Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When the big quake comes, be on the California side!" "So the concept that developed at Harvard, then at Millbrook, and later it seemed to have moved out to other places, was the concept of serial imprinting. That for thousands of years the smartest women and men have known that through manipulating your nervous system by getting high in any way that you can you can suspend the old imprints and have a chance to start a new reality." "Your theory of evolution is the key to your own personal development, or your understanding of what’s happening around you. . . . Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re going to lead." "Evolution is not accidental." "Every time you put your tongue in the mouth of a loved one, or vice versa, you are exchanging more information in one second than all the Libraries of Congress in history." "You either believe in nothing whatsoever than chance, or you’re going to believe in a biological intelligence which knows that she’s doing." "The point here is, if you’re going to feel ’synced’ you’ve got to be in a place where there are people who share your reality." "The way evolution works is this, evolution never tries to change grown ups. . . . Look in the dictionary for the word ‘adult’. You’ll find the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘to grow’." "We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes." "What happened in the 1960s was this, the time had come to avoid terminal adulthood. . . . A generation of young people simply refused to buy the adult image, the adult model." "One of the messages that I have right now, the message is this: I don’t advocate anything, but I urge you to think it over. I urge you at all costs to avoid terminal adulthood." "When you look at a map that has got those hours, those meridians, those aren’t hours, those are centuries." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Terence McKenna.] "One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively." "The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension." "So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It’s not my friend. It’s a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions." "Culturally defined reality is some kind of intelligence test, and those who are joining are failing the test." "The imagination is a dimension of non-local information." "And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings." "And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That’s how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience." "What they [psychedelics] cause is what I’m advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we’re practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction." "What is happening, I think, it’s really bigger than psychedelics, it’s bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That’s what’s happening." "This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time." "The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. . . . Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That’s how he can do his magic." "There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness." "There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this." "The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It’s just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we hear a talk given at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland in March of 2008. The speaker is the one and only Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, who has been a legendary figure in the psychedelic world since the early 1960s. Here is part of what Wikipedia has to say about Mountain Girl: Carolyn Adams, (born May 6, 1946),[1] later known as Mountain Girl and Carolyn Garcia, was a Merry Prankster and the wife of Jerry Garcia. After growing up near Poughkeepsie, New York, Adams met Neal Cassady in 1964; who introduced her to Kesey and his friends, one of whom gave her the name "Mountain Girl". Cassady took her to La Honda, Ken Kesey’s base of operations, where she quickly joined the inner circle of Pranksters and was romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter by him named Sunshine.[2] The Grateful Dead song "Here Comes Sunshine" may or may not be an allusion to Adams’ and Kesey’s daughter (the Dead were fond of lyrics having double, often personal meanings). Before actually marrying in 1981, Jerry Garcia and Adams had two daughters.[1] Garcia and Mountain Girl ultimately divorced in 1994,[1] however, they remained personal friends right up until Garcia’s death a few months later. In her talk, Mountain Girl told many stories linking her time with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to the evolution of the Grateful Dead and her life with Gerry Garcia and the rest of the band. This is perhaps one of the best encapsulations of The Sixties you will hear. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Daniel Pinchbeck at the Playalogue he led on August 29, 2007 at the Burning Man Festival. This Playalogue was held in the big yurt at the PodCluster in Black Rock City.] "I think there is a lot of evidence that suggests we’re in this kind of very critical sort of evolutionary window for the human species." "I really do feel that one of the critical things that is happening at Burning Man is a kind of conscious and subconscious interrogation of gender and sexuality." "What we have to consider is that if sexuality is this infinite spectrum, and everybody is highly unique in their sexuality, then to just have a social construct of monogamy is going to lead to a lot of anger, and frustration, and hostility." "In a lot of non-Western tribal cultures there is a kind of like a basic happiness that people have. Our culture is all about the pursuit of happiness, but at the core there’s a basic, kind of, general sense of insatiability and unhappiness." "I don’t think that the nuclear family is the natural model, or good model, for raising a child. I think, actually, the tribal community is the proper model." "And I think one question is really like is there a fixed human nature. And if there isn’t a fixed human nature, which I think is quite possible, then we can kind of reconfigure relationship patterns, relationship models, in almost any way." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We know that typically the real changes in human nature, the changes in human politics and economics and society, are brought about by two things: By people who have a map or a vision or a model of where we’re going to go, these are the philosophers. And then the technicians, the people who get together the printing presses, or the compasses, or the high technology that can take us where we want to go." "Viewed in the 1930s, when Einstein came to America, he was considered as far out as a crack dealer." "Heisenberg taught us to take the universe very personally … in both senses of the word." "So who? Who’s gonna prepare a civilization of factory workers and farmers and people who haven’t even got the Model T Ford yet? Who’s gonna prepare them for an Einsteinian, relativistic, quantum physical, ever-changing, probabilistic universe? Who? Well you know who you can count on at every time in human history when we had to make a big philosophic lurch forward. Who always came to the front and saved the day and made us feel happy and comfortable with a new future? I’m talking about those friends of ours who have always been around when we needed them, the musicians, and the artists, and the poets, and the writers, and the bards, and the performers, and the storytellers, and, OK, the minstrels, the rock n’ rollers. Right! The actors, the script writers." "The whole 20th Century, to me, is the story of how artists and writers prepared us to be comfortable in a quantum-physical world." "We’re talking about a generation of people who, since the time they were born, have been inundate by data, electronic data. To the Baby Boomers and subsequent generations electronic data is the ocean they swim in." "Of course, everybody got down on the poor doctor [Benjamin Spock]. He was blamed for the excesses of the sixties, ha ha. I was glad to have him get blamed otherwise I would have gotten blamed." "The psychedelic pudding hit the fan in the sixties when the Spock kids hit high school and college, and they wanted a gourmet education, and they wanted connoisseur sex. … Gee, we said you’re the best, but we didn’t realize that you guys would take us seriously." "The Cyber Society is a society made up of individuals who think for themselves, linked up with other individuals who think for themselves." "The Sixties were the adolescence of the Baby Boom." Following the talk by Dr. Leary I play a short personal message from Eldrige Cleaver to Timothy Leary that was recorded on January 7, 1995. The message Cleaver was so intensely trying to convey to his friend, Tim Leary, was that he believed it was imperative that the U.S. elect a woman president in the year 2000. Unfortunately, neither of these two important historical figures are alive today, and thus we can only speculate as to what they would think about the state of affairs in 2008. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option KMO’S C-Realm Podcasts KMO’S Personal Blog The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference "Flashbacks: An Autobiography"by Timothy Leary "The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time" by Hunter S. Thompson And by William Gibson: Neuromancer Mona Lisa Overdrive Count Zero

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Matt Pallamary NEW! ... Two of Matt Pallamary's books are now available on Kindle: Spirit Matters ... Kindle Edition Land Without Evil ...

