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First part of a massive but unmissable journey into high strangeness culture with Liminalist listener Mark Ehrman, on The Source documentary, prepping for the end times, Mark’s Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, the geographical cure, Jewish childhood horror stories, the US and trauma, the Bush years and US exodus, Chatwin’s Song Lines, nomadism vs. agrarianism, Jasun’s gypsy life, Cain & Abel & the original conflict, God the carnivore, the left and right hand paths, imitators and innovators, consensus realities and how they are created, David Icke and the question of who controls reality, Canada vs. US culture, the closing of the American mind, post-apocalyptic lifestyle in Berlin, the neo-liberal rush, spreading the virus vs. accepting the problem as a cure, the American heyday, calling America’s bluff, Mark’s stint in the mainstream, Ehrman’s Art Bell episode, the Area 51 caller, waiting for the Mother Ship in Pahrump, Mark as ambassador from the margins to the mainstream, who makes the culture makers, Whitley Strieber and the UFO aesthetic, the advantages of a religious upbringing, a rich symbol set, from UFO culture to scientism, infinite expansion and the hidden agenda of religious engineering, journeying into the fabric of consciousness, outer space/subatomic matter, CERN’s atom smashers, quantum space, using will to affect the quantum field, accepting the mystery, the configuration of the human mind, Whitley syndrome, closing the gap of mystery, doing the Dawkins, the spaces between, abandoning the quest for personal development, the importance of diet, ideology and reality, Jasun’s nihilist bent, finding well-being independent of values, the desert of the real, the writer’s dilemma, true Sufism, from Sumerian tablets to Star Wars, the historical Jesus, asymptotes, enlightenment ease, the Ernest Becker Institute and culture as a displacement activity, The Aquarian Conspiracy and spiritual industry, transhumanism, Changing Images of Man, upgrading the paradigm, monetizing and weaponizing human potential.
Songs: “El Mariachi” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra; “I Live Out of Time,” “Universal Table,” by Jeff Mistrali; “The More I Run” and “The Next Train to Neptune,” by Origami Conspiracy.
The book mentioned near the end of this episode, Changing Images of Man, almost seems like a social-engineer’s bible, or guidebook, and definitely confirms many thoughts I’ve had about the infiltration of alternative media and counterculture on an individual and collective level. Nice find.
I really enjoy the podcasts Jasun did with the late Mark Ehrman, so my commenting is a small commemoration of his presence, humor and all.
How is it that after several hundred thousand years as hunter-gatherers humans began the now-ten-thousand year phase of domestication and sedentism that is civilization? Mark, paraphrasing Chatwin?, expressed the event as a bifurcation into HGs and agrarianists. What caused the bifurcation? If the bifurcation did exist, then that would discount Jasun’s notion that there is a kind of civilization-making gene in humans because one would expect the gene to be universal to the species; hence, the lack of universality of the gene would also suggest that not all humans would be destined to recreate civilization in a post-civilization world. At least there would be the possibility of another Cain and Abel story but this time with the hunter-gatherer–which is he, Cain or Abel?–winning out over the agrarianist. BTW, even though the agrarianist could also offer up animal meat for God’s pleasure–and in fact did as Homer tells us, although for the gods’ pleasure–it would be rejected because God apparently prefers wild game, not domesticated, caged meat. I imagine the the meat ofcramped, caged and hormone-injected animals of agro-buisiness is particularly objectionable to God nowadays, although no one is offering Him any hecatombs.
I remember that Cain receives a mark, a theme that makes a striking appearance in Hesse’s novel Demian. I’ll need to refresh my memory on the details and how it is used in the novel.
You both were referring to Zeno’s paradox, of which the tortoise and the hare is but one of many that he concocted, another version being the arrow and its mark (of Cain). Zeno was a disciple of Parmenides who himself was taught by the goddess of the dead, Persephone, that all reality is one. Parmenides is conventionally known as the father of logic and Zeno concocted his paradoxes to prove that time is an illusion, nothing changes, and that reality is one. The present-day “mystic,” Peter Kingsley, sees Parmenides and Zeno more as shamans than as philosophers, grouped among the so-called Presocratics. Specifically, he claims and demonstrates that they were advanced spiritual beings, iatromantai or healer-prophets, who served the god Apollo and formed part of a long lineage of iatromantai headquartered in ancient Velia in Italy. More details on this in his book The Dark Places of Wisdom.
Doesn’t Becker’s thesis assume the universality of the human terror of death? Speculatively considered, the terror of death may be an emotion that arose with the advent and evolution of civilization; hunter-gatherers, both ancient and modern, may be innocent of such terror barring of course the usual fear associated with threats to survival. If so, what can we then make of culture-making?
I think I need to do a podcast with you. Oh wait, I just did! 🙂
I dont recall ever saying that there is a civilizing gene, tho I may have said something similar that you are paraphrasing…. Stated this way however, I am unsure whether I think that or not.
I also don’t know what Zeno’s paradox is! Apparently your version of me is smarter than mine.