Podcast appearances and mentions of william irwin thompson

Welcome to the DMF. Where I try to find out what motivates people behind the scenes in the world of acting and entertainment. Today on the podcast I am talking to Paul Todisco. He is a director and we are talking his film: One Day Like Rain which has a young Jesse Eisenberg. As always you can reach me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with my name Justin Younts. Thank you for listening and sit back and enjoy. Welcome to the DMF. I'm Justin Younts. In this video, I delve into the concept of 'One Day Like Rain' and how my fascination with mysticism shaped its creation. Ever since my mid-20s, I have been drawn to the mystical aspects of life, exploring various religious texts and mystical literature. This journey led me to read works by renowned authors like Sri Aurobindo, Ken Wilber, and William Irwin Thompson, who beautifully intertwine history, science, and spirituality. My obsession with these themes naturally flowed into my creative process, culminating in the film 'One Day Like Rain.' The film was shot in Southern California, with key scenes filmed in Fillmore and downtown LA. I financed the project independently, with the support of friends, and managed to create a compelling narrative on a budget significantly lower than my previous film, 'Freak Talks About Sex.' The experience of shooting on film, particularly Super 16, added a unique aesthetic that I believe enhances the storytelling. Throughout the video, I discuss the meditative quality of the film and how it aims to evoke a deeper emotional response from the audience. I share insights into the character development and the importance of authenticity in dialogue, emphasizing that the characters reflect real-life experiences and emotions. The film invites viewers to engage with its themes on a personal level, encouraging them to explore their own understanding of love, existence, and the human experience. I also touch on the challenges of creating an independent film that defies conventional storytelling, aiming instead to offer a unique perspective that resonates with those who are attuned to its mystical elements. The reception of 'One Day Like Rain' has been mixed, with some viewers deeply connecting with its themes while others struggle to grasp its abstract nature. Ultimately, my goal is to create an experience that transcends traditional narrative structures and invites viewers to explore the infinite possibilities of consciousness. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Please like, share, and subscribe for more insights into the world of independent filmmaking and mysticism. 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:04 - Concept of One Day Like Rain 00:00:11 - Influence of Mysticism and Spirituality 00:02:09 - Shooting Locations and Financing 00:03:18 - Film Production Techniques 00:04:25 - Transition to Digital Filming 00:05:17 - Viewer's Experience of the Film 00:08:17 - Reflections on Independent Filmmaking 00:10:33 - Discussion on Character Development 00:10:47 - Character's Realistic Dialogue 00:13:52 - Film Reception 00:14:53 - Conclusion

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, existing in various forms in every time and place, can become so strange as to make us wonder if they are cultural at all, and not some unexplained force of nature — the dreaming of the world. In this episode, JF and Phil use "Rapunzel" as a case study to explore the weirdness of fairy tales, illustrating how they demand interpretation without ever allowing themselves to be explained. Sign up for the upcoming course "Writing at the Wellspring" (https://weirdosphere.mn.co/) October 22-December 1 with Dr. Matt Cardin on Weirdosphere.org Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies). Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/weird-studies-music-from-the-podcast-vol-1) and 2 (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/weird-studies-music-from-the-podcast-vol-2), on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com) page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia (https://cosmophonia.podbean.com/). Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies) Find us on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp) Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau (https://cottonbureau.com/products/can-o-content#/13435958/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)! SHOW NOTES Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harryn Zohn, trans.). Novalis, Philosophical Writings. (Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans.). Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (Alex Andriesse, trans.) William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape (https://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Landscape-Making-Worlds-Science/dp/0312048084) Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780307739636) Marie-Louise von Franz, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Louise_von_Franz), Swiss Jungian psychologist Sesame Street, “Rapunzel Rescue” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-fK8rYa45Q&ab_channel=SesameStreet) Disney's Tangled (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398286/) The Annotated Brothers Grimm (https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Brothers-Grimm-Books/dp/0393058484) Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%93Uther_Index) Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780198779858) W. A. Mozart, [The Magic Flute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheMagicFlute) Dante Alighieri, Il Convito (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12867) Panspermia hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Nature-Necessary-Advances-Complexity/dp/1572734345) John Mitchell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781620554159) Clint Eastwood (dir.) The Unforgiven (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/)

This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft. Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast (his edit here) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation. Enjoy!✨ Support This Work• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Chapters00:00 Introduction to Lifelong Collaboration and Innovation 01:18 The Role of Art and Holistic Processes in Innovation 01:37 Challenges in Fostering Collective Intelligence 03:37 The Intersection of Science and Art 03:49 Introduction to the Special Episode with Tim Adelin06:36 Exploring Technology and Human Civilization 07:27 The Importance of Trust and Dialogue in Organizations 42:41 The Rise of Wise Innovation 43:34 The Information Scaling Problem 44:49 The Epidemic of Loneliness 46:58 The Obsession with Novelty 50:21 The Role of Cultural Intelligence 53:25 The Finite Time Singularity 01:01:15 The Future of Human Collaboration✨ Takeaways* Wise innovation requires reconnecting with the purpose and mission of organizations and cultivating a field that allows for the ripening of ideas and contributions.* The tension between exploration and exploitation is a key consideration in navigating large networks and organizations.* Play, creativity, and the integration of holistic, playful, and noisy approaches are essential for innovation and problem-solving.* Deep and authentic relationships are crucial for effective communication and understanding in a world of information overload.* The need for wisdom to keep pace with technology is a pressing challenge in the modern world. Innovation is a crossroads between the need for integration and the obsession with novelty and productivity.* Different types of innovation are needed, and movement in one dimension is not equivalent to movement in another.* The erosion of values and the loss of context can occur when organizations prioritize innovation and novelty.* A tripartite regulatory structure, consisting of industry, art/culture/academia, and government, is necessary to prevent the exploitation of power asymmetries.* Small-scale governance processes and the importance of care and balance in innovation are key to a more sustainable and wise approach.✨ MentionsAlison Gopnik, Iain McGilchrist, Brian Arthur, Bruce Alderman, Andrew Dunn, Turquoise Sound, John Vervaeke, Naomi Klein, Erik Davis, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Mignano, Rimma Boshernitsan, Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, Jim Brown, Elisa Mora, Chris Kempes, Manfred Laubichler, Annalee Newitz, Venkatesh Rao, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Yanis Varoufakis, Ferananda Ibarra, Josh Field, Michel Bauwens, John Pepper, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Landua, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Kevin Clark, Stuart Kauffman, Jordan Hall, William Irwin Thompson, Henry Andrews 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

I'm honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity. ✨ Mentioned & Related Links:Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin's Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

  William Irwin Thompson fue un filósofo social, crítico cultural y poeta estadounidense. Recibió el premio del Festival Internacionalde Poesía de Oslo en 1986. Describió su estilo de escritura y habla como "jazz mental sobre textos antiguos". Fue el fundador de la Asociación Lindisfarne, que propuso el estudio y la realización de una nueva cultura planetaria.

In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson predicted the rise of a new form of knowledge building, a direly needed alternative to the Wissenshaft of standard science and scholarship. He called it Wissenskunst, "the play of knowledge in a world of serious data processors." Wissenskunst is pretty much what JF and Phil have been aspiring to do on Weird Studies since 2018, but in this episode they are joined by a master of the craft, the computational sociologist and physicist Jacob G. Foster of UCLA. Jacob is the co-founder of the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute (DISI (https://disi.org)), a gathering of scholars, scientists, and students that takes place each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It was there that this conversation was recorded. The topic was the Possible, that dream-blurred vanishing point where art, philosophy, and science converge as imaginative and creative practices. Click here (https://www.lilydaleassembly.org/copy-of-what-s-happening) or here (https://www.shannontaggart.com/events) for more information on Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium at Lily Dale NY, July 27-29 2023. Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies) and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia (https://cosmophonia.podbean.com/). Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/mer-bleue). Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies) Find us on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp) Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau (https://cottonbureau.com/products/can-o-content#/13435958/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)! REFERENCES Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (https://disi.org) "Deconstructing the Barrier of Meaning," (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxZHcjovIrQ) a talk by Jacob G. Foster at the Santa Fe Institute William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312160623) Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354991795_Little_Bangs_A_Nihilist_Theory_of_Improvisation) Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies) The accident of Bob in Twin Peaks (https://welcometotwinpeaks.com/actors/my-friend-killer-bob-frank-silva/) Carl Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry (http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/jung/essay.html) August Kekule, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9), German chemist Robert Dijkgraaf, “Contemplating the End of Physics” (https://www.quantamagazine.org/contemplating-the-end-of-physics-20201124/) Richard Baker, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Baker_(Zen_teacher)) American zen teacher Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780817647803) William Shakespeare, Macbeth (https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/) Shoggoth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth), Lovecraftian entity Special Guest: Jacob G. Foster.

This week's show is with Daniel Pinchbeck. Daniel is the New York Times bestselling author of Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, How Soon Is Now, and When Plants Dream (with Sophia Roklhin). He hosted the talk show Mind Shift on Gaia TV and was featured in the 2010 documentary, 2012: Time for Change. He has written for many publications including The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Dazed & Confused, Purple, and ArtForum. He is the director of Liminal.news, an online course platform, and publishes a regular newsletter, Danielpinchbeck.substack.com . In this conversation, Daniel and I explored the fascinating topic of Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions, why we need magic right now, and how our relationship to myth can reawaken our imaginative and intuitive faculties. The quote we mentioned: “What if at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where ‘the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere? … The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different.” - William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth I'd love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let's carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below. What you'll learn from this episode: Even as someone who spends a lot of time contemplating the importance of magic, it impacted me deeply hearing Daniel share about how Western esoteric knowledge in particular is largely missing in today's world We, as a culture, have ridiculed and denied the truth and power of magic and esoteric knowledge, and there's something very healing in reclaiming it I loved what Daniel said about how our relationship to myth can reawaken our imaginative and intuitive faculties. Humans live and think mythologically, that we are scientific and logical just isn't true, the more we can make our mythical nature conscious, the more we can engage with myths in a generative and opening way Resources and stuff that we spoke about: The article that inspired this conversation Daniel's Official Newsletter: Liminal News Daniel's Website: theliminalinstitute   Thank you for listening! There's a fresh episode each week, if you subscribe then you'll get each new episode delivered to your phone every Wild Wednesday (that way you'll never miss a show): Subscribe on Apple Podcasts/iTunes Subscribe on Android Thank you! Lian and Jonathan

This week I have one of the most vulnerable, personal, and profound conversations ever shared on the show — and it's one that speaks directly to the deepest and most persistent themes addressed on Future Fossils. Android Jones is one of the world's pre-eminent digital painters and an utterly singular and inimitable visionary artist. He's also a loving husband and father of three, an old friend (even if we don't talk as often as I'd like, or as perhaps we should), and someone I regard as a torch-bearer along the paths of both professional uncompromising creativity and openly psychedelic parenting. And now he leads the way in helping me and his planet-wide fanbase learn how to process grief and rise from the ashes of loss like a badass phoenix…A few weeks ago, the barn he inherited from his father — in which he kept all of his creative technology and projects — burned to the ground. Here is the intense and vulnerable two-hour conversation we had about his loss and the spiritual transformations he has undergone since. For the first time ever, Android gives a play-by-play recounting of what happened that fateful morning and how he has grown in the aftermath of losing his “dragon horde” of technology, art, and personal records.  And we explore the science and philosophy and esoteric interpretation of what it means to grow beyond the envelope of the human organism into our “extended phenotypes” of technological augmentation — and then to lose it all in a single incandescent moment, laid bare by an Act of God to face the world with sudden and intense rawness.This is a powerful, one, folks.  I'm honored to share it with you…(Big thanks to Lucid News for inspiring me to do this. You can find a very, very tightly-edited transcript of this discussion on their website.)Editor's Note: I mention a passage from William Irwin Thompson's The American Replacement in Nature in which I misquote him as speaking on “prophets and pastoralists” when in fact he wrote about “mystics and moralists.”  You can hear the correct quote in this track from my 2016 Boom Festival performance, which plays at the end of this episode:"The moralist tends to think the laws of God are more on his side than on his enemy's, so he will try through faith and religion and the exercise of ritual to get God to settle down with him and go along with his way of life. The mystic, however, is not a moralist, for motion, complexity, and an angelic-demonic ambiguity in which one's enemy is also a part of a divine manifestation in history are all part of a cosmic life on the other side of the fence. Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe. Any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down and set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind."- William Irwin Thompson✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or PatreonBuy my original paintings or commission new workBuy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server so I can release it into the wilds as a fan-operated platform. Want to claim stake?✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Mentioned & Related Links:Future Fossils Episode 111 - Android Jones on Analog/Digital, Painting the Sutras, & Being an Artist DadComplexity Episode 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human DataomeComplexity Episode 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Ben RidgwayA Manifesto For Live Painting by Michael GarfieldDeath of a SalesmanTrezor Cryptocurrency WalletsJohn Perry BarlowTheme Music: “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP by Michael Garfield✨ A Special One-Off Sneak Peek at A New Offering for Subscribers:I recently promised members of my Patreon/Substack members-only Facebook group, where I ordinarily share on the order of ten cool external links a day, that I'd be moving my Web curation into a special newsletter supplement for paid subscribers.  Here is a public-facing glimpse at yet one more thing you can expect in return for supporting the intense love's labor that goes into the show and my other creative work:Recommended Reading:Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem (Cory Doctorow)We're in a productivity crisis, according to 52 years of data. Things could get really bad. (Michael Simmons)What kind of a "metamodernist" am I, exactly? (Scout Reina Wiley)Successful AI Will Usher in a New Era of Theology (Caveat Magister)Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified (Chloe Xiang at Motherboard)Getty sues Stability AI for copying 12M photos and imitating famous watermark (Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica)How to Practice Long-Term Thinking in a Distracted World (Bina Venkataraman at Wired)How a 'time of crisis' creates a 'crisis of time' (Richard Fisher)Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought (Samo Burja at Palladium)The Edges Cases Where Computing and Physics Intersect (Samuel Arbesman)Cosmic Connection: an anecdote about the Pioneer plaque (Roger's Bacon)Japanese Philosophies That'll Help You Spend Money Consciously (Rahul Chowdhury)Recommended Music:Vertigo Gambler — Juvenile Drama (lush folk-electronic pop co-written and mixed/mastered by fellow Santa Fean Toni Dear)David Forlano — Shiver Like Dust (iPad electronic ambient improvisations)Starling Arrow — Cradle (gorgeous all-star group of female singer-songwriters writing and recording together)fy00g — Mummy Fart! (my old friend and collaborator William Allan Ross' latest trippy glitchy bass single)Master Margherita — The Sound of Science (new dubbreak 436Hz mix by Moreno, former curator and stage manager of Boom's Chillout Gardens)Recommended Video:View From The Other Side (Drew Brophy on NDEs, shared by Charles Eisenstein)How to Watch Hundreds of Free Movies on YouTube (via OpenCulture)Cause and Constraints (Alicia Juarrero at The Complexity Lounge)Residuality Theory: Philosophy and Practice (Barry O'Reilly at The Complexity Lounge) 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

Witness to World War II in Austria, Benedictine monk for the last 66 years, friend to Swami Satchidananda, and internationally-recognized practitioner of gratitude Brother David Steindl-Rast sits down to talk with Avi Gordon of the Integral Yoga Teachers Association. The discussion covers prayer and meditation, Swami Satchidananda, gratitude, fear and trust, the remembrance of death, joy, and other topics.Network for Grateful Living: https://gratefulness.org/Brother David's Bio (from A Network for Grateful Living):David Steindl-Rast was born Franz Kuno Steindl-Rast on July 12, 1926, in Vienna, Austria, and spent his early years there and in a small village in the Alps. He spent all of his teen years under the Nazi occupation, was drafted into the army, but never went to the front lines. He eventually escaped and was hidden by his mother until the occupation ended.After the war, Franz studied art, anthropology, and psychology, receiving an MA from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and a PhD from the University of Vienna. In 1952 he followed his family who had emigrated to the United States. In 1953 he joined a newly founded Benedictine community in Elmira, NY, Mount Saviour Monastery, where he became “Brother David.” In 1958/59 Brother David was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, where he also became the first Roman Catholic to hold the Thorpe Lectureship, following Bishop J.D.R. Robinson and Paul Tillich.After twelve years of monastic training and studies in philosophy and theology, Brother David was sent by his abbot to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue, for which he received Vatican approval in 1967. His Zen teachers were Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, Soen Nakagawa Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and Eido Shimano Roshi. He co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies in 1968 and received the 1975 Martin Buber Award for his achievements in building bridges between religious traditions.Together with Thomas Merton, Brother David helped launch a renewal of religious life. From 1970 on, he became a leading figure in the House of Prayer movement, which affected some 200,000 members of religious orders in the United States and Canada. Since the 1970s Brother David has been a member of cultural historian William Irwin Thompson‘s Lindisfarne Association.”He has contributed to a wide range of books and periodicals from the Encyclopedia Americana and The New Catholic Encyclopedia, to the New Age Journal and Parabola Magazine. His books have been translated into many languages. Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and A Listening Heart have been reprinted and anthologized for more than two decades. Brother David co-authored Belonging to the Universe (winner of the 1992 American Book Award), a dialogue on new paradigm thinking in science and theology with physicist, Fritjof Capra. His dialogue with Buddhists produced The Ground We Share: Buddhist and Christian Practice, co-authored with Robert Aitken Roshi. His most recent books are Words of Common Sense for MInd, Body and Soul; Deeper than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed; 99 Blessings: An Invitation to Life; The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life; Faith beyond Belief: Spirituality for our Times; and his autobiography, i am through you so i.Brother David has contributed chapters or interviews to well over 30 books. An article by Brother David was included in The Best Spiritual Writing, 1998. His many audio and videotapes are widely distributed.At present, Brother David serves a worldwide Network for Grateful Living, through Gratefulness.org, an interactive website with several thousand participants daily from more than 240 countries and territories. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

El Filósofo y Pensador Americano, William Irwin Thompson es conocido por su trabajo sobre sociedad y cultura contemporáneas. A lo largo de su carrera ha sido profesor en universidades tan conocidas como el MIT, Syracuse o Toronto, y fue ganador del premio del Festival Internacional de Poesía de Oslo.

In the current "attention economy," which has resulted in plummeting literacy rates and the almost wanton neglect of various cultural practices, what significance does culture even have? Why seek to preserve something our age has decided doesn't have to exist? Perhaps Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game can be read as an answer to those questions. The order of monastic scholars in the novel exists mainly to remember what others were happy to consign to oblivion. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Hesse's ideas on the order and its sacred game in terms of how they might help us meet the challenge facing anyone who believes the value of culture can't be expressed in dollars and cents. REFERENCES Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312278496) Pope Benedict XVI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI), former head of the Catholic church J.S. Bach, Well Tempered Clavier, Rosalyn Tureck (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XoAJ98PbDM) interpretation and Glenn Gould (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOHnzWo8FXY) interpretation Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781453722480) Chauvet Cave (https://archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en) Peter Bebergal Strange Frequencies (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780143111825) Andy Goldsworthy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Goldsworthy), British artist Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780307476821) William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312160623)

JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that alights on some of the key ideas that run through the podcast: the dichotomy of work and play, the limits and affordances of institutional life, the obscure boundary where certainty gives way to mystery... Throughout his literary career, Hesse wrote about people trying to square their inner and outer selves, their life in the spirit and their life in the world. The Glass Bead Game brings this central concern to a properly ambiguous and heartbreaking conclusion. But the novel is more than a brilliant work of philosophical or psychological literature. It is also an act of prophecy -- one that seems intended for us now. Header image by Liz West, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green_marbles_2.jpg). REFERENCES Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312278496) Paul Hindemith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hindemith), German composer Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780393321692) Alfred Korzybski, concept of Time Binding Christopher Nolan, Memento (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312160623) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780679772873) David Tracy, [The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/790661.AnalogicalImagination)_ Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (https://bookshop.org/books/seeing-through-the-world-jean-gebser-and-integral-consciousness/9781947544154) Teilhard de Chardin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin), French theologian Mathesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathesis_universalis) Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze (https://bookshop.org/books/the-hermetic-deleuze-philosophy-and-spiritual-ordeal/9780822352297) Weird Studies, Episode 22 with Joshua Ramey (https://www.weirdstudies.com/22) Joseph Needham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham), British historian of Chinese culture James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (https://bookshop.org/books/finite-and-infinite-games/9781476731711)

