Reviews

COGNITION FACTOR: THE SMART MOVIE


written and directed by Mike Kawitzky, who answers some questions with Undergrowth at the bottom of this article. Photo by Louise Goddard.

The plot takes place in a stream of consciousness as a cyberpunk quests for enlightenment in the digital age.

The viewer is transported to a narrated virtual world in search of answers to the " Big Five" questions. It's a totally human experience as Cognition Factor stitches live conversations with Terence Mckenna, brother Dennis Mckenna, along with Ralph Abrahams, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, and twenty more of the top thinkers of our times.

The Cognition Factor is a narrated gonzo documentary, showcast inside a 3D landscape backed by original compositions from top musicians like Dr. Lx Paterson, Dom Beken and Phil Le Gonedic, of The ORB, Merv Pepler (EatStatic/Ozrik Tentacles), Colin Angus& Matt Catt (The Shamen/Pablo_Sandoz), Steve Hillage (System 7), all brought together by ambient composer, performer and originator, Mike Martin (Indidginus).

The Cognition Factor poses Five Big Questions in order of appearance:

   1. What is consciousness/cognition?
   2.  Are we evolving as a species, or are we going extinct?
   3. What do you understand as G-D?
   4. Can the fusion of science and technology occur?
   5. What happens when we die?


"What we're going to do is we're going to all wire ourselves together, linking ourselves together at higher and higher bandwidth, with greater and greater understanding"

– Terence Mckenna - the Cognition Factor

for more info and to buy the DVD visit:

http://www.cognitionfactor.net

 “The vine has spread her tendrils across the world and a genuine archaic revival was underway. My bags were packed; South America beckoned, and the ancient mysteries of the rainforest awaited. I wanted in on it…”

What is Amazonian shamanism and why is it important to the world today, as we stand on the brink of environmental change and global transformation? Traveling on a magazine assignment to Peru, Rak Razam - editor and co-founder of Undergrowth.org, sets out to discover the answers. He joins a growing movement of Western tourists coming for the legal experience of ayahuasca – the “vine of souls” – a South American hallucinogenic plant that is said to heal, and connect to the divine.

 Radio Undergrowth is proud to feature Spoonbill as our first regular artist of the month to celebrate the release of his album Zoomorphic across the country this month.

As a sneak preview of the album, we are featuring the track Bunkerfunk with it's belly of a whale bass line, stilted soul vocals and gentle synth, almost makes you want to wrap yourself up in it's lyricless glitch aesthetics. Listen here.

This summer, with the visionary support and holonomic direction of Naasko and Diogo, a pod outreach unit including Xavi and Delvin travelled to Portugal to rock the tech at a 20,000 person trance festival called The Boom.
This 7 day festival took place in a beautiful rolling countryside next to Lake Idanha-a-Nova in the central interior
of the new Portugal.

With the dedicated wisdom of permaculture designer Jenny Pell directing the gardenic whole system, the plant work of Lev from Israel and the healing intuition of Rosa from Portugal, along with Naasko and the rest of our crew we put together a 5 dimensional permaculture demonstration garden. Our boom team also included the flowing intelligence of our canadian crew on design techness Sijay and Adham as well as open american visionaries on artness Xavi and Carey.
We also had a few helpful volunteers like Mark, Khalid and Squishelle . Together we hosted a huge balinese bamboo temple with workshops from over 16 different countries during the daytime, major presentations in the evening, and a psy-cinema all night.

The Secret revealed! Of Snake Oil and Other Charmers

by Ralf

I had an interesting, if somewhat drunken, Earthdance. Given that it is the global party and day for peace, I spent the day picking peoples brains to further my understanding of why the resistance to war in this country is not growing with what has been going on. In some way I finally found an answer. In several separate conversations with people they urged me to watch "The Secret" to cast more light on things. In fact they were all saying the same thing. That to resist something will only give it more power and all used "The Secret" as an example of a cogent explanation to this theory. Luckily I had recently been given a copy of "The Secret" that I had not yet watched so it was obviously something the Universe was putting in my way. I have since watched it and am glad that people finally urged me into checking this out. I had no idea that things were getting so bad.

