C-Realm Podcast

KMO welcomes Matthew J. Pallamary, author Spirit Matters and Land Without Evil, back to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about his new book, The Infinity Zone: A Transcendent Approach to Peak Performance. Topics covered include Rudolf Steiner, sacred geometry, peak performance, martial arts, the effects of political polarization, and the merging of shamanism with science. Matthew's novel Land Without Evil has recently been adapted as a stage and airealist show and is the subject of a PBS documentary.   Music by Mornin' Old Sport.

KMO and Olga speak with Dan Baum, a self-described Tax-and-Spend Democrat and gun lover, about his new book, Gun Guys: A Road Trip. Dan begins with the observation that, over the last two decades, as gun restrictions have loosened and the number of privately owned fire arms in the US has doubled, gun violence has fallen by half. While he doesn't buy into the simplistic narrative of the pro-gun right that more guns equals a safer society, he doesn't condone the alarming and bigoted rhetoric of the left either. Dan challenges his fellow gun guys to proactively lock up their guns and keep them from falling into the hands of children, depressed teenagers and criminals, and he challenges his fellow liberals to take control of their addiction to self-righteousness and stop issuing blanket insults and condemnations of gun owners.   Music by Shanimal.   Join KMO and Olga at the 2013 Age of Limits gathering.

KMO welcomes Douglas Rushkoff back to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about the themes of his most recent book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens now, and between tangets related to Scientology, the IRS, Colbert Report schwag, ceremonial magick, the faded out look of rock stars who've had their juju drained by millions of adoring fans and the little known collapse of WTC Building 12 on 9/11, they do manage to make at least passing reference to the themes of Doug's book. KMO ends with listener feedback on last week's conversation with Guy McPherson and announcements about the upcoming 2013 Age of Limits gathering and an Evolver NYC event, The Singularity is Where? Music by Mamie Minch.

This is a recording of a conversation between Dennis McKenna, author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, and Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now held before a live audience on March 14th, 2013 at the Riverside Church theater in Manhattan. The event was presented by Evolver NYC, The Disinformation Company and the C-Realm Podcast. Filmmaker and futurist, Jason Silva, introduced the conversation which covered such topics as the way that information technology has changed how we perceive the passage of time and allowed for the forces of Orwellian social control to make one last gasp attempt at repression. Other topics of conversation include the effects of debt-based money and the transition to clock-based labor, the naive materialism of Richard Dawkins, and the compromised version of the search for truth that modern science has become. Dennis McKenna relates his realization, 40 years after the fact, that the experiment at La Chorrera that he conducted with his brother Terence was their attempt to tear apart time and space to compensate for the death of their mother. In the Q & A, Douglas Rushkoff makes light of Ray Kurzweil and his Singularitarian vision of techno-immortality. More conversations with Douglas and Dennis: C-Realm Podcast 345: Muddling Through with Dennis McKenna Psychonautica Podcast 091 with Dennis McKenna C-Realm Podcast 157: Tilted Field of Giants with Douglas Rushkoff C-Realm Podcast 99: Slapping the Monkeys Upside the Head with Dennis McKenna C-Realm Podcast 29: Corporatized! with Douglas Rushkoff      

  Guy McPherson joins KMO in the C-Realm to discuss the prospect of runaway climate feedback loops which Guy thinks will lead to human extinction in the not-so-distant future. KMO prefaces the conversation with an excerpt from episode 285: The Rhetoric of Doom. The first half of the conversation consists of an encapsulated version of Guy's presentation to the Bluegrass Bioneers, which you can hear in full on Radio Ecoshock. In the second half of the conversation, KMO asks Guy if, knowing what he knows now, he would still walk away from his tenured position and all the perks of living at the apex of empire. KMO wraps up the podcast with an excerpt from Bruce Sterling's closing remarks to the 2013 South by Southwest Festival about the fatuousness of "technological solutionism." Music by Formidable Vegetable. Join KMO, Olga, John Michael Greer, Albert Bates, Carolyn Baker, Dmitry Orlov, Gail Tverberg and Guy McPherson for the 2013 Age of Limits gathering Thursday May 23rd thru Monday May 27th, 2013.

KMO welcomes IEET co-founder, James Hughes, back to the C-Realm to discuss the possibilities for maximizing human capabilities, including ethical capabilities, in a time of rapid technological change. The conversation around the use of technology to improve upon humanity needs an infusion of compassion and adulthood to counteract the adolescent, male, techno-libertarian mentality that has kept the discussion from reaching a wider and more diverse audience. Dr. Hughes, a former Buddhist monk, has recently added some high-tech enhancements to his long-standing meditation practice, and the discussion turns to the potential benefits and dangers of the widespread adoption of this technology now that prices have come down and the hardware has become more user-friendly. The conversation ends with a continuation of the recent C-Realm theme of anticipating and responding to the trend of technological unemployment. Music by Hobotech. Present Shock & The Psychedelic Legacy of Terence McKenna: an Evening with Douglas Rushkoff and Dennis McKenna.

KMO welcomes Federico Pistono to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about the book Robots Will Steal Your Job But That's OK - How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy. Federico describes work as the single most important factor contributing to self-esteem, social status and a sense of purpose in people's lives. He also thinks that the process by which jobs are lost to automation and sophisticated software tools will accelerate and leave more and more people without the jobs that provide them with economic sustenance and a sense of purpose. The discussion turns to the need to revise the cultural assumption that a human who is not employed is a social parasite. In a world of accelerating technological unemployment, where most jobs do nothing to provide for human needs and, in fact, magnify the harms that industrial society visits on the biosphere and human quality of life, we absolutely must get past the idea everyone must "earn a living." Music by Au5 (courtesy of Adapted Records)   Present Shock and the Psychedelic Legacy of Terence McKenna - An Evening with Douglas Rushkoff and Dennis McKenna. March 14th, 2013. Click here to buy tickets.   You can contact float23 about his new record label and CD release at info@float23.com.

KMO welcoms S.T. Joshi, the author of the definitive biography of H.P. Lovecraft, to the C-Realm Podcast. Chances are you've heard of some of the products of H.P. Lovecraft's imagination, like dread Cthulhu who lies dead but dreaming beneath the waves, or that tome of forbidden knowledge the Necronomicon. Robert E. Howard is best remembered as the creator of the character Conan the barbarian. The third master of the weird tale is Clark Ashton Smith. Smith, who was both self-taught and erudite, wrote poetry, painted, carved sculpture, and, seemingly in a time of desperate financial need, wrote fantasy stories for the same publications which featured the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. The racist attitudes that were prevalent in the early decades of the 20th Century took different forms in the fiction of Lovecraft and Howard. In place of the usual musical interlude, KMO reads an excerpt from Black Canaan, a story by Robert E. Howard in which a voodoo priest leads a black uprising against the white residents of a region of Louisiana swampland called Canaan. Atmospheric music by Gallery Six.

  Gary Borjesson, author of Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs, returns to the C-Realm to follow philosophical pathways that lead from the relationship between dog and human and extend to such questions as "Can friendships ever really be unconditional?" "Is encouragement always preferable to criticism?" "Are children harmed or helped by competitive activities with clear winners and losers?" and "What is the real value of work in a world where most people work jobs that have nothing to do with providing essential goods or services?"   Music by EnviroSiren.      

