I really enjoyed listening to this collection of Alan Watts talks blended with chillstep during my commutes, Alan is a perfect companion for both the ride to work and the journey home. The spacious pauses between his words gave the music room to breathe, making it as much a gentle wake-up as it was a soothing wind-down.
He is ripping on every little TED(x) cliché and it's freaking hilarious.
If you don't get what he's parodying, check out this next talk by Pro Surfer/Model/Entrepreneur/Spiritual Being/Model/Bible Scholar Jill Anjuli Hansen - this talk is actually serious and not a parody.
I just wanna thank Pam and Susan for noticing this chick! Just a heads up, I can only watch this thing a few minutes at a time. I need long breaks. Really long breaks.
"I found an affirmation in a fortune cooky recently..." (6.53)
Robert Anton Wilson was the author (along with Robert Shea) of the popular Illuminatus! trilogy, which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986. His other books have found great acclaim as well, many of them achieving "cult classic" status. Wilson has been described at various times throughout his life as a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and agnostic mystic.
In this video from the Libertarian Party's Presidential Nominating Convention in 1987, Wilson treats the audience to a humorous and irreverent talk about everything from the state of world politics to a discussion on metaphysics, chemistry, and the nature of reality.
"In this video of footage of a lecture in New York City for a conference called Sense8 in 1990, Leary discusses emerging technologies and the Cyber World along with audience Q & A with Leary and Robert Anton Wilson."
This is the talk from Disinfo Con 2000, watch it while it's still up. All the Disinfo Con talks keep getting removed from Youtube, I really wish they'd stop doing that.
More RAW goodies tomorrow, don't wanna overload you all at once! BTW if anyone knows a site that actually succeeds at downloading a youtube video please share. I tried eight that didn't work so far... update: Thanks to David for letting me know about the Firefox extension downloadhelper for anyone who wants to save vids too.
Legends told that Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, twins who were cast into the wilderness to die. But the boys were said to be saved by a she-wolf(S.O.S. she's in disguise) who suckled them. They grew up like savages in the woods...
Darling, what'cha gonna do now? Now that you noticed it all went wrong I've been, I've been thinking That you don't know me any more Don't let the sun be the one to change you baby I wanna learn how to love, if I'm to know Cause I wanna go where the people go Cause I'm forever lost Darling, what'cha gonna say now? Now that you noticed it all went wrong Looks like I'm driving, my friends are all crazy Oh they suddenly don't know me anymore
Looks like it all went wrong
What am I to do? Darling, what'cha gonna do now?
Now that you've noticed What you gonna do now?
Now that you know
Would you like to know more?
Grant Morrison's must see Speech at Disinfo Con
HERE WE ARE! Right!
Fuck, man. I’ll tell you – when I was a kid I read Robert Anton
Wilson and all this shit. And here we are, we’re standing here, and
we’re talking about this shit, and it’s real.
Okay, I’m pissed.. and in half an hour I’m gonna come up on drugs, so watch for it.
So.. are there any practicing magicians in the audience? Put your
hand up if we’ve got any. C’mon, bold! A few. Okay: by the time we’ve
finished this, you’re all gonna be practicing magicians. This shit’s
easy, right.
I’m like you. Basically: why are we here? Why are we here at this time? What’s this all about?
And by the way, this is a Scottish accent. So reset the filters
and pretend it’s Sean Connery talking to you. Okay? Double-oh sheven.
So if you can follow me, I’m just going to talk the way I talk, and fuck you if you don’t understand me.
The deal is this: I’ve been writing this comic for the last six
years. And like you, like everybody here, we’re trying to figure: what’s
going on? Why do we feel different? Why don’t we fit into this world?
Why do we feel as though they’re not telling us the truth?
So I went out and I read Robert Anton Wilson’s books when I was
twenty years old – which is twenty years ago now – and I figured “Is
this guy bullshitting me? He says we can talk to aliens? We can talk to
people from Sirius? Is he talking crap? He says Aleister Crowley’s got
methods for contacting alien intelligence and for changing the world; is
he talking crap?”
So I did it. And no – he’s not talking crap. And we can all do it.