 This week's guest is one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, and someone I'm honored and delighted to know. I can hardly express how strange and exciting it was when I reached out to Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk and Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University, and found out he was already a fan of my podcasting…so this episode is a seriously chummy session of mutual discovery by too people perhaps already a little bit TOO familiar with one another's work. Tyson inhabits an awesome position at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems, complexity science, cultural criticism, multimedia art and design, and dreaming and scheming on applications for ancient wisdom in the digital and post-digital eras.If you value this show and would like to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please leave a good review on Apple Podcasts! As a patron you get extra episodes each month, invites to our book club, and new writing, art, and music.• Meet great people and have equally great conversations in the Discord Server & Facebook Group• Buy the books we talk about from the Future Fossils shop at Bookshop.org• For when you'd rather listen to music, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.• Thanks to Naomi Most for helping edit most of this episode! It isn't easy work.✨ Short Reads• “Building The Ark” - Tyson at e-flux architecture on GameB• Tyson's feature for Melbourne Design Week 2021• “Transformational Festivals Are A Symptom of Dissociation” - Michael Garfield• “Australian Aboriginal techniques for memorization: Translation into a medical and allied health education setting” – David Reser et al. (Tyson is last author)• The Weirdest People in The World — Joseph Henrich• William Irwin Thompson on “The Ghost Dance of the Rednecks”• “The Information Theory of Individuality” - David Krakauer et al.• “Unchained: A Story of Love, Loss, and Blockchain” - Hannu Rajaniemi✨ Podcasts• Future Fossils Book Club Discussion Recording: Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta• “What Can I Do?” on The Other Others• “Maori MAGA” on The Other Others• “Queering Dignitas” on The Other Others• FF 100: The Teafaerie on DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention• FF 86, 87: Onyx Ashanti on Surfing Exponential Change (Part 1, Part 2)✨ Books• Sand Talk - Tyson Yunkaporta• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier• Scale - Geoffrey West• Count to a Trillion - John C. Wright• Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut✨ Music• Intro Music: Live at The Chillout Gardens, Boom Festival 2016• New Release: House Ship On A Hill (2021)✨ Notes• “The bourgeousie is always plundering the margins for menu options.”• eating peacocks: diverse diets for biodiversity vs. for dominion• how to restore the lost topsoil of Settler culture without stepping on others to do it• culpability (and the role of intent) in the West versus in Indigenous communities• COVID trauma, climate change, and Indigenous postapocalyptic insights for Settler cultures• critiquing the Myth of Primitivism and the Myth of Progress• the destruction of the clan by marriage law and papal decree• sanguinal, geographic, and noetic polities• showing up in society not just as individuals, but as members of family groups• why Indigenous people fall for conspiracy disinformation• getting a smartphone as an adult and how it changes you — firsthand recollections• Marshall McLuhan, neotribalism, banishment, and cancel culture• fractal sovereignty & continental commonlaw• genderqueerness as ontological revolution• decolonizing language and sexuality vs. transhumanist escapism/linguistic reterritorialization• guerrilla weddings in the Age of COVID• trust, smart contracts, and the unsustainability of economies of scale• Megan Kelleher, Holochain, Jim Rutt, Ben Goertzel• liquid democracy• How do you prevent an autonomous zone from being subsumed by colonial forces?• being happy to not have final answers, to be one step in an age of transition• “Land is your smart room [except] it's reciprocal. One of you isn't ‘The User.' … Most of the affordances you're seeking through technology and sci-fi: these are pre-existing things. You find them through a relation and an interspecies communication with your bioregion.”✨ Support the countless hours of research and production that go into Future Fossils• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• Patreon: patreon.com//michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0xfD2BC66586FA4FBA189992E9B0037CD5cb9673EF• NFTs: Rarible | Foundation Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, I embark on a new experiment and respond to three "advice column" questions from the Future Fossils listening audience:• How do I know if aliens would like my music?• How do I talk to my five-year-old about death?• How do I be creative without training or experience?This was a lot of fun and I'll definitely do this again. Enjoy, and thanks for listening!Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon. Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and many other great things as they spill out of my overactive imagination.We’d also love to have you in our thriving little Discord server, if you’re interested in meeting other members of our awesome scene. (And if you’d like to edit Future Fossils Podcast transcripts, please drop me a line at futurefossilspodcast[at]gmail.com.)Show theme music is by original Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder.Further Resources:IntroEpisode 70 with Steve Brusatte on the Golden Age of Dinosaurs Episode 100 with The Teafaerie Episode 158 with The Teafaerie & Ramin Nazer Episode 117 with Eric Wargo on Time Loops How do I know if aliens would like my music?Eight Two Music Complexity Podcast 1 with David Krakauer Hook (film) 1991Episode 161 with Michael Phillip on Creativity, Play, and Cryptocurrency Weird Studies 75 on 2001: A Space Odyssey Southpark Season 23 Episode 2 ("Band In China") Complexity 41 with Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature DetectionThe Physical Limits of Communication (1999) Edward Snowden talks with Neil DeGrasse Tyson about aliens Episode 42 with William Irwin ThompsonSFI Musicology & Complex Systems Working Group (YouTube Playlist)Episode 125 with Stuart Kauffman on Evolution & The Adjacent PossibleKing Kong (film) 1933How do I talk to my five-year-old about death?The New York Times: 10 Annoying Kids' Toys Complexity 52 with Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm Episode 116 with Kevin Wohlmut reading Ugo Bardi & John Michael Greer The Lion King (film) 1994 Complexity 37 with Laurence Gonzales on Surviving SurvivalThe Future Acts Like You The Addams Family (film) 1991How do I be creative without training?Alicia Eggert's Stewart Brand artwork at The Smithsonian The Exaptation of the Guitar The Future is Exapted/Remixed "You're only as original as the obscurity of your sources" And when you’re ready to switch it up, here are my music and listening recommendations on Spotify.If you're in a tipping mood:• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• Patreon: patreon.com//michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0x058aCaf2dd4DB222d89D65fdDF3f0500c5622448i Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Lindisfarne Tapes are selected recordings of presentations and conversations at the Lindisfarne Fellows' meetings. In March of 2013 William Thompson granted permission to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics to transfer the talks from the old reel-to-reel tapes to digital format so that they could be posted online and shared freely. In 2021, the Schumacher Center used the digital audio to create the Lindisfarne Tapes Podcast. Reposting should include acknowledgment of williamirwinthompson.org. Learn more about the Lindisfarne Tapes here.Thompson delivered this lecture in 1974 at the Lindisfarne Summer Conference, "Planetary Culture and New Image of Humanity."

This week I talk play, innovation, noise, disruption, cryptocurrency, and trickster creativity with Michael Phillip, host of sister podcast Third Eye Drops, which I’m on A LOT – episodes 102, 88, 58, 44 with Doug Rushkoff, 38 with Niles Heckman, 28 with Bruce Damer, 21 with Erik Davis, 9 with Shane Mauss, 4 with Erik Davis, and this special mashup episode.  This one was originally recorded as Third Eye Drops Episode 239, but I went ahead and painstakingly edited out over ten minutes of filler language and head-scratching to give you the sharpest and most-polished conversation possible. If you appreciate these conversations and the extra work I put in to make them shine, please support Future Fossils on Patreon! Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and many other great things as they spill out of my overactive imagination. And if you’re broke as a joke, consider rating and reviewing Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts. It helps more than you know.We’d also love to have you in The Future Fossils Discord server, where you can find the others…Lastly, if you’re a podcaster, I recommend you get your show transcribed affordably at Podscribe.AI.Intro and outro music by Skytree.Michael Phillip has appeared on Future Fossils before:Episode 14 on WestworldEpisode 52 on Blockchain with Jennifer SodiniEpisode 67 on Magic & Media with Douglas RushkoffEpisode 135 on The Cosmic YesRelated External Sources:Buy all the books we talk about on this show from my Amazon Storefront.Lewis Hyde - Trickster Makes This WorldAndreas Wagner - Life Finds A WayAndreas Wagner - Arrival of the FittestRichard Dawkins - Climbing Mount ImprobableRichard Doyle - Darwin’s PharmacyWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Time Falling Bodies Take To LightAndreas Wagner at Nautilus - Why It Pays To Play Around(*I mistakenly said the article was published at Quanta)William Irwin Thompson et al. - The Lindisfarne TapesAdi Livnat - Simplification, Innateness, and the Absorption of Meaning from ContextPhil Ford’s Musicology Lectures on the Weird Studies PatreonWJT Mitchell - The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction(*I mistakenly said this was “Biomechanical Reproduction”)Chris Ryan - Tangentially Speaking 69 with Daniel VitalisJames Nestor - The Future of Breathing at The Long Now FoundationEvolutionary fitness landscapes visualized by @_baku89 on TwitterRelated Future Fossils/Michael Sources:MG - Cosmic Perspectives From A Fractal Planet (Burning Man 2013)MG - Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement (2011)MG - We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks by Realizing We Are Networks (2020)MG - “Ride It” music video (2005)Future Fossils 125 - Stuart Kauffman on Life, Physics, and the Adjacent PossibleFuture Fossils 160 - His Dark Materials: Narnia, Fillory, and Coming of Age in the Multiverse, with Stephen Hershey & Kynthia BrunetteFuture Fossils 159 - Michael Dowd on Post Doom: Life After Accepting Climate CatastropheComplexity Podcast 51 - Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of InferenceAnd when you’re ready to switch it up, here are my music and listening recommendations on Spotify.If you're in a tipping mood:• Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• Patreon: patreon.com//michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0x058aCaf2dd4DB222d89D65fdDF3f0500c5622448i Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tracing the cultural and mythological history of solstice celebrations across the globe, Robert Thurman in his annual holiday message shares his positive vision for thriving even in the darkest of seasons, times and situations. Examining the common practice of cultures centering winter and end of year holidays around the moment the north pole is farthest from the sun, Thurman opens this episode with a teaching on the astronomical, etymological and spiritual history of winter solstices for those of all backgrounds, faiths and traditions.. Podcast includes: an introduction to “The Edge of History” by William Irwin Thompson founder of Lindisfarne Association; a short exploration of Albert Schweitzer's perspective on human and animal souls; discussion of the connections between the wise men visiting Jesus in the New Testament and the nomadic cultures of Asia; and a personal reflection on the lure of holiday marketing, consumerism, messiahs and messianic movements This week's episode concludes with a special invitation to "Envisioning 2021: Celebrate the New Year with Dharma, Yoga, Music, Meditation, & Astrology" hosted by Tibet House US Menla Online happening Dec 29th, 2020 - Jan 3rd, 2021.

