The Origins of Consciousness in the Technological Age

Published on Jan 20, 2014

Panelists:

Graham Hancock is the bestselling author of The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis, Heaven's Mirror and other investigations of historical mysteries. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have sold over five million copies worldwide. His public lectures and broadcasts, including two major TV series, Quest for the Lost Civilisation, and Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, have further established his reputation as an unconventional thinker who raises controversial questions about humanity's past. In 2005 Graham published Supernatural: Meetings with The Ancient Teachers of Mankind, an investigation of shamanism and the origins of religion. While researching Supernatural Hancock travelled to the Amazon to drink visionary brew Ayahuasca - the Vine of Souls - used by shamans for more than 4,000 years.

Dennis McKenna's professional and personal interests are focused on the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of British Columbia, where his doctoral research focused on ethnopharmacological investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two orally-active tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. Dr. McKenna received post-doctoral research fellowships in the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health, and in the Department of Neurology, Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute and serves on the advisory board of non-profit organizations in the fields of ethnobotany and botanical medicines. Dr. McKenna is well known as the brother of Terence McKenna, a cultural icon in the psychedelic community. Together they are co-authors of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (1st Edition: HarperCollins 1993) and Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide (under the pseudonyms O.N. Oeric & O.T. Oss) (And/Or Press, 1976; 2nd Edition, Lux Natura, 1986). He has recently completed a new memoir entitled: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna. http://brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss...

Mark Pesce - Inventor, Writer, Educator and Futurist - Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of media and technology for a quarter of a century. His work has kept him on the forefront of emerging developments in science, technology and media. With a unique ability to make abstract concepts clear for lay audiences and to further the knowledge of the technologically savvy, he is a highly sought after public speaker, lecturing throughout the world on a variety of topics -- from the latest trends on the Internet, to current developments in neuroeconomics, to the future of design in an energy-conscious world. Pesce is first and foremost a storyteller, taking everyday examples from the world around us, then using these to illuminate the finer features of world that seems to be changing more rapidly every day. The author of five books and numerous articles, Pesce is widely respected as a technologist, futurist, philosopher and communicator who can translate abstract concepts into concrete explanations. Mainstream publications such as Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED and The New York Times have profiled him and his views on the interactive era. A well-respected journalist, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and The Age. For the last three seasons, Pesce has been a panelist on the hit ABC show THE NEW INVENTORS. From 2003 to 2006, Pesce chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School. His mandate - to bring cinema and broadcast television into the interactive era - led him to create a program that encouraged creative vision and is now producing a generation of award-winning entertainment professionals who are shaping the media of the 21st century.

Mitch Schultz began his life journey in Memphis, Tennessee and has since called Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, New York, Europe and Peru home. Guided by his lifelong love of storytelling, Mitch has cultivated a multi-disciplinary expertise in transmedia and culture hacking through writing, directing, and producing. He earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Texas at Austin, primarily focused on media production, communication theory, and information mapping. Soon after, Mitch completed his Masters of Fine Arts at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Following Schultz's 2011 award winning documentary, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, he launched the DMTRMX project, a multi-platform experience that serves as the model for the four-part MNTTKA Manifesto.

Terence and Dennis Mckenna on James Joyce from True Hallucinations

On a recent re-reading of 'True Hallucinations' by Terence Mckenna, this paragraph jumped out at me like a Jaguar:

"This particular afternoon, Dennis called our attension to the little hen, saying that if one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? only the one who could have fashioned the perculiar world that we had fallen into. And that was? He looked around expectantly, but finding no takers he delivered his own punch line:
"James Joyce.

Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case: that Finnegans Wake represented the most complete understanding yet achieved of the relation of the human mind to time and space and that therefore Joyce, at his death, had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing this corner of God's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis, who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.

"Jim and Nora," as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were both in and acting through everything at La Chorrera, particularly in the things that Joyce had loved. The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the wake was one of these things. It was Joycean humor that radiated outward from everything in our jungle Eden. These ideas were absurd but delightful, and they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace."--Terence Mckenna. Looking Backward. Truse Hallucinations. pg. 147. 

