DISCUSSING THE LEGACY OF TERENCE MCKENNA, WITH HIS BROTHER DENNIS AS HOST

Just got hip yesterday to this series of conversations starting June 5. I'll write more about what I think Terence McKenna's legacy is later, but for now I'll just say that I hope this online course will quickly and definitively dismiss Terence's Timewave Zero/2012/Novelty Theory hypothesis as nonsense (fascinating nonsense, for sure, but of little consequence nonetheless) and begin to reframe his legacy around his many other remarkable accomplishments and insights. I can think of no better person better qualified to start that process than Terence's brother, Dennis, who will be hosting this series.

Here's a link and some of the details about what you get for $110 ($90 if you sign up before May 20)...



By participating in this online course, you will receive:

* Four 90-minute live video seminars with Dennis McKenna and his featured guests Erik Davis, Ralph Abraham, Ralph Metzner, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, Mark Pesce and Daniel Pinchbeck
* 30 minutes of question and answer time in each seminar
* Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
* Participation in a private online community with other students
* Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
* PDF articles about course topics from Dennis and each of the guests

Click on the adthing above or on this text for more details about the program and how to sign up. Please note that I make a small commission from each sale through this site.

NONE AND ONE

Been thinking about Mount Tamalpais lately, as a consequence of reading a recently completed "determination of eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places" for Druid Heights, the woodsy community-in-the-woods co-founded by radical lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow in 1953. (There's a good-sized feature on Druid Heights in Arthur No. 16, excerpted from Erik Davis's Visionary State guidebook with a new sidebar and other material.)

The teacher Alan Watts completed several books while he was living in Druid Heights on Mount Tamalpais, and, being in a contemplative mode more often now that I live in near-wilderness, I obtained Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal (dedicated, by the way, to Watt's longtime friend/collaborator/rascal Henry "Sandy" Jacobs, who was extensively profiled in Arthur No. 26) which includes Watts's essay, 'On the Art of Contemplation.' I'll get to that some other time. What's caught my eye/mind so far, especially/also in light of all the recent hubbub over James Gleick's The Information, is this bit (pun intended) from another essay, 'The Zero-One Amazement,' dated September 1, 1971, written in the afterglow of studying G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form:

So the first distinction is between none and one (or 0 and 1). This is the yin (negative) and yang (positive) polarity of the Book of Changes, which Leibniz read in a Latin translation, and which gave him the idea that all numbers could be represented by the figures 0 and 1, so that for the series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 we have 001, 010, 100, 101, 110, etc., which is now the arithmetic used by digital computers.

I suppose this I Ching-Leibniz-binary code connection is common knowledge, but I had no idea. Alan Watts!