Visionary artist Archan Nair joins Future Fossils this week for an infectiously fun conversation about the new creative opportunities of the digital age.

http://www.archann.net/

• How learning to use new tools is a little like dying;

• Archan’s history of using computers for art;

• The feedback loop between evolving tools and evolving artists;

• How to stay clear-eyed and full-hearted about the always-on awesomeness of the world, and not let the daily BS drag you down;

• The role of the nondual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta in his life and creative process;

• The exclusivity of the present when we investigate subjectivity (“The past and future don’t exist; only now exists”)

• How is the all-encompassing now of eastern mysticism different from the “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” of our eidetic and prophetic virtual existences?

• What does the practice of Vedanta teach us about how to receive rapid change as an opportunity for transformation rather than as an overwhelm and assault on what we hold dear?

• The problem created when our educational system focuses exclusively on examining the world “outside” of us, to the neglect of what’s “inside”;

• How never speaking the word “I” can diminish the experience of a self;

• How do we lose the self in the city when we’re constantly reminded of it through social interactions?

• Social media and inauthenticity…

• Attaining beginner’s mind

• And more!

Mentioned:

• Ramana Maharshi

• Nisargardatta Maharaj

• Ramesh Balsekar 

• Richard Doyle 

• Nura Learning

• Adi Da

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“The best anti-virus is common sense.”

This episode’s guest is Dylan Curran, a cybersecurity specialist who recently went viral after his exposé tweets about the personal information Google and Facebook collected about him were shared by Edward Snowden. Strap in for an uncomfortable close look at just how little privacy we have online – it’s even worse than you already knew – but also, some straight, practical advice for how to navigate the “glass house” we all live in now, with safety, dignity, and savvy.

Dylan:

https://twitter.com/iamdylancurran

http://dylancurran.net

Here is his epic Twitter thread about how “The internet knows more about you than you do”:

https://twitter.com/i/moments/977591863732527106

Dylan works with two privacy-focused search engines:

http://duckduckgo.com

http://presearch.org

• Why there isn’t any good way to hide who you are online anymore;

• The difference between anonymity and pseudonymity, and why that matters to everyone investing in blockchain tech and crypto assets;

• Why our notions of privacy should change, and how we’re better off with the “small town” co-veillance of John Perry Barlow’s Wild Westworld than we are with 19th Century ideas of self and secret;

• Why it’s not really about data transparency, it’s about power inequality;

• The NSA’s PRISM Program and your government’s backdoors to all your private information;

• How privacy tech is only going to keep evolving if we ask for it, because the market drives invention;

• How lucky Europeans have it with GDPR, and how less great we have it in the US, where we can’t just ask them to erase our data;

• Does Cambridge Analytica scandal prove that we’ve reached the end of democracy and its replacement with black magic user-interface design for social behavioral engineering?

• How do we get people to use privacy-focused services if they don’t work as well as the convenient data-harvesting services?

• Why it’s important to let your political opponents speak (ie, Why Censorship Is Wrong, MmmK?);

• The cultural significance of “Change My Mind” style posts in combatting the filter bubble issue;

• Can we design a platform that rewards cultural synthesis?

• The difference between how Ireland and the USA have adapted to constant internet surveillance, in part because of differing governmental systems and structures;

• Dylan’s rant for individualism in the age of proliferating identity politics and obsessive membership mentality;

• Hyper-collectivization leads to hyper-personalization (according to Teilhard de Chardin) = made-up job titles;

• The decentralized future;

• Don’t use Amazon Web Services!

• The (totally shameful, unnecessary) UnderArmor hack;

• Privacy Audits as a new low-level data standard;

• Dylan’s personal digital hygiene regimen;

• And, most importantly, if EVERYONE has everyone else’s nudes, isn’t that a Mexican Standoff and we’re good?