Guest Host Larry Lowe welcomes Paul Von Ward to the C-Realm to review his 2004 book Gods, Genes and Consciousness in which Von Ward lays out a very large scale review of extraterrestrial contact with humanity and its complicated impact on our developmental process. In the first segment, Von Ward explains how the Advanced Beings that apparently had overt contact with humanity help reboot our civilization after a planetary level catastrophic event that occurred around 11,500 BC. He points out how the religions we now believe in re-framed the concept of gods into a universal, mythical God of the cosmos. The discussion then delves into the understanding of humanity as a Genetically Modified Organism and finally into how all of this sets the stage for understanding consciousness as a pervasive artifact of nature and how the individual human node of consciousness is a means for the universe to know itself.   Music by Jeanette Parsadanian.   Web Links:   http://www.vonward.com/   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_panspermia   http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/ic-all-the-way-down-the-grand-human-evolutionary-discontinuity-and-probabilistic-resources/

KMO welcomes Dan Miner of Beyond Oil NYC to the C-Realm to talk about talking about Peak Oil, Climate Change and other big picture, existential issues with busy New Yorkers. A messenger who presents the situation in its full gravity to people caught up in the collective trance will seem like a lunatic, but how much sugar-coating is too much? Does it make sense to humor people's expectations that renewable sources of energy will power the lifestyle that citizens in the heart of empire have come to regard as normal? Are minor gains that pale in comparison to the scale of industrial civilization's dilemma worth the effort? The conversation turns to "Preppers" and the way that they are portrayed as  clueless and damaged social rejects in the corporate media (e.g. National Geographic and the New York Times). Who benefits from the denigration of that tiny minority of the population who are devoting their own time and resources to cushioning the system with a modicum of resilience? Music by Glöd.

KMO welcomes Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain project to the the C-Realm Podcast to discuss the themes in his recent Orion magazine article, Dark Ecology: Searching for truth in a post-green world. Paul is critical of neo-environmentalists; environmental activists who have made peace with the logic of capitalism and the infinite growth paradigm. They see environmental stresses as technical problems which are best addressed with technological remedies, and they agree that anything that is real and worthy of consideration can be quantified by science and priced by the market. Anything else is wool-minded romanticism. KMO draws a parallel to cosmopolitan liberals who despise and ridicule their "red state" counterparts but who have made peace with the imperial wealth pump that makes their lavish cosmopolitian lifestyles possible.   Music by Southside.

KMO welcomes John Michael Greer, the Archdruid, back to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about binary thaumaturgy and other means by which political conversation in the United States has been reduced to meaningless utterances meant to divide the population into antagonistic factions. Phatic communication which is devoid of substantive content has replace analysis in contemporary political discourse, particularly on television. In response to a question about the danger of austerity playing into the hands of right wing demagogues and giving rise to fascism, JMG explains that fascism is not a right-wing phenomenon. Rather, fascism is something that arises from the neglected center when divisive political language has driven participants to extremes and left the center unrepresented in mainstream discourse. Polarizing language clears the way for totalitarian centrism.   Music by The Little Stevies.   Here previous conversations between John Michael Greer and KMO about JMG's books:   The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered

KMO welcomes Charles C. Mann back to the podcast to discuss the themes of slavery and the second great African diaspora, which took the shape of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In his book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles details how the human taste for sugar, plantation-style agriculture, and diseases like maleria and yellow fever shaped the social arrangements of Europe, African and the so-called New World and which continue to influence our contemporary way of life. KMO asks Charles about the potential for preserving the moral progress we seem to have made in the last 200 years in an ear of limits to growth and economic contraction. Nicole Foss, in an excerpt from an upcoming Full Circle podcast, weighs in on that same question. Music by The Autumn Olives. You can hear more conversations with Charles Mann in C-Realm Podcast episode 256, on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and on the Orion Magazine Podcast. Learn more about transition training in Dobbs Ferry, NY February 1-3.

KMO welcomes Lon Milo Duquette to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about magick, music, and the good so great and all-encompassing that it has no opposite. LMD is a stand-up occultist, a gnostic bishop, a singer/song-writer, and the author of 14 books on magick and esotericism. In spite of the content of the musical interlude on this week's show, Lon wants the listeners all to know that he does not drink alcohol at all these days and certainly does not condone driving under the influence. Lon explains how Solomonic magicians raise demons and put them to work in the service of the Great G, how a demon, once transformed from a destructive and directionless force, can help the magician transform his or her consciousness. Magic is, when you get right down to it, all in your head. You just have no idea how big your head is.