Tracing the cultural and mythological history of solstice celebrations across the globe, Robert Thurman in his annual holiday message shares his positive vision for thriving even in the darkest of seasons, times and situations. Examining the common practice of cultures centering winter and end of year holidays around the moment the north pole is farthest from the sun, Thurman opens this episode with a teaching on the astronomical, etymological and spiritual history of winter solstices for those of all backgrounds, faiths and traditions.. Podcast includes: an introduction to “The Edge of History” by William Irwin Thompson founder of Lindisfarne Association; a short exploration of Albert Schweitzer's perspective on human and animal souls; discussion of the connections between the wise men visiting Jesus in the New Testament and the nomadic cultures of Asia; and a personal reflection on the lure of holiday marketing, consumerism, messiahs and messianic movements This week's episode concludes with a special invitation to "Envisioning 2021: Celebrate the New Year with Dharma, Yoga, Music, Meditation, & Astrology" hosted by Tibet House US Menla Online happening Dec 29th, 2020 - Jan 3rd, 2021.

My second dialogue with Evan Thompson covers his latest and most controversial book, Why I Am Not A Buddhist, which spotlights conceptual and functional problems with Buddhist modernism, Buddhist exceptionalism, Buddhist Empiricism, and neural Buddhism. With philosophical adeptness, Evan argues a cosmopolitan view of not-self and enlightenment, and skillfully slays popular one-dimensional co-options of the Buddhist teachings by Robert Wright and Sam Harris. This episode is dedicated to Evan’s father, writer and scholar William Irwin Thompson who recently passed away; a man who profoundly impacted my life particularly during my 20’s, when I was deeply interested in the cultural evolution of patriarchy and modern human’s loss of connection with the natural world.Evan Thompson is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience by combining cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions. The best place to find out more about Evan's work is his website.  

This week I’m honored to speak with musicologist Phil Ford, co-host of Weird Studies, on a voyage that takes us from elevator muzak to aquarian cults to Disneyland to the future of magical warfare. We discuss what it means to be (or want to be) “primitives of an unknown culture,” the staging of nature, what happens when your aesthetic commitments become your reality commitments, ontological anarchy, and The Super Mario Bros Movie’s influence on the 2016 presidential election. Keep your ears peeled for deep cuts on Fight Club, the Alt-Right, Les Baxter, William Irwin Thompson, Jurassic Park, and Burning Man…Read Phil’s essay, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica.” And while you’re at it, read my comments on his essay about Time Binding & Music History on The Long Now Blog.Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon. Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and many other great things as they spill out of my overactive imagination.We’d also love to have you in our thriving little Discord server, if you’re interested in meeting other members of our awesome scene. (And if you’re up for helping edit Future Fossils Podcast transcripts, please drop me a line at futurefossilspodcast@gmail.com.)Even though we didn’t watch them until later, there must be time loops flowing back into this conversation from both the documentary Feels Good Man and the satire Sassy Justice. Go watch them both immediately and you’ll know what I mean.For more, check out my appearance on Weird Studies 26 and Phil’s appearance on Future Fossils 126. And then read more about why things keep turning into crabs at Boing Boing and in the Future Fossils Facebook Group (1, 2).Intro and outro music is from Skytree’s new LP of spacey downtempo electronica, Infraplanetary.Cover art sourced from the uncannily appropriate less-real.com/images/21162.Enjoy, and thanks for listening! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"We are living through a health crisis, an economic crisis, a racial crisis, and a democratic crisis. Each would be historic on their own. All of them are connected. That they have struck together in this way just might be what compels our transformation."– Anand GiridharadasThis week’s episode is over three years in the making: my talk from Earth Frequency Festival 2017, about a revised narrative of prehistory from which we can grow new myths better suited for our times. I almost didn’t post this episode at all, even after nearly two full days of editing, because it felt tone deaf to zoom out so far and discuss topics like mass extinctions, the evolution of plant-pollinator symbiosis, my critiques of transhumanism and SpaceX, and how fish and clams represent complementary strategies for dealing with turbulent environments. But this feature-length rant erupted from me at a time that rhymes intensely with our current moment: I was scheduled to present on futurism immediately following a heart-wrenching and visceral presentation on the (then ongoing) Standing Rock protests, and it felt right then as it does now to wield what I know in service of new stories that better serve the work of social justice. After all, it is only the alienated and colonized mind that sees climate change, racism, economic inequality, and ecological devastation as separate issues.No: if we are to truly embrace our interbeing with the biosphere (and we must), then we cannot exclude other human beings — or even nonhuman sentient beings — from our maps and models of the nondual truth of who we are. One more disclaimer: This is the last unpublished talk I gave before I started work at the Santa Fe Institute, where my poetic intuitions and armchair science scholarship have been challenged to rise to far greater rigor and discernment. I regard this two-hour screed as both one of my most inspired riffs, the closest that I ever got to a Terence McKenna sermon…but it’s also full of embryonic, raw ideas that have evolved A LOT since this recording happened. I share it with you not as a completed document but as a snapshot of a story in the weaving, and I hope you hear it as the work in progress that it was and is.Thank you and I hope you’ll take a moment to read the supplementary materials below, and support the crucial social justice orgs helping protect the lives and freedom of your neighbors here on Earth, in this especially intense and pivotal moment. For the next few weeks I am donating 100% of the sales of my original paintings and inventory of canvas prints to ACLU and Unicorn Riot. If you would like to put your money to a good cause and get some cool art for doing so, please visit https://instagram.com/michaelgarfield for details.Support this show on Patreon for over a dozen secret episodes, the Future Fossils book club, and weekly community calls, and much more. Or, better, read and share the resources below.Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).My embarrassingly white and male list of mentions from this talk:Bruce Damer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ernst Haeckel, Proteus (documentary), Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Diane Musho Hamilton, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Kary Mullis, Francis Crick, The Bardo Thodol (book), Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba, Biosphere 2, William Irwin Thompson, Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, Marie Toffler, Stewart Brand, Wall-E (film), Gregory Bateson, John Muir, Richard Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy (book), Thomas Henry Huxley, Gideon Mantell, Colin Elder, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, The Light of Other Days (book), Albert Einstein, John C. Wright, Timothy Leary, Elon MuskShare these resources:–––> Ally Tools

Show Notes & More Info Here In this episode, Ziz and Pam talk about how parents can create the conditions for children to rise, simply by letting them be who they are. We can learn a lot from our children if we give them the freedom to explore and discover for themselves what makes them unique. When parents stop trying to 'fix' children and instead, empower them on their journey, children will flourish. Also discussed: Dr. Shefali's The Conscious Parent Pam's Changing the Culture of Sameness blog David Brooks' piece in The Atlantic, The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake Daniel Pink's Drive Duncan Wardle Viktor Frankl - https://viktorfranklamerica.com/ Frankl predicted that dealing with human beings as if they are a mere thing would take its toll. He wholeheartedly agreed with sociologist, William Irwin Thompson when he said “Humans are not objects that exist as tables and chairs. They live–and if they find that their lives are reduced to the mere existence of chairs or tables, then they commit suicide.” The Real Cost of a Meaningless Education Watch this episode: https://youtu.be/LsCTBiz8fl0

How many times have you heard people claim that Buddhism isn’t really a religion, that it’s a philosophy, a way of life, that its spiritual but not religious, or even that it’s a “science of mind”? These familiar tropes are a legacy of Buddhist Modernism, what Evan Thompson aptly has coined “Buddhist exceptionalism.” In this episode we explore these common claims, especially how they have been taken up by Secular Buddhists, mindfulness teachers and even scientists.  We explore in this interview the historical reasons for why Buddhism has received special treatment, with its modernist claim that it is fundamentally different than Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism.  We dive into the confused understandings of mindfulness meditation which has been portrayed as a privatized “inner telescope” to objectively view our interior minds (brains), along with the misguided attempt to map meditative experiences onto brain states and neural correlates (Neural Buddhism).  Evan challenges the popular view that Buddhism is compatible with science, and that science can validate Buddhist insights. Drawing on his intimate friendship and collaboration with the late Francisco Varela (a key founder of the Mind & Life Institute) he takes aim at how the so-called Buddhism – Science “dialogue” has been one-sided and stifling of mutual learning. Evan Thompson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He writes about the mind, life, consciousness, and the self, from the perspectives of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy (especially Buddhism and other Indian philosophical traditions). As a teenager, Evan was home-schooled in Southampton, NY and Manhattan at the Lindisfarne Association, an educational and contemplative community founded by his parents, William Irwin Thompson and Gail Thompson. He received his A.B. in Asian Studies from Amherst College (1983) studying with Robert Thurman, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto (1990). Evan has been actively involved as one of the leading researchers and advisers for the Mind & Life Institute. We spoke today with Evan about his new book, Why I Am Not A Buddhist, published by Yale University Press in 2020. He is the author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015); He is also the co-author with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991, revised edition 2016).  

Before too much time lapses on the election clock, we impart our recent WARREN - that is Elizabeth Ann Warren - in which we discuss, among other things, nothing you ever wanted to know about her and never thought to ask. Through the unique perspectives of astrology, William Irwin Thompson and some murky political calculations, etc., we examine her "fight," conversion experience - from capitalist water carrier to down-trodden champion - her nickname ("Datum'), comparisons to other candidates and current and former presidents - and generally thing having not much to do with Allen Ginsberg. Take heed, this session includes an insider's look from our very own former presidential contender, Sparrow. To note, there is here profane speech (bleeped), sorry.

