🪄 Ecodelic Gnostic Mesozoic Media Avalanche
💻 New Six-Week Science & Philosophy Course Starts August 1 + 🍄 #PS23: First Reflections & New Art + ☦️ New AI Music Video for "You Don't Have To Move"
New episode of Future Fossils on Jazz Leadership with Greg Thomas and Stephanie Lepp coming out tomorrow! But first, news about my first online course…first peeks at my catch from the Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver…and a psychoactive music video for one of the deepest songs I’ve ever written! Enjoy another deep dive:
💻 Announcing “Jurassic Worlding” – My New Nura Learning Course Starts AUG 1!
Rescheduled to launch 1 Aug instead of 18 July to make more time for rigorous prep!
✨ Enroll Today ✨
“We need a paleontology of the present, a rethinking of our condition in the perspective of deep time, in order to produce a synthesis of the arts and sciences adequate to the challenges we face.”
– W.J.T. Mitchell
🦖 About The Course:
This Nura Learning cohort will meet on six consecutive Tuesday nights starting on 1 August to have watch-along parties for each of the six Jurassic Park/Jurassic World films, with live commentary by Michael and a concurrent group text chat and followed by short open group discussions. Meanwhile in the Mighty Networks group, we'll share in an ongoing series of related short reading and video materials, supplementary podcast episodes, and art to deepen the network of correspondences and emergent insights.
Additionally, everyone enrolled in this course gets access to the patrons-only Future Fossils Jurassic Park Discord server channels, where he and his listeners have been workshopping this book and sharing recordings from their own book club calls about Michael Crichton's novels Jurassic Park and The Lost World, and even more supplementary writings (including notes and draft chapters for the new book). It's double the fun for the price of one!
🦖 About The Themes:
All roads lead to Isla Nublar — and the fictional if all-too-plausible, and doomed, amusement park John Hammond built upon it. In the decades since their publication, Michael Crichton's best-selling novel Jurassic Park and Steven Spielberg's best-selling film adaptation both transformed the world, setting in motion revolutionary technological developments and accelerating the breakdown boundaries between the real and the virtual, the past and the future, civilization and the natural world.
Intended as a cautionary tale, Jurassic Park backfired by seeding the imagination with a gripping narrative that lit the world on fire with interest in the possibility of de-extinction...as well as the commercial opportunities enabled by an arms race to create and own new monsters of modernity: the AI, biotech, and VFX that ratcheting attempts at regulation and surveillance only help to fuel.
This daring and ambitious synthesis maps the intersections of the techno-thriller, chaos theory, complex systems science, the history of computation, emerging media, and culture...an ode to all the promise and the peril of the portals that we open and the self-fulfilling prophecies we midwife through our digital devices and scientific innovations. More than just another desperate plea to shut it down or face the consequences, this course speaks from a Jurassic World in which "dinosaurs" (our rampant tech and institutions) and humans must find better ways to live together. It's a manifesto for the dawning Technocene and playbook for the strategies required of us to survive (and even thrive amidst) this phase transition into What Comes Next: an age inspired and haunted not just by Jurassic Park but also visionary works of science fiction such as Westworld, Star Trek, and The Matrix.
Bundling together insights from more than 300 podcast interviews and 20 years of independent scholarship, Michael Garfield's debut Nura Learning course is a potent collective sensemaking experience for residents of an increasingly weird future populated by chatGPT, COVID-19, deep fakes, and resurrected mammoths. The raptors are already on the mainland...how, then, can we coexist?
“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”
- Buckminster Fuller
Fans and friends, use discount code FUTUREFOSSIL for 10% off when you
✨ Enroll Today ✨
🍄 First Reflections on & New Art from the Psychedelic Science Conference
What a trip! I just decompressed from the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver…and what a different scene it was than when I was the first musician to play at the first of these events way back in 2010. (Here are the fossils of those ancient poolside sets, back at the very start of my cyberacoustic explorations.)
I don’t have to tell you how bizarre it is to see the bifurcation underway as capital and power flow into the psychedelic former-underground and polarize it all.
On one hand we have great catharsis, promise, opportunity, and wonder as the hippies win the drug war and make powerful new therapies available to everyone who needs them (here’s my 2018 riff on this with MDMA/ketamine somatic therapist Saj Razvi — whom I met while playing a MAPS fundraiser at Aubrey Marcus’ house and resulted in my music being used extensively in the Phase II & III FDA-approved MDMA clinical trials for PTSD — here’s the Spotify playlist of the tracks I could confirm were played as part of people’s healing).
On the other hand we have a justifiably concerned community of peer support and integration counselors, indigenous plant medicine practitioners, and OG heads who see marketization of the sacred as profoundly wrong and dangerous. Even though I pledge my fealty to balance in all things, I’m old enough to see the pattern as wave after wave of liberating new “technologies” are colonized and reappropriated as tools of control. This was obvious at least as far back as 2012 and 2013, when I wrote a (commissioned and then rejected) piece on psychedelic capitalism for the MAPS Bulletin and then gave a talk about the enclosure of visionary experience at Burning Man’s Fractal Planet.
