Onyx Ashanti, King Raam, The Rock, Andrew Yang, Yuval Harari, Bill Gates, Star Trek Discovery, Charles Stross’ Accelerando & Glasshouse, Black Mirror, Esperanza Spalding, Duncan Trussell, Richard Florida, Jeff Bezos, William Irwin Thompson, Terence McKenna, John C. Wright’s Eschaton Sequence, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Eric Wargo’s Time Loops, Colin Frangicetto, Who Built The Moon?, No Man’s Sky, An Oral History of the End of Reality, Ariana Grande, Jimi Hendrix, Amazon Alexa, Life in the Glass Age at Burning Man 2013, Dadara (Daniel Rozenberg), The Mirage Men, Jason Silva, Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Michaelangelo, Slavoj Zizek, Marshall McLuhan, Chuck Palahniuk, Jordan Peterson, Aziz Ansari, Louis CK, Julia Cameron, Alan Shelton, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Zappa, Mortal Kombat, Roko’s Basilisk, Norman “Dr. Blue” Katz, Joe Biden, Awake Aware Alive Podcast, Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, Rak Razam, Adam Dipert, Giant Leap Dance Company, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Greg Parkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Weird Studies, Brave BrowserSupport this show on Patreon and score a zillion awesome perks:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe to our monthly creative explosion of a newsletter:https://michaelgarfield.substack.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For rewards and podcast extras, support us on Patreon Author and Expanding Mind host, Erik Davis enters the mind meld to riff on his new book, High Weirdness drugs, esoterica, and visionary experience in the seventies.  The tome largely revolves around three visionary creatives -- Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. We play in all three of their pools. For a full write-up and more, pop over to THIRDEYEDROPS.com   Give us a holographic hug by leaving us a 5 star review on Apple pods! This mind meld is sponsored by Vermont Pure CBD. Get 20% off of their full-spectrum wonder drops by using the coupon code 'thirdeyedrops' 

Erik Davis is back in the house for a second time to rap a bit about his latest book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.  Most of you know Erik from his podcast, Expanding Mind, or from the tome known as TechGnosis, or perhaps from his work on The Exegesis of Philip K Dick. No matter how you know Erik, you know he is the sultan of high strangeness, and High Weirdness may just be his magnum opus, which is saying quite a bit if you’ve read his previous work. High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from American countercultural voices of the 1970s, including Philip K Dick, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality―but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?   PATREON EXTENSION Listen at patreon.com/occulture Erik’s idea of weird naturalism Terence & Dennis McKenna’s experiment at La Chorrera Robert Anton Wilson’s idea of Chapel Perilous Verisimilitude and the idea of a hoax The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick as a piece of weird fiction Erik’s thoughts on The Owl in Daylight, Dick’s unrealized novel   RESOURCES High Weirdness on IndieBound High Weirdness on Amazon Erik’s website Erik’s podcast Erik on Twitter   DONATE If recurring monthly support via Patreon isn’t your thing, we do accept one time-donations via PayPal, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. Every little bit helps.   MERCH Tees, tanks, hoodies, hats. Check ‘em out on our website or at our Etsy shop.   SOCIAL Twitter Instagram Facebook Tumblr   MUSIC Vestron Vulture - “I Want to Be a Robot (Tribute to Giorgio Moroder)”   PRODUCTION & LICENSING This podcast is produced in the Kingdom of Ohio and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Executive Producers: Carter Y., Mauricio G., Daniel R., Kelly C., Bruce H., Marcelo T., Christopher B., Timothy W., Nick F., Michael Q., Jamaica J., Mute Ryan, John W., Andy E., Colleen F., Saliyah S., Michael S., Kevin C., Kyle A., Megan B., Kaleb H.   REMINDER Love yourself. Think for yourself. Question authority.

Jared Janes and Jason Snyder talk with Erik Davis, host of the Expanding Mind podcast, and author of the newly released book, High Weirdness. They discuss a wide range of topics, including eclecticism, psychedelics, philosophy, spirituality, existential dread, esotericism, capitalism meditation & more. In this Episode of Both/And Erik's Website High Weirdness Jean Gebser Twitter Questions Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Expanding Mind ep. with Dr. Elliot Wolfson Philosophize This! Frankfurt School Series Support Both/And by becoming a patron &/or subscribing & reviewing us on iTunes   Jared Janes participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, a small percentage of its price is sent to us.

Expanding Mind is going on hiatus. In this solo show, Erik reflects on a decade of podcasting, the learning curves of the show, the work of conversation, the uncanniness of our moment, and the publication of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.  

