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Psychedelic Salon

Psychedelic Salon

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Podcast 237 – “A Tribute to Albert Hofmann” Part 1

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: The Albert Hofmann Papers at Erowid.org The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online) [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet." "So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream." "We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous." "In the future it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth. It is the mark of a barbarous culture." "One doesn't 'just say no' to truth." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Andrew Weil.] "I have to tell you that the majority of human beings that I encounter operate mostly out of fear, guilt, and that when people operate from those emotions they are dangerous to themselves and to others." "We [the psychedelic community] are a very small minority, a very small minority, and have no illusions about that. And whether our minority will grow fast enough, and be able to influence humanity fast enough to avoid the catastrophe that is certain to come if we persist in the ways that we now persist, I don't know?" "If it may be as it appears that our ability to manipulate the environment, our technological ability, is so disparate with our ability to control our own emotions, that may be a fatal flaw of our species. It may be." "Deep down everything is all right, and that's the way it's supposed to be. And there may be a lot of drama in between [now and the extinction of our species], but it's all all right. ... It's OK with me if something else gets a chance, if the life-force experiments with another form, that's fine, that's OK too." "And here it seems to me is the fundamental absurdity of the way our science has developed: The most obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence. How can you construct a world view, how can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science tries to do." "Often I find, in my experience, that changes in the realm of consciousness must accompany physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Jul 13, 20101h 4m

Podcast 236 – “The Politics of Ecology”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] "To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it." "When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?" "Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire to better things, which has been called 'wantlessness', the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot'." "From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels." "And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty." "Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even in those countries where they are free to vote, are prevented by the basic postulates in terms in which they do their thinking and their feeling, from summarily decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations." "Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prisons in which they are now confined." "In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always willing, but it's technical and organizational flesh was generally weak. Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit." "My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective intention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects to the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving. We have to get it into our collective heads that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological." "It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children, who in less than forty years will be six billion, to lead a tolerably human existence without in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment." -Aldous Huxley (November 30, 1962) "All that I meant was, the sort of basic frame of reference in which political activities will take place shall be less culture-bound and more ecology-bound, let's say." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Jul 9, 201050 min

Podcast 235 – Osmond, Stolaroff, & Hubbard Discuss Psychedelics

Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard PROGRAM NOTES: On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org. "There's a central power system, and here's the source. And the guidance system simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source. The closer he gets the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is, the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation, and the more he sees his total responsibility. Now it's inconceivable to me that you could move toward that source without increasing responsibility. And to me, Leary has found a way of moving in that direction but not going toward it, because he's obviously missed his responsibility level." -Myron Stolaroff "From our crowd I think very, very few people get off the beam the way I would consider Leary and Alpert are off the beam, for example." -Myron Stolaroff "[We should use these substances] in a way which will not simply allow us to become aware of what any decent mystical saints have been aware of for a long, long time, but to become aware of how to produce a rise in the social level of communication, which will, indeed, transform the species from a biological animal to a communicating animal, which is what Teilhard had in view." -Humphry Osmond "[The map of the noosphere] is not to be created by mucking up bits of the Book of the Dead and saying how smart chaps were. This is a fraud." -Humphry Osmond "When you most need help is when you least want it." -Myron Stolaroff "This is the life that I've seen: Live or die. Be intelligent enough to get along. Don't walk in two places without knowing where you're going." -Al Hubbard "The ten year delay in our work brought about through our struggle with NIH in Washington and through being unable to cope with a large and powerful power-system there has produced, it's resulted in probably several million people being quite unnecessarily damaged." -Humphry Osmond (November 1, 1964) "You have to understand the specific risks that [using psychedelics] involves. Now the specific risk is that every person involved will be altered whether they like it or not. And that the result of this will, in a sense, alter every other relationship they have whether they like it or not." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Please Support the Archival Efforts for The Stolaroff Collection

Jun 30, 20101h 17m

Podcast 234 – “The World Soul”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it." -Rupert Sheldrake When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, "No," and then he went on to say, "Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it." "If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?" -Rupert Sheldrake "Not thinking about the World Soul but the individual soul, that the seizure of DMT is almost like a simulacrum of death itself, and that you seem to see into an ecology of souls." -Terence McKenna "The World Soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. This is all being scripted for a purpose and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything." -Terence McKenna "Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage." -Rupert Sheldrake "At the root of many problems is the denial of the problem and the fact that we maintain unconsciousness of the problem." -Ralph Abraham "I hold monotheism responsible for the mess that we're in from Abraham right on down to the present moment. I think it is the metaphor which is responsible for the dominator break-out, and that until we get a more polytheistic, nature-oriented conception of reality we will be pretty much under the gun." -Terence McKenna "For my money, monotheism is the single most reactionary force in all of human history. I don't even know what is running second." -Terence McKenna "Democracy is a step away from anarchy." -Terence McKenna "Perhaps to unify consciousness it isn't a Western hemisphere goddess we need but simply a recognition of Gaia." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Jun 24, 20101h 25m

Podcast 233 – Ram Das and Timothy Leary – “1983 Harvard Reunion”

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.] "The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you're free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim." "Methods are methods are methods. Meditation's a method and psychedelics are a method. Methods are all traps. A method by its nature is a trap. It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end. You just hope it self-ejects." "Psychedelics was one of the major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture." "Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know." "I don't for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard . . . anymore." "All form in the universe, including your mind and your thought, is part of law, it's unfolding lawfully, it's the karma unfolding, just law. And within that there is no freedom. There really is no freedom in form. The freedom comes as the formless creates the form. There's where the freedom is. And that freedom, of the formless coming into form, is a place from which you stand, or you don't stand, in which you experience the creation of your own universe around you." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "[So Emerson] came to Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said, 'Don't look for god in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor in the pulpits, look within, find divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant (translated as do your own thing) and for, I believe thirty-three years, he was not allowed back on this sacred territory. We're back after twenty!" "We were smart enough to know how little we knew." "Once you put that pill in your mouth, YOU were the Principle Investigator ... like it or not." "The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that nobody wants to leave." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Raw Master Files of This Talk la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part2.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track2.mp3 Harvard Crimson Announcement of this Talk The Varieties of Religious Experience By William James (free Project Gutenberg edition)

Jun 17, 20101h 41m

Podcast 232 – “Fisher, Stolaroff, and Al Hubbard”

Click HERE to see the video of this conversation. This program marks Our 5th Anniversary! Support the Stolaroff Collection Make a contribution to support the archiving of Myron Stolaroff's resources Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: This is a conversation that took place between Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, and a group of friends at the legendary salon that Kathleen hosted on the third Friday of every month in Venice Beach, California. The talk begins with Myron telling stories about the legendary Al Hubbard, also known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He then goes on to explain the workings of his research center in Menlo Park, California where they treated over 300 people with LSD in the 1960s in order to help them improve their creativity. He also tells of the historic first trip of Duncan Blewett, which led the Saskatchewan researchers to change the direction of their work. For his part, Gary Fisher expands on some of the comments we heard in earlier podcasts when he talked about his work with autistic and schizophrenic children who were treated with LSD and other psychedelic medicines. He also tells of a self-experiment he did to study the effectiveness of LSD in reducing severe pain. Here is a sampling of Gary's comments that evening: " 'We didn't have any bad trips because we didn't know you could have bad trips.' [quoting Laura Huxley] So all the input we ever had from anybody was how wonderful the [LSD] experience was. So we didn't have any sense that it was other than positive, and what a blessing that was." "How do you tell kids that the government is fucked?" "When you want people to be just one thing they bite you in the ass." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Research Report by Dr. Gary Fisher An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children HTML Version PDF version Audio Discussion with Dr. Fisher and Dr. Grob “Treating Childhood Schizophrenia with Psychedelics”