Looking back through time, the fossil record shows a remarkable diversity of forms, creatures unfamiliar to today’s Earth, suggesting ecosystems alien enough to challenge any sense of continuity. But reconstructed trophic networks — maps of who’s eating whom — reveal a hidden order that has been conserved since the first complex animals of half a billion years ago. These network models offer scientists an armature on which to hang new unifying theories of ecology, a way to answer questions about how energy moves through living systems, how evolution keeps producing creatures to refill specific niches, how mass extinctions happen, what minimal viable ecosystems are and why.  Untangling this deep structure of food webs may also shed light on technology and economics, and guide interventions to ensure sustainability in agriculture, conservation efforts, even venture capital investment.This week’s guest is Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science and Fellow at the Ecological Society of America. Dunne got her PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, joined SFI’s faculty in 2007, and sits on the advisory board for Nautilus Magazine.  In this second half of a two-part conversation, we discuss her work on reconstructing ancient food webs, and the implications of this research for our understanding of ecologies, extinctions, sustainability, and technological innovation.Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Jennifer Dunne’s Website.Related Reading:Modern Lessons from Ancient Food WebsParasites Affect Food Web Structure Primarily through Increased Diversity and ComplexityHighly resolved early Eocene food webs show development of modern trophic structure after the end-Cretaceous extinctionThe roles and impacts of human hunter-gatherers in North Pacific marine food websA primer on the history of food web ecology: Fundamental contributions of fourteen researchersQuanta Magazine features Dunne on humans in food webs.Jennifer on This Week in Science at InterPlanetary Festival 2019.Learn more about The ArchaeoEcology Project.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousness adopts different "structures" at different times and in different contexts, and each structure reveals certain facets of reality while potentially occluding others. An integral human being is one who can utilize all of the structures according to the moment or situation. As Gebserian scholar Jeremy Johnson explains in this episode, modern humans are currently experiencing the transition from the "perspectival" structure which formed in the late Middle Ages to the "aperspectival," a new way of seeing and being that first revealed itself in the art of the Modernists. Grokking what the aperspectival means, and what it might look like, is just one of the tasks Jeremy, Phil and JF set themselves in this engaging trialogue. Jeremy D. Johnson is the author of the recently released Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Through-World-Consciousness-Nuralogicals/dp/1947544152). REFERENCES Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and the Integral Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Through-World-Consciousness-Nuralogicals/dp/1947544152) Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (https://www.amazon.com/Ever-Present-Origin-Part-Aperspectival-Manifestations/dp/0821407694) William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312176921) Ken Wilber (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber), integral theorist Lionel Snell, “Spare Parts” (https://fulgur.co.uk/austin-osman-spare/spare-parts/?v=7516fd43adaa) Nagarjuna, “Verses of the Middle Way” (https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/verses-from-the-center) (Mulamadhyamakakarika) Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-of-the-acrobat-on-peter-sloterdijk/) Thomas Aquinas, [Summa Theologica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SummaTheologica)_ Object-oriented ontology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology) (OOO) Dogen, [Uji](https://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/DogenTeachings/UjiWelch.htm) (“The Time-Being”), from the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) Special Guest: Jeremy D. Johnson.

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.

“The human being is actually this kaleidoscope of different ways to relate to time and space. And to be present with it all, to be awake with it all, is what we’re doing.”Jean Gebser mapped the mutating structures of human consciousness, the topology of mind from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral. His work inspired generations of inquiry by authors like William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber. Now Jeremy Johnson’s latest book for Revelore Press expands into the truly visionary and unique “amensional” reality that Gebser posits as the next mutation for our planetary culture. “We’re not just going to have an ‘archaic revival’ and dump what we’ve been doing with the nightmare of history. There’s something that’s been achieved in this kind of coalescing of the self and the emergence of spatial linear time that’s true, as well.”“The endgame of perspectivalism and the mental world…is eventually breaking down to the point where everyone has their own little perspectival ‘reality tunnel,’ where nobody’s able to talk to one another and everybody’s in this sense of cultural warfare and fragmentation and social isolation.”“You should know by now that things are ever-present.”Jeremy’s Book:https://revelore.press/product/seeing-through-the-world/ Jeremy’s Podcast:http://www.jeremydanieljohnson.com/mutations Discussed:James JoyceMarshall McLuhanMartin HeideggerSri AurobindoGrant MorrisonTimothy MortonDoug RushkoffEugene ThackerGraham HarmanSupport the show on Patreon for an avalanche of secret episodes, writing, art, music, and the Future Fossils Book Club:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

My graduate advisor Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the most consistently inspiring and refreshingly different thinkers I’ve ever met. In our first Future Fossils conversation, we discussed his work to apply a profoundly “meta” and pluralistic philosophy to the everyday work of organizational development and social impact. In this discussion, we turn over the rock and examine his decades of inquiry into some of the world’s most puzzling and confounding phenomena – namely, those surrounding the UFO and its aura of science-challenging incursions into mundane reality. Might “Exostudies” be the locus of a transformation in how we understand reality? This is not your normal New Age conversation about aliens, but a rigorous look into the persistent weirdness and problematic implications of one of humankind’s greatest mysteries. As Phil Dick famously said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” If UFOs are here to stay – with all of their attendant provocations to our oversimple categories (self and other, artificial and natural, hallucination and perception, physical and immaterial) – then we are overdue for a new definition of “reality.” In preparation for his Exostudies online course this fall, we look at how to make sense of the stubbornly ineffable – an evolutionary call to take up higher-dimensional logic and more nuanced understandings of What Is…http://www.exostudies.org/“When you go into the UFO field, at least with an open heart and mind, you come across some really crazy shit. It is a freakshow. There are so many bizarre claims being made by standup citizens who are quite believable in what they are saying, even though what they’re saying just does not map onto our general view of reality.”“The truth is stranger than science fiction. Not just fiction, but science fiction.”“The phenomenon is subjective and objective; it’s subjective and objective simultaneously; and it’s neither. So I think what it’s asking us is to re-examine the relationship between mind and matter, and how do we relate to subject and object, and how has our current scientific methodology failed us horribly in having a more sophisticated answer or framing or understanding of how these two aspects are related.”“There are really good, legitimate photographs, and trace evidence, and all kinds of physical evidence for UFO craft and other otherworldly realities…and yet, there are so many fakes. And how do you sift through all that? You almost can’t.”“We’re entering into an augmented and virtual space that’s going to be ontologically fragmented, and highly pluralistic, and solipsistic. So how do we navigate that culturally? I don’t know, but I think we’re largely unprepared.”“We’re not that far from discovering some form of mini-life elsewhere. And as soon as that happens, then the floodgates are going to open in considering the implications of that.”“So many UFO or ET enthusiasts often want to put everything in one box, like ‘they’re all bad,’ ‘they’re all good,’ ‘they’re all future versions of ourselves.’ I think it’s much messier than that.”“I think one of the core strategies is hermeneutic generosity. A sense of critical thinking, but from a place of generosity, where we stay open. Postmodernism has been so jaded – the hermeneutics of suspicion – I think when we approach these phenomena, we need a different orientation.”“To really bring any kind of justice to this inquiry, we need to draw on the best thinking from as many kinds of disciplines as we can – because the phenomenon is that big, and that mysterious, and that paradoxical. So anything short of a meta, integrative approach – and even that – is going to fail.”Mentioned:Diana Slattery, John Mack, Avi Loeb, Ken Wilber, Jeff Kripal, Whitley Strieber, Arthur Brock, George Knapp, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Stuart Davis, Jeff Salzman, Richard Doyle, Carl Jung, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, DW Pasulka, Eric Wargo, Jacques ValleeSean’s appearance on the Daily Evolver Podcast:https://www.dailyevolver.com/2019/02/taking-aliens-seriously/If you liked this episode, check out Episodes 60 & Episode 91:https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/60https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/91 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror. The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous Teeming Brain (www.teemingbrain.com), wrote a chapter for the book focusing on the books and films of the Sixties and Seventies. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil to discuss the kinship of horror and fantasy, the modern ghettoization of mythopoeic art, the prophetic reach of speculative fiction, and the "cauldron of cultural transformation" that was the Sixties and Seventies. Header Image by Moralist, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_Candles.jpg) REFERENCES The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror (https://www.flametreepublishing.com/The-Astounding-Illustrated-History-of-Fantasy-&-Horror-ISBN-9781786648037.html) Matt Cardin's website (http://www.mattcardin.com) The Teeming Brain (http://www.teemingbrain.com) American literary critic S. T. Joshi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._T._Joshi) British writer and scholar Roger Luckhurst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Luckhurst) Neil Gaiman, introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death (https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Cycle-H-P-Lovecraft/dp/0345384210) The concept of "folk psychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology)" H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dq.aspx) H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tgsk.aspx) James Curcio, Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice (http://www.jamescurcio.com/post/182128171068/masks-bowie-and-artists-of-artifice-modern) (forthcoming) American author Thomas Ligotti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ligotti) British author Arthur Machen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Machen) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein) Ian McEwen, Enduring Love (https://www.amazon.com/Enduring-Love-Novel-Ian-McEwan/dp/0385494149) Weird Studies, Episode 36: On Hyperstition (https://www.weirdstudies.com/36) J. R. R. Tolkien, [The Silmarillion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheSilmarillion)_ Terry Brooks, [The Sword of Shannara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheSwordofShannara)_ Stephen R. Donaldson, [The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheChroniclesofThomasCovenant) [Night of the Living Dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NightoftheLivingDead) (George A. Romero, 1968) The Lord of the Rings animated film (Ralph Bakshi, 1978) Lloyd Alexander, [The Chronicles of Prydain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheChroniclesofPrydain)_ Madeleine L'Engle, [A Wrinkle in Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWrinkleinTime)_ The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Cthulhu_(role-playing_game)) (Chaosium) Ray Bradbury, [Something Wicked This Way Comes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomethingWickedThisWayComes) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978) William Irwin Thompson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Irwin_Thompson), At the Edge of History Interview (https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/george-clayton-johnson) with Twilight Zone luminary George Clayton Johnson [The Wicker Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheWickerMan) (Robin Hardy, 1973) [The Omen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheOmen)_ (Richard Donner, 1976) Stephen King, [Salem's Lot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Salem%27sLot)_ Special Guest: Matt Cardin.