A conversation with my wife Jennifer Dumpert about collaborative dreaming, iPad skrying, meditation, play, the problem with interpretation, and her new bookLiminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep (North Atlantic).   

A discussion with meditation teacher and author Michael Taft  host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast, about hardcore dharma, Buddhist modernism, shop talk, the soup of the sangha, and the problem of the achievement self and the blind leading the blind.  

An informative chat with clinical psychologist and psychedelic researcher Dr. Alexander Belser about qualitative research, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, the diversity of psychedelic trips, queer spiritualities, and the idea of coming “out of the psychedelic closet.”

A conversation with philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein about wonder, horror, animism, the multiverse, Heidegger, Einstein, Hawaiian telescopes, and her book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia).  

A talk with experience designer Ida Benedetto about transformative games, trespassing, rules for sex parties, active introversion, magic circles, funerals, and queer spirituality.   

Entheogenic and community activists Larry Norris and Kufikiri talk about the growing campaign to decriminalize entheogenic plant medicines within the city of Oakland. Topics include community access, education, reframing “psychedelics,” blind spots, changing the narrative, and resisting “the metronome of programming."  https://www.decriminalizenature.org/  

Poet Janaka Stucky talks about guerrilla poetry, burlesque horror, mystical language, shame, prophecy, and the strange DMT experiences that inspired his latest book, Ascend Ascend (Third Mind Books).

Science and technology researcher Rebecca Jablonsky talks about consciousness hacking, tech ethnography, information ecosystems, media fasts, and the ups and downs of outsourcing awareness.  

Poet and literary scholar Stephen Yenser talks about James Merrill and his poetic epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), based on decades of Ouija board communications. Topics include: devotion, Maya Deren, duplicity, friendship, the alchemy of language, and Yenser’s recent annotation of the first part of Merrill’s masterpiece, The Book of Ephraim (PenguinRandomHouse).   

Yogi, psychonaut, and dear old pal Spiros Antonopoulos returns to talk about the Ashtanga lineage, Crowley’s yoga chops, the gifts of rigorous practice, NYC punk yoga, psychedelic Patanjali, and the ups and downs of opening his new Los Angeles Yoga Club amid the Instagram storms of LA body culture.

In this second wide-ranging talk with Anthony Blake, author of A Gymnasium of Higher Intelligence, we discuss J.G Bennett’s ideas of higher intelligence, the active vs. the receptive will, unconditioned nature, living language, and the trouble with the metaphor of “tool."

Host Erik Davis does a solo show on Beat Zen, the Fifth precept, tantric heresy, headless dharma collectives, capitalist subjectivity, and the Psychedelic Sangha meetups popping up in a few cities around North America.

Author and renowned Tarot expert Mary Greer discusses the amazing Pamela Colman Smith (the illustrator of the famous Rider-Wait-Smith deck). We touch on the Golden Dawn, the art of illustration, Jung’s active imagination, Smith’s musical visions, and the marvelous, heavily illustrated book, Pamela Colman Smith: the Untold Story (U.S. Games System).  

Historian and astrophysicist Adam Becker—author of the elegant and clarifying book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics—talks about Schrödinger’s Cat, quantum philosophy, his beef with the Copenhagen interpretation, his fascination with Bell’s Theorem, and the difference between weirdness and nonsense.  

Writer and avant-garde publisher Tosh Berman discusses growing up in postwar California, hipster sexism, the hippie horrors of Topanga canyon, his impressions of family friends like Cameron and Brian Jones, and his charming new memoir Tosh, about growing up with his father, the remarkable underground California artist Wallace Berman.  

Writer and Ultraculture wizard Jason Louv talks about occult history, reality tunnels, his John Dee and the Empire of Angels book, Aleister Crowley’s secret Christianity, and the apocalyptic RPG the West can’t seem to escape.

Culture-crafter and plant poet Delvin Solkinson discusses permaculture principles, OS Gaia, cartomancy, visionary art, design activation, and the Galactic Trading Card Oracle.

Professor and queer historian Heather Lukes talks about Silver Lake riots, gay bikers, house ball scenes, the nostalgia for repression, and the joys and challenges of working on the online archive "The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture." 

Author and media scholar Douglas Rushkoff talks about collaborative technologies, silicon transhumanism, analog aura, the problem of the soul, and his new and timely manifesto Team Human. Join the team!  

In the first of his regular solo shows, host Erik Davis explores his personal history of “meditation"—including teenage stoner trances, voices in the head, and Zen anti-authoritarianism—with particular attention paid to the role of concentration practices in producing blissful and occasionally visionary states.  