And this is by way of trying to demolish the counterculture, and
replace it with something useful. We’re just gonna start here, and see
where we get to.
When I started doing The Invisibles – which is a comic book, for
people who haven’t seen the thing; it’s a comic book which was kind of
my attempt to explain what happened to me after I’d been abducted by
aliens in Kathmandu in 1994. And the only reason I was abducted by
aliens in Kathmandu in 1994 is because I *went* to Kathmandu in 1994 to
be abducted by aliens.
And it works. And these fuckers… they will turn up!
And what they told me was this, and they tell everyone the same
bullshit. But it’s from different perspectives, it’s from different
nervous systems; it seems to be filtered through everyone’s own view of
the world. But they keep telling us the same shit.
So I met these guys. I’m sitting in the roof garden of the
[something] Hotel in Kathmandu. And I was totally, like, doing tons of
dope, right. But in my defence, I do like a quarter of dope a day, and
I’ve been doing it since 1990. So I know this shit. And as you all know –
everyone out there who’s, like, ‘a head’ and knows what I’m talking
about knows: you don’t hallucinate. Right? If you go to the garage..
it’s the fucking garage. If you go to the 7-11, it’s the fucking 7-11.
You might be stoned; you might be picking up lots of interesting
little bits and pieces that you don’t normally get when you’re straight.
But you know what’s real and what’s not real.
So, as I say, in my defence: man, I was loaded.
But this was the end of a week in which I’d been loaded every
single day. And I’m sitting up there in the roof garden and suddenly
these fuckers arrive, and they arrive en masse. And they look exactly
like Terence McKenna described. Why is that? Coz I’d just read Terence
McKenna a year before?
What they told me was… they took me out of my body; I wasn’t in
my body anymore. This doesn’t normally happen with hash. This happens on
DMT, or it happens on, like, Ketamine or something. I’m on hash; a tiny
little bit. The size of a lentil. And I start tripping, and I’m out of
my body.
And these fuckers are there, and they say: “Where do you want to go?”
The first thing I said was: “Alpha Centauri”. Which is the first
thing you would say, of course. And they took me to Alpha Centauri and
it was fucking real, and there’s three suns, all moving exactly as we’re
told they’re supposed to move astronomically.
And I’m there, and I said to them: “What the hell’s going on?” As you might.
And they said: “We’ve come to tell you this stuff, so you can put
it in your work and explain it to the world.” Why do they always say
that to everyone? Why do they always tell everyone to go out and tell
the world what’s going on, and everyone tells us the same shit?
So these things, I met them. And what they were were, like,
silver.. like those things you get in rave videos.. silver, morphing,
mercurial blobs of chrome, that think. And they took me to the fifth
dimension. And the fifth dimension is outside space and time, and they
explained to me what time is all about.
The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae. Right?
Believe.. you don’t have to believe me; I’m just setting the story here.
They explained to me that beyond space and time, we have our
actual selves. These things that we’re experiencing right now are
sections through time. Everyone here is a section through time. But in
actual fact, you’re not experiencing your real body. What is your real
body? Your real body is a process. It starts when you’re born, and it
moves forward until you die. That is you. Seen from outside, that’s what
you look like. You look like a gigantic centipede, spread around all
the little things that you always do: up and down through your house, up
the stairs, down to the store and back – and it’s a centipede, and it’s
us. It starts as a little baby and it comes out of your mother’s womb,
and it gets bigger.
That is the process in time. Like I said: we’re experiencing
sections now, so we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this. But
think of ourselves as processes through time, which is what we actually
are.
We all know we were twelve, we all know we were ten years old.
But where is that? Point to it. Show me you at ten years old – and yet
you were there.
So these things said to me: this is what’s going on. We use time
to grow larvae, because outside space and time you can’t grow anything.
Because it’s timeless, nothing grows. What you wanna do, if you want to
make one of these higher dimensional beings – that’s actually us,
already – is that you grow it in time. So you make a universe.
And how you make a universe is: you plug a little part of
yourself into the information world that they live in – which is what I
seemed to be experiencing; this kind of sea of pure information – and
they exist in that, but there is no time. Time is part of that.. but
this is the fifth dimension; it’s like: time, space, breadth, depth..
plus.
