Posts Tagged ‘Lectures’

Who’s Tripping?

// October 13th, 2007 // No Comments » // World Issues

“THE HAGUE (AFP) — The Dutch authorities agreed Friday to ban the sale of magic mushrooms, a move sure to annoy many tourists visiting the Netherlands, known for its liberal drugs policies. The Dutch health and justice ministers said Friday that they have agreed to change the drugs laws to ban the sale and cultivation of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The move comes during an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about the safety of the so-called magic mushrooms after a number of incidents involving tourists who had taken them…

In March, a 17-year-old French girl on a school trip to Amsterdam ate the drug before jumping from a bridge over a canal in the city. She died, and the case resulted in a majority in the Dutch Parliament calling for a total ban on all forms of the drug. Since then, a media debate has raged over that and other cases, including that of an Icelandic tourist who broke both legs jumping from a balcony and a Danish tourist veering his car wildly through a camp site.”

The Independent

“Around 500,000 “doses” of packaged mushrooms are sold here annually. According to a study published in January by Amsterdam’s health services said the city’s emergency services were summoned 148 times to deal with a bad reaction to mushrooms in 2004-2006. Of those 134 were foreigners, with Britons forming the largest group…

Marjan Heuving, a spokeswoman for the country’s Trimbos Institute, a drug policy think-tank, said mushrooms are not toxic and themselves pose no physical risk to users. But she agreed that people’s reaction to them is unpredictable, depending on factors such as weight; how much food they have eaten recently; their past drug experience; psychological health; and the setting in which they are taken.
“The main danger to the user is that he will somehow hurt himself,” she said. “I should add that that’s extremely rare.”

Half a million doses sold per year in the Netherlands and an average of fifty emergency calls related to mushrooms each year. Thus, only 0.01% of doses lead to emergencies. Far lower still is the chance of accidents resulting in death. There are zero cases of overdose from psilocybin, and as opposed to alcohol or aspirin the lethal dose for psylocybin is far more than can be physically consumed. No psilocybin mushroom related deaths are even counted in the UNODC literature, and the examples hyped up by the Dutch press contain only one fatality. Compare and contrast to the number of emergency calls for alcohol related accidents, sexual abuse and deaths. Not to mention any potential benefit in psychological treatment or development that might derive from these entheogens- as showcased in the medical studies referenced below and the thousand years of indigenous use in the Americas.

No need to reiterate the case. Here is a 2000 Risk Assessment by the Dutch Government’s “Coordination Centre for the Assessment and Monitoring of new drugs”, (CAM).

The late and great Bill Hicks should have closed the debate fifteen years ago.

Other interesting references: The Harvard_Psilocybin_Project from the 1960′s, the current DEA approved Psilocybin studies from MAPS, a BBC documentary/thought experiment on the effect of a radical liberalisation of drug policy, the informed and insightful writings of the late Terence McKenna- ethnobotanist and philosopher.

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

// September 27th, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, Leadership Development

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there’s a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted…

And this groggy time we live, this is what it’s like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living in another town. In the dream, he doesn’t remember the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

Artwork; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a sea of fog

Animated Alan Watts

// August 7th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and their pals animated several audio recordings of Alan Watts (w’pedia), an iconic philosopher and writer who turned scores of people on to Zen Buddhism.”Link (Thanks, Anthony Hall!)
posted by David Pescovitz on BoingBoing and stolen by my cunning ctrl-v strategy.

Christopher Hitchens on Religion

// June 19th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

During the canonization of Mother Teresa in 2002 British columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked by the Vatican to testify against her. Author of “Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” he was well prepared for the original role of “Devil’s Advocate” (advocatus diaboli), in which he claimed Theresa was a political opportunist who had adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism.

In the lecture below Hitchens presents the case for his latest book, “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, a title well representing his abrasive, atheistic anti-fascist stance. Arguments can be made that he is inappropriately inflammatory and insensitive in a cultural landscape that is fiercely volatile, but my larger problem is that he ignores the inner development of psychological/existential/spiritual awareness from which religion derives it’s energy yet so corrupts through institution. On the other hand his argument is humanistic, libertarian, informed, articulate and entertaining.

(Click to launch video on the intellectual odyssey that is fora.tv)

“the Pope having just repudiated limbo after a long struggle. The place where the souls of unbaptized children always went- apparently it was never there. Tell it no, but it’s serious, tell it to the parents of those children. I have met those people, the people who thought that’s where that poor kids had gone having died before they could breathe properly and not been let into heaven. That’s where they thought they were, so it was real to them. What characteristics is this to say oh it wasn’t really real enough, so we made that bit up. They can’t do this. It was real, it was a real place for those parents and for the brothers and sisters, of those children too they wept at the thought of where the little one had gone and to say, oh never mind. By the way we – we are wrong about this, but we are now ready to be, infallible all over again. This is disgusting and in the same week as he does this the Pope repeats, that we need to teach the children more about hell. Go back again to terrify the composure of young and the innocent with these horrifying stories told them by maladjusted elderly virgins.”

I wonder what the famously anti-ecclesiastical Voltaire would have replied to Hitchens? Perhaps,

“La superstition est à la religion ce que l’astrologie est à l’astronomie, la fille très folle d’une mère très sage. Ces deux filles ont longtemps subjugué toute la terre.”

“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.”

A Sidenote on the Emotions of Materialism

// May 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

“A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into everything that we know. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher.

His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions.”

Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.
The Life of Reason, by George Santayana, 1905.


Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, closes a conference on science, religion, reason and survival. 2006.

