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KMO welcomes Dr. Salo Stanley to the program to discuss the global transformation of consciousness in progress as it manifests in the form of psychic awakenings, spirit guides, UFOs, and crop circles. Dr. Stanley relates some simple techniques that anyone can use to induce a calm and receptive state of mind that is conducive to contact with helpful intelligences from the realms beyond the limitations of Monday Morning Reality.

Music by Zarathrustra

http://c-realmpodcast.podOmatic.com/entry/2009-11-18T07_50_34-08_00

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Vector: Sita

KMO welcomes Bruce Damer back to the program to talk about the incredibly improbable development of an organic intelligence that creates virtual worlds and how the use of virtual worlds may reveal the mechanisms by which biological evolution got its start. Bruce says he feels like a character in a science fiction novel, and the conversation takes a tour through the realms of science fiction which has foreshadowed the global unraveling of industrial civilization in a world where information technology continues to proliferate and advance at an accelerating pace. Bruce explains why he thinks the mechanism of Moore’s Law is unlikely to spawn emergent machine intelligence.

Music by Tim

I got an email today from a listener who directed me to the inaugural post in his new blog. It's a whopper, and it starts out with...

Learning from the C-Realm and other podcasts

One of my favorite podcasts is the C-Realm Podcast, created and hosted by KMO. This podcast is outstanding in scope, and the insight of KMO as he interviews and explores the various topics covered on this podcast is excellent. Typical topics explored on the C-Realm include peak oil, entheogenic exploration, sustainable living, the technological singularity, population overshoot, food ecology, and other important topics that are either not covered, or extremely skewed in the corporate media. What follows is a list of my favorite episodes from this podcast, and then a sequence of episodes that I followed most recently that took me back and forth through the C-Realm archives, and two other great podcasts, the Psychedelic Salon http://www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts/, and Gnostic Media Podcast http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/

You can read the entire blog entry here:

http://paulhotchkin.blogspot.com/2009/11/learning-from-c-realm-and-other.html

KMO welcomes Frank Rotering to the podcast to discuss ecological overshoot, the logic and institutions of capitalism, technology, and the expression of human biological drives in the economic realm. Frank Rotering contends that ideas like socialism are “solutions of the past” and that new ways of thinking will be required to meet the challenge of the historical singularity that we now face.

Music by The Story Of





And the conversation continues in episode 30 of the Diet Soap Podcast.

Link: http://www.archive.org/details/ConfrontingAmericanParadox

Justin Ritchie prepared this segment Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto for the C-Realm Podcast.

This is a recording of a live radio interview recorded on Tuesday, 27 October 2009. Ed Yersh, the host of the Tuesday Morning After program on CKUT in Montreal interviewed KMO, host and producer of the C-Realm Podcast.

You can hear the full hour of programming in which this interview was embedded here:

http://secure.ckut.ca/128/20091027.08.00-09.00.mp3

In this Halloween episode of the podcast, KMO welcomes Erik Davis back to the program to discuss pulp horror author H. P. Lovecraft, who has achieved an astonishing level of posthumous legitimacy and is now recognized as a seminal influence in the popular imagination. Erik is teaching an online course on the works of H. P. Lovecraft for the Maybe Logic Academy. In the second half of the discussion, KMO and Erik use the themes explored in Lovecraft’s work as a jumping off point for a more general discussion of the role of the human faculty of imagination.



Atmospheric music by Dr. Richard Grossman

http://www.techgnosis.com/index.php

http://www.maybelogic.org/courses.htm

All readings in this episode are from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H. P. Lovecraft.

You can find a LOT of H. P. Lovecraft audio material on the web, for example: http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=60

Written in response to and posted as a part of this thread on the C-Realm forum on The Grow Report:

http://www.thegrowreport.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=8323

I read a short piece in Newsweek recently about how Apple's new tablet computer thingie will "reinvent computing" and how with it some indigo child of the post-iPod age "will be inventing a new language for telling stories."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/217683

And who knows? It may go that way. That would certainly be good news for me and my fellow "outside the mainstream mediocracy" podcasters, but I have lost my techno-Utopian religion.

Five years ago, I had DSL service in my home. Now, I use the wifi at the public library and I spend a LOT less time online than I did half a decade ago. I can imagine this being a temporary "setback," and I can also see it as an indicator of what's to come for a growing portion of "the Tribe" and as a decided improvement in the state of things.

John Horgan was telling me about a conversation that he had with an anti-terrorism think-tank wonk about how in five years the norm will be for everyone to be online all the time and that it will be extremely suspicious for anyone to be offline, just as now it is extremely suspicious for a person to leave their cell phone at home. The assumption of the authorities is that, since the GPS gear in your cell phone creates a continuous timeline of its (and presumably its owner's) movements, then the only reason to leave home without it is to avoid creating a record of your movements, and the only reason you would want to do that is because you are up to evil doings.

This is the panoptic dark side of the on-going collapse of the distinction between direct experience and electronically mediated experience. Things could go that way, but again, the faith of my younger years has wavered.

I think that in five years time most of us will still make use of the internet in some form. Some of us will continue sleep walking into the Panopticon and think that we're making "progress," and others will be spending more and more time "offline," and that doing so will both enrich our experience of life and make us personae non grata to those who occupy the top spots in the hierarchy.

I actually don't think that there is much danger of "the Internet" going away. "The Internet" (qua the global network of networks) existed for decades prior to the advent of MySpace, FaceBook, and free web-mail, and I suspect that some segment of the population will continue to make use of it come what may.

I can envision a time when the multi-media bells and whistles of the World Wide Web prove too expensive, impractical, and stunningly extravagant to maintain but in which Usenet, IRC, and similar text-based interfaces thrive and enable the functioning of far-flung "communities" that would otherwise not exist. It wouldn't pull the same audience as FaceBook and YouTube, but that might be for the best.

As I have slid increasingly into mnemonic and organizational impairment in recent years I have become ever more reliant on my Gmail inbox to serve as my prosthetic memory. As more people become reliant on the functions of "the Cloud," I can also imagine a time when the generous and civic-minded machines at Google might decide that if the service they provide to me is really "all that" then I shouldn't mind too terribly much if they asked me to fork over a few clams in exchange for searching the hundreds of thousands of messages in my inbox for all emails from Neal Kramer or that make mention of "the Singularity."

If that happens, a lot of people will add one more category of expenses to the list of things that they "have to" pay for each month... things that their parents and grandparents never imagined themselves using, much less "needing."

And some people will decide that they can do without the services of the Cloud. If the percentage of people who opt out is small enough, they will be ridiculed and considered kooks on the level of people who refuse certain types of medical care on religious grounds. If they are more numerous or if they opt out involuntarily due to deteriorating economic circumstances, then they may remain unacknowledged in the mainstream discourse, like the tens of millions of Americans who opt out of the annual income tax filing ritual. Whether they are ridiculed or not spoken of, they will be viewed with suspicion and antipathy by those who require a servile and predictable hoi polloi.

Most people reading this will be familiar with the life and work of Edward Bernays and his successors and with their decades-long project of blurring the distinction between wants and needs. Only in the scenarios that most resemble the fantasies of the techno-Utopians will this program continue its relentless conquest of the space of human concerns. In most of the futures I see as likely, the continuation of this program will fall into the category of endeavors that Jim Kunstler derides as "efforts to sustain the unsustainable."

In the coming years, I see more and more people regaining a working distinction between the conditions they need in order to live and enjoy a good quality of life and the objects and "services" which they have been duped into regarding as essential for the maintenance of a desired self-image and social status.

Whether by Flicker, or sneakernet, or semaphore flags, the people who opt out will find ways to communicate with each other and share the techniques they have learned for getting by without some of the so-called "essentials."

Much of what we fear will never come to pass, and much of what we fear will come to pass, and we'll discover ways to cope with it, learn from it, and live better because of it, in no small part because circumstances will force us to work with and depend upon the people close to us rather than paying anonymous and distant strangers for the things we genuinely need in order to survive.

KMO plays the second half of AyasminA’s interview with Dr. Stephan V. Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Steve details the importance of the auditory aspect of the Ayahuasca experience, and then the conversation turns to the paternalism and condescension of First World defenders of indigenous peoples. Later in the episode, KMO plays a clip from the It’s Not Us, It’s You! podcast about the totalitarian aesthetic of Wal*Mart’s new generic product packaging.

Music by Zarathustra.

KMO plays the first half of a conversation between AyasminA and Dr. Stephan V. Beyer. Steve is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, and in the conversation Steve details his lifelong odyssey into the deep regions of consciousness and spirituality which include fifteen years spent in the upper Amazon with the Mestizo keepers of the Ayahuasca tradition.

Music by Joseph A.


The excerpt from Steve's book that I read appears on Reality Sandwich:

http://www.realitysandwich.com/singing_to_plants



Here's the link to the YouTube video that Doug Lain put together that I mentioned at the end of the program:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzf4r4QMQNA&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbWGoPEN9l8

In spite of the music, the fast cutting, the hyperbolic over-dramatization ("It will be a Mad Max world"), this actually does present a pretty tight summary of the major implications of Peak Oil.

C-Realm Episode #174: Follow-Up

By Frank Aragona



http://www.agroblogger.com/2009/10/08/c-realm-episode-174-follow-up/

Patrice Gros appears in C-Realm Podcast episodes 15: Fearless, 16: Sudden Violent Death and 78: Fuel vs Food: Not!

http://www.foundationfarm.com/

And if you haven't seen Waking Life, or if you want a refresher on Alex Jones' contribution to that film, here's the link for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfEuSNejejY

...and for his bit in A Scanner Darkly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDtfKNRTY-Q