Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Most software, I think, is written by freaks." "What it [investigating psychedelics] really requires is a love of the peculiar, of the weird, the bizarre, the étrange, the freaky and unimaginable." "Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience." "DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic." "By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other." "What I’m talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that’s the primary thing to bear in mind. It’s an experience." "Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we’re working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of." "What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, … and THIS is big news!" "If you play the cultural game, it’s like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded." "Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality." "The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system." "I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine." "The ‘person’ is not an interchangeable part. The ‘citizen’ is. … The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It’s what the hippies were." "What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what’s right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is." "It’s as important to be well informed in this area, if you’re going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Oracle Gatherings, July 31-August 2, 2009 SCIENCE AND NONDUALITY CONFERENCE October 21-25, 2009 Embassy Suites/Marin Civic Center San Rafael, California

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: In today’s program there is no featured guest. Instead, Lorenzo presents the first chapter in his new novel, The Genesis Generation. In it, Lorenzo weaves the tale of a young man caught between two worlds, the world of corporate America and the world of the psychedelic community. As the story unfolds, we learn of the transformation of a 29 year old "yuppie-geek" into an underground hero of the psychedelic community. The story begins in Palenque, Mexico and moves through Texas, Amsterdam, Viet Nam, and even to Burning Man. Chapter Titles: An Awakening in Palenque Depression in Dallas Amazement in Amsterdam Confrontation in Viet Nam Stranded in San Francisco Ecstasy in Dallas Midwest Memories San Francisco Seminar Caitlín’s Salon Rindy’s Place Burning Man Weekend with Old Joe Wizard’s Council A West Coast Drive Mountain Farewell Freedom’s Promise DOWNLOAD your own copy of "THE GENESIS GENERATION" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting." "The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis." "And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature." "… of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern. The pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity, no one you would invite to your garden party." "Technique [in taking entheogens] to me is a kind of a … I’m reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable." "The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer, but facing the answer." "I mean, we’re playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the Cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot. It’s essentially a preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue because what we’re talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility In fact, not a religious sensibility, THE religious sensibility." "Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego." "Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?" "The ‘public’ has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit, which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet." "How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Tibet2Timbuk2 The song, "Beautiful Girl", played at the end of this podcast, is from their album titled Music is Life. About the pash "First Rays of Sunlight" by Clint Avery

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.] "What Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral." "So if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis." "If you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You! by Bruce Damer DigitalSpace’s Educational Spacewalk Simulation for NASA’s upcoming Hubble Servicing Mission The DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer’s Personal Web Site Mind States Conferences

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Timothy Leary.] "The people who were teaching us about consciousness-expanding drugs were people like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, even Henry Luce, the respectable conservative founder of ‘Time’ magazine. There was a large group of thoughtful people who told us that the doors of perception were going to open and an avalanche of change would happen." "Harvard is there to train Ivy Leaguers to go to Washington and Wall Street and keep the wasp establishment going. They’re not supposed to be turning out new Buddhas and a new brand of science fiction neuronaughts." "The history of America is the history of those of us that belong to this wonderful brotherhood and sisterhood of avant-garde inner voyagers. We believe that we’re the American tradition. And so we really weren’t that surprised when the thing exploded in the Sixties. That’s what we’d signed up for." "I personally now feel that the concept of generation, the generation you belong to, is one of the most important things in your life, because you’re going to be swimming like a school of fish in this school of your own generation." "It’s so simple, too. If you want to change, it’s geography, just move to the place different people hang out, and listen." "I see very clearly that the age of the people you hang out with determines your age. … Generations are temporal units, and you can jump generations, you can migrate. And how do you migrate from one generation to another? It’s time travel, just hang out with people of different ages." "What are humans for? We’re not here to fight Communism. We’re not here to fight for a job. If we don’t do that any more, what are we for? Well the answer to that is, the function of the human being is to evolve, to grow, to become more intelligent, to become a more advanced form of our species." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Support the Stolaroff Collection The Timothy Leary Archives The Media Squat (radio program with Douglas Rushkoff) The Art of Steven Rooke "Lunch with the Shulgins" (video)

Guest speaker: Missy & Andre Nobels, Mateo Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: MATEO: "Here’s the thing about divine creativity, and that really pegs it because creation is divine, and we are creators. And when we tap into that cosmic oneness and unity, spirit comes through, and we give ourselves up to spirit and allow spirit to move us instead of trying to move spirit." MATEO: "So, when you tap into divinity the ego basically disappears, and you’re in the sweet spot, you’re in the zone, and then you’re listening to yourself, and you’re blowing yourself away with what’s coming through, because it’s beyond you. It’s beyond us. It’s spirit talking." MATEO: "Time is just a thing that the mind does to try to make sense out of reality." MISSY: "I know it’s heart, for me it’s heart, whatever that is. And because the heart’s in the body, if I get in my body I can feel my heart. And I let my heart move my body so that’s my way of finding, or taping into that creative divine, or that spark." ANDRE: "You get to that point where the ego can just rest because you know your body has it, you know your being can take care of the physicality, the mechanics of whatever you’re doing, and then, once I think you can rest in yourself, in that place, then there’s space for that divine to come through." ANDRE: "This pocket we’re talking about, this divine spark, it’s not something you can hold onto. The tendency when you fall in love is you want to hold onto that beloved, to grasp and try to posses. And in a sense, what you do is you kill that spark. Especially when you’re doing something delicate and creative, you have to be really in the moment, because the moment you try to hold onto it, it’s gone." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Andre Nobels Music Andre on MySpace Mateo Pallamary’s Web Site

