Dr. Bruce Damer's Levity Zone

Dr. Bruce returns from evacuation to tell the dramatic, traumatic tale of the horrific CZU fire nearby, coming within a mile of Ancient Oaks. Climate shocks come home as giant redwoods burn bottom to top for the first time in a thousand years. A pattern break, and then another, and another will impact and transform our lives, individually and collectively as we move deeper into the century. Dr. Bruce himself is entering into his own pattern break, a month of breaking from his mostly mental life into a new state with nowhere to go, nothing to do. How often do we just... stop? While in this state he plans to test a hypothesis, that there is something deep within, and casting its tendrils far and wide in our lives: the Field. The Field is a probabilistic ninja, hurdling walls of improbability to shape our futures. Our focused attention in the Field could just possibly pull us through the coming siege of pattern breaks, forcing us to survive and thrive as the body human moves toward life and light. After this update, we then dive into Levity Salon #9: 'Is there a silver lining in an orange cloud?', featuring discussions with Salon regulars on the subject of the fires, pattern breaks, metamordernism, post-traumatic recovery and more on the Field. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer (hosting and recording) and Aaron Thayne (Levity Salon edit). [released 30 September, 2020]

The Levity Zone after six months of life-changing events for Dr. Bruce including his move in with a new love into a new house, the Gandalf Abode at Ancient Oaks. The Zone welcomes in the new Levity Salons. These Salons are live online Zoom sessions which started late in 2019 with Dr. Bruce's Patreon community. This Salon (#4) featured the timely theme of Pandemics and the Human Future, it being recorded in March 2020 during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Bruce gives his take on the situation and then shares a lively dialogue amongst almost forty participants. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer (hosting and recording), Allan Lundell (editing and music overlay), Aaron Thayne (final release edit) and Bodhi Setchko (music). [released 8 June, 2020]

With the passing of Ram Dass, your Dr. Bruce speaks from his heart to prepare humanity for the decade of the 2020s, calling for a humane and sane response to coming climate shocks, giving a happy report on the publication of the Hot Spring Hypothesis for and Origin of Life article (his greatest intellectual work), and the blessing of his new home, the Gandalf Wizard's Abode. He departs 2019 in bed in a state of exhaustion, but also holding deep gratitude for our very existence and the conscious, loving awareness which humanity can attain through a Human Wellbeing Climate Moonshot. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer (recording and editing), Sun Lundell (cover photo). [released 30 December 2019]

Your Dr. Bruce returns after yet another four month absence from the Levity Zone. I am thrilled to report that my life transition is going very well with this property transforming into a community with members and retreats, a dream of mine for 25 years. My Gandalf House rising on the hill is almost complete and I moved into the upstairs back on June 30th. New ventures are progressing with Mason and Carlos and I am even getting involved in a global effort called Climate Mitigation Associates which will build a network of experts to help bridge our civilization over the coming shocks from climate change. On top of this I have started a Patreon and 20 of you have already signed up! Find the link to my Patreon page, which has many tiers of benefits, in the resources for this podcast. This episode of the Levity Zone features a dinner talk I gave at Thompson Rivers University in my hometown of Kamloops in south central British Columbia, Canada back on March 29th, 2019. I was honored there as Distinguished Research Alumn by the university which I attended right out of (and during) high school in 1979-82. What I was moved to do that night was to give my most heartfelt thanks and appreciation to the people and land that really made me, a sort of love poem to my home community. Kamloops is at the center of some key early climate changes as you will hear from some of the audience questions. Thanks go out to Nancy Bepple and the staff of TRU for making this beautiful event happen, and to my surviving family members, Eric and Susan Damer and cousins Margaret and Mike Stewart-Smith and the many other friends who came and occupied two tables. It may be a truism that once in your life... the boy, or girl, must come home... and boy did I do that! I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! Credits: Thompson Rivers University faculty and staff (hosts), Dr. Bruce Damer (recording and editing), Kristof (audio cleanup), Eric Damer (cover photo). [released 31 August 2019]

Your Dr. Bruce returns after a four month absence from the Levity Zone. Remarkable changes have been happening in my life and I am now "springing forward" into a bright new season of starting up ventures in space, origins of life, evolutionary biology, and computing as well as constructing my Gandalf House here at Ancient Oaks. So, rejoin me now as I return for our 70th podcast with an update from my world, now more hopeful and more globally connected than ever to support an emerging positive future for humanity. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer (recording and editing), Arlene Olynyk (cover photo). [released 19 April 2019]

Dr. Bruce celebrates the life of environmentalist Fred McPhereson and his role in saving the San Lorenzo River (and Valley) creating the paradise in which we live. Credits: Fred McPherson, Alexa Razma and Dr. Bruce Damer (recording and discussion), Kristof (editing and sound warming), music (Max Hartstein and the 25th Century Ensemble) [released 12 December 2018]

Dr. Bruce is back after a heartfelt series of major life changes to bring you this podcast Becoming Human, a recording by SAND (Science and Nonduality) for their Emergence Series webcast in preparation for the SAND2018 Conference in San Jose, California. Join us for a wide-ranging storytelling salon with topics as diverse as the cold realms of science, intuition and the synchronous field, connecting with Deepak Chopra, holding Endo thought experiments, my original vision to work on the origin of life, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, deep human evolution, the Eleusinian Mysteries and kitchen biogenesis. Credits: Vera de Chalambert (host), Kristof and Dr. Bruce (editing), Kristof and others (music). [released 23 October 2018]

Your Dr. Bruce shares a hot tub and a chorus of crickets with Dr. Future (Al Lundell) after returning from highly stimulating and encouraging meetings in Boston and Providence where he met a new team of Mac and Mike who are serious about building a "CubeSat" prototype of SHEPHERD. SHEPHERD is the audacious spacecraft design worked out with Peter Jenniskens and Julian Nott back in 2015. It is a "sailing ship for space" which if it works could encapsulate, handle, extract and make new little worlds out of asteroids and thereby creating the stepping stones for us to become a Solar System Civilization and spread complex life out into the cosmos. During the East Coast meetings I sketched out a simple "bag with rock" design that could be flown on a CubeSat, a tiny satellite that hitches a ride on a bigger launcher. We start out there and then come down from such heady fare to matters of the heart and my own daily breathwork and yoga practice where I turn OFF the mind! Of course we end up swinging back to space and SHEPHERD and wrap it up with some pretty visionary stuff. So join us now for a steamy journey on a lazy night in late August of 2018 for a moment of pleasurable contemplation in a world getting ever weirder and weirder. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer and Allan Lundell (recording), Kristof and Dr. Bruce (editing) [released 31 August 2018]

Dr. Bruce returns from science fieldwork and Middle Earth adventures in New Zealand with a full report following this episode featuring his 2015 Earth Frequency festival talk on "The Emerald and Azure Civilization" held in the gum tree forests of southern Queensland, Australia. This free-flowing rap takes you from how our visionary viewpoint has been constricting as we replace a formerly emerald green world of nature with the harsh azure blue glare of technological civilization. He then offers how we might collectively push back against the forces of our darker nature with the calling forth of the evolving forces of light, emanating from the old world of Eleusis to the new tools of the Elixirs and Endo. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer (recording), Kristof (editing), Tranzporter (cover photo) [released 31 July 2018]

Dr. Bruce Damer and Dr. Deepak Chopra meet and share news and views about the science of life's origins, old rocks and new chemistry, and the fundamental engine of creation in a mutual sense of spirit of healing in this emergent connection. Recorded in Facebook Live in front of 22,000 of Deepak's followers on Friday April 6th at the 2018 Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, Arizona this was Dr. Bruce's first experience of mass audiences in social media. It was fun so there is more to come! Credits: Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Bruce Damer (recording and discussion), Kristof (editing and cover art) [released 29 May 2018]

Your Dr. Bruce finds himself back in Islamabad, Pakistan spending one beautiful April spring day at a flower-decked lakeside retreat hand-crafted by a dear friend, Shahnaz Minallah. We spent a delightful time "gup shupping" (Pakistani for shooting the breeze) while breezes flowed and Pashtuns from the wild north worked around us. We explored the theme of "lock-in" which is entering Pakistani society with Chinese development to garner millions in apartment building/shopping mall/smartphone living. Lock-in will soon threaten thousand year old ways of life including craft hand-workers such as a Pashtun weaver who "says a prayer with every thread." Shahnaz vows to do something about it by creating an online export business to preserve these ancient and beautiful crafts and village ways. In between we speak about our shared passion for healing practices and the rise of "Jedis" and their energetic "Force" around the world. Credits: Shahnaz Minallah and Dr. Bruce Damer (recording and discussion) [released 26 April 2018]

Dr. Bruce and Al Lundell submerge together in the hot tub on Future Peak to record a new Tubcast. Levity Zone listeners get a first peek into a whole new practice Dr. Bruce has been immersed in for several years within a community called the Luminous Awareness Institute. In Luminous, skilled practitioners use powerful combinations of methods for healing various types of trauma which, for many of us, were "coded in" by experiences in childhood. As living conditions have improved worldwide, people are healthier and live longer than ever before. However, many suffer in a state of anxiety induced by destructive narratives that can lead to depression and dissociation. This situation seems to be rooted in a variety of character styles driven in party by these core traumas. Will science and the healing arts converge to discover how to rewrite our "psychological boot code" and heal humanity? Hear how this audacious possibility, perhaps the biggest story of our time, may hold the key to creating a beautiful and sustainable civilization. Credits: Dr. Future-Allan Lundell (recording and discussion), Dr. Bruce Damer (discussion and editing), Ryan Beck (music-ProgeNotes), [released 31 March 2018]

Dr. Bruce brings you a vital new teaching for our times from Dr. R. P. Kaushik. We live in a time dominated by the "wiles of the mind", thoughts which swirl around mind and trap it within limits, conditioning it and morphing it into "the me", "the ego" or simply "self-centeredness". Operating from this "small self" defined by cycling thought creates suffering within each of us and for the whole world. Fake news and not so fake news, social media, and ordinary computer interactions all trigger thought which activates the small self, often providing initial rewards followed by a hollowed-out collapse. Dr. Kaushik guides us step-by-step to become an observer of these thoughts triggered, for example, through an episode of anger. By letting thoughts pass and dissipate, we enter into a great silence, opening to a sense of peace and universal energy, and from there we may then cross the threshold to enlightened awakening. Credits: Dr. Bruce Damer (introducer), Dr. R.P. Kaushik (presenter), Mystical Sun (music), Jacob Aman (site and cover art). [released 26 February 2018]

Celebrate Dr. Bruce's Blue Moon Eclipse (56th) birthday on January 31st, 2018 by returning to a magickal night last August 31st, at Burningman 2017 with the Wizards Light troupe in the Playalchemist pyramid. Journey on this mystical musical spoken word performance on why communion traces back to our very origins and is the likely mechanism for our very survival. On top of all that, grok a novel insight of a tripartite system that may actually generate everything, from life's beginning through all of evolution to culture, technology and even our experience of spirit in the union of communion. Credits: Brad Nye, Chris Krywulak, Mark Lee and the organizers of Playa Alchemist for the venue; Josiah Ruben and his team at Promosa (stage support, audio recording); Samantha Sweetwater (leadership, invocation, choreography and dance); DISSOLV (music, effects); Jasmine (dance) and Dr. Bruce Damer (spoken word journey). [Released 30 January 2018]

For the 60th Levity Zone podcast, Dr. Bruce brings you Communion in the Pyramid, a team performance of cosmic proportions held at Burning Man 2017. Join Samantha Sweetwater for an invocation from our deepest communal origins followed by Valentin Santana and Andre Reinero (aka DJ DISSOLV) rocking their board bringing forth a new composition in their "Calibrate" line... danced to by the phenomenal Jasmine. A crack of thunder signaled yours truly, the Wizard, to stride slowly forward into the light on stage in possibly the largest interior space ever constructed on the Playa. Burner brothers and sisters were then piloted on a vocal and musical journey from life's origins to the point where we monkeys set foot on our moon and turned on at the Summer of Love, fifty years ago. The illuminated disk ship that is Burning Man then wheeled its way through alien encounters toward a glorious future in the cosmos. Credits: Brad Nye, Chris Krywulak, Mark Lee and the organizers of Playa Alchemist for the venue; Josiah Ruben and his team at Promosa (stage support, audio recording); Samantha Sweetwater (leadership, invocation, choreography); DISSOLV (music, effects); Jasmine (dance) and Dr. Bruce Damer (spoken word journey). [Released 30 December 2017]