In Jonathan Glazer's loose screen adaptation of Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin, a creature of mysterious origin drives around Scotland in a white van, collecting lonely men and spiriting them away to an otherworld where they are turned into food.... or something. Drawing on a deep well of literary, visual, and musical tradition, Glazer (with help from his score composer Mica Levi) create a vivid work of tragedy and horror, masterfully executed for maximal weirdness and unwaveringly true to the auteur's intent to reveal our world from an "alien perspective." In this episode, Phil and JF discuss some themes and ideas they've pried from this exquisite tangle of image and sound. Along the way, they discuss the role that serendipity, coincidence, and fate play in both art-making and scholarship. REFERENCES Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) Other films by Glazer: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004) Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) Iannis Xenakis, Greek composer Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017) Ligeti, Atmosphères Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016) Screen shot of "Space Invader" (https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/e/e38b53e4-e148-4e2d-b301-0b3bb15779ff/RV_ugxHk.jpg) Easter egg in Under the Skin Weird Studies Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis John August, American screenwriter Phil Ford, "The Devil's On Your Side: A Meditation on the Perennially Disreputable Business of Hermeneutics" (unpublished) Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2013) William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science Interview with Mica Levi (https://www.indiewire.com/2014/11/mica-levi-on-why-composing-under-the-skin-was-really-mental-190232/), who composed the score for Under the Skin Atar Arad, American violist David Caspar Friedrich, [Wanderer above the Sea of Fog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WandererabovetheSeaofFog)_

This week is part two of the intense, bizarre, and wonderful roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we discuss the puzzling connection between clowns and DMT; John’s voyage into the strange realm of mediumship; and Michael’s life-altering series of UFO encounters right after college. Among other things…The Guests:Michael Aaron Kaminshttps://twitter.com/michaelaaronkJohn David Eberthttps://twitter.com/johndavidebertIkkyu Sojunhttps://twitter.com/mimeticvalueSubscribe to Future Fossils on any platform you desire:https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossilsSupport this show on Patreon. It’s good for you and makes you feel good:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldWe Discuss:How everyone gets their own language once we invent the universal translator.Addressing the question of hyperspace “entities” from nonduality and landscape agency.Clown/Harlequin Theory in the psychedelic realm.JDE:“Now I don’t wanna do DMT. You’ve ruined it for me, because I don’t wanna see a clown.”Ikkyu:“Imagine Meow Wolf…but a thousand times more.”The Joker is a floating signifier.Ikkyu talks about an extremely potent and disturbing N,N-DMT trip.The Mantis-Clown connection, vis-a-vis Michael’s Peruvian ayahuasca experiences.The clown in Eastern philosophy as Lao Wonton, the childlike “crazy” old man in kung-fu movies.Michael’s ONE critique of William Irwin Thompson (hint: “Lindisfarne,” what’s in a name?).What is the difference between the techno-optimism of Buckminster Fuller and the techno-optimism of Peter Thiel, Peter Diamandis, and Jeff Bezos?Trump the Clown, the Magician, the Alchemical Fool.Ikkyu:“What if I were like Duncan Trussell or Joe Rogan but I interview ideas, rather than people?”JDE interviews Rudolf Steiner through a medium, Shruti Campbell. He tells us of his love affair with Steiner.JDE explains how he become convinced that there are in fact legit mediums who can communicate with dead people.The theme of confinement in world myth.Exoteric lab institution science and esoteric wilderness field prospecting discovery science.Michael goes into unprecedented detail about his UFO sightings in 2006.Sufjan Stevens’ song “Concerning the UFO Sighting…”Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Pope about UFOs.Book: Who Built The Moon?Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” music video (feat. Kate Bush)Michael’s eternalist/quantum-democracy theory of our self-fulfilling origins/histories.Dan Larimer vs. Vitalik Buterin on the limits of crypto-economic governance.The connections between alien abductions and shamanic initiations.Searching for metaphors complex enough to allow us to inhabit and dwell in hypermodernity.Carl JungCrowley’s Thoth TarotTimothy Morton’s HyperobjectsJames HillmanNassim TalebThe Flying Spaghetti MonsterRupert SheldrakeJohn C. WrightSam HarrisStephen HawkingErik DavisZechariah SitchinWestworld“The Moon” Tarot CardGreg Egan’s DistressFinnegans Wake - HCE (“Here Comes Everyone”)Blade Runner 2049Charles Stross’ AccelerandoJeff Noon (Vert & Pollen)Steven Greer & CE-5Jacques ValleeJ Allen Heinich (sp?)Prometheus & AtlasMircea Eliade See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Happy holidays, Weird Studies listeners! In this short "Christmas Bonus" episode, your intrepid hosts finish up what began as a discussion of Nick Land's concept of hyperstition. Following last week's closing remarks about the importance of "banishing" ideas that might otherwise take us over, the segment focuses on the dividing line between the personal and the political. Where does the one end and the other begin? What do we risk when we choose to make a necessarily limited standpoint the locus of some totalizing view? The answers will take back to the birth of eukaryotic cells, the sin of Cain, and the wisdom of Sun Ra. References made in this conversation were included in the show notes for Episode 36 (https://www.weirdstudies.com/36).

"I go way back" says William. Thompson first encountered Yogananda when he was in high school in the 50s, which got him interested in planetary thinking. In this interview, Thompson recounts meeting famous gurus, exploring the counter culture, teaching at M.I.T., leaving academia, running programs in NYC, and more.

Stone, bronze, iron... glass? In his recent thought and writing, transdisciplinary artist and thinker Michael Garfield defines modernity as an age of glass, arguing that the entire ethos of our era inheres in the transformative enchantments of this amorphous solid. No one would deny that glass plays a central role in our lives, although glass does have a knack for disappearing into the background, at least until the beakers or screens crack and shatter. Glass is weird, and like a lot of weird things, it can serve as a lens (so to speak!) for observing our world from strange new angles. In this episode, Michael joins Phil and JF to talk through the origins, the significance, and the fate of the Glass Age. Michael Garfield (http://weirdstudies.com/guests/garfield) is a musician, live painter, and futurist. He is the host of the brilliant Future Fossils Podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2). REFERENCES Michael Garfield's website (http://michaelgarfield.net/) + Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/michaelgarfield) + Medium (https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield) + Bandcamp (http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com) Michael Garfield, "The Future is Indistinguishable from Magic" (https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-indistinguishable-from-magic-5b9596a4ea) (This is the essay we discuss that was unpublished at the time of the recording) Michael Garfield, "The Future Acts Like You" (https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-acts-like-you-7848b55475d5) Michael Garfield, "The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast" (https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-3-living-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-2a42538ee2) Artist David Titterington's Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/posts/16115658) Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=797) Corning, "The Glass Age" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12OSBJwogFc) (corporate video) Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (https://www.amazon.com/Baudelaire-Jean-Paul-Sartre/dp/0811201899) John David Ebert, "On Hypermodernity" (https://cultural-discourse.com/on-hypermodernity/) John C. Wright, The Golden Age (https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age-John-C-Wright/dp/0765336693) J.R.R. Tolkien, [The Lord of the Rings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLordoftheRings) Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects) Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, Who Built the Moon? (https://www.amazon.com/Who-Built-Moon-Christopher-Knight/dp/1842931636) Pink Floyd, [The Dark Side of the Moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDarkSideoftheMoon)_ Marshall McLuhan, [The Gutenberg Galaxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheGutenbergGalaxy) Marshall McLuhan, [The Medium is the Massage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheMediumIstheMassage) Spinoza, Ethics (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3800) Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1991-cbc-massey-lectures-the-malaise-of-modernity-1.2946849) Martine Rothblatt, [Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality](https://www.amazon.com/Virtually-Human-Promiseand-Perilof-Immortality/dp/1250046912) John Crowley, [Little, Big](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little,Big)_ Jose Arguelles, Dreamspell Calendar (http://www.13moon.com/dreamspell.htm) William Irwin Thompson, Lindisfarne Tapes (https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/legacy/lindisfarne-tapes) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-audible-past) Karl Schroeder, “Degrees of Freedom,” in Heiroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (https://www.amazon.com/Hieroglyph-Stories-Visions-Better-Future/dp/0062204718) Michael Garfield, “Being Every Drone (https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78)” Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Evolution-Henri-Bergson/dp/0486400360) Special Guest: Michael Garfield.

Phil stops by JF's Canadian homestead for a raucous IRL conversation on the idea of presence. The range of topics includes objects of power, the magic of books, the mystery of the event, modernity's knack for making myths immanent, genius loci, the mad wonder of Blue Velvet, and the iron fist of the virtual. REFERENCES Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Bot Be Televised" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGaoXAwl9kw) Louis CK on smart phones at the ballet recital (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3jbaeseT8) Henri Bergson, [Matter and Memory](http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/matterandmemory.pdf), Creative Evolution (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163-h/26163-h.htm) Gilles Deleuze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze) on the virtual: see Bergsonism, Proust and Signs, The Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition, Cinema II: The TIme Image Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, "Being Anarchist" (http://expandingmind.podbean.com/e/expanding-mind-being-anarchist-051018/) JF Martel, "Reality is Analog" (https://www.metapsychosis.com/reality-is-analog-philosophizing-with-stranger-things-part-one/) Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo26032843.html) (and Gyrus's review (https://dreamflesh.com/review/book/myth-disenchantment/)) Gyrus, North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos (https://polarcosmology.com/) William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture (https://www.amazon.com/Time-Falling-Bodies-Take-Light/dp/0312160623) Geoffrey O’Brien, Phantom Empire (https://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Empire-Movies-Mind-Century/dp/0393312968/) David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html) Donald Barthelme (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Barthelme) David Lynch, Blue Velvet (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/) Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Meraphysics (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cannibal-metaphysics)