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is the Question and Answer session following the talk heard in the previous podcast. In it, Terence answers questions from the audience, such as, "Can you talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness in layman’s terms?" [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "It doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope, or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean, processes always occur in the same way. And this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature. These things are as it were simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff." "Thinking means something. It’s not just something we do. It means something. It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong." QUESTION: What is the nature of magic, or what is magic or the wonder it invokes? "Magic is not a trivial issue at all." "If you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is are very close to the same thing." "The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality, through acts of language. And language is very, very mysterious. I mean, it is true magic." "All so-called primitive people know that the world is made up of language. That you sing it into existence. That what you say it is is what it is. That is it maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension." "Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. This is what quantum physics teaches." "Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy. Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty that it’s, at this point, to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors." QUESTION: Why don’t some people get high when they take psychedelics? "The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting." "But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past." "We are caged by our cultural programing, and this is the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives." "If we could train ourselves to simply remember our dreams, psychedelics would become obsolete." "Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it is worth." "Language is partially the key here. We cannot move into a reality we cannot describe. If we can’t describe a world, we can’t be there." "As long as we let the establishment set the language agenda we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian, world of consumerism and schloko values that the establishment has prepared for us." "The way I think of these psychedelics are a different way, is that they are catalysts for the imagination." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? I mean it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? … I think so." "I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy, and I forget that not everyone is so fortunate." "What I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "An added wrinkle [to the story of ever-increasing complexity] is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound." "I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game. If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently players in the cosmic drama. And in this particular act of the cosmic drama we hold a very central role. We are at the pinnacle of the expression of the complexification in the animal world." "Since the rise of Western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that we’re getting from the impact of human culture on the Earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere …" "History is a state of incredible destabilization. It’s a chaostrophy in the process of happening." "It’s very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist. Because if it were to exist it would impart to reality a purpose. … Science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose." "Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable Omega point." "So why hope? Isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so. I think the out-of-control-ness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact that it’s out of control. I think that if it’s out of control then our side is winning." "We represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event." "In our species complexity has turned inward upon itself. And in our species time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution, and instead historical time is generated." "It is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history. History then is ending. History is a kind of gestation process. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. It’s an episode in the life of a species." "Culture is merely clothing on the human experience." "The body is the nexus of the mystery of life, and our culture takes us out of the body." "More and more, the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian Mind." "We now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of Apocalypse We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be awaiting us." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The first very dangerous side effect of psychedelic drugs is long term memory gain. And the second is short term memory loss. And I forget the third." "The time has come for us as a species, and for you all as individuals, to move into the post industrial society." "We all create our own reality." [Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre] "You can make up all the abstract gods or leaders that you want, and theories and so forth, but you’re just whistling in the dark. The existential facts of the matter are that you are in the nose cone of your own time ship, hurtling at the speed of light into a dark future, and you don’t have a clue or navigational map. And if you’re scared, well, grow up." "The sillier a religion is the more passionately fanatic people will defend it, if you know what I mean. So you’d better be careful when you buy a god, because it can get you in a lot of shit." "Quantum physics is all about loosening up your tight structure." "Now think about jazz. What’s jazz about? Jazz is about singularity, about creating your own rhythm, improvising, doing your own riffs, innovating. Hey, that’s exactly what quantum physics is all about." "The fact that you become an individual, and think singular thoughts, doesn’t mean you can’t be understood." "The function of the government is simply to protect us, not from ourselves, but protect us from bad [impure] products." "No matter how crazy, fucked-up an individual can be, he can’t be as fucked up as the Catholic Church." "You know that collectivity lowers intelligence. No matter how dumb the individual is, there’s no dumb individual that could have caused World War II." "Colleges, universities, are tax supported, state supported, or financed by wealthy individuals and trusts to prepare you to find your niche, your spot, your cog in the great industrial machine. This is a factory." "Don’t decide to major until after you graduate. When you get 50 years old, select your major." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Keepin’ The Vibe Alive Mick Mashbir Mick’s MySpace Page Lyrics to "American Weirdo"

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I don’t want to legalize drugs. It’s not the government’s business to legalize anything we do privately in our own homes. Are they going to legalize masturbation." "By far, the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men. And it starts in the home." "The concept of a generation implies that young people are doing something different." "Each of these generations, my generation and the so-called hippie generation, we’re heroic. We were thrown into the future where there was no map, where there were no guidebooks." "Hippies, to be honest, were not very hip, compared to the beatniks." "The function of the 21st century is to learn how to operate our brains." "The human brain is designed to design realities." "You have to face the fact that people born between 1946 and 1964 are a new species." "The way evolution, as I understand it, works is DNA, biological intelligence, Gaia wisdom, egg intelligence does not like final forms. … You’ll see the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘grow’. In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing, and it is also someone who has reached their final form. And if there is one thing you can say about evolution, she does not like final forms." "There really is an awesome epidemic of deliberate stupidity that is laid upon us by the media, by the press, by magazines and so forth. They simply do not raise any of the issues that challenge our interests or intelligence." [Quoting Abbie Hoffmann] "We may have been young, and we may have been silly, and we may have been idealistic, and we may have been too romantic, but god damn it, we were right!" "I have one cause, and that’s the goal of the performing philosopher, is to encourage you, and inspire you, and empower you, to the extent I can, to Think for Yourself and Question Authority." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Timothy Leary Archive Cody & Sancho’s Podcasting Tutorial The Conversations Network (Levelator)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties." "In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’." "Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology." "Nothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough." "So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It’s a very Talmudic notion. It’s a very psychedelic notion. It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual. And this is in fact how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science." "The idea of the individual is a post-Medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers." "The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea." "Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. … Nobody opens a book and looks at print … We read print, but we look at manuscript, because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it." "[Quoting Marshall McLuhan] High definition is the state of being well-filled with data." "Print is the least invisible of all media. Print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information."We are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-tone kind of thing." "A perfect media is an invisible media, and print is the least invisible of all media." "Those who read, do not see, even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world. They read. They attempt to read nature. And you can’t read nature. You must look at nature. You must see nature." " ‘The Medium is the message’ means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference." "Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century." "The reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things, clearly. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic/eschatological." "What I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character, per se. You never know who is speaking." " ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries." "Joyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this." "It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get." "Anna Livia Plurabelle is Molly Bloom on acid, basically." "People say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience." "The character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that you are supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that." "What all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language." "We are living in a terminal civilization. I don’t want to say dying, because civilizations aren’t animals. But we are living in an age of great self-summation. … Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation underway." "The purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future." "Somehow, complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Oracle Gatherings … June 2009 … The Fountain

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have." "The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow." "American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently." "He [William James] later wrote the book "Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide." "The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden." "The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly." "As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some more information on exactly how evolution got started." "All of you in this room have experienced more realities, more crisis, more of life, you’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers in the past." "The generation you belong to is of key importance." "Nobody died for my sins, man. I did my time for ‘em." "Let me give you an example of set and setting. If you take LSD under the following conditions: you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber, and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention, that is bad set and bad setting." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place." "Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may never know what hit us." "If I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the Net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull." "All time is is how much change you can pack into a second." "You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise." "It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you." "Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected." "It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is." "This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?" "To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination." "Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating." "I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago." "It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense." "Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity, and beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences." "The momentum now is inevitable. Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable." "What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all." "When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let’s be frank about it, it is enslavement." "The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Transcript of this Talk Video of Bruce Damer’s EvoGrid This is the book Terence spoke about in this podcast.

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The two quotations below are by Sasha Shulgin.] "Internally, no one’s an elder. Internally everyone’s kinda around 35 or so." "The people at the industry said, ‘Gee, if you have that kind of imagination that you can look at a structure and guess at another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do.’ And I did." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Earth & Fire Erowid, Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Nick Sand, and Dave Nichols PROGRAM NOTES: Erowid’s LSD Vault LSD and Drug Testing LSD FAQ Part 1 LSD FAQ Part 2 "I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event." –Ralph Metzner "The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture." –Ralph Metzner "The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943." –Ralph Metzner "Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state." –Ralph Metzner "It [the prohibition of psychedelics] puts the industrial civilization in a very unique position. It’s just about the only society in the whole history of humanity that doesn’t have any use for non-ordinary states of consciousness." –Stanislav Grof "We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimention in the psyche. It’s a legitimate dimention in the universal scheme of things. It doesn’t mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously." –Stanislav Grof Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Party of Israel

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Many people are afraid to be free. They’re afraid that if liberty were to seep through the land then they would loose something. The just don’t trust themselves enough to be free." "Prison is a luxury. Unfortunately it is wasted on people who don’t know how to use it." "The objective is to get as far away from The Man as you can." "There’s only one technology of freedom. It’s the human brain." "You’ve got to be smart to be free, and most people don’t want to take the responsibility to be free." "You are as old as the last time you changed your mind." (Anon quoted by Leary?) "Liberty is inexorably intertwined with intelligence." "Every time you hear that word ’security’ watch out, because somebody’s going to take some of your freedom away." "One way to become more intelligent is to migrate to where people are as intelligent or more intelligent than you." "I’m basically pro-drugs. Drugs give you more options. Now I’m not pro any one drug. I’m pro-freedom-of-drugs." "We can only go as far outward as we have gone inward." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Timothy Leary Archives ONLINE

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s me in Hawaii sometime in 1994. "I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it!" –Ralph Abraham "Notice that throughout history the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the blacks, they’ve taken their hits, but the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history have been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people [the Internet] utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb." –Terence McKenna "Chaotic as the Web is, what it is is a controlled psychedelic experience spreading through the populace at the highest levels of intelligentsia." –Terence McKenna "What it [the Internet] will be in the future will depend on what kind of people with whatever motives would actually go there." –Ralph Abraham "I think it’s [the Internet] built into the evolutionary morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos in that it could no more be stopped than mitocondria or societal organization."–Terence McKenna "I think it [the Internet] will supersede us. I don’t know how much monkey meat will be connected to the World Wide Web when the Web is complete. It may shed the monkey meat."–Terence McKenna "The population explosion could end, let’s say, because of the World Wide Web. This is my greatest dream." –Ralph Abraham "Nature is a world wide web. That was the first world wide web." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcasts 19 (Part 1) & 20 (Part 2) “The World Wide Web and the Millennium” a conversation between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham (August 1998)

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by J. Krishnamurti.] "Give your heart and your mind with every thing that you have to find out a way of living differently." "Where there is love, do what you will it will be right action, but never bring conflict to one’s life." "We are talking about a revolution, not physical, but a psychological revolution in which there is no, at the depth, conformity. … Conformity exists when there is comparison. For a mind to be totally free from comparison, that is to observe your whole history which is embedded in you." "What’s your answer to this question that human beings have lived this way for millenia upon millenia, why haven’t they changed? . . . Why don’t you, if you’re at all serious in this matter, why don’t you ask yourself that question? Why am I, a human being who has been through all of this, why haven’t I changed?" "To go into this question of bringing about a total revolution in what is, one must have an extraordinary sense of awareness." "And when observed through history, through our life, all that hope and faith have no meaning at all, because what is important is what we are, actually what we are, not what we think we are, or what we think we should be, but actually what is." "What we are trying in these discussions and talks here is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind. Not accept things as they are." "To understand is to transform what is." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More information about Krishnamurti Krishnamurti Founda.tion of America .J. Krishnamurti Online Books by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s home in Hawaii sometime in 1994. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think what life on islands brings home to us is that Earth itself is an island." "I think the technological principle on which the next century [21st] will operate is a mimicking of nature, solid-state, micro-miniaturized, solar-based, no moving parts, and so forth." "Any theory which has us gathering together in large crowds to chant should look back at the Third Reich before it proceeds too far with its agenda." "America is a cultural bulldozer. It just tramples and destroys everything in its path." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "The evolution of intelligence: Now this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter. "I think it’s time to dust off the word pagan again. The word pagan seems to mean one who loves life. A pagan is someone who loves humanity and would never dream of oppressing humanity with Original Sins and other life sentences, which distract from self-esteem and courage and self-confidence." "We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes, we are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes that didn’t grow up and develop tails and swing around in trees. . . . In many aspects, the human species is an immature species. We haven’t committed ourselves to a final form, and therein, perhaps, lies our great usefulness to the DNA code and the biological wisdom." "If you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve, and grow, and go through the changes, the many changes that are possible, at all costs avoid terminal adulthood." "If you stay in the same place, you tend, obviously, to not be exposed to new challenges, and you’re not going to be under pressure to grow. Although, it is well known though, that if you migrate, if you want to change, if you want to grow, if you want to develop, if you want to reach a higher level, a standard genetic tactic, and a standard human tactic, is to migrate to a new frontier where you have a chance to develop and grow." "People born in the same generation share an unspoken sense of reality throughout the world." "DNA uses juvenilization, mutation and change in the young, only when there’s a challenge that the old way can’t face." "The last fifty years of the twentieth century in this country are simply the history of the baby boom moving like a pig through a python through American culture." "If you find yourself in a generation that is pretty stuffy, migrate! A generation is an island in time. … You’re as old as the people you hang out with." "The intelligent evolutionary tradition has always been intelligent skepticism of authority." "Throughout human history, those in power have been wrong 99% of the time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More about Mary Pinchot Meyer

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] "The good. What is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky. The true. What is it? Trickier, even trickier. The beautiful. What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste." "Beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams." "On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving, the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces, near the levers of the human machine is immense." "When I say psychedelic I have something very specific in mind that a substance or a plant should do. It should not inhibit clarity, in other words not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out or confusion. It shouldn’t interfere with that, and it should transform thought. And it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed." "The biggest danger with psychedelics is that while you are in that open state some moron will mess with you." "Matter is not lacking in magic. Matter is magic." "At bedrock, the universe is more like a DMT flash than it is like an 18th century garden party, as we were previously assured by the practitioners of science." "An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change." "But if I’m right, that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the apple of its eye. … You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose, to add to the complexity. Your enemy, disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness." "The psychedelic community is cleverly invisible. Because our choices in gender expression, fashion, and so on have, by crypto-osmosis, come to dominate the values of the culture, we can no longer tell ourselves from straight people." "Basically, when you smoke DMT what happens is pure confoundment." "DMT does not provide ‘an’ experience which you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some kind of hyperdimensional inflation, instantly. And then you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can’t be downloaded into as low dimensional a language as English." "One toke [of DMT] away is this absolutely reality-dissolving, catagory-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility. And I feel like this is a truth that has to be told." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima(?) PROGRAM NOTES: "There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education." –Timothy Leary "I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made." –Allen Ginsberg [NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.] "To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances." –Terence McKenna "It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone." "Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence." "I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!" "The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream." "The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature." "The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Butterfly Hunter by Klea McKenna Psychedelic Salon Forum at TheGrowReport.com (closed)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] >"Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it’s quite spectacular." "It’s [ayahuasca] essentially ‘brain soup’. There’s nothing in it which doesn’t occur naturally in human neuro-metabolism." "It’s [ayahuasca] the only hallucinogen I know, where if it’s made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn’t done it." "What it [the ayahuasca experience] is is a self-generated, self-controlled immersion in a non-causal, parallel construct of some sort." "This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don’t want to clench, you don’t want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation … most of the time." "In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told." "Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Wrye Sententia PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Wrye Sententia.] "How can we have confidence in what we think we know, in our particular version of reality, in our particular take on the world? … What is real and what is false, and does it really matter if there is a difference." "Mind is built on consciousness. It’s an accumulation of life-experience over time. … Consciousness, for me, is sort of a snapshot in the photo album of the mind." "Cyberpunk, I think, is about altered states of body and altered states of mind." "And the reason I mention the decade of the drug wars [in connection with cyberpunk fiction] is because there are a lot of overlays between altering your mind through drugs and altering your mind through technologies, hard technologies." "Now we can’t protect ourselves from misconceptions. But I think we can keep from evolving them, maybe by taking the doctrine of signs and saying, instead of finding the purpose find the consequence." " ‘Augmented reality’ supplements the physical world, the external world, with additional information." "If we put filters on cameras to enhance the picture, what kinds of filters can we put on our minds to enhance our day-to-day walk?" "If cognitive liberty is the right of each individual to think independently, or autonomously, and to engage in the full spectrum of thought, and to have access to multiple modes of consciousness, if that’s what cognitive liberty is, it’s something that is a political goal." "The cultural machinery never rests." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics

Guest speaker: Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: "Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. No lasting change is effected by politics; it has to come from within." –Nina Graboi "How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies we die. We are that stream." –Robert Forte Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: FREE Mp3 Downloads "Psychedelics, Science, and WTF" (Comment thread with Robert Forte) ">Operation Mockingbird Project MKULTRA Cointelpro 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press David Ray Griffin shows that the official story about 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true. These contradictions show, therefore, that individuals and agencies articulating the official story of 9/11 have made many false statements. Congress and the press clearly should ask which of the contradictory statements are false and why they were made. This book is purely factual, simply laying out the fact that these internal contradictions exist. As such, the book contains no theory. Politicians and journalists who deal with the issues raised herein, therefore, will not be giving credence to some "conspiracy theory" about 9/11. They will simply be carrying out their duty to ask why the official story about 9/11, arguably the most fateful event of our time, is riddled with so many contradictions. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers – who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers – is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 – stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves – and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day p> 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. 1 Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world’s strongest and most technologically sophisticated country? Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad. Contributors include Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Karin Kwiatkowski, John McMurtry, Peter Phillips, Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Ola Tunander.

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "We have the concept of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal city of Plato’s Republic. So casually we might call that Utopian fantasy. Although Plato did try to actually realize it in the political organization of a particular city. He ended up in jail for that effort. Another thing to kind of keep in the back of your mind as we choose whether or not to associate with this particular strand of the human endeavor [utopianism]."–Ralph Abraham "A restoration of the sense of the life of nature could lead to a new society in which heaven and Earth are mediated through human beings. Human beings would be the mediator of the marriage of heaven and Earth to bring about a harmonious relationship at the whole of nature on this Earth, somehow bringing human society into a right relationship between the Earth and the heavens." –Rupert Sheldrake "If you restrict yourself to the realm of the rational, then you only have two choices: utopia or more history. And more history is beginning to look less and less likely." –Terence McKenna "I see all these Christian fundamentalists running around, they also believe in the millennium. And they are the major anti-progressive force in most advanced societies." –Terence McKenna "We have the money, the scientific knowledge, the communications systems and so forth to solve any of our problems, feeding the hungry, curing disease, halting the destruction of the environment. The problem is our minds, that we cannot change our minds as quickly as we can redesign harbors, flatten mountains, cut rain forests, dam rivers, these things pose no problem. Changing our minds is very difficult." –Terence McKenna "We represent the individual atoms that are flowing together to make the transcendental object at the end of time." –Terence McKenna "The historical record does not support the eschaton." –Ralph Abraham Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic art is the public face of the communication device of our new religion." "Man’s attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination. There’s hardly anything that hasn’t been used one time or another, or in one culture or another, to get this [psychedelic] experience." "We don’t care what method people use [to turn on]. We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that can turn you on. But we also insist that no one tell us that we can’t use our sacraments that seem to work for us." "We’re convinced, and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in a meaningless, robot, assembly-line series of activities. They don’t really know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but they’re just pushed off to this assembly-line and off they go." "[By drop out] we mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in to the productive." "You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses." "There’s no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers." "We use this word ‘psychosis’ the way we used the word ‘devil’ or ‘devil-possession’ or ‘witchcraft’ two or three or four or five hundred years ago." "When the time comes, let your kids turn you on. That’s my message to the middle-age, middle-class, whiskey-drinking American suburban family." "So jail to us is not a middle class disgrace. Here I am, a former Harvard professor, I’ve been arrested three times in the last year. Isn’t that disgraceful? To me that just means I’m doing my job. And if I don’t get the establishment a little worried, I wonder if my message is not getting through." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Robert Forte, Ann Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "I think it’s extraordinarily important, again, the context of set and setting that we use these drugs in, if we’re going to succeed in the Psychedelic Renaissance, is something that needs to be underlined again and again." –Robert Forte "I would say that, arguably, the oldest use of psychedelics in our Western culture, let’s say, is the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were a psychedelic drug ceremony that occurred every year for 2,000 years in ancient Greece." –Robert Forte "Using appropriate scientific methodologies and naturalistic observations, [Timothy Leary] showed that psychedelic drugs were safe. He showed their clinical effectiveness. He showed their effects on enhancing creativity." –Robert Forte "Personally, I think my most keen friend amongst the various phenethylamines and alkaloids I’ve worked with and synthesized has been 2CB. To me, it’s a vary favorable, warm, and very comfortable compound." –Sasha Shulgin [MDMA] is the most remarkable insight drug, and is a suburb tool for psychotherapy." –Ann Shulgin "Any drug, including MDMA, the most it can do is open up what’s inside you already." –Ann Shulgin "When I have not had a good psychedelic trip for, let’s say, six months, I begin to feel that I’m beginning to get out of balance. … I think that instead of regarding psychedelics as a drain on the system, frankly, they are my favorite vitamin. That’s the effect they have on me." –Ann Shulgin "And for all I know there are three, or four, or seven lives going on that I don’t remember either awake or asleep, but I feel consciousness is my living relationship with the world." –Sasha Shulgin "My belief is that when you get involved in a psychedelic experience you are in a communication with part of yourself that you’ve given up trying to communicate with or forgotten about communicating with. So it’s not something that’s imposed by a drug. It’s something [that is already there and] the drug allows you to experience and to function with. So I look upon it as being a revealing thing from within myself, rather than a thing imposed upon myself by an external drug." –Sasha Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (2008 Conference) Horizons Conference audio online at the Internet Archive The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics “Ghosts I” from Nine Inch Nails The first 9 tracks from the Ghosts I-IV collection available as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF.