And they said to me: the universe you live in, the world you’re
living in, is a larvae. Every single one of us here is the same thing.
There’s no distinction. All we do is.. we don’t understand what we are.
And they explained to me: if you’ve got a two-dimensional field,
see; a flat plane, and you stick your hand through it – there’s one hand
there, but if you stick your hand through a two-dimensional plane, the
two-dimensional entities who live on there, they will see four circles.
Right? Four distinct, completely different circles. But no, it’s the one
hand.
Every one of us in here is the same fucker. We’re all the same
thing, according to these weirdos. And what we are is.. thank you… I’m
pleased someone agrees. And what we are is intersections through 4D
space-time.
So yeah, I look like this. I stop here. No, I don’t stop here.
I’ve been here for, what, five minutes now? Where was that guy who was
here five minutes ago? Where is he? Point to him. But he existed; you
all saw him. I saw you five minutes ago. Where is that guy?
So this led me into some very strange alleyways.
These things explained to me that.. as I say, the universe is
some kind of larval entity. What it does is it proceeds through stages
of development.
But it’s the idea that if you’ve got a foetus, it starts off..
like every living thing, it starts as a unicellular entity, it splits..
it becomes a lizard; it becomes a mammal; eventually it becomes a human.
And they said to me: the culture you’re living in is.. understand it this way: phylogeny recapitulates history.
So what we’re actually watching is this thing coming towards
self-awareness and coherence in the same way that a foetus does. We
haven’t even been born yet. There are no adults on this planet.
There’s not one adult on this planet.
Which explains a lot. It explains why we let fuckers like Bill
Clinton bomb the Kosovans. It explains why I let Tony Blair put cameras
in the streets... Read more of the Disinfo con transcript here.
From the site: TED CANCELLED THE LICENSE FOR THIS EVENT, WHICH COULD NOT MOVE
FORWARD UNDER ITS AUSPICE. THIS PROGRAM IS TOO GOOD TO NOT BE DELIVERED
AND WE REGROUPED. AS WE HAVE LOST OUR TED-BASED SPONSORSHIP AND TICKET
REVENUE ONLY WILL PAY SOME OF OUR BILLS, TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS TO OUR
NON-PROFIT ARE APPRECIATED.
TED is revoking the license of TEDxWestHollywood, just
a couple of weeks before their event, "Brother, Can You Spare a
Paradigm?" without offering a reason, beyond a vague statement
suggesting that the program is not sufficiently scientific. This
occurred just two weeks before the April 14 event, after over a year of
preparation. If you're feeling a sense of déjà vu, that's because they
used this same line of reasoning to pull videos by Graham Hancock and
Rupert Sheldrake just a few weeks ago, an incident that sparked wide controversy.
Oh haven't seen this before! My day is made! (update: though seemingly I've posted it also last november, blast my memory!!!)
The HEAD Revolution - Hedonic Engineering And Development - began with the psychedelics and bio-feedback machines of the 1960's, then graduated to Lilly float tankes, scientific study of yoga, and neo-reichian body relaxation and neuro-awareness teques. Describing the latest brain-change machines, Dr. Wilson argues that Hedonic Engineering has come of age and we are the first generation in history to have the capacity to tap the full potentials of our brains and graduate from humanity to superhumanity.
RAW lecture given on 03/04/1988, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
See the comments for the explanation of the above image. I took a test http://www.selectsmart.com/RELIGION/ about which religion/BS i subscribe to, and I can't really express in words just how funny and apt I find it that I crashed the application!
He wasn't too happy with it. Compares it to a scientology camp lol... They don't pay you and need you 7 days 12-15 hours a day. Good thing the talks are still great though, but they won't be able to keep it up for too long if they keep up this attitude and start with censorship or bias when it's about expressing ideas... The video is pretty hilarious to hear about the "TED experience."
This is kind of depressing, I shared both talks on the blog and can't believe TED did this. At least they posted the following link below, the majority of the comments are heartwarmingly in defense of both men and against censorship at least:
"Graham Hancock’s talk, again, shares a compelling and unorthodox worldview, but one that strays well beyond the realm of reasonable science. While attempting to critique the scientific worldview, he misrepresents what scientists actually think. He suggests, for example, that no scientists are working on the problem of consciousness.