Additional Media:

My three-part essay on The Evolution of Surveillance, a psychedelic foray into the history of predator-prey co-evolution and our invention of weird new technological sense organs:

Part 1 - From Burgess Shale to Google Glass

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-1-burgess-shale-to-google-glass-220fefb3a906

Part 2 - Red Queens & Evil Eyes

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-2-red-queens-evil-eyes-79fcbce68d5e

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

The song at the end of this episode is “Transparent” from my live performance at Mycelium Studios in Melbourne, Australia last year. You can grab it for free here:

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/2017-02-03-mycelium-studios-melbourne-australia

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Support the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):

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Self-aware machines, organs on a chip, brain-entangled meta-human military units, smart-sensor-gridded coral reefs, drone flocks, DNA-based computing, robots having baby robots…the line between the “made” and “born” is getting blurrier and blurrier each day. What does it mean to be alive in a time when we already treat the corporation as a legal person, fall in love with chat bots, and “possess” telepresence robots in virtual reality for work?

This talk is a three-part argument:

1 - The Internet is usefully understood as a psychedelic substance, in that it remixes what we ordinarily think of as “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “other.”

2 - The psychological effects of the Internet are, then, usefully addressed through the methods of psychedelic harm reduction (like MAPS’ Zendo Project, techniques developed by the Women’s Visionary Congress, or KosmiCare in Europe).

3 - Because the Internet remixes everything, it casts our categories of “made” and “born,” “alive” and “mechanical” into question – and suggests a more complex and nuanced understanding in which “intellectual property” has a life and a destiny of its own, and we have far more in common with machines and “corporate persons” than we’re used to thinking.

Therefore, the best way forward in this crazy age may be to treat ALL things, the living AND nonliving, with compassion and respect. We’re almost certainly mistaken about what merits care, these days…so let’s be kind to our machine descendants, treat our great ideas like children that we can’t control but CAN encourage down the right path, and in general do everything we can to be remembered as good parents to/for/by Whatever Comes Next…

Recorded at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017, Black Rock City, Nevada. Guest appearances by Mitch Mignano (guest of episode 57) 

For more along these lines, check out these related media:

• The prologue to this talk, a short rap from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia Innovation Lab last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfjnWkDwYrc

• An archive of nearly all of my public talks since 2009, including every talk I’ve given at Burning Man:

http://evolution.bandcamp.com

• Writings about the co-evolution of humans and technology:

http://medium.com/@michaelgarfield

Thanks and Enjoy!

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This episode’s guest is David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute – the world’s pre-eminent research center for complexity science. We discuss SFI’s new Interplanetary Project and how they are weaving scientists, engineers, science fiction authors, concept artists, and musicians together into a new collaborative storytelling and visioning project about how we can sustainably scale human civilization beyond Earth – and help spark a renaissance of Big Picture thinking and Big Problem solving worthy of our species in this century.

About SFI and the Interplanetary Project:

https://santafe.edu/research/initiatives/interplanetary-project

About the Interplanetary Fest:

https://interplanetaryfest.org/lineup

Cool local news coverage about David & The Interplanetary Project:

https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2017/07/11/out-of-this-world/

“Part of my job, and SFI’s job, is to not allow people to imagine that they’re living in isolation – IN ANY SENSE. Right? Socially, intellectually, economically, technologically, and so on.”

“Is there a different way, now, of getting the best of what we have done to as many people as we possibly can? And in a way that isn’t preachy, isn’t didactic, is genuinely engaging and fun? And where a single individual, somewhere in the world, who we’ve never met, who has limited resources, could make a real contribution to it?”

We Discuss:

• How can we make ideas that benefit the world as easily accessible as possible, as open for expansion and review?

• Why it is necessary to take a planetary perspective, and why SFI decided to open up this vastly trans-disciplinary Interplanetary Project;

• Why it’s worth reviving the spirit of the World’s Fair for a new wave of international co-imagination;

• How complexity science has invaded our everyday thought in the form of “hyperobjects” – launching us out of the enclosed infinity of modernity (endless, but knowable) and into a new exploration of capital M “Mystery” in the cosmos, in which the edges of the map are now its center(s);

• The importance of soliciting the perspectives of children and other marginalized groups to help us strike the course for a new renaissance;

• Whether to be comforted by “human exceptionalism” and our uniqueness in a vast and senseless cosmos, or by the possibility of our total lack of specialness in a cosmos rich with life and mind;

• What Krakauer thinks of the enduring “either/or” question, of why we should be spending ANY money on space exploration when we have so much hardship here at home;

• Does the existential serve the utilitarian? Or to put it another way, is answering the Big Questions just a luxury, or is it the fruit and reward and deep work of human existence?