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Alicia Danforth, who is Dr. Charles Grob’s research assistant, leads a Playalogue at the 2007 Burning Man Festival. In this wide-ranging group conversation, Alicia skillfully guided our eclectic audience through the intricacies of FDA-approved psychedelic research. "I’m hoping to spark ideas in other people’s minds about what can be done to get a foothold in advancing psychedelic research." –Alicia Danforth "I tend to think of music [in a therapeutic psychedelic session] as a little boat you can hop on when you’re journeying and ride to wherever you need to go." –Alicia Danforth. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: Ecstasy : The Complete Guide : A Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits of MDMA by Julie Holland, M.D.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic drugs are to the human mind today what the discovery of the microscope was to medicine and biological science three or four hundred years ago. Psychedelic drugs expand and speed up consciousness. They are going to bring about a tremendous change in our society, in our view of man and our way of life in the future." "When you take LSD you do go on a trip. It’s a voyage. It’s the most ancient voyage that man has ever known, the one beyond your mind and your current tribal situation into the incredible possibilities which lie inside. So it’s a fair statement to say an LSD voyage is a trip." "A chemical age is going to have a chemical sacrament." "Every great breakthrough in religion and science has always involved a new method of bringing into consciousness what you couldn’t see before, the telescope, the microscope. And you remember, the fellow that developed the telescope back in Florence a few hundred years ago got into the same sort of trouble with society that we’re in today. Any new instrument which opens up consciousness threatens the establishment." "It takes a long time to learn to use LSD. It’s no shortcut. It’s no instant mysticism. It’s no instant psychoanalysis. It’s tough, hard work." "Stay away from it unless you’re willing to take LSD in a state of grace for serious and important purposes." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Erik Davis.] "The imagination is a key, and pivotal interface, between human beings and the natural world." "Any kind of restorative, sustainable renewal of our planet has to exist on the imaginal realm as well as the realm of technical solutions, political developments, and technological fixes. It’s a multi-dimensional problem." "So the imagination is really the core, the source, the matrix of our multi-dimensional experience." "The creative imagination functions in a different way than religious beliefs allow us to engage with." "If we’re into integration now, with science and technology, that means that we can’t avoid that skeptical voice [of scientific, existential materialism]. We have engage and learn to integrate that skeptical voice as well. [To think] it’s our job to just say ‘No. Those science people they don’t understand. They’re locked in rationality. It’s actually this mystical world, this magical world’, is a profound failure, in my opinion, of our role. And the more we go into loosy-goosy mystic New Age stuff as a concretized belief system, rather than as an open, playful world that adds richness to our lives the way that poetry does, or the way that religious imagery does, drawing us to those higher realms but holding them lightly so that we can still engage a skeptical materialist, for me, that’s what integration means." "The new paradigm is that there’s not a paradigm." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Erik Davis’ Web Site: Techgnosis

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "I’m very pleased … to see how much of the youth culture has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue. Because it really means that after 20, 30 years of unstinting distortion and misrepresentation by the media and some of the powers that be, that nevertheless the curiosity is intact, the opportunity is available, and people have not been fooled by the effort to denigrate, dumb-down, sideline, water down, sell out, whitewash and screw over the idea that psychedelic plants are an excellent and necessary part of any program of spiritual self-exploration." "Our evolutionary heritage lies in the use of psychedelics. It was in all probability that psychedelics called forth our humanness." "For all of its capacity to razzle dazzle, science has some serious drawbacks, some serious limitations that psychedelic experiences make more starkly evident, I think, simply because psychedelic people then compare the full spectrum of their experience to the paradigm they’re being offered." "Nature is self-similar across scale." "We can extrapolate towards cosmic processes by thinking about our own lives." "In other words, we represent the quintessential gathering together of novelty. We are more than mere matter. We are more than mere biology. We are more than mere aboriginal culture. We are all of those things plus we are our skin of technical connections." "The Big Bang is completely improbable, utterly improbable. It is the most improbable of all improbabilities. So just remember that when the fascism of science is telling you that astrologers don’t know what they’re talking about, and somebody else doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I mean, science has built a house of cards on worse than sand, quicksand!" "I’m willing to say I’m convinced that history is the annunciation of the nearby presence of a transformational event. . . . History is what happens when an animal species has its genome distorted by the nearby presence of a transcendental object." "Love, in the heart of a monkey, which is what we are, is an effort to image this transcendental thing at the end of time. To love is to open to the presence of the Other, and that’s a very, very profound boundary dissolution." "Ultimately at death, I think probably the only way you can meet death fully in command of your faculties is to love it, to surrender to it." "What it might take you forty years to do through a process of rational analysis, and psychotherapy, and deconstruction, and so on and so forth, it can happen literally overnight on a sufficiently alarming dose of a psychedelic substance." "One of the great things about psychedelics that is so corrosive to capitalistic values is that psychedelics show you that the best stuff is in your own head, better than walking down Madison Avenue looking in the windows is sitting in your shabby apartment on six dried grams [of psilocybin mushrooms] looking in the windows." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "You have to go out of your mind to use your head." "Now, in taking this eccentric position, of taking the brain seriously, you run the risk of getting out of touch with your professional colloquies." "Now from the standpoint of the strategy of the genetic material, every living species is simply a creative solution to a packaging problem." "This [early imprinting of young ducklings on orange basketballs instead of mother ducks] is both funny and tragic, because it raises the question, in the case of the human being, what accidental orange basketball have you and I been exposed to early in life?" "At times it seems to us that one of the functions of the mind is to rationalize and protect an accidental early imprint." "We suggest that psychedelic drugs may be seen as chemical agents which temporarily suspend your old imprints." "The thing which excites us these days is the corollary concept of psychedelic RE-imprinting." "I think that anyone who doesn’t experience, at some moment during their psychedelic sessions, and intense awe-full fear has been cheated by their psychiatrist or their bootlegger." "LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever known to man." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are from a conversation held in September 1991.] Terence McKenna: "But in fact it seems that the ouroboros has taken its tail in its mouth and these two concerns psychedelics and computers] are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge." Terence McKenna: "The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic." Terence McKenna: "Yes, I mean television certainly has an influence on the mass mind, but on the creative, cutting-edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture, but if you watch television it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television." Terence McKenna: "As a global society, possessing DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting wooly mastedons and that sort of thing, but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded." Terence McKenna: "Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward ‘outing’ the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this, as are psychedelic drugs." Terence McKenna: "High definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point on-the-ropes linear uniform unitarians, because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography. And it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within society." Ralph Abraham (in 1991): "Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation but because it’s not interactive. Interactive computer graphic games where you can watch the soap opera but also play with it to change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema." Terence McKenna: "So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: These comments were recorded on September 3, 1991, and the opinions expressed by the participants in this podcast may have changed in subsequent years.] Rupert Sheldrake: "If it were just one (crop circle), the hoax theory would be very plausible, but a phenomenon over such a long time period, now with ones turning up in other parts of the world as well, increasing levels – 400 of them last year [1990] in different parts of Britton, this requires quite a large effort." Rupert Sheldrake: "The alien theory [about the formation of crop circles] is a very rare one among the theories encountered. The one I think is most popular among people who take seriously the phenomenon and think that the hoax theory is not the only possible explanation is that the spirit of the land itself, or Earth mysteries long embedded in these ancient megalithic monuments are sort of coming back to life again and somehow are being reactivated in Brittan’s hour of need, or that Gaia or the Gaian intelligence or the Gaian mind itself is involved in some ongoing dialogue or communication which principally has the effect, year by year, of attracting more and more attention. And the message year by year seems to be ‘Watch This Space’." Ralph Abraham: "I think we should bet on the red and we should bet on the black. Probably you are right. Probably it’s a hoax. In case it’s a hoax, probably military, all right. But just as the fanatics of this phenomenon can’t dis the hoaxes theory to zero, neither can we reduce the non-hoax theory to zero, therefore, we have to keep our eyes open in case it actually begins to say some understandable intelligence to us. We can’t dismiss it completely." Rupert Sheldrake: "I think this is the only rational position to adopt, namely to treat it as a natural historical phenomena, or at least a phenomenon. Let’s just say a phenomenon, to investigate it emphatically, I think, is Bacon Ian science." Terence McKenna: "I’m claiming that orthodoxy is defending itself against magic. It’s a war between reason and magic. … It’s a desperate struggle between rational orthodoxy and magic." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Crop Circle Links 1. Why real crop circles cannot be hoaxed:http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html 2. http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/ Her photos can be found here: http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/photos/ 3. Andreas Mueller’s Interview with African Shaman on Crop Formations http://www.kornkreise-forschung.de/textCredoMutwa.htm 4. Interactive site: http://www.cropcircle-archive.com/archive/index.php?language=en 5. http://swirlednews.com/index.asp 6. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/index2.html Crop Circle Videos Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 1 (This link was broken the last time it was tested.) Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 2 http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7441333249846634309&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Unsigned Circles http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=2802311361701974260&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Alien Signs http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5043378172083766362&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Star Dreams – The Crop Circle Phenomena http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=966639197455233571&q=crop+circle&hl=en Julia Set http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6223143790883248313&q=crop+circle&hl=en Book mentioned in this podcast Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults by : Jacques Valle’e Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 118: 21st Century Koans

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: Terence McKenna: "In the absence of cannabis the dream life seems to become much richer. This causes me to sort of form a theory, just for my own edification, that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. … And if you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication." Terence McKenna: "And what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas." Terence McKenna: "Alcohol, on the other hand, is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits. What a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead." Terence McKenna: "For the 19th century, and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. … For the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology." Terence McKenna: "To my mind, the whole of Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish." Terence McKenna: "Hashish, cannabis, has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenic field you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world." Terence McKenna: "There’s a deeper issue which is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude." Ralph Abraham: "It [cannabis] is medicine for cultural evolution." Terence McKenna: "If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity." Terence McKenna: "It can turn you into a stupor, sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it, and I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it." Terence McKenna: "We [the U.S.A.] represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans." Terence McKenna: "Governments have always been, and continue to this day to be, the major purveyor of drugs, worldwide." Terence McKenna: "The day the Russians left [Afghanistan], the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels." 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.] "Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured." "The precondition for creativity is, I think, is disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos." "The prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman." "This really is the bridge back to the archaic, shamanic function of the artist, permission to explore the irrational." "And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human beings, first in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone, within 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us and points us toward the kind of extra-planetary mega-civilization that we can feel operating on our own present like a kind of great attractor." "This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal, is the production and condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the human animal is language. … Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude with anything else going on on this planet." "Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language." "Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys. It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream." "The glory of the human animal is cognitive