In addition, Hancock makes statements about psychotropic drugs that seem both nonscientific and reckless. He states as fact that psychotropic drug use is essential for an “emergence into consciousness,” and that one can use psychotropic plants to connect directly with an ancient mother culture. He seems to offer a one-note explanation for how culture arises (drugs), it’s no surprise his work has often been characterized as pseudo-archeology.
TED respects and supports the exploration of unorthodox ideas, but the many misleading statements in both Sheldrake’s and Hancock’s talks, whether made deliberately or in error, have led our scientific advisors to conclude that our name and platform should not be associated with these talks."
Yikes, they're not holding back either. What a sad use of language.
"Further to my last two statuses I am disgusted to report that TED has indeed hidden my "War on Consciousness" presentation and Rupert Sheldrake's "Science Delusion" presentation on the TEDx Youtube channel. Both videos are now marked as private and so no member of the public can now view them or make up their own minds about them. If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition." -Graham Hancock on Facebook
"In attempt to brush up their severely
tarnished image after censoring my presentation “The War on
Consciousness” from the TEDx website today (on the grounds that I was
“unscientific”) and also censoring the presentation “The Science
Delusion” by my colleague Rupert Sheldrake for the same reason, TED have
now rushed to create a remote corner of their website, which I imagine
they hope no-one will see, where our talks have been put back online and may be debated: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/.This
gesture, they claim, is in response to my suggestion that they had
censored us and should be taken as evidence of their “spirit of radical
openness”.
All I can say is this is extremely devious behavior
on TED’s part. On the one hand they take down two videos from Youtube
that had generated enormous public interest and traction (mine had
received over 130,000 views and Rupert’s over 35,000 views). Then as
soon as TED is tagged for censorship (did they hope we wouldn’t notice?)
they put the videos up again in a remote place, which cannot benefit
from URL sharing by any of the previous 160,000-plus viewers and which
is, thus, to all extents and purposes invisible.
Worse, rather
than allowing those viewers who do find this remote corner of the TED
website to make up their own minds about our presentations, TED feel the
need to “frame” our talks in a way, they say, that can “highlight both
their [i.e. Hancock’s and Sheldrake’s] provocative ideas and the factual
problems with their arguments.” I find this manoeuver disingenuous in
that (1) I see no “framing” at all of our “provocative ideas” but plenty
of “framing” of what TED claim are the factual problems with our
arguments; this “framing” occurs in the lengthy introduction that TED
has published to our videos. (2) TED did not approach either Rupert or
myself in advance for any refutation of the “factual problems” they
allege in our presentations. In fact I refute all these so-called
“factual problems” with regard to my own presentation, and have now
posted these refutations on the TED blog (http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/)
in the form of a series of questions to TED to which I expect answers.
(3) The whole concept of this manoeuver by TED is worrying and
insulting. It implies that TED believes it has the right to act as
arbiter of the context in which my presentation and Rupert’s
presentation is received rather than simply putting what we have to say
before an intelligent public and letting the public decide. It also
suggests that TED believe the public are incapable of making up their
own minds about our arguments without approved scientists first
highlighting "the problems” with our arguments. Would TED, we wonder,
treat many of the provocative talks by, for example, Richard Dawkins, in
the same way?
I hope that many of my wonderful and supportive
facebook community who see this post will go to the TED URL linked above
(again -- http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/)
and register to post, and add comments there. I believe this is an
important issue and it is important that TED do not get away with what
(regardless of how they try to finesse it -- "spirit of radical openness
LOL!!) is after all censorship." -Graham Hancock on Facebook
The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality, in principle. The fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in. The impressive achievements of science seemed to support this confident attitude. But recent research has revealed unexpected problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine and psychology. Dr Rupert Sheldrake shows how the sciences are being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. Should science be a belief-system, or a realm of enquiry? Sheldrake argues that science would be better off without its dogmas: freer, more interesting and more fun.
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books, including The Science Delusion. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. His website is www.sheldrake.org.
