THE MUSHROOM MAN

Gordon Wasson
1996, 43 min 09 sec

In addition to being a legendary mushroom expert, Robert Gordon Wasson was an author and Vice President for Public Relations at JP Morgan & Company.¹ He studied at the Columbia School of Journalism and then the London School of Economics after receiving the first Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. After teaching English at Columbia University from 1921-22, he became a reporter for the New Haven (Connecticut) Register. By 1925, he was living in New York City and writing a financial column for the New York Herald Tribune. Wasson joined the JP Morgan Company in 1934 where he pioneered the field of banking public relations. He served as vice president from 1943-1963 when he retired.

Wasson’s introduction to mushrooms came from his wife Valentina Pavlovna Guercken. On their honeymoon in New York’s Catskill Mountains in 1927, Valentina found mushrooms similar to the ones she had known in her native Russia. This discovery sparked both their interest and they went on to study and incorporate mycology with other disciplines such as religion, art, history, and linguistics.

WORMWOOD

Errol Morris, Netflix series, USA
2017, 1 min 27 sec

Wormwood is a 2017 American six part docudrama miniseries directed by Errol Morris and released on Netflix on December 15, 2017. The series is based on the life of a scientist, Frank Olson, who worked for a secret government biological warfare program located at Fort Detrick, Maryland (the USBWL). It focuses on the events leading up to and following his controversial death, which the US government originally claimed was a tragic accident, but later admitted was likely a suicide, caused by a mental breakdown brought on after being unknowingly dosed with LSD, while at a meeting with colleagues from the CIA who were involved in Project MKUltra. It also in the present day, follows Frank Olson’s son, and discusses his belief that his father may have been murdered due to being perceived as a potential security risk. Interspersed between interviews and archival footage, are live action reenactments of the final day’s of Frank Olson’s life and the various theories involving his death.

HUMBOLDT PENGUINS CHASING A BUTTERFLY

Marty McGuire, Philadelphia zoo, USA
2010,  0 min 51 sec

Several Humboldt penguins decided it was time to chase a butterfly.

SINGULARITY 1ON1,
CONSCIOUSNESS IS MORE THAN COMPUTATION!

Stuart Hameroff, Arizona, USA
1975, 1 hour 1 min 27 sec

Dr. Stuart Hameroff is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Together with British quantum physicist Sir Roger Penrose, Hameroff is the co-author of the controversial Orch OR model of consciousness.

During this 1 hour conversation with Hameroff a variety of interesting topics are covered, centered around the concept of consciousness.

THE QUANTUM NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Roger Penrose, Moscow, Russia
2013, 7 min 8 sec

Knighted in 1994 for his contributions to science, Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS, is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher.

Penrose is internationally renowned for his scientific work in mathematical physics, in particular for his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. His primary interest is in a field of geometry called tessellation, the covering of surfaces with tiles of different shapes. In this segment he concentrates on the concept of consciousness.

TERENCE MCKENNA DISCUSSES IF REALITY IS REAL

The Taxonomy of Illusion
1993, 7 min 29 sec

Segment of a lecture of Terence McKenna on the Taxonomy of Illusion, specifying on the concept of truth and reality, using the example of language to elaborate.

Ashok Gangadean’s interviews on  Consciousness, Connectivity, and Integral Models of Reality

11. YOU TICKLE, THEREFORE I AM

 

‘To live is to be other.’ The philosophical implications of belonging sketched in its larger context of the outer and inner space of the unknown: the pluriverse. Once again, physics is facing foundational questions: What is the nature of time? What is the nature of space? What is the role of the mind in the description of reality?

Reality is not a given. It’s almost as if the world suffers from reality vertigo. The very notion of reality itself is at stake, or at least the access to reality that media is controlling. Reality has always been entangled with the stories we tell ourselves. Even the language we share, or not for that matter, right now while we’re having this dialogue, is after all embedded in a worldview we agree on sharing. Reality is co-agreed upon, it’s a “consensus reality” that is co-authored.

Funny how Hitchcock used to say that reality is stranger than any fiction we could concoct. It reflects the new epistemology that is now emerging from within science confirming that reality is indeed much weirder than we initially thought. “You’re theory is crazy,” Niels Bohr once quipped to his fellow quantum physicist scholar Wolfgang Pauli during a lecture at Columbia University, before adding “although what divides us, is whether your theory is adequately crazy enough!” And really, quantum experiments describe the world as completely absurd—that the mind of the observer is entangled with the observed phenomena. We basically live in a participatory universe. Consciousness used to be considered as something of a sidebar, as an after-effect of matter itself, but now a new epistemology redefines the emergence of reality as implicitly embedded within consciousness. Much in the way, quantum physicist turned philosopher David Bohm, defines consciousness as implicit to the basis of reality. So, we’re back to storytelling! Science can only tackle this “reality” gap by including the storyteller, by including the observer.

The old paradigm of a presumed objectivity as a privileged one-dimensional position meant only to relieve us from our core responsibilities, which only contributed to the bankruptcy of our world, obscuring ecological disasters, and adding to the military build-up and the global imbalance evident today. Just as the quantum paradox redefines reality as participatory, it’s time we include our own responsibility as part of the reality we construct, as part of the stories we tell ourselves. Alberto Manguel once said about Jorge Luis Borges that “There are writers who attempt to put the world in a book. There are others, rarer, for whom the world is a book.” We find ourselves in Borges’ participatory universe of storytelling. For him, a book only exists when read. “It’s the reader who gives life to the literary works because he rescues the words from the page.” Similarly one could say: a film only exists when someone watches it. It’s the viewer or reader who becomes the protagonist.

 

 

FURTHER READING & RESEARCH

 

Antonis Rokas, Where sexes come by the thousands, (2018)

Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974)

Alberto Manguel, With Borges (2006)

 William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsburg, The Yage Letters (1963)

 Terence McKenna: The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992)

 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat And Other Clinical Tales (1985)

Dayna Baumeister: Biomimicry Resource Handbook: A See Bank of Best Practices (2014)

David Bohm: The Best of Dr. David Bohm Interview

Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation (2016)

François Truffaut: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1976) 

The Best Dr. David Bohm Interview

Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (2016)

Stanislav Lem, Solaris (1961)

Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell (1954)

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018)

William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsburg, The Yage Letters (1963)

 Terence McKenna: The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992)

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat And Other Clinical Tales (1985)

Jittu Krishnamurti & David Bohm, The Ending of Time (1985)

The Ending of

Jeff Noon, VURT (1993)

CONTACT

 Robert Zemeckis, USA
1997, 3 min 37 sec (fragment)

A clip from the movie Contact (1997), where Jodie Foster describes her experience and the faith that others must have to believe her despite her lack of hard evidence.

‘Contact’ is a 1997 American science fiction drama film, an adaption of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name.

Jodie Foster portrays the film’s protagonist, Dr. Eleanor Arroway, a SETIscientist who finds strong evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact.

DO WE HAVE A QUANTUM SOUL?

Stuart Hameroff, TEDxBrussels, Belgium
2010, 10 min 21 sec

Dr. Hameroff’s research for 35 years has involved consciousness. Recently Hameroff has explored the theoretical implications of Orch OR for consciousness to exist independent of the body, distributed in deeper, lower, faster scales in non-local, holographic spacetime, raising possible scientific approaches to the soul and spirituality.

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS?

David Chalmers, TED TALKS, USA
2014, 18 min 37 sec

Our consciousness is a fundamental aspect of our existence, says philosopher David Chalmers: “There’s nothing we know about more directly…. but at the same time it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.” He shares some ways to think about the movie playing in our heads.