Jun 10, 20101h 38m

Podcast 231 – Damer-McKenna: “Bruce, Terence, and Virtual Worlds”

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence's house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain. One of the reasons I think it might be interesting for you to hear this conversation is to get a feel for what it was like to hang around with the bard McKenna. While you might think that he did most of the talking, you will find that the opposite is true, and much like Aldous Huxley, Terence did a lot of questioning and listening. It wasn't only from books that they acquired their particular views of the world. A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer Terence McKenna's comments on NPR about his time with Bruce “I spent last week withBruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Jun 7, 20101h 9m

Podcast 230 – Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 3

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future." -Ralph Abraham "In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for "the snap", that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. ... What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history." -Ralph Abraham "The edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It is a special time." -Ralph Abraham "Salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension." -Terence McKenna "This is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. ... What we must become is clear." -Terence McKenna "To the degree that we can change our minds we will escape extinction." -Terence McKenna "If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity you're going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity." -Terence McKenna "I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite." -Ralph Abraham "I think that grass root research, based on phenomena that are actually common sense, that are part of everyday life for many people, could help to wake us up, to give a greater clarity about what's really going on, and make us recognize that there's far more interconnection between us and other species, and us and other people, than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public." -Rupert Sheldrake "What we're saying is that we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions. Someone once said, 'If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth we would stop immediately.' . . . So we have compartmentalized our lives, and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal work that is destroying the planet, destroying communities, and so forth." -Terence McKenna "Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion." -Terence McKenna "As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we're inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and we're going to produce incomplete agendas and answers." -Terence McKenna "The great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? It's the idea that there is no distinction between shit and Shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing." -Terence McKenna "The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community." -Terence McKenna "Yes, well it is an ambitious enterprise, and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever forward!" -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

May 27, 20101h 7m

Podcast 229 – Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 2

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery." "Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined." "What is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense." "As our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate." "Vast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences, including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo." "While we've been waiting for the Palaidians to descend, or for the Face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy." "[Artificial intelligence,] this most bizzare and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation." "Time is defined by how much goes on in a given moment, and we're learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second." "Surely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizeable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ralph Abraham.] "The very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think, even individually, matters enormously in the long run. That's the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory." "In the creation of societies it was altruism, essentially, that was involved in going from where we were to where we are, and it could well be that without love, for example, further evolution is impossible." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

May 19, 20101h 29m

Podcast 228 – Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 1

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "The development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn't changed much for 100,000 years." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. ... It wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world, whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history it was man the huntED." -Rupert Sheldrake "The shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back." -Terence McKenna "The domain in which the change [from animal to human] was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. And this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since." -Terence McKenna "You don't need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind, there's plenty of lower-level minds than the divine mind that could be out there." -Rupert Sheldrake "My notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood, and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious." -Terence McKenna [Rupert disagreed with this.] "The idea that this evolution's equipped us with minds, and language, and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it's come from, where it's going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole seems to me a rather improbable supposition." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's not decided what's going to happen next, there are imaginations of many levels, including human imaginations, at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on what's happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up, but without the goal being fixed in advance." -Rupert Sheldrake "[Evolution] is a game, one of the rules of which is: The rules can change." -Terence McKenna "Time is not a tyranny. It's a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

May 15, 20101h 18m

Podcast 227 – Shulgin-Watts: “Sasha at MIT plus Alan Watts”

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Alan Watts PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Sasha Shulgin.] "So I look upon these materials [psychedelics] as being catalytic, not productive, they do not DO what occurs. The allow YOU to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material." "I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials." [In testing a new substance] "You go with great caution. Decide what is the amount is that would have no effect and take one thousandths of that amount." "How does the mind work? What kind of a probe can you make to look at the function of the mind? To me, it's going to be a psychedelic material, that has very little action in experimental animals, to look into actions in man that are not seen in experimental animals." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Nature has mercifully arranged the principle of 'forgettery' as well as the principle of memory. ... And you begin again. You see, it doesn't matter in what form you begin. Whether you begin again as a human being, or as a fruit fly, butterfly, or a beetle, or a bird, it feels the same way that you feel now. So we're really all in the same place." "So the possibility, even the imagination that there could be such an experience [of the end of the world] in the back of our heads, is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good, feeling that it's all right." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

May 8, 20101h 12m

Podcast 226 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Newton himself was a man with a foot in two worlds. He was a thorough-going occultist. His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous. And yet he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society." "History itself is a kind of alchemical process. ... History is the catalyst of nature." "If we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage, and our heritage in the shamanism of the archaic, then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate, not to enslave, and somehow we've lost the thread." "You know, Tim Leary used to say, 'When in doubt, double the dose.' " "Capitalism, I can't say this enough, is NOT in our interest." "The Earth is perfectly capable of raising outrageous hell without us triggering a nuclear war." "My faith is that we're just slow to get rolling, and that once the battle is joined, once every person on Earth realizes that we're in a battle for planetary survival, then people will get with the program, it's just that things aren't bad enough yet." "We're lead by jackasses. We [the psychedelic community] don't bother with our political processes." "What we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us makes their way into those positions of power. I mean, you can see that now [1992], those guys are not fit to throw guts down to a bear ... ANY OF THEM!" "What we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state. I mean, what we are are the propagandized masses inside a Fascist dictatorship." "Know your enemy and they probably will not be your enemy." "I think that the Third Reich was a Sunday school picnic compared to the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church. ... In a civilized political environment those people would be placed under immediate arrest." "The way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history." "And so it's up to the creativity of ordinary people, and the strongest weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people is the psychedelic experience, because it allows you to put information together in new and exciting ways. And this is to be then the basis of a new political order. It has to be." "The model of human nature which this society has deified makes it a pathological act, a sin, and a crime to alter your own consciousness. This doesn't make any sense. We are at war with ourselves, and we're losing." "It's all about personal empowerment, and personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Apr 30, 20101h 13m