This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:Subscribe on Patreon to watch the uncut interview:https://www.patreon.com/posts/20618842Our New, Better Life?https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/Why I Am Afraid of Global Coolinghttps://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/Discussed:What inspired Charles’ thorough history and critique of civilization, The Ascent of Humanity, and how it differs from “anti-civilization” texts.The independent convergent evolutions of civilization in Mesopotamia, China, India, and several other places, pointing to the inevitability and directionality of what we call “progress.”What new stories emerge at the intersection of the timeless attractors toward a whole and healthy, thriving biodiverse world of human inter-beings, and a fragmented post-ecocidal VR fully artificial landscape?When is it useful to think of humans as part of nature and when is it useful to think of humans as distinct from nature?“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”What cultural appropriation gets wrong in its attempts to retrieve and revive indigenous rites (“It’s not the content of the rituals; it’s the spirit of the rituals.”)Money as a ritual: “One of the reasons money comes so easily to us is that it’s a kind of ritual. The human mind…ritual is its territory.”“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”Operating on a story that believes the world to be dead leads to a world that is, in fact, dead – whether or not it actually was dead in the first place. Treating nature as a resource rather than as a community of minded cohabitants and potential collaborators is a self-fulfilling prophecy and an act of self-sabotage.Charles’ critique of the New Age technologies of manifestation as oblivious of where the intention or vision comes from in the first place, how we’re enfolded into our environments……and how paradoxically similar that critique is to the disenchanting philosophies described by people like Yuval Harari and Timothy Morton, who make the case that it’s equally the case that the world is alive, or that humans are basically just machines. Or Erik Davis’ “re-animism,” in which we return to a pre-modern sense of a sentient environment through our encounter with AI-suffused devices.How the scientific quest for control over a purely mechanical cosmos pushed us all the way around into some truly weird revelations about the indeterminate, irreproducible, and contingent workings of our mysterious universe.Why machines don’t provide a sufficient metaphor for understanding consciousness, and certainly not for reproducing it.Is trying to fit the complexity of the world into a linear narrative structure the problem at the root of all this? Is it a form of violence to talk about time and evolution having a direction?“I’m not a story fundamentalist. If I say the world is built from story, I also recognize that that itself is also a story. I look at the story of inter-being, for example, as really just the ideological layer of an organism that is far deeper than story.”“There are many ways to know. And we’re conditioned by a story that says only the measurable is real. So we’re conditioned to give priority to ways of knowing that have to do with putting things in categories.”“Progress as currently formulated is not real progress at all. We’re not getting ANY closer to the fulfillment of human potential. Well, aybe we are getting closer on one very narrow axis of development. But there is so much more to a fully expressed human being…and we’re moving away from it in a lot of ways.”What metaphor for mind/life/nature is set to replace “the computer,” just as “the computer” replaced “the steam engine,” which replaced “the geared watch?”How black box AI solutions restore the mystery and magic to the technosphere, replacing reason with blind faith.Kevin Kelly, Stephen Pinker, William Irwin Thompson, Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Brock,“The more empathic our participation, the better off we’ll be.”Can we be TOO empathic?“I think on some level, we all DO feel what all beings are feeling.”The boundaries we draw between our selves and the world, between one organism and another, also evolve.The healing power of grief.Purge-aholics Anonymous.The evolution of service as a continuously shifting, molting thing that changes, that requires careful listening. No moment is the same.The sacred disquiet that attends our new perspective as we learn to see a bigger (ever-bigger) picture.“We have to be cognizant of the inevitable reduction that happens when we assign values to things…one way to translate the humble awareness of the limitations of quantified value is to design currencies that do not need to grow in order to survive.”Did money invent science?“Property is an agreement. It’s not an absolute objective thing…as much as libertarians would like it to be.”Why cryptocurrency (wants to, but) can’t replace human agreement with code.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on YouTube:http://youtube.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSupport the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldBig thanks to our featured sponsor, transhumanity.net!7y8qr5yz See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s guest is independent culture critic John David Ebert – mythologist, philosopher, art historian, author of twenty-six books, and co-founder (with John Lobell) of http://cultural-discourse.com. We talk about the rich mythological references of Blade Runner 2049 in light of the larger – and very urgent – matter of mechanizing human reproduction and the (actually rather ancient) male quest to appropriate the mysteries of the goddess…Here’s John’s Blade Runner 2049 essay:http://cinemadiscourse.com/blade-runner-2049/John’s awesome YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5B4tbk3U40S4q_3Qt-cVgQJohn has a knack for connecting very different sources across civilizations and millennia, anchoring this conversation about a modern science fiction masterpiece in a transcultural Big Story of the evolution of human consciousness. (Listen if you liked Episodes 42 & 43 with William Irwin Thompson on planetary culture, Episode 38 with Marya Stark on reclaiming the feminine mysteries, Episode 18 with JF Martel on art and reality, and Episode 14 with Michael Phillip on WESTWORLD.)John David Ebert Quotes:“Every new cosmology makes new machines possible.”“I’m interested to hear about utopian projects…because after all, we’re going to need them.”We Discuss:- Marshall McLuhan’s work on Sputnik’s technological enclosure of the planet and the end of “nature” (not to mention “natural catastrophes”);- How poets and artists make visible the “invisible environment” of subliminal information about each age;- Art’s revelation of cosmology through history, from nested heavenly spheres in medieval religious art to the newly-opened skies of Dutch realists to our anxious re-immersion in the closed infinity of the Anthropocene as depicted by H.R. Giger;- The transition from worship of the Earth Mother to the Sky Father, and the centuries-long struggle to control the mysteries of birth and death with science;- The connection between Niander Wallace in 2049 and Enke, sumerian trickster creator god;- The difficulty of replicating ecosystems in space for those “off-world colonies”;- “Here There Be Tygers,” Jurassic Park, and how monsters (as avatars of the pissed-off Great Mother) disappeared from the Renaissance world maps but make a new appearance in hypermodernity, thanks to genetic engineering;- Akhenaten’s experiment in monotheistic sun god worshipping utopia;- What should we do with the 100% certainty that our cosmopolitan super-cities will all soon be underwater, and it’s time to rapidly escalate our alt-civilization experiments?- The evolution of civilizations, from early revelation to imperial phase to decline;- The rhyme of history between Ancient Rome and Modern America;- The retrieval of shamanism and the re-establishment of a polar civilization in the late 21st Century;- The lineage between Pacific Northwest spirit-travel shamanism and contemporary Californian VR avatar science fiction and superhero stories;- And more! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