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson REMOVED per REQUEST by alleged copyright holder. Download from the Internet Archive MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson REMOVED per REQUEST by alleged copyright holder. Download from the Internet Archive MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher and Charlie Grob PROGRAM NOTES: In 1963, Dr. Gary Fisher wrote a paper titled Interim report on Research project: An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children (This link will take you to the full report.) Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option [From the Report] We have given treatment to 12 patients. They have ranged in age from 4 years, 10 months to 12 years, 11 months. The average age is 9 years, 10 months. All patients are severely emotionally disturbed and are considered variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism. Nine Children are considered to be childhood schizophrenics, one case of symbiotic, infantile psychosis and one case of manic-depressive psychosis. . . . We have found that the patients who have responded best to the treatment are those who: have speech; are more schizophrenic than autistic; older (10 to 12 yrs.); exhibit more blatant psychotic symptomatology . . . The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feeling and effectual states. The experiences that have produced such painful and frightening affect have been repressed and the feelings produced by such traumas have been denied. Consequently, the individual has built a massive control system wherein all experience is denied and he exists in an isolated, unfeeling condition which renders him helpless and incapacitated. The psychedelic drugs have the potential of breaking this psychotic control which then allows the individual to re-experience his trauma and to again experience his feelings. This phenomena has been amply proven with our work with these severely disturbed children, wherein they return to traumatic experiences and re-live and re-experience them. By working through these painful episodes the patient is then able to rid himself of the horror of them, to reevaluate their significance and be freed of the psychic effects of their repression. This process has been repeatedly observed in our psychotic children. The transcendental experience, often described in the literature, has occurred with 4 of our children. It might be added that we were very surprised to see this experience occur in such disturbed and young children.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "As you well-know, I never wanted any credibility. I’m more concerned with incredibility." "I believe in change. I’m a change agent. I want to keep changing myself. … Change is going to be the norm from now on, and we’re not changing from A to B, we’re changing in an explosive, multi-directional way." "Yeah, there are forces which slow down change. Certainly, you are aware of the fact that every educational institution, from first grade up to the high altitude of The College of Marin, every institution that’s supported by taxpayers and administered by politicians is carefully designed to keep young people serenely and productively stupid." "It’s necessary to have the conservatives, but it’s also necessary to have the mutants, the migrants, and the people with new ideas." "It’s always the intelligent that move. It’s always the intelligent that migrate, because it’s simply smarter to move out than to stay back in the village and quarrel over cobblestone streets and neighborhood territory. Quarreling over territory is lower mammalian and lower primate [behavior], and it’s the smart, the evolutionary people who always move out." "Now they say that there was a counter-culture [in the Sixties]. There was no counter culture. This was a left-wing, partisan statement. There were 100 counter-cultures. There were as many counter-cultures as there were groups of friends and lovers meeting together to look into each others’ eyes and smile. That’s the point of the Sixties, there was not one orthodoxy being replaced by another orthodoxy. … You make your own world. Don’t blame your parents and don’t blame society. Figure it out for yourself." "You would not have had the drug culture movement of the Sixties if you did not have the do-it-yourself psychology movement of the Fifties." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Coalessence Festival (October 3, 4, 5, 2008) For the best drug information available online, be sure to visit Erowid.org. Dr. Timothy Leary in WikiPedia.org The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana

Guest speakers: Nick Sand and Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: [The following quotations are by Nick Sand.] "This process of sharing through language our inherited ability to manipulate first stone tools, then concepts and symbols through language and printing, and then moving into the networking of electronic and virtually instantaneous world wide communication, are three quantum leaps of exponential increase in consciousness." "The continuity of these constructs through which we perceive the world is what we call tradition." "This leap across the gap into the unknown is unavoidable but it must be made. We have no choice. As we are moved to higher levels of evolution change will occur. The constructs and veils of our collective consciousness have to give way." "Purity of intention and purity of product go hand-in-hand to produce a transcendent trip." "For the chemist also, the mere intention toward purity is transformative. A path unto itself. This is Alchemy!" "It is time to become conscious, and existence has given us this valuable tool, LSD, to start this process. I pray that we have the time and courage to make this next leap in evolution. I believe that LSD is one of the gifts given to us by Spirit to do this." "I think that the psychedelics are the midwives of change. They help the change occur." [The following quotations are by Myron Stolaroff.] "Having been working with this for a number of years, and observing a lot of experiences, I’m convinced that what LSD does is simply to open the door to your unconscious." "As one who has abused LSD by trying to overcome difficulties with repeated experiences, I have found that a good meditation practice is an excellent way to keep the gains from experiences alive. … Deepening meditation practice deepens your LSD experience, and having more profound LSD experiences yields instant gains in deepening meditation practice." "When we use LSD appropriately, it can provide a direct, crystal-clear path to the height of spiritual ecstasy. It can provide the direct experience of the godhead, and our government makes this valuable tool illegal." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hofmann’s Potion – Video Documentary Part 1 of 6 RESEARCH REPORT NO. 1 INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDY QUESTIONNAIRE STUDY OF THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25 by Malden Grange Bishop (Dodd, Mead & Company: New York, 1963)

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Every evaluation is an evaluation of the organism as a whole, because the nervous system interlocks with the immunological system, and the endocrine system, and the neuro-muscular system and so on. So every evaluation you make is an evaluation of your whole body, and separating it into mind and body is a fictitious dichotomy. It’s a synergistic process." "What the front brain knows does not control you at all. It just thinks it does." "The idea of reality as a singular noun doesn’t make any sense to me at all any more." "Everybody has their own neurological reality-tunnel, which is why we misunderstand one another so often, and why we misjudge one another so profoundly." "I don’t think there’s a single drug, psychedelic, antibiotic, aspirin, or anything you can name that has the same effect on two people. People have to find out for themselves which drugs are safe for them." "Among the drugs that are currently controversial, that is to say illegal, I would say marijuana is the safest." "I think the dangers of LSD have been overstated to an incredible extent." "Most problems exist because the verbal form you put them in creates the problem." "So what you experience tomorrow, if it entirely fits your beliefs today, it’s because you’re not paying attention." "Every child is intensely curious until they get to school, and the function of school is to kill the curiosity by telling them there is one correct answer, and we know it already, and don’t do any thinking of your own." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcasts Mentioned In This Program The C-Realm with KMO The Cannabis Podcast Network The Dopecast with the Dopefiend Lefty’s Lounge Psychonautica with Max Freakout BB’s Bungalow Pothead’s Coffee Shop Blacklight in the Attic The Entheogenic Evolution with Martin Ball Ape Reality with Tom Barbarlet Biota.org’s Artificial Life Interviews with Tom Barbarlet Shrink Rap Radio with Dr. Dave

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When I say think for yourself, I don’t mean think selfishly for yourself. I mean think independently." "If you’re going to think for yourself, you gotta learn to think clearly." "The person who thinks for herself or himself has to have a sense of humility, and of modesty, and of relativity because you have to realize that I’m thinking for myself, but hopefully you are too, and you’re bound to come out with something a little different from me. So there has to be an ability to listen, compassion, plus the modesty. No matter how smart we are there’s a lot we aren’t going to be able to figure out tonight." "I’m glad we’re laughing together because that’s a key. A sense of humor is the key. … That ability to laugh together certainly goes along with the ability to think together." "Any time you introduce a new technology of thought processing, or of thought communication, you change everything else." [Speaking about the biblical Eve] "I’m really pleased that the first member of my species was a woman who had the courage to stand up on her feet and think for herself." "The idea that any human being should be forced by economics, forced to do work that can be done better by a machine or a computer is totally humiliating to any concept of our human dignity and worth." "Now in the Industrial Age, a good person was someone who was prompt, reliable, dependable, productive, efficient, and replaceable." "It’s always the artists, by the way, I think. The artists, and the entertainers, and the writers, and the musicians whose job it is to prepare society, to become a comfortable way for changes that otherwise would be too frightening." "The point of the 20th century, you can argue, is to get us to accept knowledge, processing, and reality on screens." "To me, a computer is a thought processor." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A case in defense of Salvia divinorum Mythic Imagination Fred Johnson and Michael Meade Johnson sings an introduction for Ari Berk "What Was Said to the Rose" Mythic Journeys (preview trailer)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think disease is (and I don’t want to be held to this entirely, but) largely more linguistic than people think." "The story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living." "Nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power. And it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism. Nothing is unannounced. If you’re paying attention, stuff comes down the pike, first the little waves, then the medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami. But you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected." "What it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always say. But THAT something is coming at you is usually pretty clear, pretty clear." [In response to the possible evolution of artificial intelligence] "It’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclineith toward bodhisattva-hood, then the bodhisattva are on their way. If on the other hand, intelligence doesn’t incline toward bodhisattva-hood, then probably the house-cleaning of all time is on its way. Because when these AIs come to consciousness and realize what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed, indeed." "Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiratualized the world, but we didn’t tame it." "It’s very interesting, how the re-animation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding it. That you could pass through the reductive phase of science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, and still not have a handle on what does it mean to be a being, what does it mean to be a human being, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow we got to this place without answering any of those questions." "Connectivity is the pre-condition for love." "My view of, let’s say, the last thousand years, is that it’s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it, more soul-searching afterwards, more questioning ‘Why? Why did we do that?’ " "People are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estate. But instead they’re invited to fetishize, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest. And all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own ends: The accumulation of capital investment, or the acquisition of land, or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that. Our human-ness is constantly being eroded." "The image I have of our community is, we’re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship." "Sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience." "If psychedelics don’t secure a moral community, then I don’t see what the point of it is. Otherwise we’re just another cult." "It’s good to dry out occasionally. Very occasionally." "It’s always puzzled me how this community has never really understood its roots in American Transcendentalism, or why we never used that hammer against the establishment. Because this sort of secular-mystical-Theosophical brand of thinking is just as American as mom and apple pie, and yet you rarely hear it invoked by our people. And yet it’s where our roots grow deepest, with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorn. I mean, my god, these are the people who put together 19th century America." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think reason can take us only a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination." "There have been many episodes in the history of science where great hope gave way to paranoia." "The [UFO] hysteria has become more explicit and has wandered in first one direction and then another, but if this is a contact it’s the most peculiarly un-contact-like contact it’s possible to imagine." "And this is something I’m going to try and convince the UFO community of, what we drug people have that you don’t is repeatability." "The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity." "Reason, but a willingness to explore the edges has been [my] method. … I have never seen a violation of physics that was not connected somehow with a psychedelic experience." "Not all psychedelics are alike. And this very small family of compounds, called the tryptomine hallucinogens, bear careful examination if we’re seriously interested in this question of exterrestial penetration of the human world." "Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff [psilocybin], Gordon Wasson, Richard Shulties, Albert Hofmann, the giants know that this stuff is animate. This is not a drug. It’s something that’s disguising itself as a drug in order not to spread alarm." "I think that the alien will be so alien that your jaw will hang in the air. And expecting to meet an anthropoid-like alien with an interest in your reproductive machinery and gross industrial capacity is as culture-bound a concept as searching NGC-321 for a good Italian restaurant. It’s absurd on the face of it." "All of human history is the signifier of the presence of the alien. Human history is what happens to an advance animal species when it is inner-penetrated on a scale of a million years by a mind in another dimension." "The flying saucer, the alien, the other is what is sculpting us out of animal organization as we move toward it in time. This is what shamanism is all about. This is what the psychedelic people are discovering as they descend into these trances." "A shaman, and a psychedelic person, and a UFO contactee, is someone who has seen the end. They simply didn’t know what they were looking at, because who knows what the end looks like." "The world is not what it appears to be." "Psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was to the re-defining of astronomy." "I think that the ‘real other’ need not be guarded by the frail efforts of a cults apologists." "Now you may have thought telepathy was you hearing somebody else think. Apparently, that’s not what telepathy is. Telepathy is you seeing what somebody else means. It’s the visual acquisition of meaning rather than the audio acquisition of meaning." "I think that we are on a collision course with a planet-transforming event, and that we have been for a very, very long time. I also believe that it lies below the horizon of rational apprehension at this point in time." "That’s where the frontier of this hyper-technical fantasy is headed, toward a revivification of knowledge systems that were ancient when the pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye." "I think we’re on the brink of a tremendous evolutionary adventure, and that it will involve physically re-designing ourselves." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Conference on Precession & Ancient Knowledge Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 117: Aliens are ‘Real’

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth." –Rupert Sheldrake [Speaking of the past:] "So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways." –Rupert Sheldrake "The basic idea I’m proposing is that the so-called ‘Laws of Nature’ may be more like habits. They may depend on what’s happened before and on how often it’s happened. So there may be a cumulative memory in nature, largely unconscious, which gives rise to habits and things, which accounts for the stability of nature as we know it. But this is not all governed by eternal laws that were there at the Big Bang." –Rupert Sheldrake "The English couldn’t bear this void for long, caused by the suppression of pilgrimage [by the Protestant Reformation], and within a few generations had invented tourism, which is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage." –Rupert Sheldrake "I think a great move forward would happen when astronomy and astrology link up once again." –Rupert Sheldrake "If the Sun has a kind of consciousness, then what about the entire galaxy, with this mysterious center?" –Rupert Sheldrake "What we call the imagination is actually the universal library of what is real, that you couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real, somewhere, sometime. And that to me is very empowering because that’s the truth that you learn at the center of the psychedelic experience that’s so mind boggling that you can’t really return with it, that it’s real." –Terence McKenna "Now it’s time to realize that trying to reason upward from the laws of atomic physics to organism is not going to work. That there are … emergent properties at every level." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Galaxy Map Hints at Fractal Universe

Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Preet Chopra.] "The ’set’ is talking about what the individual who ingests a psychedelic brings to the table in terms of their life experience, their mood, expectations, family history, their personality structure, significant relationships, and their systems of belief. ‘Setting’ accounts for all the other factors that are not internal to the person, the physical environment, location, all sorts of sensory stimuli that might be present during intoxication, and the other participants, particularly a therapist or facilitator." "A term that’s out there among recreational psychedelic users is ‘psychonaut’, which really means, from Greek, ’sailor of the mind’, and I think this is kind of the experience those folks are going for." "In terms of reducing risk, I certainly feel that anybody with certain medical contra indications, and taking prescription drugs, should really avoid taking a psychedelic." [In response to a question about the fact that there was very little dialogue between the study participant and the attending psychatrists:] "Minimal dialogue during the actual experience. And that is based on the work that Grof did, and Panke saying, hey, let this medicine do its own work." "There are some people who believe that by putting on eyeshades and listening to music there is less incidence of sensual kinds of phenomena, and that allows for more of a psychological benefit." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Scientists Who Revived Magic Mushroom Research Hallucinogen Gives Lasting Spiritual Boost "Spiritual" effects of mushrooms last a year Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms’ Transcendent Effect Lingers

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Most people are living in a world they can’t understand. And when people can’t understand something they tend to go for sinister explanations of it." "I prefer to think that, at minimum, there are about 24 conspiracies afoot. . . . I cannot find any proof of any conspiracy that really existed, that was brought into court and convicted, that lasted more than ten years before everybody double-crossed everybody else, and the conspiracy fell apart." "He [John von Newman] realized that most of our perceptions are in the ‘maybe’ mode. They’re not yes or no, they’re not true or false, they’re just ‘maybes’. I think ‘maybe logic’ is probably the greatest invention of the 20th century." "I regard religion and patriotism as the two major mental illnesses afflicting this planet." "The CIA/Tsarist/Nazi Alliance began to me to seem more and more the key to everything that’s been crazy and bizarre and incomprehensible about American foreign policy in the last fifty years. I think the central thinking of the ruling class of the United States is basically within the Tsarist paradigm." "Patriotism is loyalty to a gene pool." "I would say faith is the chief fomenter of war in the whole history of the world. Even in comparatively secular societies it becomes an article of faith that the government is justified. The other side is all wrong. We’re all right. And nobody’s supposed to think about the question at all. That becomes despicable. I believe we should think about the despicable." "It absolutely stops thinking entirely if you’ve got enough faith." " ‘Faith is believing what you know aint so’. That’s why they put lightening rods on their churches." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "What I’ve observed, and I think it’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine." "If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance." "Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. . . . Time is, in fact, speeding up." "No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night." "Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck." "What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use ‘higher dimensional’ in the mathematical sense." Definition of ‘eschaton’: "Eschaton comes from the Greek word ‘echatos’, which just means the end." "The ‘hard swallow’ built into science is this business about the Big Bang. … This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. … Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It’s the limit case for likelihood." "We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event." "Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us." "[The psychedelic experience] is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind." "The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "For as long as I can remember I have been influenced by a role model who has guided me through my navigation of this amazing life. I am a great follower of Socrates." "Corrupting the minds of the young is a difficult job, god knows it’s ill-paid, somebody has to do it." "I do feel this is a wonderful time for change-agents to be alive." "I ended up growing up thinking that everybody was like me, and that is, obviously, a mistake." "As soon as you belong to a system where you’re not known individually, and where you don’t know, individually, the other people, you are by definition depersonalizing yourself, a robot cog of the Big Machine." "This [1946] was the peak of the industrial age, and the aim of psychology was to help people be ‘adjusted’. Remember? If you were well-adjusted that was it. And the worst thing you could say was someone was maladjusted, which means they were thinking for themselves. "I see Ram Das two or three times a year. He comes by my house and we split a bottle of wine or a six-pack and have a joint or two." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: (This program marks our third anniversary of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon!) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Aldous Huxley.] "Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows." "We are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions." "Given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country." "If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government." "The really interesting thing about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered." "Man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature." "You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect." "And then again, in the case of these very strange substances like psilocybin and lysergic acid, I think there is a great deal to be said for doing what William James talked about, which was getting people to realize that their ordinary, sort of common sense view of the world is not the only view. The universe they inhabit is not the only possible universe." NOTE FROM LORENZO: A few minutes after I posted this podcast on the Net, I checked my email and discovered that fellow saloner John H. sent me a link to the following video. After you listen to the talk by Aldous Huxley you may find it rewarding to view the following video and then do a little thinking about what is really going on in the U.S. today while you re-read "Brave New World". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Link mentioned in this podcast: The Center for Cognitive Liberty

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [Quoting a friend] " ‘The apocalypse is already happening.’ The slow apocalypse is unraveling all over the world." –Terence McKenna "If it’s all on automatic, if the world is either undergoing some kind of mass extinction and soul migration into the Elysium realm, then very little has to be done. If, on the other hand, it isn’t on automatic then what is the nature of the political and social world that we should construct for ourselves and our children?" –Terence McKenna "What we have is a future-phobic society that places a great deal of stress on the preservation of a pseudo-tradition called "Family Values" by some people, but it has many names. It’s not an archaic social model, or anything rooted in long-term human organization. It’s basically the 19th century industrial model of the couple with some children fitted into an industrial economy." –Terence McKenna "It seems to me that a whole re-thinking of the notion of freedom has to come, and that it isn’t strictly a matter of more freedom." –Terence McKenna "I think we’re going to have to go back to Plato. Plato did not trust the poets, and the heirs of the poets in our hell bard are Madison Avenue." –Terence McKenna "The interesting ideas have to do with touching the taboos."–Terence McKenna "I’m basically an optimist, but not because I have faith in human institutions. But because I think there is a transcendental attractor that will eventually pull our chestnuts out of the fire." –Terence McKenna "I do believe that history is the proof of the presence of a hyperdimensional something or other, which is acting on ordinary biology." –Terence McKenna "The government follows. It doesn’t lead. We need leadership now, and leadership comes from people, that’s us." –Ralph Abraham "We’re not being led by evil people. We’re being led by jackasses at this point." –Terence McKenna "Pretending that this catastrophe [a coming global ice age] is not probable will almost certainly guarantee that it takes place real soon." -Ralph Abraham "Let’s avoid the disease of denial, because if we don’t admit a problem then there is no solution." –Ralph Abraham "What free trade means is the right to sell crap everywhere. The right to deal Coca Cola in Afghanistan, that’s what free trade is, the right to sell Volvos in Turkmenistan. It’s a bad idea, free trade. We don’t want to make trade easier. We want to make the manufacture of objects and excruciatingly expensive process and the moving of them from one market to another damn near impossible, because what we want is the de-materialization of culture." –Terence McKenna "The Great Leveling, which the Left always called for has in fact taken place in part, and that’s why you have less money. When the leveling took place did you think it was going to kick back into your pocketbook? You haven’t visited Bangladesh recently." –Terence McKenna "The Nation State has become a Fascist tool, all Nation States. What these companies stand for is unbridled gangsterism." –Terence McKenna "What we need to do is dematerialize our interphasing with nature. If we’re going to keep the body then we have to jettison material culture. We cannot have both the body and material culture." –Terence McKenna "Yes, I think that we’re going to a grand destiny, and that the planet will survive this, but consciousness is the flashlight to throw on the path." –Terence McKenna "History is an agitation in biology that proceeds the Eschaton, and it only takes it 25,000 years to rise out of the sea of chaos." –Terence McKenna "Love is what lies at the end of the historical descent into novelty. It has to be." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "The key thing about the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized adult form." "The more power you give to the young of your species, the sooner you give that power to them, the faster your species is going to grow, the farther your gene pool is going to move into the future, and of course it goes without saying, the key to everything, the more growth in the individual will result." "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The smarter you are, the higher you want to be, that’s obvious." "The key to the sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult-hive over-specialized models." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD? (Discover Magazine)

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that any models [of the psychedelic experience] that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical are really, really feeble compared to the experience itself." –Ralph Abraham "It’s the Logos-world that we’ve lost the connection with." –Terence McKenna "I think the difference between a representation of the [psychedelic] state and being in the state itself is the sense of meaning, engagement, and intensity." –Rupert Sheldrake "When language became something acoustically processed it became so bloodless that it became then the willing servant of abstraction, which before had been an exotic and little explored branch of linguistic activity, that suddenly burgeoned into the major concern of a lot of people." –Ralph Abraham "I regard language as some kind of project that is uncompleted as we sit here. . . . Clearly, the whole world is held together by small mouth noises, and it’s only BARELY held together by small mouth noises." –Terence McKenna "If you buy in to the idea that psychedelics somehow are showing you the evolutionary path yet to be followed, then it seems obvious that what it entails is a further completion of the project of language." –Terence McKenna "The intellectuals, unfortunately, at the top of the pyramid are the last to get the news. They’re still pouring over Locke, and Hegel when what’s really happening is Guns n Roses and Nirvana, and I don’t mean the Buddhist state of transcendence. . . . So culture tends to be ruled by the people who are the last to get the news in terms of new technologies which are reshaping the culture." –TerenceMcKenna "Literacy is finished. It was a phase. It’s not to be preserved by anyone other than curators. The rest of us are going to live, obviously, in a culture shaped by new forms of media." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Spirit Matters by Matthew Pallamary

Guest speakers: Allyson & Alex Grey plus Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "Our parents were completely unprepared for the sixties . . . and for our behavior." – Alex Grey "[In drug education as it is practiced today] there is this kind of overriding mis-characterization of drugs, and an exaggeration of the problems that, marijuana especially, gives us." –Alex Grey "And they contradict people’s own observations."–Allyson Grey "There are perils, and we have children and we want to protect them. So drugs can lead to terrible things as well." –Allyson Grey "Basically, you want to establish a bond with your children, and not to come in with total, preconceived notions about how they ought to behave. The idea is to listen and to establish a link of trust so that you can really be there for them, instead of alienating them. So you have to learn about these substances and the possible substances they’re using, so that you can be an informed assist for them." –Alex Grey "If you’ve already been lying to your kids about drugs, then why should they listen to you about anything, including the dangers of meth?" –Alex Grey "If any of you haven’t gone a year and a half without any substances, it’s really a great experience. The altered state of sobriety is something Alex and I recommend." –Allyson Grey "This is what my mother taught me when it came to sex, and I applied it to drugs. Whenever a child asks a question you answer it, and you don’t tell them things they don’t want to know, or they’re not ready to know. But if they ask you something, you tell them honestly." –Allyson Grey "We’re part of an underground society, and that’s a heavy burden to place on a young mind if they’re not ready." –Alex Grey "The Connection Between Mathematics and the Logos" Ralph Abraham tells the story of how he became involved with the psychedelic community and how psychedelic medicines informed his work and that of the generation who developed the personal computer among other achievements. In this trialogue, Ralph poses (and answers) the question,"Have psychedelics had an influence in the evolution of science, mathematics, the computer revolution, computer graphics, and so on?" "We have to admit that mathematics has been reborn, and this rebirth is some kind of outcome of, apparently, the computer revolution and the psychedelic revolution, which took place concurrently, concomitantly, cooperatively in the 1960s." –Ralph Abraham Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Bruce Damer.] "It seems as though the universe is a sort of self-contained thing, never looses any information." "A mechanism called ‘life’ was able to fight against all this crud, and entropy, and fires and brimstone and preserve this little piece of information [DNA] forward, and it’s called reproduction, it’s called life. And that process has outlived the life of most stars. It’s certainly older and tougher and more resilient than all the configuration of the continents." "What if the universe, like Chris Langston’s brain, is gradually booting up an awareness of itself?" "And are you part of that great project that the universe is trying to do, which is to know itself?" "It’s like exposing you to the most powerful drug ever given to primates, which wasn’t alcohol, it’s not nicotine, it’s not MDMA, it’s not LSD. It’s the computer/human interaction." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option (click to) Contact Bruce Damer "A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You" an essay by Bruce Damer

Guest speakers: Ann and Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do." . . .Sasha "Let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug." . . . Ann "I really cannot conceive of a color test that would show positive with 2C-B or 2C-I in urine because the amounts there are so small." . . . Sasha "There are many, many things that are potentially active as psychedelics and have not been assayed, not been tasted. The whole art of taking an unknown compound and beginning to find out what it’s action is going to be sounds naively simple. You just start taking more and more of it until you turn on. But the truth is your turn-on may be a convulsion. It may be sedation. It may be all kinds of other types of action. So you have to sneak up on a new compound. So if you are at all considering looking at these kinds of things, I stress: Be extremely cautious if they have not been taken in humans before. Preliminary animal screening, to me, is worthless." . . . Sasha "The hypnotic trance state is, I believe, fully as good as any drug in opening those doors inside a person’s psyche, and I do believe that instead of risking legal problems, you should go to a good hypnotherapist and find out how to discover yourself that way." . . . Ann "Sasha usually tries to remind people that it isn’t the drug that is giving you an experience, whether it’s one of love or anything else. It is your own psyche, the drugs act as keys to the inner doors. I mean, DMT will definitely open a different door than mescaline, but it’s all still what’s inside you." . . . Ann Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Ann and Sasha Shulgin: Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story Tihkal: The Continuation