Podcast 225 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I've never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself." "So what you have to do is just like every other thing, everything you've been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what's really going on, which doesn't mean that you're reckless." "We've been polluted by Disney." "We are living inside a 90% Nineteenth Century world view. And a culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves, because what cannot be said cannot be done. What cannot be said cannot be put in place." "So in a way, one way of thinking about psychedelics is that they empower language. It's a way to force the evolution of language. The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language." "It was very important, I think, to the Establishment to suppress that [hip phrases from the Hippie culture], because new words are the beginnings of new realities." "What holds us together is what holds all sub-cultures together, which is an experience. In this case, the experience of being loaded, and, you know, it's a very powerful and immediate kind of experience." "It's amazing that the world has evolved as far and as fast as it has, the human world, glued together by nothing more than small mouth noises." "The whole history of the evolution of the Western mind is in a sense the birth of the Logos. The Logos is making its way towards self-expression, and it's doing this by claiming dimension, after dimension of manifestation." "The mind is not a form of intelligence. The mind is the theater in which intelligence is manifested. You don't want to confuse the garage with the car. ... Everything goes on within the confines of mind. It's like the light that you switch on when you walk into a darkened room, and then everything else is the furniture within the room. Mind is simply the light which is shed over the landscape of appearances. ... Mind is the inclusive category, I think." "It's very important to try and make some accommodation to the local language, because in a way, only the local language is appropriate to the place. ... Somehow the local language is a part of the local reality." "The one thing you learn taking psychedelics is that nothing is straightforward." "Anybody who starts talking to you about the grandeur that was Rome, should be reminded: The grandeur of Rome was it was a bargain-basement on three floors masquerading as a military brothel. It was not a great civilization." "I'm completely convinced that no one is in control, and that this is very good news." "In a sense, the flying saucer is nothing more than a modern rebirth of the philosopher's stone. The flying saucer is the universal panacea at the end of time. It's the thing which cannot exist, but which does exist, and which if we could obtain it everything would be different." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Apr 27, 20101h 33m

Podcast 224 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think, when it's all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C." "The African 'Cradle of Civilization', I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't believe that is going to have to do some fast talking." "They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were." "DMT is this very short-acting hallucinogen that you smoke, but it's a neurotransmitter. It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals. In terms of nature, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens. In terms of impact, it's the strongest of all hallucinogens. It's a completely reality-obliterating experience, and it comes on so quickly that you don't grok it like a drug." "The other thing about DMT that's weird is, it does not affect your mind. In other words, you don't feel gaga with ecstacy. You don't feel relaxed. You feel exactly the way you felt before you did it. It's that the world has just been swapped out, and that's strange. I sort of like that, that it doesn't lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes, instead it just does something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced by a three-, four-, five-dimensional, highly colored moving environment filled with screaming elf-deamons." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Apr 23, 20101h 28m

Podcast 223 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." "In a Christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command god to act. In other words that in some strange way the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires." "The Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of god. So it's a completely different attitude toward being human. It's an empowering attitude." "In the hermetical, magical view human beings are not tainted by Original Sin." "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." "Had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece, Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did." "Alchemy, and conjuration, and tailsmanic magic, and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished, really, not as a throwback but as a kind of prelude to modern science. Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise." "[John] Dee is the last person to be able to unify into one world view science, and mathematics, and magic, and astrology all together." "Paracelsus was an interesting guy. He's essentially the inventor of drugs because he was the first person extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence." Today's podcast begins a newly uncovered lecture by Terence McKenna. His topic is "Hermeticism and Alchemy" and he begins this 1991 workshop in fine form, making statements such as: "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." And, "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Apr 13, 201059 min

Podcast 222 – “Crimes Against Nature: The Civil War Against Drugs”

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Jonathan Ott.] "It is, of course, absurd for humankind to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet." "A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground." [In reference to releasing violent criminals to make room for small-time, non-violent, simple possession offenders.] "In short, drug prohibition is impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific, unhealthy, immoral, unecological, undiplomatic, and dictatorial." "Drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing paranoia." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Apr 6, 20101h 30m

Podcast 221 – McKenna: “Evolving Times”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing." "Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance. And not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed. Poetry may have been at its climax. Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy, there's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin." "All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later." "What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance." "We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it." "All of them, if you generalized, what these substances do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. ... Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries." "The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder." "We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma." "There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them." "I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself." "I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking." "The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak." "I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster." "We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis, which is the way we may well be headed." "It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another five hundred or a thousand years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created, will be the first to be swept away. So it's very, very important that people take back their minds, and that people analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point." "So what needs to be done is to spread the idea that anxiety is inappropriate. It's sort of like we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society, because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it's dying, and be deluded, and regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the role then, I think, for psychedelic people is to try and spread calm." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Apr 3, 20102h 7m

Podcast 220 – Damer: “EvoGrid: The Ultimate Nerd Project”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup." "[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists' beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere." "Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life." "The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people's minds more than on the streets. It'll be in the minds first." "The giving response that we have [when natural disasters occur], and through technology the fact that we can sort of be there virtually, and be in the environment that those people are in, and the crisis they're in, the empathic response coming out of support is perhaps the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there's a disaster." "Not only is no one running the world, but it probably isn't possible for anyone to run the world. And once we come to that realization we become human again because we'll say, 'Look everyone's human. Everyone is trying their best. Everyone is going from crisis to crisis, and we'll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I also think will be a healthy thing." "So in a sense, it'll be the geeks that inherit the Earth, but it'll be enlightened geeks we hope." "We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization." "When you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye, and therein you will find your rescue." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer Online Bruce Damer's DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer on the BBC Forum The Planetary Mood Ring Project

Mar 28, 20101h 8m

Podcast 219 – “Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 2

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Now the key thing to the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized form." "It's obvious that if any quantum leaps are going to happen in evolution it's best designed to happen in a period of adolescence." "Evolution has always involved people like us getting together as we are tonight, figuring out where we came from, and who's slowing us down, and what's the factual evidence as to how fast and where we can move?" "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The key to neurological navigation is to be able to voyage into exactly the circuits of your brain that you want to be exactly when you want to be there and with whom you want to be there." "The key to the Sixties, as we see it now [1979], was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive over-specialized models." "Show me a taboo and I'm interested in it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Mar 23, 201058 min

Podcast 218 – “The Truth About Cannabis”

Guest speaker: Claudia Little, BSN, MPH PROGRAM NOTES: Below you will find the list of links to Web sites that Claudia Little refers to in her presentation about the safety, benefits, and importance of the cannabis plant. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marijuana – Why it Works Supporting Studies and Articles Growing Acknowledgments from Health Organizations regarding the Medical Benefits of Cannabis Health Organization Endorsements AMA Calls for Scientific Review of Marijuana’s Prohibitive Status How Cannabis Works The Brain’s Own Marijuana (Get link to complete article from Scientific American at this link) Cannabis and the Brain Marijuana Compounds Possess Synergistic Anti-Cancer Effects, Study Says Marijuana Extracts Relieve Intractable Cancer Pain Better than THC, Study Says Books on Specific Conditions Aging, Arthritis, Cancer, Chronic Pain, Gastrointestinal Disorders, HIV/AIDS, Movement Disorders, Multiple Sclerosis (Americans for Safe Access) Comprehensive Reviews of Recent Research Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids Some of the Most Significant Research Results of 2009 ‘Gold Standard’ Studies show that Inhaled marijuana Is Medically Safe and Effective (CA Center for Medical Cannabis Research) Feds’ Top Pot Researcher Says Marijuana Should be Legal (UCLA’s Taskin/Lung Cancer Risk) If Pot Prevented Cancer You Would Have Heard About It, Right? (Boston University re: Head/Neck CA) Smoke Has Contrasting Effects On Lung Function Compared to Tobacco, Study Says Moderate Marijuana Use Not Associated with Altered Cognitive Shills, Study Says Opposite Relationships Between Cannabis Use and Neurocognitive functioning in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia Review: Supposed Marijuana and Schizophrenia Link "Overstated" Weeding Through the Hype: Interpreting the Latest Warnings About Pot and Schizophrenia THC Shown to Help Patients with Schizophrenia Safety of Cannabis Addictive Properties of Popular Drugs Conant vs Walters (Safety for your MD) Marijuana compounds may offset alcohol-induced toxicity, study says Marijuana Users Substitute Pot in Place of More Dangerous Substances, Study Says Marijuana Ingredient Blocks Opiate Dependence, Study Says Federal Agency in Charge of Marijuana Research Admits Stifling Studies on Medicinal Cannabis Organizations to Join: Drug Policy Alliance National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Americans for Safe Access Marijuana Policy Project Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Extras 2009: The Year in Review NORML’s top 10 Events that Shaped Marijuana Policy Annual Marijuana Arrests in the US Top 10 Cannabis Studies the Government Wished it had Never Funded Ashland Alternative Health, LLC The Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP) is a state registry program within the Public Health Division, Oregon Department of Human Services. Ashland Alternative Health’s team of physicians and professional staff will successfully guide you through the OMMP process of acquiring an Oregon Medical Marijuana Card. Our mission is to be the foremost medical marijuana advocate for patients in the state of Oregon by providing a clinic that sets the gold standard in professional, compassionate and private care while upholding the guidelines of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. Please call us at 541-488-2202 for more information. Vaporizer Information

Mar 9, 20101h 20m

Podcast 217 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean it’s like a magnet for screwballs." [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . go figure .] "I’ve seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe." "My technique, which I recommend to you, is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing we’ve got." "Probe the edges." "Psychedelics work. If you think that I’m bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and then we’ll talk. That’s the sine qua non. It’ll work, on demand. I’m not saying, ‘And wait forty years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It’ll work. It’ll blow your mind to shreds. It’s real." "What I’ve decided is that the [DMT] experience is an archetype. It’s the archetype of the circus." "I think where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time. Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen." "The dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else." "Fairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language. And the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication, faries, and language suggests that here we might have a restrictive gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns." "As long as we pursue the destruction of the Earth, and the elaboration of materialist ideology, and the suppression of psychedelic states, and the suppression of the feminine we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology." "The apocalypse is no longer a rumor. It has arrived in many parts of the world." "Do what you think is right. Think about what you think is right, and once you’ve thought about it then do it!" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Mar 5, 20101h 26m

Podcast 216 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here." "A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate." "It’s more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we’re not using. They [the machine elves] want us to speak in colored lights." "I think that the subtext of the governments’ fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run. And I think this is true of any society. It isn’t an American phenomenon. It’s that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hassidic Rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises. And you get millions of people questioning the first premises, and then the powers that be become very nervous." "Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state." "This is a heresy for sure, I’m not that fond of LSD. I think it’s a very sloppy drug." "It’s the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala." "We have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present. The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future." "History is not a random walk. It’s not a series of undirected, random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved." "The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the New Age." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Terence McKenna Audio DMT Nexus Index of /audio/McKenna

Mar 1, 20101h 29m

Podcast 215 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The surface of things is not where attention should rest." "I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world." "We’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu." "I came to feel, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it [DMT] is secret. It is not a secret. It is THE secret. There is a secret, and this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is. It’s that the way the world is, is a way that you can’t think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity." "You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told." "Without this [the smoked DMT experience] in the picture, half the world is missing." "What we have discovered in DMT is, literally, a chemical doorway to the bardo." "One thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure, is to convince you that what’s real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what’s real." "The biological object is made of time itself as much as it’s made of space and matter." "I’ve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul." "The Twentieth Century is analogous to the birth canal of human history." "What’s interesting about DMT is that it occurs naturally in the human brain. We all make it all the time. And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all. This is a human metabolite that you’re getting a tremendous of, but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, bio synthetic pathways, that can deal with it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Feb 20, 20101h 41m

Podcast 214 – “Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 1

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "For the last four or five thousand years, freedom and intelligence and individualism have been moving in an unbroken chain from East to West. So that here on the banks of the Pacific Ocean we obviously have assembled the most advanced nervous systems on the planet." "We all live within the reality bubble that our nervous system projects." "Neurology was the real revolution of the Sixties." "Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re gonna lead." "The old theory, by old I mean the one they’re still teaching in your colleges, says that new speciation takes tens of millions of years to create a new species. Well if that’s so let’s go back to Quaaludes. Why bother?" "The Sixties was a genetically designed and programmed paedomorphic revolt against adult authority." "I’m sure that most of the people who have felt alienated, I think many of the people who are put in mental hospitals, are simply people who were born with nervous systems that we call futique, as opposed to antique." "It’s so simple, that to be in the right place you’re in the right time. Tune the place you are to the vibrations of the brain circuits that you want to activate at the time." "Evolution never tries to change grown-ups." "We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes." "I urge you, at all costs, to avoid terminal adulthood." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Feb 12, 20101h 9m

Podcast 213 – “The Alchemy of LSD”

Guest speaker: Alan Watts Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege. ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "So we have to think again and try and find out, think deeply, what is fundamentally taboo in this culture and perhaps in other cultures as well. What information, in other words, would really let the cat out of the bag and give away the show?" "But you see, the trouble about deep secrets is they can’t be repressed indefinitely." "And we don’t even think that we had anything personally to do with the fact that our fathers once had an evil gleam in their eyes, but that evil gleam was you … coming on." “And so underneath the opposition, or the polarity, between self and other or between any other pair of opposites you can think of there is something in common.” “This is the description of anxiety: Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other … forever." "So one of the problems of the various chemicals which can change the human mind in certain ways so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together is that they do rather give the show away. And people who take these chemicals and see through the human game cannot be trusted." "What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do." "When you are told, from childhood, that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily you remain permanently mixed-up." "You can’t have pleasure in life without skill, but it isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill." "It’s very bad form if an actor always acts the same way. That’s what’s called a Star, as distinct from an actor. A real actor can become anything." "LSD is simply an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope, except this one’s inside you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge, you can use a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So in the same way, according to your capacity and your knowledge you can use an interior instrument to your advantage … or just for kicks!" "The thing that we’ve learned from history is nobody ever learns from history." "Any law which in a way tries to enforce by the power of the state its private morals, or your own business in looking after your own nervous system, is in a fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization." "The rule for all terrors is head straight into them. … Whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it, and it will disappear." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Soft Pack on MySpace iTunes Band Website Spirit Plants Radio on the air 24/7

Feb 8, 20101h 21m

Podcast 212 – “The Genesis Generation”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo NOTE: This chapter was revised for the paperback edition that was released in February 2015. Please see the Kindle edition for the current version of this chapter. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Lorenzo.] "Forget getting a permanent job. Forget careers and the quest for financial stability. They are all false gods, sent to you by the Capitalist elite on Wall Street, whose primary goal is to trap you into a life of servitude." “You still haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” began Shadow. “It should behoove us all to take the words of the Empire’s leaders at face value. They have declared what they call a War on Drugs. Of course, that’s a lie on its face, because they aren’t putting drugs into prison cages, they’re putting people in them. This is no war on drugs, William, this is a war on consciousness, as Richard Glen Boire says. It’s a war on people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo. It is a war on the very people that we are going to need to get us humans out of this mess we’ve created for ourselves. And if this is really a war, as they want to call it, then you and I, young William, you and I are their sworn enemies." "We are at what many believe to be the most pivotal moment in human history that we know of. The arrow of unsustainable consumption, powered by the bow of credit, has reached the top of its flight. There is nowhere for that arrow to go now but down, and where it is going to land is anyone’s guess." “A thousand years from now, humans will most likely still be walking the Earth, as we have done for over a million years already. Some of those future humans will have genetic links to us. . . . And those people of the future will be alive because they had at least one ancestor, maybe you, who was a part of what their historians will call the Genesis Generation. "We are raising our children to become serfs!" "Our families are detaching from the monetary system and applying their energy in different directions, like raising some of their own food, and entertaining ourselves without spending exorbitant amounts of money." “Unlike that insidious John Galt, I am advocating that We the People go on strike and remove our minds from their System of servitude. For we are fully aware that it isn’t the handful of CEOs who are the producers. No, in fact, they are the looters now. It is time to keep our best ideas to ourselves, here in our own community." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Feb 4, 20101h 6m

Podcast 211 – “Empowering Hope in Dark Times”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?" "Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances." "We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings" "[We] often feel like hapless atoms, running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever. We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else." "There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it." "Every society, in the moment of its existence, has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation (good alchemical word), a distillation of what has preceded before." "Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball." "What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it." "The mushroom said to me once, ‘Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage,’ and I said, ‘What’s the payoff on that?’ And it said, ‘It shows you it loves courage because it removes obstacles.’ You make a commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up." "It is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites." "It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas." "We are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery if we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer. Then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast that says, ‘May ye be alive at the end of the world.’ " Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Leo Plaw at the Temple of Visions Gallery (Los Angeles) Fantastic Visions Exhbition Berlin the sun blindness

Jan 29, 20101h 29m

Podcast 210 – “From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower”

Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled "From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking." "The suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic thinking, began roughly two thousand years ago. And you get more intense socio-economic and socio-spiritual hierarchies … until you get to where we are today where there is state control of consciousness as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life." -Anna Waldstein "They’re incredibly good at convincing us that we need a new car, and that new shirt, and the toys for our kids, or whatever, but very good at also convincing us that we don’t need this type of thing any more, this psychedelic thinking. But despite the Powers’ attempts to eradicate this, it bubbles up. … The power elite doesn’t want us to think like this because it disengages us from consumerism, it connects us with the environment, and makes us question what’s going on." -Ivan Casselman "Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact the box itself is figmentary and illusory . And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates one cannot be truly original in thought. So once we are stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on top of the groove or the bottom of the groove, its still going down that same path." -Cameron Adams Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Jan 22, 20101h 23m

Podcast 209 – “An Audio Collage of Aldous Huxley”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control." "I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do." "That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy." "Democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time." "Ulysses is obviously a very extraordinary book. I mean, I don’t exactly know why he wrote it, because I mean, a great deal of Ulysses seems to me to be taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The complete recordings of the Aldous Huxley 1961 London interview may be found at: The Grey Lodge Occult Review

Jan 12, 20101h 12m

Podcast 208 – “It’s Time To End The War on Drugs”

Guest speaker: Ethan Nadelmann PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Ethan Nadelmann.] "The War on Drugs, this policy of punitive prohibition, is a horror in our society, something that cannot be morally justified, cannot be justified in terms of health, can certainly not be justified in terms of public safety, that cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that I’ve ever heard of." "The War on Drugs is a cancer in our society, in our American society and in global society." "There’s never been a drug-free society, and there’s never going to be a drug-free society. We are moving increasingly into a world in which there will be ever-more psychoactive drugs available." "The stand-bys, you know, the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol and marijuana and coca cocaine and opium, they’ve been with us for thousands of years in one way or another, and they’re going to continue to be part of our society and our lives, whether we like it or not." "When drug treatment gets owned by the criminal justice system, drug treatment simply becomes a synonym for coerced abstinence." "We need to aim to cut America’s incarcerated population in half, to pick a rough number." "We need to get that term, over-incarceration, into the popular dialogue, into the popular language." "One of the definitions of power is when somebody tells you to do something, and you do it without asking why. That’s the definition of power. Somebody tells you to do it and you do it without even asking why, that’s the power of the prison-industrial complex today." "California used to be known as the state of higher education and is now known as the state of higher incarnation." "When you live in a society where one of the most powerful political forces is the organization which earns its livelihood from keeping its fellow citizens behind bars, I don’t know of any other free society in which that is the case. That’s a distortion." "I define recovery as getting to the point where your drug use, if you use drugs, is no longer impairing your life. … That’s the objective, to get on with your life." "It’s about accepting that each one of us, who have struggled with drugs, has to find their own path. And that the role of the state should certainly not be to get in the way and optimally to facilitate this." "That we are each sovereign over our own minds and bodies, that is the core principle that we have to keep putting out there." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Drug Policy ACTION Network Drug Policy Alliance Network A New PATH Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing

Jan 5, 20101h 4m

Podcast 207 – “A Tribute to Alan Watts”

Guest speakers: Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and others PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast begins with a short clip of Alan Watts speaking about human consciousness. Then we join Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and a few other friends who are discussing the life of Alan Watts a few months after his death in November 1973. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alan Watts in Wikipedia List of books by Alan Watts

Dec 21, 20091h 5m

Podcast 206 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 6

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you." "If I want a more intense drug experience I take more of one drug." "Low doses of psychedelics, or moderate doses of psychedelics, transform the quality of thought. You think faster, think deeper, think odder, think broader, but you need more for that to burst through into hallucination." Terence McKenna’s ‘Private’ List of Most Influential Books The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/039484484X The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0916870480 "The world is something to look at, and that attitude in the presence of psychedelics will throw open a cornucopia of riches." "I don’t know what life is like without cannabis. I hear there is such a thing." "The thing about DMT, and we didn’t talk about it much this weekend, is it is an inhabited space. A HUGE percentage of people who take it encounter entities of some sort in there. Not entities like wombats and foxes, but entities with intelligence of some sort, with language of some sort." "I think that in service to the principle of parsimony, preferring the simplest explanation, these things [beings encountered in DMT space] must be human souls. "Now I dare to hope that maybe there is some kind of existence beyond the grave." "I’ve looked at the literature of near-death experience. What those people are describing is far more mundane than a DMT trip." "I would suggest, with great heat, that if we want to study the near-death and after-death experience, that actually you come far closer to dying, whatever that means, on DMT than you do in drownings and things like that." "If you’re living right, your life should get just more and more baroque, beautiful, complicated, mysterious … and then you die." "I prefer to think that it [2012] is not a planetary catastrophe, or a mass dying." "Perhaps what enlightenment is is it happens to an entire universe when it drops its matter and anti-matter out of its structure, and it becomes entirely made of light. That would certainly fulfill the Novelty Theory [sic]." "It’s a bit baroque for my taste." [Speaking about the concept of parallel universes. Of course, Terence never lived to read: April 14, 2003, Scientific American, Parallel Universes Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations http://www.krabach.info/astro/parallel_universe/parallel_universe.html "The universe is a series of impediments to the expression of novelty." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option So You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher? (PDF) by R. Andrew Sewell, M.D. • McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Dec 10, 20091h 23m

Podcast 205 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 5 (Timewave)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "You don’t conquer time by building vast instrumentalities and seeking a primary particle and all that. The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "I live in a kind of waking hallucination. I have a little aphorism which covers this. It’s: Rome falls nine times an hour. It falls more than that and less than that, but let’s say it falls nine times an hour. Well, then your job is to notice every time it falls. In other words, what we think of as our random musings and our personal mental furniture is in fact our subconscious awareness of these systems of temporal resonance operating around us." [Comment by Lorenzo: I have no idea what he means by this.] "I do entertain the idea that we may each have our own Timewave, sort of following the model of astrology." "What will happen, as novelty asymptotically increases, in the final months, hours, minutes, seconds is boundaries will dissolve, all boundaries They’re already dissolving. We see the nation-state dissolving, but wait’ll the atomic field dissolves." "It’s not a gravity collapse. It’s a novelty collapse. We are collapsing into a black hole of novelty." "The future is not like the past except that it hasn’t happened. If you were to suddenly find yourself in the future, it’s a vector-storm of unrealized possibilities. You’ve never seen an unrealized possibility." "I believe that the idea that is the most fun is probably the closest to the truth, and I find this idea to be absolutely delightful." "The whole thing [Timewave hypothesis] smacks of the impossible. It’s even pushed me toward the idea that maybe this is not actually a reality. We’re trapped, or I’m trapped. I don’t know if you’re trapped. But we’re in some kind of piece of fiction. It’s like a Phillip K. Dick deal, you know. We’re in some kind of simulacrum, and the clue to the fact that it’s a simulacrum is this impossible idea [the Timewave]. And so the point of the idea is not to believe it, but to use it as a wedge to fight our way out of this labyrinth and back to whatever reality we were in before we fell into this situation. Something like that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dustin Cantwell’s Fane of the Cosmos

Dec 2, 20091h 4m

Podcast 204 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity." "Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process." "Feelings are primary. The primary datum of experience is feeling, and then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience. And then still lower on the rung, and I maintain lower on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience." "I think it’s really important to keep things as simple as possible because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly baroque. So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of Great Atlantis only further exacerbates the problem." "We know that behind all this constipated sociability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience. It’s important to keep it in mind in very psychedelically situations. But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality and commit crimes based on delusion about what is and isn’t reality." "The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of the culture. It is literally the response to toxic cultures. The more toxic the culture the more ego is revered as a natural value within that culture." "People are clueless, and they’re being used and abused. Seemingly intelligent people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconsciousable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous towards the Earth. … Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decomodify experience. … What is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?" "Novelty is that quality of nature that seeks complexity. It’s countervailing force is called habit." "The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it these past 500 years, because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true; the intuition that every moment is unique [time is not uniform]. It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysics of being." "The way you investigate time is by moving inward, by investigating metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "It is as though the Winter Solstice of 2012 was some kind of dwell point out of which the temporal continuum is being generated." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "The more of a mind you have, the more fun you can have when it’s fucked-up." -Nick Herbert (Wikipedia entry about Nick)

Nov 18, 20091h 12m

Podcast 203 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it." "If you aren’t ‘cool’ then you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means, by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed. But it can’t really be faked. But the whole engine of marketing is designed to make you think that it can be faked. I don’t know if I’m cool or not, but I am incredibly resistant to any effort to make me think I’m uncool." "You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears." "It’s very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked. … This nobody ever criticizing anybody else brings the intellectual enterprise and the refinement of human knowledge to a screeching halt. The way in which the intellectual enterprise moves forward is by being critiqued, analyzed, subjected to tests." "Scientists really respect each other for proving that they are wrong. If you have a theory that you’ve defended for fifteen years, and then you publish a paper saying, ‘I’ve been over it again. I’ve looked at the data again, and you know what fellow colleagues, I botched it. I was wrong.’ They promote you for this. They say, ‘This is the essence of intellectual honesty.’ … Religion doesn’t work like this. In the religious domain you never admit you’re wrong. You further elaborate the story to save whatever preposterous notion has been exposed. … And so what you get is error based on error based on delusion based on illusion based on lie based on half-truth based on supposition based on somebody thought it would be nice IF." "Somewhere after the Sixties, when the government decided that universal public education only created mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights, education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry. And instead we took an authoritarian model. The purpose of education [today in the United States] is to produce unquestioning consumers with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is." "If you turn cannabis into a Schedule I drug, a felony, suddenly all of these people who never felt inspired to dissent, never felt the heavy hand of the government, are automatically members of a criminal class. And what this does is thus radicalize the people so persecuted, and in a feedback loop of paranoia drive the government then into a frenzy of trying to understand and control this minority group. The idea that states of mind are matters for legal manipulation, it’s amazing that that discussion is even taking place in a democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson." "In the whole Marxist episode nobody was ever required to piss in a cup in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China to establish their loyalty to the government or the corporations, and yet that went down here with barely a murmur." "Once you find psychedelics there’s nothing between you and a complete check-out from your cultural heritage. The only cost to you is the complete abandonment of everything you’ve ever known and loved." "You can choose to be free, but it’s the last choice you’ll ever make." –Kafka [McKenna's Five Percent Rule] "As long as any school of dissent remains below five percent of the population no money is budgeted to destroy it." "I think that no one is in charge, and this is a very good thing because it allows the internal dynamic of the situation to express itself. Everybody who wants to control the situation is fighting a loosing battle." "I don’t feel this need for intellectual closure. I don’t see why things should make sense." [McKenna's Law] "As you advance in social hierarchy the percentage of smart people does not increase. … Every human situation is bedeviled by morons. No matter how high you rise you’re surrounded by fools, and you’re lucky if you’re not one of them. That’s the basic thing to guard against." "It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding." "The mushroom said to me once, for one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another." "Culture is institutionalized paranoia." "I think what’s happened is that the top of the culture, it’s profoundly intellectually bankrupt. There is no plan except to keep peddling stuff, basically until the forests are gone and the oceans polluted. It’s not malevolent. It’s simply that they are clueless." "What I’m pleading for is an enlightened form of alienation, not simply an emotionally driven alienation, but a strategically driven alienation. See, alienation can be used not to create neurosis but to attain freedom, creative alienation, alienation that embraces itself as the sour

Nov 11, 20091h 30m

Podcast 202 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves." "If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being. But given a more advanced nervous system and a more advanced cultural tool kit the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love." "The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a position like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion, the illusion created by the local language." "The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being." "Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste." "The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil." "Nature seems to be in the business of building systems that transcend themselves." "We are all just swarms of personalities. The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea." "Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over." "We’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner." "What shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals." "The keeper of the values [of his culture] is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit. … The shaman at the top realizes that, my god we stare out onto an abyss. We do not know." "Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness." "Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises." "Sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideology." "Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion, not a feeling to be drawn from that observation, the conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt present of the immediate moment must be what life is for." "I would say the bouquet of life is this moment." "I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever you miss the point." "We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children." "Life is what you get when a hyper dimensional object protrudes into ordinary space." "We clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter." "In my highest states I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this [human existence] is the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than this. This is the bottom line, and so the good news is it’s only up from here." "The last dance you dance alone, and nobody will be watching." "I don’t think you should live in anticipation of the drama of your death-bead scene, better to repair to the moment." "The real message of the psychedelic experience and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique we’ve been carrying out here is to take the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience, this is all you know. It’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibilities, fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope, who knows? But in the moment of being we have the completion of being. It is always complete, every moment." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Oct 27, 20091h 20m