TED Talks

// March 1st, 2007 // 7 Comments » // World Issues

TED is a four day annual conference held Monterey, California at which a “group of remarkable people gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value”. A huge array of world class speakers speaking/performing for 20 minutes each- not only on TED (Technology, Education, Design) but business, development, science, society and pretty much anything. What really makes the value really incalcuable is that all the presentations are available online, for free. All on Google Video, or released each week on the TEDtalks site.

Example speakers include;

Richard Dawkins, – evolution beats even intelligence // life is beyond imagination
Al Gore, -what we can do to avert a global climate crisis
Robert Wright,- that human history has an arrow — toward greater complexity and intelligence
Nicholas Negroponte, – challenges for the $100 laptop (One Laptop Per Child)
Daniel Dennett, – the imperative of educating the world religions // revealing dogmas
Jimmy Wales, – the management system of Wikipedia
Tony Robbins, -how to unlock your true potential
Dan Gilbert, -the misguided pursuit of happiness
Sir Ken Robbinson, – creativity is as important as literacy // creativity is educated out of children
Malcolm Gladwell, -on learning from spaghetti sauce

The 2007 conference begins this month, so an ever increasing plethora of awesome intellectual stimulation awaits!

(thanks Mazzy!)

Richard Feynman

// February 20th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

I just finished a series of four lectures on quantum physics, given in plain(ish) English by the incredible Dr Richard Feynman (1918–1988). Feynman’s genius won him the Nobel prize for physics, saw him publishing revelatory dissenting opinion while investigating the Challenger disaster and publicly envisioning nano-technology in the 50′s.


His engaging, authentic and accessible style made him a legendary lecturer and watching him speak in this series is a pleasure in itself, let alone the fact that he makes one of the most complex aspects of our physical reality comprehensible for the non-scientist.

I’ve never been able to figure out how to explain Quantum Electro Dynamics and I thought that this was an opportunity to try a poor, unhappy audience to see whether it was at all possible to explain this subject in a finite number of lectures. And I chose to come to a part of the world as far distant as possible from my home so that if I were not quite successful I wouldn’t have to suffer so directly.

Richard Feynman, University of Auckland, 1979.
Feynman lived a remarkable life; from his work in the Manhattan Project and the anguish the atomic bomb caused, to his passion for translating Mayan hieroglyphs and latin drumming. He was a a true Renaissance man- simple and complex in all the best ways.

“The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” is a 50 minute interview with him in later life, revealing much of his history and life philosophy, available on GoogleVideo. His blackboards at his death.

“I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”

Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Benefits Beyond Calculation

// February 13th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // World Issues

This morning I listened to a podcast featuring Dr Edward O. Wilson, Pelligrino University Research Professor, scientific humanist and sociobiologist. He was joined by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox to consider the fate of the creation. Below is an extract from Dr Wilson’s speech on the state of the biosphere and an empowering call to reasonable action.

“What are doing about it?… We are engaged in mapping the hotspots of the world… areas like the forest of Madagascar, the western gap, rainforest of West Africa, Sri Lanka, New Calendonia, the rainforest of Hawaii- the extinction capital of America, and so on…
34 of these richest of the hotspots cover only 2.3% of the land surface of the world, but they have within them nearly half of all the known species of plants and animals. Save them by whatever means its takes and you can save a lot of the Life.
Add to them some major core areas of the remaining tropical rainforest wilderness Amazon, Congo and New Guinea and your covering 70% of the known species. And how much would it cost to do that, one payment of approximately 30 Billion dollars… 1/1000th of the annual world domestic product of 30 Trillion dollars…
We can solve this problem, but we haven’t got the will yet… The cost is not very high and the benefits are beyond calculation, I repeat the benefits are beyond calculation.

A civilisation able to envision God in an Afterlife is surely going to find a way to save the integrity of this magnificent planet and the life it harbours. I will close by a quote from my friend the late John Sawhill, president of the Nature Conservancy…
“Society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.”"

The Challenge of the Hour

// November 14th, 2006 // 9 Comments » // Leadership Development

Professor Sacks is Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and a world leader in interfaith dialogue. His address, extracted below and in full on mp3 which you should really listen to, is one of the most beautiful religious expressions I’ve ever heard. A call for openness between religions supported by a humanistic interpretation of Exodus that is both educative and compelling.


“I believe that at the university, and in the public square in general, in the 21st century we are being tested. Anyone of religious beliefs and certainly the three great Abrahamic monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to become open to one another rather than closed off from one another…

I actually believe that if we do not do this we face a great danger, of a return to the wars of religion that scarred the face of Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries. And we really must have thinking equal to the challenge of this hour…

Friends, I have tried to suggest that the great test which religions will face in the 21st century is, are we open to the other? Are we open to the stranger? Are Jews open to non-Jews, Christians to non-Christians, Muslims to non-Muslims? Are we willing to stand up and insist in the name of our faiths for the rights of one who is not like me to continue to be not like me and yet be my equal serving God and bearing his image within me? Can we see the human other as a reflection fo the divine other? That will require all our humility, all our generosity of spirit but above all all our openness.

And that is the meaning of the otherwise cryptic phrases in Exodus when Moses asks God, “What is your name?” And God replies, “I will be where I will be”, meaning quite simply, in the place where you least expect me to be, there I am. And I will be there too in the face of one whose faith and language and culture and history are not like yours. You will see the trace of God in the face of a stranger, even in Pharoahs daughter, even in two Egyptian midwives, and I believe that is the openness we need to survive the terrible risks of the 21st century…

I just wish to give expression to the still small voice that never gives up hope, and that prepares the ground maybe between just a few in each religion, because those few when the time comes, will become the leaders of a new way. That is all I can say. “

Professor Jonathan Sacks was speaking in Australia at Monash University, via SBS.

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