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2nd-Aug-2008 01:01 pm - what are the plants telling us?
http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/515596

audio of Dennis McKenna's address to the 4th Annual International Shamanism Conference.
20th-Sep-2007 03:13 pm - technopaganism at the end of history
http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/lectures/Technopagans%20at%20the%20End%20of%20History/

an audio transcription of an entire weekend workshop at Esalen lead by Terrence McKenna and VR pioneer Mark Pesce. these two really smart guys tackle a wide range of material related to the arcane aspects of technology in our post-modern era. some choice exerpts transcribed:

In ages where the imagination is empowered, magic rules the world. In ages where the imagination has somehow given way to positivism, empiricism, reductionism or some other form of so-called realism, magic withers on the vine. The realization that code is magical invocation is really a powerful one. Language in the hands of science becomes descriptive and discursive. Language in the hands of a magician creates...and we haven't seen languages like that for several centuries in the west. But when you write code and implement it, this is magical language. When your utterance is iterated in the machine, something happens. Once it is debugged, it is a magical invocation that works. And the world is becoming progressively more and more ruled by invocation.
~
Language has some kind of symbiotic relationship to meat and silicon.
~
Where the anxiety arises is in people trying to explain to themselves what is happening. The world is now so complex very few people "understand" it. But in whatever area you don’t understand it you generate mythology which explains it to you. So most of us, as the culture becomes more complex, our participation in it becomes more magical, more animistic, more provisional, more mythic. This is both a good and a bad thing. It leads to cults...which I think is a bad thing; in other words, people accept explanations for reality, the only argument for which, is that they are explanations for reality. Their persuasive force otherwise is zilch.
~
Modernity was thoroughly existential. In other words, reductionist science tells you you’re the product of a cosmic accident; meaning is conferred; you’re lucky to be here; nature has no interest in your fate; nature indeed has no purpose at all. My own intellectual journey both experientially with psychedelics and through mathematical analysis of history, etc. leads to the conclusion that this existential point of view is able to maintain itself only by ignoring the evolutionary thrust toward complexity and novelty that occurs on every level of being.

And that in fact, if you begin to value novelty, you suddenly have a basis for a new human ethic, because human beings with their languages and their technologies represent a level of novelty never before achieved on this planet, something that builds on animal nature as a platform but goes well beyond it. So suddenly, from being a random accident, a chance-created witness to a meaningless cosmos, we become the cutting edge of the very process that the cosmos itself seems to value or seek to magnify and preserve. So what has crept back into being, for me and anybody else who accepts these overarching metaphors, is value. It’s a different kind of value than we’ve ever seen before. The last time we knew values, they were handed down from a religious hierarchy which talked directly to God and got strange messages. The new values are self-evident from an examination of nature. Anyone can inform themselves about the facts of biology and large scale complex systems, etc.

The new story is a story of recognizing our placement at this breaking wave of novel advance. Suddenly technology becomes a religious enterprise, good for something other than building consumer electronics and small appliances, and actually seen as the path toward some kind of transcendent possibility. The goal is well-formulated in spiritual ontology but the methods are a mess. They either don’t work or require lifetimes or make demands on people’s behavior that are practically inhuman. I think the new story is based on the recognition of our own centrality. We haven’t stood at the center of the cosmic stage for 700 years in our official myth. And now suddenly we’re returned there. Returned not merely as witnesses in a central position, but suddenly as actors. Because these technologies that are coming into our hands are truly promethian. Truly faustian. Truly capable of making us like unto a god. But not in the service of market capitalism and consumer fetishism; more in the service of the emotion of awe.

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