I guess I better start with a positive, as it wouldn't be right to bring anyone down with negative vibes. These guys are definitely getting craftier we have to tip our hats to them on that level. I have long wondered how long it would take for the establishment to get a serious handle on what we have been up to and start fighting fire with fire. Obviously this particular movie has a struck a chord with a number of people from the psychedelic world here in Melbourne. Indeed this makes sense since it draws heavily on the emergent spiritual theory that seems to be growing out of the Psychedelic and Quantum Physics worlds about the nature of reality and ones ability to control it and manifest it with ones thoughts. This idea is obviously becoming more and more of a driving force assisting in the decision making of people from our culture.

And as The Secret is one of the newest and freshest manifestos, in the tradition of What The Bleep Do We Know etc, about where such an insight can lead us in the way we live our lives it makes sense that it seems to be influential at the moment. Indeed it is actually produced and made by a team of people FROM Melbourne so another reason why it must resonate so solidly with people from this city. This theory and greater enlightenment that is growing is of course very exciting and I certainly understand and believe much of the framework and basis behind it. My own deep psychedelic sojourns have allowed similar teachings to be downloaded. However once receiving this enlightenment one must be cautious about where the logic steps then take us as to how we apply that in the practical physical world. And once 'THEY' work out we are onto this they will inevitably use it against us. And so they have with the production of this twisted abomination;The Secret.

Obviously the central 'truths' behind "The Secret" are in some way correct. As they have to be in order to coat the blue pill they are feeding us in it in a believable framework. The more believable the less likely we will notice the atrocious mind control going on in this pithy piece of propaganda. The whole premise behind the movie seems to have been to resubvert the Psychedelic enlightenment back into blatant consumerist, capitalistic, individualistic culture. They have certainly hit on one of the Ancient Laws of Attraction all right. That of Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted. Almost all of the premises are presented to show how to use these skills and techniques in order to amass more wealth for ONESELF personally and to make ONES own life a heaven at the expense of all else. The American Dream in a nutshell really.

That was really where this movie started to rankle me. A quote on the shows own website states; "Previous to what Rhonda had thought, she discovered there were people out there alive who were aware of this information. Actually, there were lots of them, and they were some of the world's greatest living scientists, philosophers, and authors. In every part of the world, different fragments of The Secret were being offered, to anyone that would listen. All that was needed was to pull all of the pieces together... Well it appears that every part of the world includes one Australian businessman and a veritable army of Americans. Amazing that the whole worlds knowledgeable people now happen to reside only in America. Or maybe it's just that as, by the movies own admittance, "The Secret" has been passed down in a direct lineage from the Babylonians (surely that was a clue guys Babylonians warmongering psycho's remember?) it was bound to be concentrated in the seat of world power. Or maybe they uncovered it recently in Iraq. After the helicopter assault camp, Camp Alpha, had been established at the site of ancient Babylon in 2003 and they had finished ethnically cleansing any of the pesky sand niggers in the area they uncovered it and returned it to all of us lucky westerners as a spoil of war.

(Sundancer by Dakatz)


It's June 2006, London.

A shift was in the making. I'd been staying at the Parallel Youniversity in West Hampstead for a month, while its Dean, Megatripolitan Fraser Clark, had been off on some Saharan adventure. This was hippy, or - as Fraser might have styled it - `zippy', central. The first storey flat had a couple of decades worth of rave-olutionary activity pinned to its walls, the reminders of several East Asian and subcontinental tours adorning the eaves and immeasurable layers of grime and hair worked into its carpets. Apparently most of the hair belonged to Jonty, the dog, who I was tasked to mind, along with the world's wildest indoor plant. While in the zippy lair, under the Hanging Gardens of Pronoia, I had privilege access to Fraser's extensive countercultural library. Flying off the shelves was a book called Its Happening: a portrait of the youth scene today by J L Simmons and Barry Winograd (1966), a couple of hipper members of staff in Sociology Dept. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.