Psychedelic 'McKenna' Adventures At the edge of the Abyss (on-line course)

The Brothers McKenna are widely known to the psychedelic community.  Their ideas and adventures, explorations of inner (and perhaps outer) space, and their Amazonian odyssey in search of answers to the mysteries of time, history, and being have been well chronicled by Terence, who though he passed on in 2000, still haunts the Net as an avatar and articulator of a radical and highly unconventional perspective on humanity’s current precarious perch on the edge of the singularity.  Even the most skeptical souls can no longer deny that our species is at the threshold of an enormous and irrevocable plunge into novelty; a plunge that will change forever our understanding of who we are as a species, and our place in the scheme of a universe that is marvelous, terrifying, beautiful and puzzling in ways that we cannot begin to comprehend.

US PRICE: $110

Early bird special, through May 20th: $90.00

To join click the image above or go to  http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=1350994

 or read more below...

Terence, not by choice, escaped to a hyperspatial redoubt, just as humanity crossed the threshold into the third millennium of its problematic  career on this planet.  His younger brother Dennis continues to grapple with the revelations and insights, perhaps delusions, that the two brothers confronted during their journey to the Amazonian rainforest in 1971 in search of exotic hallucinogens and high adventure. They found both, in spades, and it changed them, and perhaps the world, forever.

Now Dennis has determined that the time has come to tell his side of the story, and is proposing to write a book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss; the title is in recognition of the name the two brothers and their intrepid band of fellow adventurers chose for themselves, partly tongue in cheek, and partly – mostly, as they discovered – deadly serious. Dennis is using Kickstarter.com to garner the resources, and time, needed to write this work, which will be both a memoir of sorts but also a fresh examination of the revelations forced onto them at the climax of that heart-of-darkness journey. Those who may be interested can find a detailed description of this proposal on the Kickstarter web site at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862402066/the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss

The Course


This course is offered as a follow-up to the launch of the writing project and an anticipation of themes that will be explored in depth in the book, slated for release in the fall of 2012. The course will consist of four sessions, with dates set for June 5^th, 12^th, and 25^th and July 2nd.  Using live video, each webinar session will be hosted by Dennis McKenna in wide-ranging conversations with key guests who are recognized leaders on the cutting edge of post-millennial thought: Daniel Pinchbeck, Ralph Abraham, Marc Pesce, Ralph Metzner, Luis Eduardo Luna and Erik Davis.

Most have also been close personal friends of Terence and Dennis over many decades; they have shared Terence and Dennis’ fascination and preoccupations with the concepts under discussion and have been key players in the development, elaboration, and expression of these ideas.  Like Terence and Dennis, they lived through the social, environmental, and political changes that have characterized our ever-accelerating race toward novelty during the late 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st; in many respects, they are the people who have helped to catalyze the radical changes in global consciousness that have resulted.

Each webinar will be 90 minutes in length, with the first 60 minutes devoted to a dialog between Dennis, the host, and one or more invited guests.  The format will be an informal discussion, preceded by a brief exposition outlining the main themes under consideration in that session. There will be ample opportunities for the audience to interact in real time with the host and guests following the hour-long conversation. Participants from the audience will be able to ask questions and offer their own comments and insights via live video chat, text, or email.  If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course.

---

FEATURED GUESTS

Daniel Pinchbeck

Sunday, June 5, 3:00 p.m. EST

In this first session, the role of host and guest will be reversed. Author and commentator Daniel Pinchbeck will fill the role of host and moderator, and Dennis will be the interviewee.  It will take the form of a free-wheeling retrospective look at the influences that led the brothers to forego any hopes of a normal life or careers and head to the Amazon in search of psychedelic secrets in 1971.  It will be a personal reminiscence.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) and Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002). His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, ArtForum, Arthur, and many other publications. He is currently the editorial director of Reality Sandwich and a national columnist for Conscious Choice magazine. He is also the executive producer of the PostModernTimes series of interviews, directed by Joao Amorim, and is featured in Amorim's upcoming documentary, 2012: Time for Change.

Here are some of the questions he will be asking Dennis about his early years with Terence:

• What were the personal, familial, and societal factors that led to their preoccupation with matters both arcane, and peculiar?
• What was behind their early interest in psychedelics, transdimensional realms, consciousness exploration?
• What did their baffled parents, teachers, priests and peers make of all this?

Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna

Sunday, June 12, 3:00 p.m. EST

The second session will be a conversation between Dennis and his guest, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna. Eduardo is one the closest and oldest  friends of Terence and Dennis.  He also happens to be one of the world’s leading experts on ayahuasca ethnography and New World psychedelic shamanism.
Eduardo was there (almost) from the start. A well-educated but distinctly un-psychedelic seminary student growing up in the tiny Colombian river community of Florencia in 1971, Eduardo’s first encounter with Terence on his way back from his second visit to La Chorrera changed his life forever. Terence was fizzing with fresh revelation when they met and was literally wild-eyed, a Messiah come back from the forest.  Eduardo’s exposure to the strangest ideas in the known universe drove him to abandon his dreams of the priesthood forever and to plunge headlong into the pursuit of psychedelic shamanism. Terence and his companion traveler, the legendary Kumi, lived at Eduardo’s vinca for several months while they worked out what was to become TimeWave Zero and the first draft of the Invisible Landscape.

One of the most influential anthropologists in the field of ayahuasca research, Luis was the first to study the ayahuasca shamanism practiced   by mestizo (or mixed-blood) people in the Amazon. Born and raised in the Colombian Amazon, Luis was educated in Spain and Norway, and always had a foot in both worlds. His work revealed the importance of the diet that ayahuasqueros follow, and the pivotal role played by the icaros, or magic melodies, in shamanic ceremonies. Luis has also studied the Brazilian ayahuasca churches such as Santo Daime, Uniao do Vegetal and Barquinha. He is the director of Wasiwaska, a research center for the study of psychointegrator plants, visionary arts and consciousness, in Brazil, and is the author of several books, including Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (co-authored with Rick Strassman et al.), and his much loved collaboration with the painter Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: the Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman.During this session, Eduardo and Dennis will talk about:

• How the path of Eduardo's life was changed after meeting Terence McKenna
• How the nature of Eduardo and Dennis's collaboration has changed through the years
• The inside scoop on the psychedelic scene they were a part of--between the two of them they know where all the bodies are buried!

Ralph Abraham

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

What is TW0? And does it really describe anything? Terence proclaimed to his dying day that it was a map of the quantum structure of time, and that it could be used to predict the future; even more shocking, he claimed that its spiral structure predicted the collapse of the space/time continuum on a specific date, December 21^st, 2012.  This date just happens to coincide perfectly with the predicted end of time based on the Mayan Calendar, as well as other world traditions that seem to express expectations of a major shift in the planetary world order, if not the cosmic order, on or around that date.

This is the ‘teaching’ that two bemushroomed, raving wild men walked out of the jungle proclaiming??  Dennis is not so sure, and in recent years has begun to publicly question whether it means anything, or whether it means what Terence believed it to mean. No one knows the answer, but many very intelligent people have been both baffled and fascinated by Time Wave Zero.

Ralph Abraham has been involved in the research frontier and the development of dynamical systems theory in the 1960s and 1970s. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields, such as medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, and psychotherapy. He is the author of Foundations of Mechanics with Jerrold Marsden, Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior with Christopher Shaw, Chaos, Gaia, Eros, and Chaos, Cosmos, and Creativity with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna.

Ralph Abraham will join Mark Pesce and Dennis McKenna in a lively debate about the validity of the Time Wave, which Dennis has become more skeptical about in recent years. They will discuss:

• Is the TWO real?
• What is the proof in favor of its existence? 
•  Is there something about it we need to understand before 2012, in order to avert or prepare for global catastrophe?

Mark Pesce

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

Dennis and Terence disagreed on whatever it was they experienced together following the Experiment at La Chorrera.  Was it a simultaneous psychotic break, a shamanic initiation, an alien abduction, or something even stranger?  They honestly don’t know, and interpretations have changed over the years. What is definitely odd about the La Chorrera “Event”, whatever it may have been, was that they brought something back with them.  This was the mathematical construct derived from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching that has become known as Time Wave Zero. Most psychoses or shamanic experiences do not end up yielding a mathematical tool, particularly one that purports to describe the fractal topology of time, and one that (possibly) predicts the end of the world.

Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster.  In 1994 Pesce co-invented VRML, a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California’s world-famous Cinema School and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School. In 2006 Pesce founded FutureSt, a Sydney consultancy dedicated to helping clients negotiate the challenges presented by our ‘hyperconnected’ future.

In this session, Mark Pesce will discuss all things Time Wave with Ralph Abraham and Dennis:

• What is TW0? And does it really describe anything?
• Does it really hide the answer to our current ontological and historical dilemma?
• Why does its interpretation coincide so closely with the apocalyptarian predictions of so many other cultures?

Erik Davis

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 P.M., EST

Although Terence did not live to see it, many of his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream cultural zeitgeist--a state of affairs about which he would feel quite comfortable.  He predicted much of the wild changes we are witnessing during this time of global transformation. There can be little doubt that psychedelics, in permeating our culture, in opening the door once again to the rediscovery of parallel worlds and non-human intelligences, have functioned as a major catalyst of that change, and that new transformed worldview. These ideas no longer seem so strange because many people have taken psychedelics; many have confirmed for themselves what Terence and Dennis were raving about. In this session, Erik Davis joins Ralph Metzner and Dennis for a conversation about the evolution and transmission of these ideas.

Erik Davis is a North American writer, social historian, cultural critic and lecturer. He is noted for his study of the history of technology and society and his essays about the fate of the individual in the dawning posthuman era. Although significant aspects of his work include media criticism and technology criticism, his works span across other disciplines to include a larger social history of art, religion, and science, technology, and politics. His books include TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Led Zeppelin IV. 


Erik will be talking to Ralph Metzner and Dennis about the following:

• Is there an impending historical singularity on the horizon?
• What are the possibilities for trans-human metamorphosis and plant-human symbiosis?
• Has alien contact already taken place and what is the likelihood of humanity migrating into space?

Ralph Metzner

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 p.m.

Whether or not Time Wave Zero is ‘true’ or not, there is little doubt that it has evolved into a pervasive cultural meme, sharing the space with a whole universe of cultural archetypes that certainly did not exist, or at least were a lot less overt, when Terence and Dennis were growing up in that small town in Colorado in the 1950s.  In the post-millennial, pre-eschatology decade of the third millennium A.D., a whole host of bizarre notions about the impending historical singularity, trans-human metamorphosis, plant-human symbiosis, the emergence of the Gaian planetary intelligence, the globalization of the human nervous system, the archaic revival, alien contact, space migration, transdimensional realities, parallel universes, and many others that would have seemed like schizophrenic delusions to earlier generations, have now become an accepted, almost mundane, component of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist.  Suddenly we find ourselves living in a science-fictional universe; without even noticing it, things seem to be getting stranger and ever more bizarre at a rapidly accelerating pace.
This final session, hosted by Dennis with guests psychedelic pioneer Ralph Metzner and techno-guru Erik Davis, will explore the ways in which many of Terence's predictions about the changing nature of the world have become true.
Ralph Metzner's work has been focused on the transformations of consciousness, and as a graduate student, he worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) on the Harvard Psilocybin Projects. He co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience, and was editor of The Psychedelic Review. He is founder of the Green Earth Foundation and His books include The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, Green Psychology, and two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of Ayahuasca and Teonanácatl.
The discussion will cover various topics including:

• How have Terence's ideas permeated culture?
• Do psychedelics have an evolutionary function? 
• Can psychedelics help us transition into ahistorical time?

We could ask for no two finer minds with whom to explore these themes. At the end of this final session, you may have a glimmer of some of the answers, but we guarantee, you will have a lot more questions! And it is in that dynamic space between knowing and unknowing, that understanding and insight may flourish.

ABOUT OUR HOST

  Dennis McKenna is a ethnopharmacologist focusing on the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices. He is well known for his work with his brother Terence McKenna and their ground breaking research in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and is co-founder of the Hefter Research Institute that promotes scientific research on hallucinogenic compounds.

By participating in this online course, you will receive:

• Four 90-minute live video seminars with Dennis McKenna and his featured guests
• 30 minutes of question and answer time in each seminar
• Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
• Participation in a private online community with other students
• Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
• PDF articles about course topics from Dennis and each of the guests

We hope you join us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the lives and ideas of Terrence and Dennis!

PRICE: $110

Early bird special, through May 20th: $90.00

To join click http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=1350994