• Looking at the development of fields like AI, might it not make more sense to take on the biggest projects indirectly, obliquely, by focusing on tiny pieces and more modest goals?

• Is Earth’s “minimum viable product” a second complete biosphere? Will “humans” really ever make it to other worlds, or will only “biospheres” – humans understood as focal points of entire ecosystems, within which we will travel?

• What is the role of science fiction in imagining the future?

• How does our hyper-connectivity change the way we understand the self and each self’s role in something greater?

• What new (and likely anti-fragile, decentralized) modes of governance will emerge in this era?

• Ethereum is sponsoring SFI’s computational science summer school, interested in using network theory and agent-based modeling, and other complex systems sciences concepts/practices to explore new modes of social infrastructure and governance;

• How important it is to not regard humanity’s Big Problems as merely software engineering problems, and what we miss by turning away from our cultural inheritance in the regard of these matters;

• Why it’s silly to think of art and science as completely separate projects, and how SFI uses the best of both to inspire the next generation of planetologist;

• How TED presents an inaccurate, maybe even disingenuous, view of the scientific process;

• How the Santa Fe Institute’s first-ever festival is just the tip of a global, all-inclusive brainstorming session about the best possible future for our species;

• And more!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Terry Patten is a lifelong practitioner of both contemplative spirituality and real-world activism whose new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide To Inner Work for Holistic Change, gives us lucid instructions for how we can start to ask the hardest questions and engage the toughest problems in our age of global transformation.

https://www.terrypatten.com/a-new-republic-of-the-heart/

I met Terry in 2005 when he was teaching how to recognize and integrate the psychological “shadow,” our repressed unconscious, at a seminar for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. His warmth, humility, and generosity of spirit is palpable in this conversation, and reflects the decades of experience that has inspired his latest writing…it’s an honor to have Terry on the show, thirteen years after he transformed my life by teaching me how to engage and love the hardest, most unpleasant parts of my own mind.

In one of Future Fossils Podcast’s most vulnerable episodes yet,

We Discuss:

- How to deal with new problems that none of us have the abilities to handle on our own, or even by thinking together?

- How do we actualize our true potentials and what roles do others play in this?

- The need for personal transformation in order to meet our civilization-level challenges.

- There is no formula. It’s all an adventure. But you can’t ignore any of it.

- (How/) Can Global Warming and other urgent “wicked problems” be a planetary koan?

- Does social media provide an adequate venue for the difficult and vulnerable conversations that we need to have?

- The leap of faith that is group improvisation in art and collective sense-making.

- What does it really mean to “Follow Your Bliss?” What role do heartbreak and genius play in this?

- The need for the secular and spiritual communities to come together in respectful mutual discussion in an era of vicious disagreement.

- How the ideological defense of conspiracy theories AND mainstream narratives gets in the way of effectively focusing on our most urgent realities…and how to evolve beyond the media environment that prefers inflammatory grudge matches over compassionate mutual learning.

- What do we do if we never get “reality” back, and people’s points of view just keep diverging? How can we come together on coherent strategies if we can’t come to a consensus on the basic facts?

- Who inspires Terry Patten as exemplars of heartful and soulful transformational activism?

“We live in a culture that is in deep, deep denial…[Global Warming] is talked about all the time on the evening news, but it’s denied just as much on the evening news. You aren’t really talking about it if your voice isn’t breaking with emotion. We’re kind of in this mass consensus trance that doesn’t allow us to break through into effectiveness. It’s a time that calls for revolutionary engagement, and yet…”

“How to stay reality-bound in our post-truth era is at the center of things.”

