Michael Garfield: Psychedelics in the Age of Accelerating Weirdness, Episode 84, The Psychedelic Entrepreneur Podcast 
Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield is devoted to helping navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and helping cultivate the curiosity and play we’ll need to thrive in it. As host and producer of both Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast, Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers — a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary “mind-jazz” performances in the form of essay, music, and fine art. Standard-bearer for a new generation of boundary-defying scholars, Michael refuses to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, walking through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice — speaking and performing everywhere from Moogfest to Burning Man, SXSW to Boom Festival, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to Long Now‘s Ignite Talks to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
Follow him on Substack, Medium, and Twitter (or join his book club on Patreon) for a kaleidoscopic avalanche of explorations into human-technology co-evolution, the pre- and post-history of creativity and communication, and other soulful and subversive futurism. Subscribe to his music on Spotify and Bandcamp and follow him on Instagram for clips from works in progress.
In this episode, Michael Garfield and Beth Weinstein discuss…
- How the perception of organisms plays into their evolution
- The relationship between mind, communication and the unfolding of biological form in time
- Michael’s psychedelic influence and how it has shaped his scholarly and artistic expression
- Thinking about the brain’s electrical activity as “weather”
- Sitting in the liminal zone during psychedelic experiences, and how Michael tries to anchor the insights that come into his eyes open, waking experience
- Studying ways that humans use certain things: “use webs”
- How capitalism is founded in the deeper logic of biophysics, growth and the scaling of networks
- The idea that the work of culture and knowledge production flows as an underground river through repeated waves of colonization
- How we are under existential assault from the institutions we’ve created as a way of trying to shelter ourselves from the ravages of an unpredictable world
- Civilizations and their institutions as life forms in their own right
- How in becoming more “porous” through psychedelic use you are interrogating the boundary of self and other and essentially issuing an invitation for the “other” to enter you
- “Fugitivity” as defining this time
- How we need to preserve the wilderness at all costs, including the wilderness of the “uncategorizable self”
- How the world is getting stranger and stranger and the surface area of our questioning now exceeds the surface area of our answering
- Staying connected to simple things when you feel overwhelmed by the world
- The relationship between mind and language
- How psychedelics give us experiences that elude or ability to communicate them and beckon us into more eloquent communication
Michael Garfield’s Links & Resources
- Website ▶: https://michaelgarfield.blogspot.com/
- Instagram ▶: https://www.instagram.com/michaelgarfield/
- Substack ▶: https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/
- Twitter ▶: https://twitter.com/michaelgarfield
- Medium ▶: https://michaelgarfield.medium.com/
- Patreon ▶: https://www.patreon.com/michaelgarfield
- Spotify ▶: https://open.spotify.com/artist/46UT138ndv6ZAeDt0eO64h
- Bandcamp ▶: https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/
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