This week’s guest is one of my greatest inspirations: the historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson. Author of sweeping works of synthetic insight like At The Edge of History (a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972), The American Replacement of Nature, and Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community: The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years. Lindisfarne’s roster reads like a who’s who of influential latter-20th Century thinkers: Gregory Bateson, Lynn Margulis, Ralph Abraham, Stuart Kauffman, Paolo Soleri, Francisco Varela, David Abram, Hazel Henderson, Joan Halifax-Roshi, James Lovelock, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Maurice Strong, and Michael Murphy were among them. In his latest and last book, Thinking Together at the Edge of History, Thompson looks back on the failures and successes of this project, which he regards as a “first crocus” budding up through the snow of our late-industrial dark age to herald the arrival of a planetary renaissance still yet to come. Bill’s wisdom and humility, vast and inclusive vision, and amazing skill for bringing things together in a form of freestyle “wissenkunst” (or “knowledge art”) made this and every conversation that I’ve had with him illuminating and instructive.(Here are links to the first two chats we had in 2011 and 2013, as well as to my video remix of one of Bill’s lectures with footage from Burning Man.)For anyone who wants to know what happens after universities and nations lose their dominance and both economy and identity “etherealize” in a new paradigm of ecological human interbeing that revives premodern ways of knowing and relating – and/or for anyone who wants to help build institutions that will weather the chaotic years to come and help transmit our cultural inheritance and novel insights to the unborn generations – here is a conversation with one of the master thinkers of our time, a mystic poet and professor whose work and life challenged our assumptions and proposed a powerful, complete, and thrilling view of our emergent role as citizens of Earth.We talk Trump and our future-shocked need for charismatic strongmen, digital humans and the tragicomedy of the smartphone takeover, technocracy versus the metaindustrial village-monastery and “counterfoil institutions,” the “necessary exercise in futility” of dealing with rich and influential people to fund important work, how the future arrives unevenly, and how to get involved in institutional work without losing your soul…Also, cryptocurrencies and universal basic income as symptoms of the transition of the global economy from a liquid to a gaseous state; QUOTES:“Austin is, of course, an air bubble in the Titanic…”“The counterfoil institution is a fractal…it’s the individual and the group, kind of like Bauhaus…it had an effect, but it was very short lived. So I argued in Passages [About Earth] that these entities [including artistic movements like Bauhaus, but also communities like Auroville and Fyndhorn] were not institutions, but ENZYMES – they effected a kind of molecular bonding and effected larger institutions, but they themselves weren’t meant to become institutions. And so Lindisfarne, which was a temporary phenomenon of Celtic Christianity, getting absorbed by Roman Christianity, was my metaphor for this transformation.”“When you’re getting digested and absorbed [into the system], it can either be thrilling because you really WANT to become famous and you want to become a public intellectual, and you want to namedrop and be part of the power group…but if you’re trying to energize cultural authority, then it’s difficult in America. You can get away with it, I think, more successfully in Europe, where there is this tradition of Great Eminences, and in Paris, once you’ve done something of value as an intellectual, then you’re part of it for your life. It isn’t like, ‘What are you doing next? Do it again, do it again, do it again.’ So American culture, based on this kind of hucksterism and boomerism and success culture, is very resistant to that sensibility.”“We’re always a minority. If we look at The Enlightenment, we’re talking about, what, twelve intellectuals in all of Europe? If you’re an extraterrestrial and you flying-saucered into Florence in the 15th Century and said, ‘Hey, I hear you guys are having a Renaissance?’ And they said, ‘What?’ What do three painters mean? It’s still the Middle Ages for them. And so everybody’s in different times’ laminar flow. Some are faster and more ultraviolet and high energy, and others are very wide, slow, and sluggish. And that’s how nature works.”“Each person makes his own dance in response to the laws of gravity…if we didn’t have gravity, we wouldn’t have ballet.”“If you’re running a college, or a dance troupe, or an orchestra, or ANYTHING – someone in the group has to learn how to deal with money. And I think I failed, even though I succeeded in raising millions, by being a 60’s kind of countercultural type who was suspicious of money. I crossed my legs and was afraid of violation. And I didn’t come fully to understand the importance of money. But now that we bank online…” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's episode is brought to you by Visionary Magnets, the refrigerator poetry magnets that turn your boring old kitchen appliances into the substrate for woke invocations, tantric pillow talk, and other occult goofery. Support their Kickstarter and "enlighten your fridge" today! Or tomorrow. Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week is part one of a special double-length episode with Jon Lebkowsky, founder of EFF-Austin – one of the unsung heroes of Internet culture, whose tale stretches through the earliest web communities and reads like a list of landmark moments in the history of digital rights and culture. http://weblogsky.com/ https://twitter.com/jonl https://www.facebook.com/polycot/ https://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/495/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html We talk about the early days of hacking in the Wild West of the 1990s, how the World Wide Web has changed since then, and the promises and perils of the Internet in the 21st Century. It’s a winding tale of pseudonymous keyboard-slingers and federal raids, roleplaying game empires and sci-fi visionaries, centered on the unsuspecting hippie cowboy outpost of Austin, Texas, Once Upon A Time. Enjoy this special conversation on the history of the Internet we know today, and a snapshot of the hopes and fears of life online in the dawn of our digital era… TOPICS: - The threat of Internet-empowered fascism and “participation mystique” (or maybe worse, a corporate plutocracy) eroding rational civil discourse and the dignity of the individual - The problems with “Net Neutrality” and how it makes more sense to focus on “The Freedom to Connect” - Connectivity vs. Interdependence (OR) Networks vs. Buddhism - Does the Noosphere already exist, and we’re just excavating it? - The History of Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin and how it was connected to the secret service’s raid of legendary role-playing game designer Steve Jackson (GURPS) - The hilarious, troubled Dawn Age of e-commerce before secure web browsing - Jon’s work with a Gurdjieff group and his encounters with esoterica as an editor of the Consciousness subdomain for the last issue of the Whole Earth Review - Cybergrace, TechGnosis, and Millennial concerns about the mind/body split in the first Internet and our need to humanize technology with whole-body interfaces and MOVEMENT - Embodied Virtual Reality & Other Full-Sensory Immersive Media - Cory Doctorow’s new novel Walkaway as a banner book for the maker movement and a new form of cyber-social-liberation. - The movement of political agency back into city-states in a digital era - “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” - Shaping the future of wireless infrastructure in the early 00s of Austin - Getting our values right before we imprint the wrong ones into superhuman AI - Putting together diverse conversation groups to solve “wicked problems” - New forms of participatory open-source politics suited for an internet age SOME OF THE PEOPLE & STUFF WE MENTIONED: Whole Earth Provisions, Whole Earth Review, The WELL, Whole Foods, William Gibson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hakim Bey, William Irwin Thompson, Alien Covenant, Terminator, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Mike Godwin, Bruce Sterling, Clay Shirkey, WIRED Magazine, Fringeware, RoboFest, Heather Barfield, Neal Stephenson, Terence McKenna, Church of the Subgenius, Mondo 2000, Erik Davis, GI Gurdjieff, The National Science Fiction Convention, Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear, Jon Shirley, Jennifer Cobb, Robert Scoville, Greg Egan, Ernest Cline, Octopus Project, The Tingler, Honey I Shrunk The Kids (Ride), Charles Stross, Glass House, Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow, Alan Moore, Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University, Jake Dunagan, Plutopia Productions, The Digital Convergence Initiative, Chris Boyd, South By Southwest, Boing Boing, Make Magazine, Dave Demaris, Maggie Duval, Bon Davis, DJ Spooky, Forest Mars, OS Con, RU Sirius, Shin Gojira, Open-Source Party, JON LEBKOWSKY QUOTES: “The Noosphere can certainly have pathologies…” “The Internet was originally a peer-to-peer system, and so you had a network of networks, and they were all cooperating and carrying each other’s traffic, and so forth. And that was a fairly powerful idea, but the Internet is not that anymore. The Internet has, because of the way it’s evolved, because it’s become so powerful and so important and so critical, there are systems that are more dominant – backbone systems – and those are operated by large companies that understand how to operate big networks. That’s really a different system than the system that was originally built.” “SO FAR we’ve managed to keep the Internet fairly open…the absolute idea of net neutrality might not be completely practical.” “Science fiction is a literature of ideas, but a lot of those ideas do not manifest in exactly the way that they did in the book.” “I don’t have a real high level of confidence that anybody understands exactly what the fuck is going on.” “You couldn’t get a consumer account to get access to the Internet at that time. And in fact I think the first companies to do that were here in Austin.” “At the time, we were the only game in town for internet stuff…” “One thing I learned was, if you’re at the very cutting edge, it’s hard to make money.” “There are a lot of people who aren’t in touch with themselves internally. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to do that.” “I know that that’s sort of the goal in VR development: to give you a fully immersive experience where you’re really in a completely other reality, like in the Holodeck. But, you know. I’m still dealing with THIS reality. I don’t want another one.” “In an online community, people are always itching for ways to get into real human proximity with one another. They’re always looking for ways to meet.” “That’s my idea of what works now: is to have events that are experiences, you know, versus people just like, going to movies, or watching television, or going to a concert and watching a band play.” “I keep thinking that we won’t be able to solve our problems with bureaucracy or the kind of governance structures that we’ve been living with, but I look around me and see people who are doing just fine, and doing great work, and living their lives…and I’m sort of feeling hopeful and a little bit confident that those people will step up and do what they need to do to make things work, even if our so-called elected officials aren’t doing it.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The buzz: “49% of employees feel that a future in which people will ‘work from anywhere in the world' is now” (ADP “The Evolution of Work” 2016). Reality check: Your company can't be global without being local. What is your CHRO's role in this? HR needs to understand and comply with local and global cultures, practices and regulations – recruiting, interviewing, hiring and compensation – while supporting a globalized business with a local feel. Say what? The experts speak. Nicole Sahin, Globalization Partners: “For the first time in human evolution … the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture” (William Irwin Thompson). Dr. Patti Fletcher, SAP SuccessFactors: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark … there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves” (Carl Sagan). Join us for HR, Globalization, and Localization: More than Meets the Eye – Part 2.

The buzz: “49% of employees feel that a future in which people will ‘work from anywhere in the world' is now” (ADP “The Evolution of Work” 2016). Reality check: Your company can't be global without being local. What is your CHRO's role in this? HR needs to understand and comply with local and global cultures, practices and regulations – recruiting, interviewing, hiring and compensation – while supporting a globalized business with a local feel. Say what? The experts speak. Nicole Sahin, Globalization Partners: “For the first time in human evolution … the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture” (William Irwin Thompson). Dr. Patti Fletcher, SAP SuccessFactors: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark … there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves” (Carl Sagan). Join us for HR, Globalization, and Localization: More than Meets the Eye – Part 2.

Could you believe that even the great fairytale of Rapunzel carries keys of cosmological wisdom? In this sixth episode of the Starry Telling Podcast, More Than Astrologer Gemini Brett forays into the fairy forest to open windows into the current story of Sacred Marriage as expressed by the dance of Venus and Mars. Six is the number of the Lovers in the tarot, after all. This StarryTelling was fueled by the high magic of singer / songwriter Water Dropz who gifted the episode with live accompaniment and the incredible improvised composition "I Will Bring You Roses." Episode Six closes with Water's "Mana Prima" from her album "Dream Me Open," a collaboration with visionary artist Eric Nez, whose painting from the project you see here. Follow the links below to find more of Water Dropz, Eric Nez, Gemini Brett, and much more about the cycles of Venus and Mars. Thank you for tuning in! See you in Starry Story Space! Love and Planets, Gemini Brett www.MoreThanAstrology.com www.WaterDropz.bandcamp.com www.EricNez.com www.OneDoorLand.com Rapunzel Cosmology by William Irwin Thompson: http://uh494.yolasite.com/resources/KIC%20Document%200001.pdf "Mercury, Venus and Mars" from Daniel Giamario, visionary of the Shamanic Astrology paradigm: http://shamanicastrology.com/archives/category/articles/venus-mars-and-mercury-articles "Aberrations in the Venus Mars Cycle" - Robert Blaschke - Mountain Astrologer Magazine - 2010: http://mountainastrologer.com/tma/aberrations-in-the-venus-mars-cycle We'll be diving deeper into these Venus and Mars episodes through interviews with Gary Caton (dreamastrologer.com) and Daniel Giamario (shamanicastrology.com) in the very near future.

(1) FRITJOF CAPRA - Originally aired April 2009 (2) NORA BATESON - Originally aired July 2012 Both interviews this week explore systems thinking - one of the key ingredients of a world that just might work. First. I speak with FRITJOF CAPRA, who wrote a book in 1981 that greatly influenced my view not only of science, medicine, agriculture, energy, and even politics - it influenced my view of reality. That book was THE TURNING POINT, and its message is as profound and revolutionary today. "We live today in a globally interconnected world, in which biological, psychological, social, and environmental phenomena are all interdependent. To describe this world appropriately we need an ecological perspective which the Cartesian world view does not offer. What we need, then, is a new 'paradigm' - a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values." Capra wrote those words in its preface. In the second half my guest will be NORA BATESON, and we'll talk about AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, the wonderful documentary she's made about her father, the late anthropologist GREGORY BATESON. Her documentary is subtitled A Daughter's Portrait of Gregory Bateson. It tells of the unique anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, and systems theorist, who was ahead of his time in seeing reality as made up not of things or even of ideas, but of relationships. The film features interviews with California Governor Jerry Brown, physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, Whole Earth Catalogue publisher Stewart Brand, cultural philosopher and poet William Irwin Thompson; and Nora's sister, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson. Nora's film will introduce Bateson to a new generation and remind many of us of the impact her father had on the way a lot of people perceived the world. "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think." Those are the words of the late Gregory Bateson - and I couldn't agree more.

The story of Mitochondrial Eve may help us return to the feminine center and a re-balancing of civilization, Dr. Bruce tells us that story and follows up with the solid scholarship of William Irwin Thompson.

The story of Mitochondrial Eve may help us return to the feminine center and a re-balancing of civilization, Dr. Bruce tells us that story and follows up with the solid scholarship of William Irwin Thompson.

David Spangler is an internationally known spiritual teacher and writer. Instrumental in helping establish Findhorn in northern Scotland. In 1974 Spangler helped the social philosopher and cultural critic William Irwin Thompson, to found the Lindisfarne Association and became one of the first Lindisfarne Fellows, a group of scientists, artists, religious teachers, political activists, economists, and […] The post Creating Wholeness: The Maple Tree and the Cottonwood Tree appeared first on Future Primitive Podcasts.