“Love is going to have to find a voice that’s even more powerful and authoritative than the voice of righteous indignation and anger. Love is going to have to reassert its natural authority…whether it’s a great hospice project or it’s the process by which we turn all of this around, the heart is at the center of it.”

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Patricia Gray is an animal music researcher, working with all kinds of creatures (humans, whales, songbirds, bonobos, even coral reefs) to understand what functions pitch and rhythm have in animal communication, how the sound of our living planet is actually a symphony of hidden meaning, and how to improve our lives by embracing the innate musicality of our human brains.

https://research.uncg.edu/patricia-gray/

We Discuss:

• How she went from being a concert pianist to the chamber music director for the National Academy of Sciences to the piano-playing lead of a National Science Foundation-funded research lab;

(http://www.wildmusic.org/research)

• How our understanding of animal communication has shifted over the last few decades from using human language to using music as the orienting metaphor;

• The evolution of (and scientific study of the evolution of) music-making in our species;

• Pitch discrimination, beat entrainment, and musical memory (rhythm and frequency pattern detection, musical memory and capacity for repetition);

• How human conversations rely on musical intelligence for us to flow together and follow and “jam” with each other;

• The cultural origins of “biomusic” as a scientific discipline;

• Making music with bonobo apes at the Georgia Tech animal communication lab;

• Dancing sea lions and cockatoos;

• Why do and don’t some animals learn to find the beat?;

• Which came first, music or language?;

• Harmonized sonic environments and acoustic ecology attuned to the biome (disrupted);

• How human technology and civilization has disrupted animal communication in the wild AND human (and pet) psychology at home;

• The songs of elephants, mice, bats, and other inaudible “songsters” revealed by new microphones;

(https://www.mckalcounisrueppell.org/)

• Whalesong! Analyzing the musical structure of cetacean communication and seasonal songs;

• Human babies are musical animals! The science of neonatal musical cognition;

• The uncanny similarity of whale and human musical systems…what does this suggest about an underlying mathematical order to the cosmos?

• Understanding the oceans through a combination of reef hydrophones and machine learning;

• Letting the wild back into music and society… 

• And why it’s essential to teach children music!

See Also:

Bernie Krause, Roger Payne, Mark Tramo, Peter Cook, Ani Patel

(http://www.musicmendsminds.org/mark-tramo) 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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Biological Time Travel: Organ Regeneration & Brain Reanimation – Turning back time in cells and tissues with the new medical techniques of bio-logics, simulating “t = 1” in the human body...

This week’s guest is Ira Pastor, CEO of the revolutionary biomedical firm BioQuark in Philadelphia. I had no idea who these people were until Ira messaged me about appearing on the show…and I’m so glad he did, because otherwise I don’t k now when I would have learned about their work with new techniques that enable truly miraculous treatment of brain trauma, catastrophic organ failure, and other complex and confounding issues. 

We’re on the cusp of another moment in history when we have to redefine what it means to be “dead,” and how far someone can go before they’re irrecoverable. And at the prow of that epochal shift is BioQuark’s method of simulating ooplasm – in other words, “tricking” our cells into thinking that they’re fertilized ova at the very beginning of embryonic development, so they’ll do amazing feats that even stem cells won’t do.

I have to admit, I went into this conversation a skeptic. And everything is still bracketed by a big “IF” – but I’m considerably more willing to believe that this is coming, soon, and that it’s going to be a good thing. Get ready to have your mind blown by a conversation about the miracles that might be commonplace in just a few more years…

http://bioquark.com

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We Discuss:

• Why do some other organisms (like jellyfish and amphibians) demonstrate such awesome regenerative abilities, but human beings don’t?

• How to reset a cell’s internal “clock” to zero and induce extraordinary regenerative abilities;

• How this research builds on existing science dating back to the 1950s (and retrieves “lost knowledge” from other animals we’ve been evolutionarily separated from for hundreds of millions of years);

• How biology as a lab science has changed over the last century, and how that (in part) reflects changing sentiments about the relationship between masculine and feminine, physics and biology, waves and particles;

• Neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation research and the link to The Immaculate Conception and our lineage’s trend toward increasing neoteny and pedomorphism;

• Regarding Liz Parrish, Aubrey DeGrey, and other death-resisting transhumanists…where does work like Bioquark’s fit into the picture of radical life extension and its current genomic/pharmaceutical bias?