activity, song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent." "The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in fifteen or twenty thousand years." "The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act." "Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness." "Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. … If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found." "Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics." "The civilization that was created out of the collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: Today’s program features the second tape in a series of trialogue tapes that were recorded in September 1991 at a private recording session with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna. It begins with a wrap-up of their previous conversation, titled "Grass Roots Science". And then they begin with a new topic, introduced by Terence McKenna and his plan for "Saving the World". [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "If mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago." "As I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin, the one I come back to again and again as being central to any social program which would create a sane and caring future for our children and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment is the problem of over-population. All other social problems can be seen as being driven by the excess of human population on the Earth." "First of all, let’s just take it at face value: Each woman should bear only one natural child. Now what would be the demographic consequences of this? Startlingly, within fifty years the population of the Earth would be cut in half, without war, epidemic, forced migration, government programs of sterilization, and so forth and so on." "A child born to a woman in a high-tech, industrial society, in the upper class of that society, will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often told." "Notice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman, ‘How would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero? All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.’ " "I don’t think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future." . . . and from there, Ralph and Rupert point out a few of the problems with Terence’s plan and go on to propose yet another clever solution for saving the world. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Rupert Sheldrake: "Especially in Brittan, this declining confidence in science, and this declining funding of science has let to a reduction of scientific morale. Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students. . . . It looks as if the great golden days, the golden age of the sixties and seventies of endless expansion, is over, perhaps forever." Rupert Sheldrake: "So morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap, indeed, almost free in some cases. And much of the leading research has been done by students as projects. And this has made it clear to me that students, who do tens of thousands of projects around the world are quite capable of doing leading-edge research. They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance." Terence McKenna: "I think that science has not only moved from the easy problems to the hard problems, in its evolution over the past thousand years, it’s also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems." Terence McKenna: "Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature. Science is done to make money on a vast scale." Terence McKenna: "I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military/industrial complex." Terence McKenna: "And I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified scientific data. That’s an obscene concept." Rupert Sheldrake: "The vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999% at least, which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree, about the nature of consciousness, the range of imagination, and the powers of the human mind, etc. is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact, every effort is made to suppress it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Grass Roots Science Report mentioned in this podcast: An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Essentially, today’s podcast is a series of short notes to myself, little things that I don’t want to forget" [The following quotes are by Lorenzo] "As my Mexican friends sometimes say, ‘If you don’t change your direction, you are going to wind up where you’re heading.’ " " My problem, I discovered, was that there had been far too much DOING in my life and not nearly enough BE-ing." "I didn’t own my stuff. It owned me. … I now finally understand that nothing I possess is more precious to me than the opportunity to be able to appreciate a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day." "When I stopped trying to save the world I also stopped trying to save myself . .. and THAT was a big mistake." "Perhaps we all will have to first revolutionize our own lives, and then, on the foundations of our individual revolutions, will a new global consciousness arise." "It seems to me that our beliefs are what ultimately shape our personalities. So who OWNS those beliefs? If I do, then I am a freethinker, in charge of my own destiny. But if my beliefs own me, well, then the institutions that formulate and promulgate those beliefs, they own me." "I have finally come to grok the fact that the purpose of my life is not to reach a destination. Nor is my life a journey. No, for me at least, the purpose of life is to dance. A dance with no beginning and no end, just an endless dance." "Here and now. Here and now. All else is but memory and fantasy." TERENCE McKENNA QUOTES FROM THIS PODCAST: [The following quotes are by Terence McKenna] "People don’t take enough [psychedelics], that’s all." "When we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing." "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." "The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal." "These boundry-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." "Get it straight. This is about an experience. Not my experience, your experience. This is about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard." "This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution, you are a free and indipendent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MUSIC USED IN THIS PODCAST: "Miss About You" (with vocals by Sharon), "Counting Days", "Long Distance" LiquidAlchemy with Queerninja … [email protected] "Velvet Apple" the sun blindness "Anything Can Happen" Catal Huyuk Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert "the Zahir" by Paulo Coelho

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [Note: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "These are the two things we don’t have: As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves." "We have not, in this culture, awakened to the depths of the crisis that surrounds us." "Our culture is in trouble. Not trouble! We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways, horror beyond your wildest imagination, or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination." "The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs but plants. It’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way." "When you talk about Gaia, it’s only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women. It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals." "We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I’m sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing, basically, to do enough hallucinogens in the diet." "It is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally. Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in." "Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behavior are acceptable." "There are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell. One of the other." "What we deny, as a culture, as a culture of materialist positivist reductionists, it the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature." "I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence. But that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. V.S. Ramachandran PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes are by V.S. Ramachandran.] "Let’s think about what the standard explanations were [before the late 1990s] for synesthesia. The most common explanation, which we used to hear until about five or ten years ago was, ‘Oh they’re just crazy, they’re nuts,’ because it doesn’t make any sense. And this is a common reaction in science. If it doesn’t make any sense you brush it under the carpet." "It turns out that synesthesia is more common among acid users, but that to me makes it more interesting, not less interesting." "You cannot solve one mystery in science by using another mystery." "Synesthesia my even hold the key for understanding the emergence of language and abstract thought." "It turns out that it [synesthesia] is much more common among artists, poets, and novelists." "One of the things you know as a physician is that when you think something is crazy it usually means you’re not smart enough to figure it out." "Art is not about copying. It’s about distortion and exaggeration, but you cannot randomly distort an image and call it art." "There is only one pattern of neural activity that can exist at one time, and it will destroy any other competing patterns of neural activity. This means there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes are by Terence McKenna] "Culture denies experience." "We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to its surface." "We’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason, and science, and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm." "We’re in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it." "All the boundaries we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved [when using psychedelics]. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. Government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them." "The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the slave-driven agricultural projects, in the corporate office, whatever it is." "Madness, basically, up until the level of physical violence, means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore there is something wrong with you." "I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology." "History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing. We have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years." "What psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise. Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas." "The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego." "The key, on one level, to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding. That’s where it begins." "We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort. . . . You don’t get serial killers in the chipmunk population." "What the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable." "It seems to me that culture, at least this culture, is a shabby lie." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:40 – Mark Pesce: "I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t to escape into another dimension but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can’t always see because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us." 06:29 – Mark Pesce: "Because where we’re going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry." 15:13 – Terence McKenna:"Obviously, from the first time I had a major [psychedelic] trip on it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications." 17:09 – Terence McKenna:"Whatever it was that psychedelics were doing, it was taking anybody’s notion of reality, anybody’s mindset, and radically extending it. And if they found that comfortable they were ecstatic. And if they found it horrifying they were traumatized. But the common thread was, takes ordinary minds, makes them bigger, stranger, more grotesque, less predictable, more bizarre." 24:22 – Terence McKenna: "Our ideologies are probably lethal, obviously lethal I would say. But they are, fortunately, a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving." 27:16 – Terence McKenna: "Occasionally you flop on the seamy side. It gives a literary quality to life that’s lacking among the tight-assed." 32:24 – Terence McKenna: "If anything undoes us this will be it, that our language has failed, that we misread each other’s intent, that we could not understand each other. So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history. I mean, history is the story of languages that failed, and when language grows perfect history will end." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Mark Pesce.] 11:35: "The singularity is how Terence’s idea of the Eschaton is working its way now into popular cultures through scientists." 16:42: "There are periods of time when your DNA isn’t doing anything at all, when it’s quiescent. And at that time, when it’s not interacting with the world around it, it can enter what physicists call superposition. When it’s not interacting it can enter a quantum state. That quantum state says that it can be in this universe, and this universe, and this universe, and this universe. Well, it can be in a lot of different universes. In fact, it can be in ten with five hundred zeros following it, possible universes." 30:33: "The ability for you to react to your environment from your genetic code verses being able to react to your environment because you can communicate using language is probably at least ten million to one times faster. That means at the same time we acquired the ability to speak everything about us in terms of humanity, and human culture, and human thought, and human understanding suddenly went ten million times faster." 47:22: [talking about nanotechnology] "The world we’re going to, the entire physical world, can now start to look a lot more like Legos that get snapped together at will. And if you think about the difference between building a castle out of sand and building a castle out of Legos, you’re starting to understand the difference that we’re about to be presented with in the material world. So at the atomic scale level of the material world is about to become linguistically pliable. This is an ability we have never had before." 52:01: "It’s my belief, and I want you to prove me right, that the psychedelic community represents the authentic search for a middle path, because what’s happening in the psychedelic experience is that there’s a stretching of being. There’s a stretching of being that allows new forms of language and new ideas to enter. We all understand this intuitively because we come back from a psychedelic experience with some expanded sense of awareness, that we’ve been opened up to an understanding we didn’t have before." 54:08: "You can argue about the specifics of when it’s going to happen, but what you can’t argue about is that there are three waves. We can take a look at the shape of these three waves and the fact that these three waves seem to be concrescening on a single point, and that this single point is where Homo sapiens is going to be left behind, and we’re going to see the emergence of a new species." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] 04:33 "What I think a psychedelic society, what that notion means or implies to me in terms of ideology, is the idea of creating a society which always lives in the light of the mystery of being. In other words, that solutions should be displaced from the central role that they have had in social organization. And mysteries, irreducible mysteries, should be put in their place." 06:44 "Much of the problem of the modern dilemma is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected. . . . You see, if you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite." 11:59 "Experience must be made primary. The language of the self must be made primary." 12:14 "What I’m advocating is that we each take responsibility for the cultural transformation by realizing it is not something which will be disseminated from the top down. It is something which each of us can contribute to by attempting to live as far into the future as possible." 15:12 "A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks." 19:07 "We need to realize that there is a gene-swarm, not a set of species on the Earth, that half the time when you think you are thinking you are actually listening." 29:44 "I think the engineering mentality, which will [???] to change man into his machines, will have to be counter-poised by the psychedelic, Earth-oriented, imagination oriented side of things, which will create then the potential for the spiritual marriage that will be the alchemical perfection of a new form of humanity." 31:14 "You claim this higher level of freedom by the simple act of applying attention to being." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option (click for) The art of Denis Numkena Entheogens and the Future of Religion Sacred Symbols of the Dogon: The Key to Advanced Science in the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs The Science of the Dogon: Decoding the African Mystery Tradition