Religious scholar Diana Pasulka talks about anomalous cognition, 2001 monoliths, disclosure, future truths, absurd Christianity, and her book American Cosmic (Oxford).  

A talk with religious scholar Diana Pasulka about UFOs, scientific believers, book encounters, elite cabals, studying weirdness, and her new book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford).

Author and plant behavior researcher Monica Gagliano talks about courage, scientific blindness, plant spirits, cannonball trees, cosmic glitches, and her fascinating new book Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries & Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic).  

Michael Taft speaks with Erik Davis about author Robert Anton Wilson, anarchism in the 1970s, Terrence McKenna, P.K. Dick, psychedelics, cultures of awakening now and then, Zen practice, and more. Erik Davis is an author, podcaster, award-winning journalist, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is probably best known for his book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, a cult classic of visionary media studies that investigates how our fascination with technology intersects with the religious imagination. And his podcast, Expanding Mind has long been a favorite of mine.Techgnosis.comShow Notes0:25 – Introduction2:58 – Erik’s book, High Weirdness, Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies6:11 – The impact of Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger; guerrilla ontology; libertarianism, anarchy, and radical individualism13:34 – Wilson’s anarchism’s basis in his cosmic view against institutionalized and concentrated power15:43 – Ontological anarchism – ‘multiple perspectives all the way down’ ; relationship of metasystemic thinking and emptiness/nonduality; the challenge of wrestling with different perspectives that don’t quite fit together and the insight that comes from it23:10 – How trying to fit everything into one map doesn’t work, and the place of psychedelics in recognizing that; realizing that language constructs reality, and learning to deconstruct and go beyond language and maps27:23 – Wilson’s Quantum Psychology, its exercises in switching models and taking new perspectives; what makes a spiritual teacher different from somebody who is handing you a lot of very useful techniques and practices33:00 – Why tech/STEM people might be interested in meditation and psychedelics; how younger generations connect more horizontally rather than vertically (between generations or between different statuses in society); psychedelics as learning experiences rather than tool-using experiences37:26 – Capitalism’s influence on views and uses of psychedelics, how a potentially radical or even revolutionary compound can be whittled down into something that’s a performance enhancer40:00 – How mainstream materialism (“all reality is created by the brain”) requires explanations for what happens with psychedelic use; how the illegality of psychedelics affects the vibe and the relationship with them44:29 – Modern taming down of both psychedelics and meditation; reminding people about the potentials for radicality and weirdness: “The weird is part of reality. It’s not a distortion of what is otherwise seen with clarity.”48:21 – Pharmaceutical companies patenting synthetic psilocybin – “There’s still all these mushrooms growing up in the grass, and as long as there’s a culture of […] people who like weird experiences, there’s going to be this zone that’s outside of it”54:27 – How do you encourage the highest percentage of people who are doing corporate mindfulness, mainstream meditation to enter into the deeper folds of it1:04:46 – OutroYou can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.

Culture critic Mark Dery talks about Surrealism, the gay voice, penny dreadfuls, and the occult and Taoist influences examined in his fascinating new biography of Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Little Brown).

Erik Davis, writer and host of Expanding Mind podcast, joins us on the show to share what he sees are the essential skills we need to navigate the chaos of a reality liquified. ***See Below for full episode breakdown Head to http://bit.ly/ATTMind88 for video, full blog entry, complete show notes, and relevant links. Head to the ATTMindPodcast subreddit to discuss this episode: https://www.reddit.com/r/ATTMindPodcast ------------------------------------- SUPPORT THE SHOW

Martial artist and psilocybin explorer Kilindi Iyi talks about African martial arts, high dose psilocybin work, African-American psychedelia, Dr. Strange, and the metaphysics of darkness.

Erik Davis is an author, a podcaster, an award-winning journalist, and a lecturer based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author of several books, including Nomad Codes, The Visionary State, and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and his essays have appeared in scores of books, including Zig Zag Zen, Magic in the Modern World, The World According to Philip K. Dick, and AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Μan. Erik explores the cultures of consciousness on his long-running weekly podcast Expanding Mind, on the Progressive Radio Network. He has also written for The Wire, Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Wired, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice, and he has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, public radio, and the New York Times. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, and recently earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. His next book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies, will be out in the Spring of 2019 through MIT Press and Strange Attractor. Aaron Weiss is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and religion program at CIIS in San Francisco, where he studies Indo-Tibetan and Western philosophies.