• What’s the worst that could happen? Is this going to be affordable for everyone? Ira addresses issues of unequal access and (“access for everybody, it’s not just for the billionaires”) and puts Michael at ease about other possible negative outcomes. (Including ZOMBIES.)

• The Future of the Medical Industry: a decrease in pharmaceutical company dominance and the business of endless management, and the rise of a business of CURES – no lifelong dependence on medication, no 3D printed transplant organs, just good old-fashioned “miraculous” healing, along with electroceuticals, microbiome supplements, parasite-based treatments, 

• The Future of Medical Research: international alliances, Right To Try, navigating a complex menu of potential regulatory environments for research, and how Merck partnered with China to create a tropical island hub for medical research tourism…

• And more!

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This week’s episode features returning guest JF Martel, film-maker, culture critic, and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. In his first appearance on Future Fossils, we discussed art as an opening to the transcendent and his awesome three-part essay on the philosophy of Netflix’s Stranger Things, “Reality Is Analog”…so it only made sense to have him back to weigh in on Stranger Things 2 and the extremely artful Blade Runner 2049, both of which speak directly to the evolution of the soul and “the human tragedy” in an increasingly digital age. 

It’s ultimately a discussion of The Sequel, and how what distinguishes good simulacra from bad is all in the label, “Made With Love”…

JF’s book and blog:

http://reclaimingart.com

JF’s podcast:

http://weirdstudies.com

We Discuss:

- The humanization of replicants (and the “animalization” of a previously monstrous demogorgon) as empathetic characters in these stories, and how that provides a vital contrast to our future-shocked insistence on hard categorical divisions between made and born, human and non-human;

- Carl Jung and Jungian therapist James Hillman, The Velveteen Rabbit, and “earning one’s soul” through individuation of the self (soul as connection to the imaginal contrasted with soul as individuality);

- Where does order come from in the evolutionary process?;

- The theological angle on the soul as digital because it is the soul as the absolute appearance of a singular (non-evolutionary) form;

- Do things need to happen for a reason?;

- Is it better to act as if you’ll die tomorrow or to act as if you’ll live forever? (And does thinking “only now exists” make you a lousier person?);

- Balancing the two poles of “soul” in philosophy: that which exists beyond cause and effect, and that which is made through tribulation;

- Looking at our lives from the perspective of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return and Alan Watts’ notion of the life as a symphony, comprehensible only from the outside;

- The genius horror writing of Thomas Lugatti (sp?);

- Why it’s so important not to spoon-feed your audience the plot points of a film, to invite them into an interactive process with the narrative;

- Donna Haraway, John David Ebert, body hacking…and the shadow form of posthuman philosophy in the peril of ironic hipster detachment to human incarnation;

- Rachel Nagelberg’s book The Fifth Wall and how she figures our postmodern dissociation from self through a matrix of surveillance technologies and the out-of-body experiences they induce (see also Erik Davis and Technobuddhism);

- The difference between a good sequel and a bad one is “Made With Love” – and how the character of “Luv” in Blade Runner 2049 can be read as a statement on the evils irony is capable of;

- The Strong Female Lead as a major trope in recent cinema, from Silence of the Lambs to The X Files to Arrival, and what it means about femininity and institutions in our current Zeitgeist;

- An update on the writing process of Michael’s book, How To Live in the Future;

- More gushing about James P. Carse’s book, Finite and Infinite Games;

- Dungeons & Dragons. ;)

- And more! 

Quotes:

“There’s no reason why something can’t happen for no reason at all. The only way you can prove the Principle of Sufficient Reason - that things happen for a reason - is by presupposing the principle.”

“The universe might have come about in all its complexity ten seconds ago, and might disappear in another ten seconds for no reason at all.”