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] 11:53 "There’s no question but what the human imagination has taken to itself so much power that it no longer can remain on the surface of the planet. We sort of have to part company with the planet for our own good and for its [own good]." 14:15 "I think that the old evolutionary model, which was that evolution was the struggle of the fittest, and the devil take the hindmost, is pretty much discredited. And we now understand that what is maximized in evolution is not the sharpness of the fang or the length of the claw, but the ability to cooperate with other species, harmoniously. That’s what’s being maximized. … Humans are a perverse lot, and I suppose what one can reasonably hope for is incremental advances toward the good." 16:02 Terence begins talking about Ketamine. [NOTE: He is talking about injecting Ketamine, NOT snorting it, which is a more recent phenomenon.] 17:19 "It’s [Ketamine] a troubling psychedelic, because a lot of people, I think, are doing it who have never done any other, and I think that would be very, very misleading." 19:09 "On Ketamine your definitions dissolve so completely that it’s a major accomplishment to realize that you’re a human being on a drug." 22:39 [Regarding synthetic vs. natural substances] "I’ve always taken the position that it was important that the psychedelic have a relationship to a plant." 25:31 "I am Oss and my brother is Oeric. … When we wrote that, that was straight transcription. That’s what the mushroom said." [Referring to their underground classic, "Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide". 26:56 "The mushroom has this peculiar ability to invoke, or allow, or trigger a voice in the head, this logos-like phenomenon of information unrolling in your head. No other drug that I’m familiar with does that consistently." 37:52 "What freedom means is you find out how good you are by discovering what you do when you have the power to destroy yourself, and we as a species are in that position and no one can do it but us. And if we do not destroy ourselves, then very obviously the intellectual tools that we have taken in hand are the tools which will send us out to the stars." 49:57 "Science did work better in the 19th century than it’s working in the 20th because reality is slowly slipping through its fingers." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:11Terence McKenna:"My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it’s an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances." 09:42 Terence McKenna: "This is a think-along lecture, by-the-way, and you’re free to think-along at any point that you feel so moved to do so." 11:53 Terence begins telling the story of how the Timewave Zero hypothesis came to him during a long meditation on the King Wen sequence of the I Ching. 20:36 Terence McKenna: "We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration." 27:33 Terence McKenna: "But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it." 32:29 Terence McKenna: "We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don’t matter. And that now doesn’t matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human." 41:50 Terence McKenna: "This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies." 35:41 Terence McKenna: "And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Seabrook Leaf Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:25 Lorenzo introduces Seabrook Leaf who then leads a playalogue titled "The Establishment of a Tribal Land Base" during the 2007 Burning Man festival. 06:44 Seabrook begins his rap. (See YouTube video beginning at 1:30) 11:30 Anonymous: "The coercive forces of control all work to keep people apart and separate, and so tribe is the healing medicine for that." 12:05Anonymous: "You can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your family." 14:47 Seabrook Leaf: "I think it’s clear that working together like we do at Burning Man is going to be a crucial part of surviving the shift. . . . And I think this is the crucial part of this kind of tribalism, whether it’s putting up a yurt or raising food in a garden, we’re going to have to get back to the basics." 16:59 Dale Pendell begins telling about a cooperative community on San Juan Ridge he was a part of in the 60s. 18:57 Dale Pendell begins telling about the May Day and Halloween festivals that the San Juan Ridge community created. 22:35 Anonymous: "We spend most of our time in a cyber-tribe, and I still feel connected. I feel like maybe the future of tribalism is going to reach beyond geographical locations, because we can’t really afford to travel everywhere and meet all these different people." 29:25 Anonymous: "How can we expand our acceptance of people as a whole, but recognize the reality of what we can manage in our day-to-day resources and things we have to do to provide for our community?" 36:22 Anonymous: "If it doesn’t grow out of the ground it came out of a mine." 40:53 Anonymous: "Bring a love-consciousness, always, as the focus of us being awake now. It has never been more urgent." 46:37 La: "And it just came up so big for me that we have to eliminate fear as our motivator. We have to use what we see around us clue us in, but not operate out of that distress. It’s so tricky, slippery." 49:39 Anonymous: "So in the best of situations you can pick an environment that has what you imagine to be the least potential for social corruption, but at the same time there’s a very big wild card that comes with saying ‘Let’s plant this here but we don’t know what all the rest of our neighbors are going to be doing in twenty years." 53:51 Dale Pendell: "It’s wonderful for a child to know where they came from, what their tribe is, and they have a place to come back to if what they rebelled against turns out to be better than they thought it was." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:11 Ralph begins with "Fractals on my mind, an epic in four parts." . . . Part one, the sandy beach. 13:54 Ralph Abraham: "It’s the fractal boundary, the sandy beach, which destroys determinism." 16:58 Ralph Abraham: "At the age of one, or two, or three, or something, when speech is beginning, what was going on before that? Presumably, that was what everyone was doing before speech came altogether if there ever was such a time. And that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced when the linguistic phase arrives." 23:36 Ralph begins his description of "a mathematical model for monogamy". 26:04 Ralph Abraham: "I’m not saying that order is always bad, but cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced. I wouldn’t elevate chaos above cosmos or vice versa, but systems, probably to be healthy, they need a certain balance." 33:08 Rupert Sheldrake: "Catholicism, in a sense, is a kind of polytheism. You have all the angels. You have all the saints. When you go into a cathedral there’s all those side chapels and shrines. It’s just like a Hindu temple." 40:34 Terence McKenna: "The form that I’ve probably fallen under the sway of is some kind of neo-Platonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypothesizations that lead into the One." 1:12:58 Ralph Abraham: "Science is not mathematical, and mathematics is not science. Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people. Mathematics is an inborn ability that everybody has, like breathing." 