Podcast 201 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present." "If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it’s paranoia." "Art is like the footprint of where the imagination has been." "Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception, not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be." "Who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore when there were saber toothed cats walking around that weighted 1100 pounds?" "Imitation is an act of the imagination." "What is a city but a complete denial of nature? … Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho." "What this [virtual reality] should tell us, in the domain of light the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will." "Shamanism didn’t use matter to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind, in the presence of unusual neurochemicals, to produce unusual phenomenon and unusual sensoria of experience." "A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination." "We now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this." "Clearly we [humans] view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion." "The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow … and our best people are working on that very problem." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #1 Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #2

Oct 21, 20091h 26m

Podcast 200 – “A Few Words From Our Elders”

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: SASHA SHULGIN: "So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive, they do not do what occurs, they allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get into and express yourself without the help of the material." "My main argument for continuing to use the term [psychedelic] is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about." ANN SHULGIN: "My interest in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche. They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be." "The psychedelics, the visionary plants, allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning, because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge." "The ’shadow work’ is, perhaps, the most important use of these materials, as far as I’m concerned, that there is. Because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it’s not a monster, that it’s not a terrible, horrible beast, that it is the uncultivated, the unsophisticated and slightly, sometimes, unlawful part of ourselves, which can be one of our greatest allies as long as we can find the courage to do the work necessary to discover it and become one with it and to negotiate with it." "I consider them [psychedelics] basically spiritual tools." BABA RAM DAS: "The place we share is that place that stands nowhere, not the place that’s caught in these spirals that involve intellectual advance, or ‘Now we know it!’, and so on. That’s all like little ripples on the ocean." "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised." TIMOTHY LEARY: "…neuro-geography that tells us that where you are determines who you are, habitat determines species." "We are literally at a position where collectively, working in harmony, we can do most of the things, and take the responsibilities, which in the past have been attributed to the great deities of the past. I think the Golden Age is ahead. It’s the age of humanist science, humanist technology, pagan science, pagan technology, high tech, high touch." "I think it’s our duty as explorers and as frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminology. … I really feel that words are tremendously important. . . . We’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years because more people have been killed in the name of god that any other word around." TERENCE MCKENNA: "Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment." “Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!” "On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It’s crawling all over you! And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification. So that it comes towards you – they come toward you – they divide, they merge, they’re bounding, they’re screaming, they’re squeaking – and they hold out objects, which they sing into existence, or which they pull out of some other place. And these things are, you know, like jewels and lights, but also like consommé and old farts and yesterday and high speed; in other words, they are made of juxtapositions of qualities that are impossible in three-dimensional space. What they’re like is – and in fact, this is probably what they are – what they’re like is, they’re like three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is… it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun is really funny it’s an A,B,C,D pun; and it’s simultaneously all these things… well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which st

Oct 16, 20091h 34m

Podcast 199 – “Timothy Leary at MIT – 1967″

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy, because it’s all a play of energy that we’re involved in." "Now the message I have is an old one, the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It’s those six words: Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in. It’s a rhythm." "Now how do you turn on? Well, I’ll tell you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking. You can’t think your way out of this sticky black checker board of an American education. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on you’ve got to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament." "Now with all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Viet Nam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house." "The educational system, at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug." "The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully because you’re likely to get hooked." "You, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out, and by drop out I mean all the way. You can’t vote, I urge you not to do politics, don’t picket, don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Oct 6, 20091h 9m

Podcast 198 – “Terence McKenna on NPR – 1999″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences." "For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status." (This was in response to a question about legal highs.) "Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them." (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.) "Science fiction is the gateway drug." "I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in." "Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist." "I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I’m interested in finding one doorway that works." "Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced, free house calls in our homes. This could almost be a litmus test for sanity." "Whether achieved through some yogic or some quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways." "It’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight [that we are creatures of language] is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. … Code is the primary reality." "I’ve always felt in a way that the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was ‘We’ll try anything as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work,’ and that automatically exempts psychedelics." "Once you find psychedelics you’re not looking for the accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine, or oneness, or something like that." "Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously, since the sixteenth century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language, and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on." "Computer code is magical language. It’s language which when executed causes something to actually happen." "So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis." "Drug-taking and drug-using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap we’ve had to put up with we would have gotten some kind of remediation from the Justice Department." "You know, the dirty little secret of Northern California’s vast economic success down at Silicon Valley is the creativity that was injected into this area in the 1960s through the LSD revolution. In many, many significant cases it’s the same people." "Where do the ideas come from? You know, people who don’t take psychedelics think it’s all moving lights and little concentric circles. They don’t understand that these are tremendously emotionally moving dramatic scenarios that one could not possibly generate out of one’s mind." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: "The Virtual AllChemical Powwow" for Terence Mckenna at his house in Hawaii on February 25th 1999 Erik Davis’ Interview of Bruce Damer for Wired Mag

Sep 30, 200959 min

Podcast 197 – “McNature”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "It seems to me that it [Nature] is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language." "Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity." "Nature is actually the goal at the end of history." "Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination." "And what we’re looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization." "We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what’s going on or that the generation which follows us will know what’s going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what’s going on?" "It’s no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other." "Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong." "Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society." "Living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding. So that every day you know more, and see into things with greater depth, than you did before." "Culture is another dimention." "The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Sep 16, 20091h 31m

Podcast 196 – “Timothy Leary vs. Notre Dame”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Of course, what the politicians debate about is really irrelevant because they’re in basic agreement. They believe in the system. They just want the power to run it. So they give us the illusion about fighting fiercely about words and tactics and promises, but we know, don’t we, that there’s no choice there." "What’s it all about? What’s life all about? Why are we here? To build bigger and bigger machines? To do things faster and faster and think more and more? In fifty years everyone will know what I’m telling you tonight. That the only reason for being here is to get on this glorious adventure of finding the Divine, unraveling the great conscious mystery story. That’s the only point, ecstatic being, that is, get high and stay high." "Dope is going to be the religion of the future." "You just can’t drop LSD the way you slug a beer. It’s much too intricate" "Once you start playing around with reality you are never the same." "Most of you aren’t ready to take psychedelic drugs now because you haven’t done much work on the yoga of the senses. To put it in a word, most of you are senseless." "It may not come as a surprise to an audience of Catholics that the sensory realm has, since the dawn of human history, been recognized as one of the great sacramental approaches to the divine. And any religion that has lasted for any time at all has utilized the sensual experience as a way of turning on the beholder, getting him high, getting him ameliorated to a god-intoxicated state." "If you don’t have a sacred place stick to beer." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Sep 14, 20091h 11m

Podcast 195 – “The Future of Higher Intelligence” Part 2

Guest speakers: Robert Anton Wilson, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: "Creativity has a touch of the bizarre" –Robert Anton Wilson "Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate." –Robert Anton Wilson "We need something to replace death as an intelligence increaser. Generally, the only way that intelligence could grow was to get rid of the people who haven’t taken any new imprints since adolescence, as Tim would say." –Robert Anton Wilson "The bizarre, the unthinkable is where creativity comes from." –Robert Anton Wilson "In that process [Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures], we are dissipating, collapsing, out of all the structures we know, not into chaos, not into the collapse of civilization, but into a higher level of coherence." –Robert Anton Wilson "There seem to be more optimism about psychedelics. They seem to be treated now with more rationality, as I was hoping they would be back in the Sixties, but they couldn’t be then. We were too ignorant." –Dr. John Lilly "The dumb people in the Sunbelt have all gone to Washington and New York to seek their fortunes there, people like Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. He’s just plain dumb. He’s got a track record not where everything he touches is turning wrong simply because he’s betting on the past." –Timothy Leary "The doomsday sayers, the people who are warning of and hoping for some sort of apocalyptic crisis, an earthquake, an end to everything. Now anyone who lays that trip on you, just look at them and smile and say, ‘Listen, the world isn’t coming to an end. You have come to an end of your vision. It’s you who feel that your end is at hand. The evolutionary picture is moving along beautifully.’ " –Timothy Leary Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Sep 14, 200953 min

Podcast 194 – “The Future of Higher Intelligence” Part 1

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: This recording was made at a conference held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981. Panelists include: Dr. Timothy Leary, Frank Baron, Dr. Andrew Weil,Walter Houston Clark, Robert Anton Wilson, and Paul Krasner [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I think it’s all about the brain, or certainly the brain as the key to consciousness and intelligence. The brain, as we well know, is the taboo organ of the 20th century." "The introduction of a new technology, a new paradigm, a new world model to a primitive society takes a lot of delicate doing. You can’t spook them too quickly. … You have to attach the new model to some of the old theories." "It is now possible to access your brain. It is now possible to activate circuits that were undreamed of before. … There’s no limits to the creativity, and imagination, and novelty, and intelligence that can be generated by this instrument, the brain, whose function we are now realizing is to fabricate reality." "The more you understand about the complexities of the brain, and the psychopharmeucedicals which activate it, the more cautious, the more careful, the more experimental, the more scientific you are before you rush around activating this instrument." "The function of human life from now on is to learn how to access, to activate, to direct, manage, and control your own brain." "It’s not the survival of the fittest. It’s the survival of the people with a sense of humor who can say, ‘Hey, look at those dinosaurs. We won’t go that way." "You can only evolve and mutate when you can laugh at your old form and go beyond it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Aug 24, 20091h 11m

Podcast 193 – Alan Watts & friends “The Houseboat Summit – 1967″

Guest speakers: Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Allen Cohen PROGRAM NOTES: "The Houseboat Summit" was held in February 1967, and has been documented in several places on the Web. In addition to the quotes below, which are from this podcast, you can read a more complete transcript of this historic meeting here. "I think that, thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership." -Alan Watts "What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed." -Alan Watts "My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it’s always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form." -Timothy Leary "Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life." -Alan Watts "That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality." - "And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom." -Alan Watts "Increasingly, we’re developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it." - "Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with." -Timothy Leary "What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks." -Alan Watts "Half the things I’ve done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn’t have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat." -Timothy Leary "In other words, when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting. See, we’ve left this game and it bores us." -Alan Watts, February 1967 "I would agree to change the slogan to ‘Drop out. Turn on. Drop in.’ " -Timothy Leary Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Matt Muirhead’s e(n)tymology

Aug 17, 20091h 26m

Podcast 192 – Timothy Leary “Live at the Stone – 1987″

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "So to me, that Summer of Love [1967] was kind of a coming out party, a coming of age party, of the first wave, the first year of the baby boom [when the first boomers turned 21]." "It’s kind of interesting that the military, and the police, and these bureaucrats, they live in a germ-free society. They live in shells of bureaucratic boot kissing." "I’m very much against addicts and drug fuck-ups." "At those moments in human history where it’s time for our species to confront a new reality, whether it’s going from four foot to two foot, or it’s to make love face-to-face or whatever, there’s a certain breed of human beings in every gene pool who come along at that time and make us feel comfortable. They explain, they personalize, they popularize what’s really happening. Now you know who these people are. They are the artists, the musicians, the playwrights, the poets, the myth makers, the wizards, the jugglers, the story tellers, the crazed scientist, the mischievous physicist, you know who they are. In every epic of human history these people come along." "So finally we catch on, it’s the governments that cause all the fuck-ups." "It doesn’t do any good to think for yourself if you don’t know how to think." "They say, never mind about politics or economics or religion, it’s language that controls society and that controls the individual. And who controls the language controls everything. … If you control the language, and the technology of the language, you control the mind." "The personal computer allows you to do exactly what these French philosophers say we gotta do, control your own screen." "The real message I get from the 20th century is learn how to be cyber-hip." "Literacy my friends is the oppressive chains of the educated middle class." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Timothy Leary Recordings (MP3 Format) Download Instructions PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 1 Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 2 Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 3 The Sordid Story of a DEA Informant Halperngate (PDF) by Jon Hanna Halperngate II (PDF) by John Beresford, M.D. The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc (PDF) by Erik Davis

Jul 24, 20091h 34m

Podcast 191 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 5

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable." "This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human." "It’s a relationship [ingesting mushrooms] like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers." "I said [to the mushroom], ‘What are you doing on this planet?’, and it said, ‘You’re a mushroom, you live cheap.’ " "To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back." "One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life." "Memory training is great psychedelic training." "There’s something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology." " ‘Drugs’ and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position." "Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image." "I can’t think of a society on Earth where people don’t take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Jul 17, 20091h 36m

Podcast 190 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna]. "Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda. Ayahuasca will work with you." "The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious." [Also see The Art of Steven Rooke.] "Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?" "Obviously, it’s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious." "The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That’s why it’s not important that yogas’ claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there." "Once you come face-to-face with these psychedelics, the trail ends. You have found the answer. … Now the question is, ‘What the hell do you do with it?’ " "Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made." "It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are IN the presence of the Mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide." "What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it’s accessible." "The race isn’t to the swift. It’s to the thoughtful." "There will be difficult moments in a five-gram [mushroom] trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is." "This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience." "On ketemine you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough to realize that you’re on a drug." "At the interface of the sayable and the unsayable [in a psychedelic experience] is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that’s what I think it’s important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas." "Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated." "One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?" "If you eat before you sleep after a trip, it won’t be nearly so hard a come-down." "DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eddy Lepp’s personal Web site Free Eddy Lepp (the song)

Jul 8, 20091h 26m

Podcast 189 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.> "Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god. ... [This] is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort." "I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business." "Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism." "The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another." "I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. … I think that these plants ‘take people’ as much as people take the plants. … When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenic fields of all the people who ever took it." "All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion." "People are concrescences of ambiguity." "I think the sitter should be there only if there’s a three dimensional emergency." "I have never felt that the primary use of these things [psychedelic medicines] was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn’t for that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links mentioned in this podcast Burning Man Poster Contest Oracle Gathering in 2009 Symbiosis Gathering in 2009 Burning Man Guidelines for First Timers What to and not-to bring to Burning Man

Jul 1, 20091h 40m

Podcast 188 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness." "Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage." "This is what I talked about last night about the archaic revival as the notion of making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow." "We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual. There will not, apparently, be business as usual." "You either have a plan, or you are a part of somebody else’s plan." "The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it." "We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us." "I’m fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you’re getting somewhere." "If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind." "For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined." "Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option California Institute of Integral Studies GocStock

Jun 24, 20091h 31m