Mind Meld 104 | The Beauty of a Billion Failures with Dr. Dennis McKenna and Dr. Bruce Damer

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Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist, researcher and author who has spent decades doing academic and personal research with psychedelics. Dennis is also the author of Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, a memoire about his adventures with his brother, the late Terence McKenna.

In addition to being part of the same circle as Dennis and Terence McKenna, Dr. Bruce Damer, is a researcher at UC Santa Cruz focusing on origin of life theory. Bruce has also worked on projects for NASA in which he developed asteroid-capturing spacecraft.

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We are oh so fortunate that nature doesn’t fear failure like we do. As seamlessly as the natural world appears to be humming along in a perfect, cyclical, interwoven spooky harmony, it’s taken an unfathomable amount time to get here. We’re undoubtedly living within the triumphant result of countless failures and cataclysmic resets.

That’s what this mind meld really seared into my neurons.

Listen to our first mind meld with Dennis and Bruce here

As Bruce and Dennis lay out, we’re the cherry on top of an infinite cake of bones and dust. Billions upon billions of complete existential failures, most of which probably never even made it past the primordial soup. We may even be the sole victorious swoop of the universe’s self-organizing creative proclivity. Even if we’re not, we are at a minimum a supremely rare jewel in the cosmos.

So if the creative force in the universe isn’t afraid of promiscuous failure, give yourself a break.

Musings in this mind meld include 

• Does the cosmos read and write information like data?

• Have we found the “progenote,” the engine of material creation?

• Is survival of the fittest really how nature operates?

• Do we need to move humanity off of Earth?

• Is there a hidden order in the cosmos guiding life to boot up and organize?

• Life can’t exist without communication

• Has life booted up millions of times all over the cosmos or are we the center of the universe in terms of life?

• Does spirit need to exist to explain existence?

• The power of imagination and and the lost art of endogenous trips
• Dennis Mckenna’s ESPD50 conference and lifting the prohibition on psychoactive plants

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