1:25:10 Terence McKenna: "Everyone knows that cannabis is trivial and harmless, but that doesn’t mean that we’re on the brink of changing the social taboos about it. It feels to me as though they will never change." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 10:50 Terence McKenna: "I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty, and the transcendental object is the novelty of novelty. . . . a tiny thing which has everything enfolded within it. And that means you’re in another dimension, where all points in this universe have been collapsed into co-tangency." 16:56 Terence McKenna: "Biology has a complete four dimensional, five dimensional map of the planet’s history."Ralph Abraham: "What the hell, the comet’s on its way. Let’s get it on." Terence McKenna: "The planet says, the comet’s on the way. Lets get these monkeys moving towards the production of sufficient complexity that when this impact event occurs it will have a transcendental rather than simply an …" Ralph Abraham: "Have an opportunity to escape into another dimension." Terence McKenna: "Yes." 21:02 Terence McKenna: "If you pursue these psychedelic, shamanic plants there is inevitably this conclusion scenario, or this apocalyptic intuition. And I think that shamans have always seen the end. That the human enterprise in three dimensional space has always been finite." 22:47 Terence McKenna: [discussing knowledge of life after death] "But in fact, I think this is probably the paradigm-shattering, world-condensing event that is bearing down on us." 25:04 Terence McKenna: "That’s what life is. It’s a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality." 28:52 Terence McKenna: "So even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics there are ways of tinker-toying the syntactical bits together to produce incredibly optimistic transcendental and psychedelic scenarios." 37:22 Terence describes his "simple way" of thinking about what may happen on December 21, 2012. 39:30 Terence McKenna: "But I’m telling you, Ralph, there’s something out there. There’s something out there, and I’ll know it when I see it." 40:06 Terence McKenna: "Believe it or not, I hate unanchored speculation. And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge in the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking." 43:33 Terence McKenna: "I think people should drive out and take a look at the Eschaton at the end of the road of history. And what that means is psychedelic self-experimentation. I don’t know of any other way to do it. But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the Eschaton and kick the tires and so forth, then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people." 53:56 Terence McKenna: "No one is directing or controlling the creative energies of this species. It’s being driven by thousands of micro-units called companies, all pursuing agendas they won’t discuss with anybody who hasn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement. So god knows what they’re doing out there, and they’re fiddling with life, and minds, and intelligence, and micro-dimensions, and you name it." 54:57 Terence McKenna: "It’s the future we’re living in, Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it until something better comes along, or until we get sick enough about that system to do something about it." 55:43 Terence McKenna: "I think here in the final moments in human history we should push the art peddle to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process as we possibly can." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:32 Terence McKenna: "But the fact of the matter is, there is no reason to believe that time is invariant, and experience argues the contrary." 12:39 Rupert Sheldrake: "Maybe, you see, that the bonds between pigeons and their home are comparable to the bonds between people and other people, and indeed they may be related to that which holds society together. When we say "the bonds between people", we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. It may be that there is an actual connection between them. . . . This kind of social bond, this kind of linkage, may be utterly fundamental." 17:28 Ralph Abraham: "Especially for people like Americans, who watch television for seven hours a day, there is somehow not enough time away from language." 17:37 Terence McKenna: "But notice that most prophetic episodes are dream episodes. I think that supports my point that we have lost connection with a kind of fourth dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given." 25:59 Terence McKenna: "Somehow language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world." 26:29 Terence McKenna: "The obsession with intellectual closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys, because nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality. I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries that are in principle insoluble. They’re not simply unsolved problems, they are in principle mysterious. All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence, but it’s the death of conversation." 30:57 Terence McKenna: "I question whether we actually think in words, or to what degree we do. What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools, such as psychoactive plants, is that as the intoxications deepen thought becomes vision, and one thinks in images. And I imagine that this is the aboriginal thought-style, and we must have thought in images for a long time before we downloaded into words." 35:48 Terence McKenna: "If a prophecy comes true, does that mean then that in principle all of the future is determined? You see, we have to avoid determinism here because a true determinism means thinking is pointless, because in a rigid determinism you think what you think because you couldn’t think anything else. So the concept of truth is utterly without meaning in a rigid determinism." 37:21 Terence McKenna: "I don’t think the meaning of human existence lies in culture. It lies in the individual. And to access that meaning a certain amount of deconditioning, i.e., alienation, has to take place from a culture. If you’re just a cheerful representative of your culture you’re a kind of mindless boor." 40:10 Rupert Sheldrake: "There are astonishing powers in the animal and the other realms of nature, which we have just simply been blind to. We’re blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science." 50:55 Terence introduces the topic of time into the discussion. 52:02 Terence McKenna: "Examine, or recall to yourself for a moment, what it is that orthodoxy teaches about time. It teaches that, for reasons impossible to conceive, the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment. Now whatever you might think about that idea, notice that it is the limit test for credulity. In other words, if you could believe that you could believe anything. It’s impossible to conceive of something more unlikely. Yet this is where science begins its supposedly rational tale of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe. It’s almost as if science is saying, ‘Give us one free miracle and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless casual explanation." 1:02:38 Terence McKenna: "When these curves [about population, climate, pollution, etc.] are extrapolated, it’s very clear that we have taken business as usual off the menu." 1:05:27 Terence McKenna: "The ride to the end of history is going to be a white knuckle experience." 1:06:02 Terence explains what he means by the word ‘eschaton’. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:18 Ralph begins by describing "Terence to himself". 05:46 Ralph Abraham: "So in our process of trialoging we find it very much enriched by Terence’s phenomenal knowledge of history, and not only that, but his special way of saying it is sort of a, you’re familiar with this here, a bardic skill. So that whatever he says will have [long pause]more effect than it actually deserves" [added with humor that was followed by laughter]. 08:36 Terence "shares his view" of Rupert. 