I’ll say much more about this in a solo podcast soon, because this paradox is on display not just in psychedelics but in social media, in UFO disclosure, and wherever else I look…the synthesis of street and sanctum or mountain/monastery/marketplace appears to be the challenge of this century for those of us trapped in (or even near) the burning building of western civilization.
But for now, I’ll let two of my favorite correspondents speak:
Oshan Jarrow writes on #PS23 at Vox:
In the afternoon, I moseyed over to hear Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology and a leading researcher in the psychedelic science realm. At the moment of my entrance, he was describing how brain activity grows more “entropic” on psychedelics. You might recognize entropy as what the second law of thermodynamics tells us the universe is tending toward: disorder. In terms of the brain, you can think of it as the unpredictability of electrical activity.
Entropy is also a fitting theme for the conference at large, which otherwise resists being packaged into a tidy narrative. Everything from the outfits to the art installations is spiced with unpredictability. Even the weather, which delivered a quick bout of hail Thursday night, was surprising. …
Across a number of panel discussions, participants have suggested that integrating psychedelic experience at the cultural scale requires wholesale systemic change.
Often, this sort of thing is usually followed by a few vague critiques of capitalism or the profit motive. “Don’t forget,” said Jamie Wheal, a writer and co-founder of the Flow Genome Project, “the set and setting of the psychedelic renaissance is free-market capitalism.”
Ken Jordan writes on #PS23 at Lucid News:
That a psychedelic conference could fill the Colorado Convention Center is itself a mind twister. But what may be most striking is just how normal it all seemed. This wasn’t Burning Man, not by a long shot. Most attendees kept their freaky threads and playa gifts at home. Folks were generally self-contained and well-behaved. It wasn’t your grandpa’s trippy happening. …
In many ways, PS2023 can be seen as an expression of how much MAPS has accomplished, as well as the contradictions at the heart of the enterprise. …
As the closing ceremony reached its climax, Doblin’s speech was interrupted by a protest. The group was small, but they were loud and determined. Eventually he invited them on stage to address the crowd. It was a classy move, more reflective of a savvy movement leader than a corporate CEO.
The protestors challenged the relative paucity of Indigenous voices at the conference, and warned against mixing sacred plants with commerce. For many in the crowd, the moment was cathartic. Psychedelics are not just another kind of medicine, and they should be treated with at least a bit of awe for the experiences they can invite. Afterwards, the protest was what most people wanted to talk about. Not just that it happened, but that the episode ended with a protestor, Lira Ornelas Godoy, inviting Doblin to embrace.
I’ll leave it there for now. Stay tuned…
🎨 Live Painting + Gallery Display at #PS23
One KEY takeaway from this conference was that I was right to retire from live painting in 2020. As much as I love it, painting at events has become an obstacle to doing more impactful work and spending time in the social reactor and synchronicity vortex that festivals and conferences offer. Of course it was wonderful to be invited to participate in the gallery and art auction by Android Jones when I had him on Future Fossils, but
Plus, music + speaking + painting is too much gear! I’m tired of lugging more than half my weight around. It’s time to fly and that means leaving half my cyborg crab shell in the past.
If you follow me for art, don’t give up on me yet — I’m just reallocating my time as a painter to the studio so I can spend more time with family while I work. I will continue to make paintings, analog and digital. Plus, I just relaunched my shop! Every cardstock print now comes “bagged and boarded” in a plastic sleeve with a reinforcing cardboard backing:
Anyway, about the new work! Here is a preview of my latest painting, started at Papadosio/Dirtwire/CloudChord here in Santa Fe and then advanced at PS23 to be completed in my house. This work-in-progress, “Flying White,” is the third in a trilogy of works that spans six years and tells the story of my ever-deepening encounter with my anima and Godself:
Much more about this soon. Until then, I’ll be taking offers on the finished piece…
Here are the two pieces I had accepted into the Tribe 13 Gallery for this event — both of which remain available and both of which I’ll gladly pass on far below their list price to the right recipients:
☦️ “You Don't Have To Move” Music Video
My most popular song of all time now has a shiny, strangely profound AI music video! On deep phenomenology and Psychedelic Christianity and Taoism while camping, maybe in the desert, maybe on a trampoline…
Download this song here:
Here's the song played live back in 2009:
Lyrics:
I'm falling out of these open eyes
Filling up all of the world outside
I'm seeing more than fits in my mind
Spilling the bliss out through bright surprise
If there's one thing I know, it's that
Angels appear when you stop trying to prove them
And the clouds clear; you don't have to move
I'm falling out of these open eyes
Challenging all my ideas of size
What was once narrow feels miles wide
All of a sudden, in all of time
If there's one thing I know, it's that
Angels appear when you stop trying to prove them
And the clouds clear; you don't have to move
And now, the paywalled juicy stuff that I reserve for folks who help me feed my kids: