Each time you visit this page, you’ll find a different randomized selection of Evolutionary Lectures to expand your heart, mind, and soul.
♥ Enjoy & Evolve ♥
🠗 🧙🏽♂️ randomized 🧙🏽♂️ 🠗
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Dr. Eben Moglen
Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media
re:publica Talk [2012]
“Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity’s most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual freedom and civic virtue requires us to achieve specific free technology and free culture goals. Our existing achievements in these directions are under assault from companies trying to bottleneck human communications or own our common culture, and states eager to control their subjects’ minds. In this talk–one of a series beginning with “The dotCommunist Manifesto” and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei”–I offer some suggestions about how the Free World should meet the challenges of the next decade.”
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Eben Moglen (of the Software Freedom Conservancy) @ Law of the Commons Conference, National Lawyers Guild, Seattle University 2009
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❝ Does the science of evolution really prove that life, humanity, and the universe as a whole are meaningless accidents? On the contrary, as science has shown how everything in the universe is subject to evolution, including matter, life, and human culture, these very facts reveal that the process of evolution is unmistakably progressive. And, as Steve McIntosh demonstrates, when we come to see how evolution progresses, this reveals evolution’s purpose-to grow toward ever-widening realizations of beauty, truth, and goodness. McIntosh argues that the purpose of evolution is not intelligently designed or otherwise externally controlled; rather, its purpose is being creatively and originally discerned through the choices of the evolutionary creatures themselves. Without relying on spiritual authorities, the author shows how the scientific story of our origins is actually a profound and sacred teaching compatible with many forms of contemporary spirituality. Evolution’s Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins presents a fresh and compelling view of evolutionary science and philosophy, and shows how a deeper understanding of evolution itself can lead directly to a more evolved world. ❞
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
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“Mckenna discusses the evolutionary theories surrounding our emergence out of the hominid line, how the development of human egos has been disempowering and how global values based on archaic systems can be recognised as the gaian mind of the planet through the medium of the internet. The gaia hypothesis now has a solid scientific underpinning, inspired by James Lovelocks work”
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“Walter Houston Clark has defined “religion” as an individual’s inner experience of a Beyond, especially as evidenced by active attempts to harmonize his or her life with that Beyond. The Johns Hopkins experiments suggest that a large fraction of mentally healthy people with spiritual interests can have a profound experience of a Beyond—a mystical-type experience—with the aid of several hours’ preparation and a supervised psilocybin session. Furthermore, most of the study volunteers report that encounter as among the most spiritually significant of their lives and as bringing sustained benefits. How do we get from such experiences (however occasioned) to “religion” in Clark’s sense, and in the sense of a group pursuing spiritual ends? Perhaps that transition is, as Brother David Steindl-Rast claims, inevitable. The talk will address that process, and will argue that some social organizations have strong but unacknowledged religious aspects. It will also ask how nascent religious groups can form in ways that minimize the pathologies that so often have given the “r-word” a bad name, while channeling sociality to cultivate individual and collective well-being.
Robert Jesse is Convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP; csp.org). CSP’s interest in non-ordinary states focuses on the betterment of well people, in contrast to the medical-model treatment of patients with psychiatric diagnoses. Through CSP, Bob was instrumental in forming the psilocybin research team at Johns Hopkins University, and he has co-authored three of its scientific papers. He also lead the writing of an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the União do Vegetal’s use of a sacramental tea containing DMT, a controlled substance. A unanimous Court upheld the UDV’s right to its practice. Bob has long participated in the development of the Bay Area spiritual community that draws liberally from the non-creedal, non-hierarchical ways of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends). His formal training is in electrical engineering and computer science.”
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Bruce Sewick
Treating Addictions Using Psychedelic Assisted Therapy
College of DuPage Seminar [2018]
“Recorded as part of a seminar on Psychedelics: Therapy, Culture and Cluster Headaches. Bruce Sewick LCPC, RDDP, CADC discusses the clinical use of psychedelics particularly in the treatment of alcoholics and addicts. Bruce Sewick is an Adjunct instructor in COD’s Human Services and he teaches the Psychedelic Mindview class.”
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❝ In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think. ❞Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
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Dr. Rick Doblin
Transformational Psychedelics
The Long Now Foundation Seminar [2020]
“Humans have consumed psychedelics for at least the last 10,000 years. The outlawing of psychedelics in most of the world in the 20th century didn’t stop that, but it did put an end to promising research into their psychotherapeutic applications to treat depression, addiction, PTSD, anxiety, and trauma. Today, we’re in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with some psychedelics fast on their way to becoming legal medicines. One of the key players behind this movement is Rick Doblin, Ph.D.. In 01986, he founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit research and educational organization that has developed the medical and legal framework for the use of psychedelics to treat mental health conditions. MAPS has distributed over $20 million to fund psychedelic research and education, and in 02017 won fast-tracked “Breakthrough Therapy” designation from the FDA for using MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). With legalization now in sight, what is the future of psychedelic medicine?”
Categories: Lectures, Symposia, Video Essays
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Ralph Nader
To the Ramparts
Politics & Prose Book Lecture [2018]
“Since the release of Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, Nader has led the charge against destructive and exploitative corporate power. The co-founder of public interest groups including Public Citizen, Critical Mass, Commercial Alert, and the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, Nader continues to demonstrate the efficacy of grassroots activism for democratic change. His new book is a searing analysis of how Big Business, abetted by the flaws of recent presidential administrations, created the political climate that put Trump in the White House. As provocative as ever, Nader takes both Democrats and Republicans to task for their failures to curb corporate excesses and their abandonment of the poor and middle-classes.”
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia, Talks
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Neonn Felicity Curations
📚 Lectures / Books 📚
YouTube Playlist
1/14
Geo-Strategy#2: Christian Zionism and the Middle East ConflictGeo-Strategy #8: The Iran TrapNazis Never Left — They Just Rebranded. Here’s How They Took Over Mainstream PoliticsMichael Parenti "The Struggle for History" North Hollywood, California June 1994Michael Parenti "Democratic Government vs. The State" Long Beach, California September 1991Michael Parenti "Reflections on the Overthrow of Communism" Santa Rosa, California March 1996A Spectre Haunting: China Miéville on the Communist ManifestoManifesting the Utopian Mind 🔮 Neonn Felicity 🔮 Lightning in a Bottle 2022When Freedom Is Oppression: White Resistance To Federal Power w/ Jefferson Cowie | MR LIVE 1/30/231/14Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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Chris Hedges
The Wages of Rebellion:
The Moral Imperative of RevoltEthical Philosophy Book [2016]
“Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges—who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class—investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges’ message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization.
Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as “sublime madness” — the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this “sublime madness.”
From South African activists who dedicated their lives to ending apartheid, to contemporary anti-fracking protests in Alberta, Canada, to whistleblowers in pursuit of transparency, Wages of Rebellion shows the cost of a life committed to speaking the truth and demanding justice. Hedges has penned an indispensable guide to rebellion.”
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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David Graeber
DEBT:
The First 5,000 YearsAnthropological Economic History Book [2012]
❝ Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. ❞
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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KRS-ONE
The History of Hip Hop
Black History Month Keynote Lecture [2014]
“Hip Hop Legend KRS-One came to Cal State LA for a Black History Month keynote and dropped some knowledge and enlightenment on our Golden Eagles. Here’s the full speech.”
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“Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama — the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history.
The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama’s farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.
In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party’s call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence.
Kelley’s analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party’s challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party’s demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.”
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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Dr. Carl Hart
MDMA for the People:
Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of HappinessMAPS Talk [2020]
“Carl Hart, Ph.D., is the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. His research focuses on the behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs. He is particularly interested in what social and psychological factors influence drug use and their effects, and using evidence-based research to formulate more humane drug policies.”
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Douglas Rushkoff
Open Source Democracy
Social Philosophy Lecture [2008]
Computers & Society, NYU. Following is the foreword, by Douglas Alexander, to Rushkoff’s paper on the same topic:
“The internet has become an integral part of our lives because it is interactive. That means people are senders of information, rather than simply passive receivers of ‘old’ media. Most importantly of all, we can talk to each other without gatekeepers or editors. This offers exciting possibilities for new social networks, which are enabled – but not determined – by digital technology.
In the software industry, the open source movement emphasises collective cooperation over private ownership. This radical idea may provide the biggest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft. Open source enthusiasts have found a more efficient way of working by pooling their knowledge to encourage innovation.
All this is happening at a time when participation in mainstream electoral politics is declining in many Western countries, including the US and Britain. Our democracies are increasingly resembling old media, with fewer real opportunities for interaction.
What, asks Douglas Rushkoff in this original essay for Demos, would happen if the ‘source code’ of our democratic systems was opened up to the people they are meant to serve? ‘An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us to confront the issues of our time,’ he answers.
That’s a profound thought at a time when governments are recognising the limits of centralised political institutions. The open source community recognises that solutions to problems emerge from the interaction and participation of lots of people, not by central planning.
Rushkoff challenges us all to participate in the redesign of political institutions in a way which enables new solutions to social problems to emerge as the result of millions interactions. In this way, online communication may indeed be able to change offline politics.”
Categories: Essays, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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“Research into psychedelic drugs was interrupted in the 1960’s due to regulatory changes. Recently, these compounds are once again studied both as therapeutic agents in psychiatry and as experimental tools to further our understanding of the human brain. David Nutt stands at the forefront of these developments as principal investigator of a team including Robin Carhart-Harris and other researchers at Imperial College, London. Together, they are running clinical trials of psychedelic substances including psilocybin in the treatment of depression. They are also using brain imaging to investigate the effects of psychedelic drugs on activity and connectivity within the brain. At this lecture, he will cover the latest research findings and share his vision of the future of psychedelic science.”
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❝ From the author of the bestselling “Art and Physics” comes a new book with breathtaking implications. Making remarkable connections across a wide range of subjects, including neurology, anthropology, history, and religion, “Leonard Shlain” argues that the development of alphabetic literacy itself reinforced the human brain’s left hemisphere — linear, abstract, predominantly masculine — at the expense of its right — holistic, concrete, visual, feminine. “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” charts the connection between alphabetic literacy and monotheism; patriarchy and misogyny, and tracks the correlations between the rise and fall of literacy and the status of women in society, mythology, and religion. ❞
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia