Bureau of Lost Culture

As the pace of change accelerates, it seems that yesterday’s fantasies about the future may become today's reality. Ideas about whether technology might remove, replace or rewire bits of our brains, control our thoughts, stimulate our pleasures, deliver religious experiences or even transport us into entirely artificial realities, seem very current.

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But what if these were ideas that scientists, inventors and governments have been pursuing for centuries?  What if there is a whole lost culture of fears and dreams about technology in the history of consciousness?

These are the questions at the heart of Mike Jay’s book Wireheads, An Unnatural History of Technology and the Brain  - an investigation into the long and often surprising history of attempts to connect machines with the mind.

We discuss the recurring hopes of transcending our limitations, our fear of losing control of our minds, and our persistent desire to find technology that will unlock the mysteries of consciousness. And we ask, even if these fantasies were fulfilled, would they make us superhuman, post-human - or less human?

And we get into madness, the counterculture’s fascination with altered states, the blurred boundary between science and pseudoscience, Tim Leary, John C. Lilly, and the strange ways in which yesterday’s science fiction sometimes becomes tomorrow’s ordinary - and we hear of some very strange devices..

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My thanks
Stephen
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Britain has always been home to people who live differently. Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers, Showmen/women who carry the fairgrounds from town to town, families who made their homes on the waterways, and, more recently, the New Age Travellers who emerged from the 70s counterculture, the free festival movement and the rave scene.

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Today that tradition continues in new forms through a new generation of travellers, vanlifers, boat dwellers and people trying to establish off-grid homes on small pieces of land.
 
DICKY DREAD is the pen name of Richard Leach, whose life has bridged two seemingly contradictory worlds as a physics professor and an active participant in traveller communities, free festivals and off-grid culture.

He came to the Bureau to talk about who gets to belong in Britain, and on what terms. We also get into drug addiction, 

Dicky's  book Living on the Road, Waterways or Off-grid in the UK, draws together decades of his lived experience into an extraordinary manual of how to live in alternative Britain.

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We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But if you can contribute to this crazy endeavour,
Join our Patreon HERE
thanks
Stephen
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#vanlife #off-grid #offgrid #travellers #gypsy #counterculture #newagetravellers #battleofthebeanfield #gypsies

If you're going to watch your local football team this weekend, or perhaps catch a big match on a TV screen in the pub, do you know that you may be unconsciously participating in an ancient ritual? And as you're shouldering your way to the bar from the mosh pit at some gig and grinning at those you pass, are you aware that the artist you were watching may be embodying some spirit of transformation?

That was the radical proposal of the book The Death and Resurrection Show that Rogan Taylor published in 1985, a book that is exceedingly difficult to get hold of now but one that became the inspiration and touchdown for my guest in this episode.

David Bramwell returned to the Bureau to talk about The Ghosts of the Medicine Show, the book he's written about the themes of Rogan Taylor's Death and Resurrection Show. It is also a personal memoir of something most of us can relate to -growing up and being transformed by seeing musicians and artists and actors.

David asks: 'What if the musician, the actor, the clown, the circus performer, the rock star — even the celebrity — are the latest manifestations of something that began much, much earlier'

For most of human history, before temples, books and organised religions existed, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their knowledge could not be written down; it had to be remembered, performed and embodied.

The figures who carried this knowledge were the shamans—storytellers, healers, singers, dancers, magicians and guides who used performance to preserve culture, bind communities together and lead people through experiences of suffering, transformation and renewal.

Where are they now?

We also get into football, funerals - and ABBA..

For more on David and The Ghosts of the Medicine Show

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We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But if you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, Join our Patreon HERE
 
thanks
Stephen
 

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#bureauoflostculture #medicineshow #shaman #shamanism #psychedelic #football #theatre #music #tripping #art  #consciousness #thedeathandresurrectionshow #rogantaylor

For centuries, it seems Britain’s magic mushrooms remained hidden in plain sight—growing in fields, parks, and hillsides. When knowledge of them did emerge, it passed between people through rumours, oral testimony, underground publications, and increasingly, reports of court cases.

Robert Dickens of The Psychedelic Press came to the Bureau to tell the extraordinary story of the Psilocybe Pickers: the kids, the Psychonauts, the countercultural explorers, and amateur mycologists who helped elevate a small native fungus into part of Britain’s psychedelic history, folklore, legal case studies, and relationship with the landscape.

We get into that, explode some myths, talk about the power of landscape, fairies and hear about a strange magic mushroom incident in the 18th century

Psilocybe Pickers - A Short History of Bemushroomed Britons

Myths of the Magic Mushroom - Interview with Andy Letcher

More on Rob and The Psychedelic Press

All Things Fungi Festival 

 

#bureauoflostculture #magicmushroom #psilocybin #terencemckenna #psychedelic #wasson #mariasabina #libertycaps #tripping #psychoactive #psychedelicpress #psilocybinmushroom

Has 20th-and 21st-century physics moved away from the brute materialism of the nineteenth century toward ideas that resemble the world’s ancient mystical traditions?

Might many of the discipline’s greatest figures — Einstein, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and others - have been privately motivated by philosophical and sometimes mystical questions about consciousness, reality and humanity’s place in the cosmos? 

Jonathan Black came to the Bureau to talk about A Secret History of the Universe - a countercultural narrative of science that has been obscured by a mainstream insistence on secular materialism, and one that reveals how biographers have routinely downplayed their subjects' metaphysical leanings. 

In 2007, after getting rejected by every major UK publisher, Jonathan's book The Secret History of the World became an international bestseller. The public resonated with an idea the publishers had not: the possibility that many pivotal cultural developments were shaped by ideas transmitted through occult rather than mainstream institutions, 

A Secret History of the Universe continues the theme.

We get into all this and talk about consciousness, relativity, quantum physics, prayer, mystical experience, magic, and ideas as entities.

For more on Jonathan and his work

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Friends
 
We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau but we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes
 
If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
My best
 
Stephen
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#counterculture #mysticism, #science #quantumphysics #realtivity #magic #magick #secrethistory #jonathanblack #markbooth #occult