“We don’t know what death means, so we don’t know what it means to live your last day, in that context. But the idea to live as if you’re already dead – that to me has a lot of resonance, because it means that you live your life in such a way that the story of your life has been written somewhere. For me it resembles Nietzsche’s idea of The Eternal Return: it’s that every action you take should be something you would will yourself doing for the rest of time, for eternity, so that everything resonates at the deepest level.”

“Good stories don’t really work in such a way that everything has its place, morally, in the universe. It’s more like everything makes sense at the aesthetic level. It’s like everything fits together aesthetically somehow, through some weird synchronicity. And I think that it’s possible to look at life that way, and to experience life that way.”

“I would compare Jurassic World to one of those Old West roadshows that used to travel around in the 1910s and recreate the battles of the Wild West in the kitschiest, most facile way possible – and Stranger Things is more like a Pre-Raphaelite painting to me. It’s SO hyper-aware of what it’s doing, and at the same time it’s not ironic. It REALLY IS nostalgic. It REALLY IS pining for that lost time.”

“I don’t think technology is helping a lot of people ‘make a soul.’”

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“Ah, eventually you DO plan to TALK ABOUT dinosaurs on this dinosaur podcast, right? Hello? Yes?”

- Ian Malcolm about this episode.

This week’s guest is professional dinosaur hunter Steve Brusatte, paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.

https://twitter.com/stevebrusatte

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Beyond being a totally awesome – and more importantly, FRESH – take on the Mesozoic Era that weaves vital updates from the last twenty years of discovery into the official story, this book also paints a rich and lively portrait of the human beings who actually do dinosaur science. Their stories moved me as much as the story of how the dinosaurs evolved, came to dominate the landscape, and then disappeared. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs offers more than the “what” of prehistory; it also offers us the “who” and “how” and “where” and “why,” and it will be a spiritual experience for anyone as into dinosaurs OR science OR science writing as I am.

Plus, Steve’s great fun to talk to. He’s totally contagious.

WE DISCUSS:

• How we’re living through a worldwide renaissance of paleontology, a “Golden Age of Dinosaur Science” – and how it

is related to deeper historical and economic trends – such as the opening of new international trade routes, increasing access to science education, and accelerating global development (the movement of wealth discovers dragons);

• How the technology and methods of dinosaur science have advanced dramatically over the last few decades – but it’s still “a discovery science” that requires people out in the field, opening the ground and looking for new fossils;

• Steve’s legendary globetrotting professors Paul Sereno and Mark Norell, and how their generous mentorship launched his career;

• How paleontology remains one of the most awesome lifestyles for anyone with the spirit of an adventurer;

• The role of landscape in stimulating the imagination – especially for bored Midwestern children whose imaginations fill the empty space with visions of lost worlds;

• What it’s like to BE a paleontologist and to know about the history of the land where you are, to have insights into the Deep Time Big Story and how it relates you to the ground on which you walk;

• How time perception changes when you’re in the badlands doing paleontological field research;

• Michael’s childhood mentor and role model, rockstar revolutionary “heretical” paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, who had a habit of weaving Bible scripture and Broadway musical numbers into his energetic and engaging dinosaur ecology talks;

• The major role that contingency plays in mass extinctions and the rise and fall of groups that otherwise seem dominant (like dinosaurs, and humans) – ie, “How do you become dominant? How do you rise up from nothing and become a BRONTOSAURUS?”

• And the major role that MYSTERY plays in our understanding of the ancient world;

• Oh, and we also talk about dinosaurs! For like half an hour. About Tyrannosauroidea, specifically, and how T. rex rose to greatness. And how to survive a mass extinction. But you’ll just have to listen for the rest.

QUOTES:

“I’m always thinking about, ‘Where is this area, where was it during the Mesozoic Era, what was it like when Pangaea was still around, what kind of environments were there, what kind of dinosaurs were living there?’ Just having this perspective, when you travel around on the Earth, of looking at landscapes and being able to see the looooooong history of those landscapes. Being able to see in the shapes of hills, and the types of rocks that are exposed, and the colors of those rocks, being able to see deep distant pasts, reconstructing vanished worlds. And I think that’s part of the magic of sciences like paleontology and geology…and probably nobody that’s not a paleontologist or geologist thinks like that. I’m sure we just think really strangely.”

