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Using Psychedelics For A Spiritual Journey (Video)

Using Psychedelics For A Spiritual Journey (Video) | Third Monk

A bag of shrooms can send your mind racing on a spiritual sprint, turning you into a soul surfing psychonaut. In this psychedelic speech, Jason Silva explains how a psychedelic experience can be a tool for interpersonal transformation.

Check out the in depth guide: A Guide to a Successful Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary

The program is a voyage chart, a series of signals, which, like the pilot’s radio provides the basic orienting information required for the trip. – Programming the Psychedelic Experience, Timothy Leary

psychedelic-stargazing

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The Ecstasy of Curiosity and Insatiable Drive for Knowledge – Jason Silva (Video)

The Ecstasy of Curiosity and Insatiable Drive for Knowledge - Jason Silva (Video) | Third Monk

In this Shots of Awe episode, Jason Silva talks about the fundamentals of the cognitive ecstasy we experience from the chase of knowledge. Knowing provides closure, but the mystery of not knowing inspires curiosity, wonder and a shared quest for answers.

To entertain such ontologies is to re-contextualize one’s self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. – Tim Doody

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Leaving the Herd to Express Your Creativity – Jason Silva (Video)

Leaving the Herd to Express Your Creativity - Jason Silva (Video) | Third Monk

Little boxes, all the same. All the people in the houses all go to the university. And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same.

Pete Seeger sang those words about the development of suburbia and conformity in 1963. How can we fully express our creativity and avoid becoming zombies? In another inspiring hit of stoner philosophy, Jason Silva wonders what pushes people away from the herd.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

-Nietzsche

Works mentioned in this video:

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth.

Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.

– The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Robert Anton Wilson – Reality Tunnels

Robert Anton Wilson described his writing as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations—to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps and no one model elevated to the Truth.”

“My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.”

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Psychedelic Drugs, Technologies of Ecstasy – Jason Silva

Psychedelic Drugs, Technologies of Ecstasy - Jason Silva | Third Monk

What happens in the moment of ego death during a psychedelic experience? 

Jason Silva explores shamans of modern culture and how psychedelic drugs can reset the “self”, opening it up to new visions that transform our perceptions of reality.

“Reality, it seems, is multiple, and tightly coupled to perception. The conditions of perception can be varied within a broad range by a variety of psychedelic technologies.”
– Diana Slattery

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Space Exploration is Infinite Fuel for Curious Minds – Jason Silva

Space Exploration is Infinite Fuel for Curious Minds - Jason Silva | Third Monk

Jason Silva highlights the human tendency to keep moving forward, out of the trees, out of the caves, and eventually out of this planet. 

Exposing a curious mind to astronomy opens up a world of possibilities that influences progressive thinking. The desire to explore space and the infinite unknown creates a shift in values from self preservation toward universal expansion.

What the space age was seeking all along was not so much an expansion of physical space as an expansion of mind.

When we dream of space, we dream of transcendence, we dream of what we might become.

-Marina Benjamin, Poet

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Using Psychedelics For Creativity and Problem Solving – Jason Silva (Video)

Using Psychedelics For Creativity and Problem Solving - Jason Silva (Video) | Third Monk

Futurist Jason Silva provides examples of psychedelics being used as tools for problem solving and creativity during a discussion at the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas – Sydney Opera House, 2012.

Psychedelics Resets Your Operating System

That quote from Tom Robbins where I said that “We need to pull ourselves out of context in order to gawk in amazement at the wonders of the world.”, he was talking about psychedelics, but I think it applies to everything we in our lives.

He says, “It’s not that psychedelics manufacture wonderment or that they can automatically make us more imaginative beings, but what psychedelics does is pull us so radically out of comfort zones, they decondition our thinking, they thrust us out of everything we thought we knew about the world in order to see things as if for the first time and form new synaptic connections.

Cannabis Expands the Mind’s Network

Marijuana induced a state of hyper priming. It expanded their “associative net” so that they were able to make more far reaching connections among things and ideas. Perhaps that’s because it dissolved usual separateness, categorizations, and other compartmentalized ways in which we store information. If that’s not reason enough for cannabis to be used as a tool, at least for creative people, I don’t know what is.

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Twitter Reacts to the Legalization of Marijuana for Recreational Use in Colorado and Washington

Twitter Reacts to the Legalization of Marijuana for Recreational Use in Colorado and Washington | Third Monk image 1

Legalization of Marijuana took a step in the right direction as voters in Colorado and Washington have become the first states to legalize and regulate marijuana for recreational use. A huge victory for drug law reform advocates, and a massive win for everyone in general. The positive reaction on Twitter came from a diverse set of people, a good sign that cannabis is outgrowing the shackles of misinformation and propaganda.

Legalization of Marijuana Use Tweets

Joe Rogan, Comedian and UFC Announcer

Rashida Jones, Actress (Parks and Rec)

Kevin Smith, Director

Phil Plait, Astronomer

Big Boi, Rapper (Outkast)

Eddie Bravo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Instructor

http://twitter.com/eddiebravo/status/266119763233759232

Erik Griffin, Comedian and Actor (Workaholics)

Jason Silva, Futurist and Filmmaker

Kevin Pereira, Tech Host (Attack of the Show, Pointless)

http://twitter.com/kpereira/status/266034355552522242

Alchemist, Hip Hop Producer

George Lopez, Comedian and Talk Show Host

KT Tatara, Comedian

B-Real, Rapper (Cypress Hill)

Rob Van Dam, Pro Wrestler

Mike Epps, Comedian and Actor (Next Friday)

Rihanna, Pop Singer

Freddy Lockhart, Comedian

http://twitter.com/freddylockhart/status/266039208437772288

J.A. Adande, Sports Writer

Legalization of Marijuana

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The Transcension Hypothesis, Life After the Singularity – Jason Silva (Video)

The Transcension Hypothesis, Life After the Singularity - Jason Silva (Video) | Third Monk

What happens after the Singularity? The Transcension Hypothesis by John Smart offers an account of what comes after the technological singularity, also accounting for Fermi’s Paradox. Basically, after our technological adolescent and expansionist explorations, we turn from outer space to inner space.

Our journey undergoes S.T.E.M. compression, the compression of Space, Time, Energy and Matter – until non biological minds live inside virtual worlds at the Nano and Femto scale, further compressing complexity until we create black hole-like conditions and disappear from the visible universe. – Jason Silva

Click here for more detailed information on the Transcension Hypothesis.

jason-silva-Transcension-Hypothesis

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How Drugs Helped Invent The Internet – Jason Silva Interview (Video)

How Drugs Helped Invent The Internet - Jason Silva Interview (Video) | Third Monk

Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller Interview with Jason Silva

Biological and Technological Convergence

When the internet does is it connects all of our minds together. And we sort of transcend the limitations of time and distance, so now we move into a post geographical world where we can come together and self organize, and have unexpected relevancy, and serendipity based on shared passions, not bounded by the skin bag.  Amber Case, the Cyborg Anthropologist says that every time we make a telephone call, we’re actually creating a techno social wormhole. It’s technological mediated telepathy. Andy Clarke (Natural Born Cyborgs) says “We should stop thinking of the mental apparatus as bound by the skin bag because the reality is the mental apparatus is dance between brains, their environment, their technology, and their tools.” The extended mind thesis talks about how our iphone is not just a tool but its actually outsourcing our cognition, storing parts of our memories. Just like we have a neocortex, the iphone is part of the extended man.

Psychedelics and Technology

It’s interesting to draw the analogy between psychedelics and computers. Timothy Leary used to say you take psychedelics to get rid of your mental filters, to get rid of your preconceptions,  to expand your sphere of  possibility, to unbound…to free your mind. When he saw the potential of the computers and the internet, he came out in the 90s as a techno optimist and said the computers are the LSDs of the 90s. A lot of the engineers who invented the personal computer and the microprocessor, they were all tripping when they had those realizations of extending the mind with technology.

> @jason_silva | Jason Silva Twitter Feed