Sleep Sweepers by Flying Lotus is used as the background track for Terence Mckenna’s take on the psychedelic effects caused by eating cannabis edibles.
We in the 20th century tend to smoke our cannabis aside from the occasional holiday cannabis cookie, cannabis for us is something that is smoked. On the other hand for the 19th century and for all of European civilization cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared and this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience.
If you read the accounts of people like Theodore Gautier, Baudelaire and Fitz Hugh Ludlow written in the mid 19th century they are describing experiences that are obviously, or are for them as powerful as a 500 micro gram dose of LSD proved in our own life times, and we forget this, we tend to think of it as a social drug and a kind of a minor drug on a par with smoking a cigarette or having a cognac or something like that. Well in fact for the serious eater of hashish it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology.
Sir Ken Robinson outlines the problems of a linear standardized education. Its time to throw the old model out and revolutionize education towards a model that builds an environment where children may explore their talents, find their passions, and are given room to flourish.
Bring on the Learning Revolution Ted Talk – Notable Excerpts
…education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often it’s not.
Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it’s not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that’s simply improving a broken model. What we need — and the word’s been used many times during the course of the past few days — is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don’t find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense; things that people think, “Well, it can’t be done any other way because that’s the way it’s done.”
I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln…”The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.” I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. “As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
…many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them.
One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who’s spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us.
…human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability…At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem.
The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food…there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they’re customized to local circumstances.
…we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
…human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes…But it’s not only about that. It’s about passion. Often, people are good at things they don’t really care for. It’s about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy.
You know this, if you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn’t feed their spirit, it doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.
We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.
There’s been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days…I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats…”Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.
Futurist Jason Silva provides examples of psychedelics being used as tools for problem solving and creativity during a discussion at the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas – Sydney Opera House, 2012.
Psychedelics Resets Your Operating System
That quote from Tom Robbins where I said that “We need to pull ourselves out of context in order to gawk in amazement at the wonders of the world.”, he was talking about psychedelics, but I think it applies to everything we in our lives.
He says, “It’s not that psychedelics manufacture wonderment or that they can automatically make us more imaginative beings, but what psychedelics does is pull us so radically out of comfort zones, they decondition our thinking, they thrust us out of everything we thought we knew about the world in order to see things as if for the first time and form new synaptic connections.
Cannabis Expands the Mind’s Network
Marijuana induced a state of hyper priming. It expanded their “associative net” so that they were able to make more far reaching connections among things and ideas. Perhaps that’s because it dissolved usual separateness, categorizations, and other compartmentalized ways in which we store information. If that’s not reason enough for cannabis to be used as a tool, at least for creative people, I don’t know what is.
Dr. Roland R. Griffiths, Professor of Behavioral Biology Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, discusses how psilocybin mushrooms can mirror and enhance the effects of meditation.
Meditation has similar affects physiologically in various humans who practice. But the actual practice of meditation is best left to each practitioner so they may construct a method that is best suited for the individual.
Sir Ken Robinson shares many uplifting ideas and stories to support his movement for a drastic change in our method of educating all humans. Intelligence is diverse. Education at the moment uses more of an assembly line method of teaching by stream lining what is “important”. Human’s become a valuable part of a whole when they understand their individual value, skills and passions.
Schools Kill Creativity Lecture – Notable Quotes
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.
Is it ADHD or Untapped Potential?
I’m doing a new book at the moment called “Epiphany,” which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of; she’s called Gillian Lynne –have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.” She’s wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, “Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer?” And she said it was interesting; when she was at school,she was really hopeless. And the school, in the ’30s,wrote to her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate;she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s,and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point.It wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.
Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother,and she was led and sat on this chair at the end,and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it –because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian, I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here. We’ll be back; we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer.Take her to a dance school.”
I said, “What happened?” She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think. They did ballet; they did tap; they did jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company — the Gillian Lynne Dance Company — met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history; she’s given pleasure to millions; and she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Close some doors today. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they lead you nowhere. – Paulo Coelho, author
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters – whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life.
Terence McKenna talks about the diseases of modern society, the archaic revival, the psychedelic mystery, culture and transformation from the question and answer session of his lecture entitled ‘Eros And The Eschaton’.
The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of disease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless.
I applaud all of this; because it’s an impulse to return to what is felt by the body – what is authentic, what is archaic – and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That’s what the world is.
A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to bring about a measurable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.
Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn’t usually change significantly.
“Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older,” says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Personality was measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, which covers openness and the other four broad domains that psychologists consider the makeup of personality: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Only openness changed during the course of the study.
Griffiths says he believes psilocybin may have therapeutic uses. He is currently studying whether the hallucinogen has a use in helping cancer patients handle the depression and anxiety that comes along with a diagnosis, and whether it can help longtime cigarette smokers overcome their addiction.
“There may be applications for this we can’t even imagine at this point,” he says. “It certainly deserves to be systematically studied.”
Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller Interview with Jason Silva
Biological and Technological Convergence
When the internet does is it connects all of our minds together. And we sort of transcend the limitations of time and distance, so now we move into a post geographical world where we can come together and self organize, and have unexpected relevancy, and serendipity based on shared passions, not bounded by the skin bag. Amber Case, the Cyborg Anthropologist says that every time we make a telephone call, we’re actually creating a techno social wormhole. It’s technological mediated telepathy. Andy Clarke (Natural Born Cyborgs) says “We should stop thinking of the mental apparatus as bound by the skin bag because the reality is the mental apparatus is dance between brains, their environment, their technology, and their tools.” The extended mind thesis talks about how our iphone is not just a tool but its actually outsourcing our cognition, storing parts of our memories. Just like we have a neocortex, the iphone is part of the extended man.
Psychedelics and Technology
It’s interesting to draw the analogy between psychedelics and computers. Timothy Leary used to say you take psychedelics to get rid of your mental filters, to get rid of your preconceptions, to expand your sphere of possibility, to unbound…to free your mind. When he saw the potential of the computers and the internet, he came out in the 90s as a techno optimist and said the computers are the LSDs of the 90s. A lot of the engineers who invented the personal computer and the microprocessor, they were all tripping when they had those realizations of extending the mind with technology.