- Steve Brusatte

“Nobody in science ever does anything alone. MAYBE in mathematics you can be a lone genius and figure out some great proof just sitting alone in your boxers in the dark, or whatever, but MOST science is NOT LIKE THAT. It’s collaborative, you work with teams, you NEED teams, and you need good mentorship when you’re student. So now that I run my own lab, I just hope I can provide for my own students what my mentors did to me.”

- Steve Brusatte

“There’s something just indescribable about that feeling of finding and holding and appreciating fossil objects. And that never gets old. A new fossil discovery never gets old.”

- Steve Brusatte

“Studying dinosaurs isn’t going to save the world, of course…BUT…”

- Steve Brusatte

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Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ continuous unfolding creativity.

http://timfreke.com/

http://timfreke.com/ONLINE-TOUR/COSTS.aspx

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We take a deep dive into the nature of time, reality, and creativity:

• Is spiritual awakening the “leading edge” of evolution? (Not technology, as proposed by Kevin Kelly et al.?)

• How story may be more fundamental to reality than we’ve believed

• Is evolutionary “novelty” created, or simply discovered lying in wait?

• A psychedelic view of time in which the present is a “handshake” between all possible pasts and all possible futures

• Can we change the past, or merely our interpretation of it?

• Soul as the fundament or medium of our intersubjectivity

• Does the imagination operate as an information platform distinct from biology and physics?

• Is Heaven an evolutionary emergent?

• Is mind, imagination, and soul a different level of a hierarchy of being, or is it the interior experiential dimension of

what we call body and matter?

• The relationship between subjective and objective in the time-stream

• The ongoing trialogue between MG, Ken Wilber, and Bruce Damer on the origins of life and co-enactment of mind and matter “all the way down” through orders of complexity to the very quanta of our cosmos

• The role of landscape and material agency in prebiological and postbiological inheritance (what comes before and after DNA?)

• The Invention of Death

• The proposed/hypothetical symbiosis of the soul and body 

• Tim’s critique of artificial consciousness and mind uploading

• Can we ensoul technologies? If bodies can provide a vehicle for these nonphysical information patterns, can we engineer new bodies that invite souls into novel forms of incarnation?

• Can you give something a soul by loving it?

• The Question of Death

• Evolution as the movement from unconsciousness unity through individuation into conscious individuated unity.

Quotes:

“Fundamentally, it’s a flow. It’s a process. The universe is not made of things.”

“The philosophy that I’ve been exploring is that we have the wrong metaphor of time. That time doesn’t pass…but rather, time accumulates. And there is more past now than when we started this conversation…and the past hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s actually present, because everything that has ever happened is implicit in this moment.”

“Every moment is the meeting of the possible, the ground of being, the potentiality, and everything that has been. But what this next moment can be, it’s limited. It must contain everything that’s happened before.”

“The potentiality for the rainbow was there before eyes. But there was no rainbow.”

“Technology is brilliant, but it’s nothing compared to the imagination.”

“What I’m suggesting is that there is information on the soul level, which is nonphysical, which is a separate domain….we can’t reduce the body to physics, and we can’t reduce the soul to biology.”

“The immortality of the soul has evolved as a continuation of the emergent and evolutionary universe. If you look at the history of what people have said about death, it’s almost like it’s evolving.”

“There is no objective reality. There is, rather, objective information objectively and subjectively perceived.”

“The body is discriminating information sensually, and then over the top of that, imagination is discriminating conceptually.”

“Evolution itself has evolved. The physical universe did not happen through genetic mutation and natural selection.”

“The more individual we become, the more we can understand the oneness.”

“The whole philosophy, really, is a way of intellectually shoring up some almost childlike insights that arrived for me when I feel most deeply awake.”

“Life is Good. Death is Safe. And what really matters is Love.”

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