09:12 Terence McKenna: "And my intellectual method has always been to seek out the heretical. And so when I heard that Nature had called for the burning of a book [insert title], I burned up my tires on the way to the store to see if I couldn’t obtain a copy." 16:38 Rupert introduces Ralph. 19:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "His [Ralph Abraham's] ability to visualize mathematics, I’m sure, is innate. But I think it was enhanced in the late 60s and early 70s by certain inner experiences, which would fall into the category of what Terence calls hands-on pharmacology." 22:54 Ralph begins his introduction of Rupert. 27:21 Rupert tells the story of his first meeting with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham. 32:00 Rupert Sheldrake: "Part of him [Terence McKenna] is a millenarian prophet. Part of him is a Dominican. He professes to be a pagan, but his Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning, and his experience as an altar boy have never left him." 34:16 Terence tells about when he first heard of Ralph. 36:43 Terence McKenna: [Speaking about Ralph Abraham]"It’s impossible not to fall in love with the man. He’s the teddy bear of advanced mathematics." 45:07 Rupert Sheldrake: "[In science,] if you can do things cheaply, you’re completely free, because the only control that they have is through money and giving out funds. And if you don’t need the funds you can do what you like." 1:13:39 Terence McKenna: "What do I think? Well, not that." 1:14:20 Terence McKenna: "I’ve always felt that what biology is is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macro-physical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language." 1:19:36 Terence McKenna: "The real question I’m raising is, to what degree does language create the assumption of an unknown future." 1:24:03 Terence McKenna: "We alone, I think, are tormented by the anxiety of the unknowable future. And it’s an artifact, I maintain, of culture and language." 1:28:28 Terence McKenna: "And I don’t believe that time is invariant. I didn’t intend to open this up as a general frontal attack on the epistemic methods of modern science, but, in fact, the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience, and it’s merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business." 1:29:36 Terence McKenna: "As a practical matter, I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Bruce Damer] 08:17 Bruce tells about the three-day white out that followed the 2002 Burning Man festival. 15:59 Bruce talks about the problem of dust on the moon. 18:46"We all grew up seeing buried lunar bases and happy astronauts running around mining and other things, it ain’t going to happen. I concluded, after a lifetime of believing this and two years of actually working on this problem, that we’re not going to do this. We don’t have the technology." 21.52 "How rare are we in the universe? How rare a thing are we?" 24:02 "These solar systems are out there. They’ve been bathed by our radio waves. Are there any receivers? Is there anyone out there to pick up ‘I Love Lucy’? Probably not. Why? Because those solar systems have all the wrong properties for probably our kind of life or any kind of life." 29:39 "In this chunk of the galaxy we’re the only noisy solar system. . . . We may be extremely rare. We may be the only ones in our little quadrant. We may be the only ones in our galaxy, or the only one in our local group of galaxies. Life like ours is unbelievably difficult to create. And here we are, our concerns are can we get to the office on time. We don’t even think about the miracle each one of us is." 31:42 "What I’m trying to build up is a picture of why you don’t need religion. All you need, if you want to be awestruck, is to consider the improbability of you, the improbable miracle that is you." 35:05 [Commenting on a computer-generated depiction of an astrophysical zoom-out from Earth] "If the universe was at all attempting to find consciousness, for a split-second, a primate brain on Earth had in its little synaptic gaps a picture of the universe. The universe saw itself momentarily." 38:48 "What if the ultimate goal of life, of the universe, was to become fully conscious? And what I mean by that is the entire universe becomes, instead of this jumble of matter and quantum whatever, it becomes a single conscious being?" 42:02 "For life itself to have a chance to expand out into the universe, and populate and infuse the universe, we may be one of its only shots [at this], at least in our area. We’re one of the only chances to do this, and we have a very limited window." 46:52 Bruce talks about the possibilities ALife might explore should it ever be set free in a quantum computer. 51:18 Bruce tells the story about his vision (during the AlChemical Arts Conference in September 1999) of Terence McKenna’s ‘getaway car’. 1:03:57 Bruce begins a stream of consciousness riff about quantum reality that is packed with mind-blowing concepts and ends . . . "In the universe you are all participants. So if you think about it you change it. If you try to study it you change it." 1:08:39 "The next time you have a powerful dream consider that it may have come from the field." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Lorenzo’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival Bruce Damer’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival Matt Pallamary’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival

Guest speaker: Pablo Amaringo [NOTE: All quotations below are by Pablo Amaringo, as interpreted by Lorenzo from Zoe7's translation.] Pablo Amaringo was elected to the Global 500 Roll of Honor of the United Nations Environmental Program in recognition of outstanding practical achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment through the USKO-AYAR school. PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:23 Susan Blackmore introduces Pablo Amaringo 07:16 "I was born and raised Catholic, but I did not really subscribe to the way in which that religion interpreted existence and life, particularly life after death." 13:02 "From experience, I came to learn that ayahuasca bestows upon the user knowledge about a variety of topics, not only consciousness and perception, but also leads one to realize that what we perceive is an illusion." 17:57 "In 1968 I had a revelation that we live in a sort of organism, an organism somewhat like a ship in that it keeps us, and not just us humans, but every living thing in something like a cocoon. And I was told that this home of ours, this ship, is becoming endangered simply because people are not taking care of the environment." 22:30 "We should not think only about the immediate future for ourselves living on this planet, but also about the futures of our children and grandchildren. What are we going to leave for them? What are they going to find? Those are questions we should ask and resolve before it’s too late." 23:46 "One of the chief problems here is the lack of love, love for the environment and love for each other." 28:02 Pablo begins talking about the ayahuasca visions in his paintings. 47:36 "By going into the psychedelic experience, by going into the world of plants, one is able to first and foremost know about himself. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities in his eyes." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option; Ayahuasca Visions by Pablo Amaringo, Luis Luna, and Luis Eduardo Luna

Guest speaker: Susan Blackmore PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:30 Jon Hanna introduces Susan Blackmore 08:04 "A lot of people kind of think that scientists like myself are kind of pushing the problem [of what is consciousness] away, some are, but there’s a huge excitement about what we do with this mystery, and it’s a very strange mystery indeed." 09:22 "That’s what we mean by consciousness, in contemporary science, what it’s like for you." 09:38 Susan talks about ‘the great chasm’ between mind and brain, sometimes called the ‘fathomless abyss’ . . . "It’s the chasm between subjective, how it is to me, and objective, how we believe it must be in the real physical world. Don’t underestimate this problem." 11:48 "So that’s the sense in which I mean consciousness might be an illusion: not what it seems to be." 18:48 Susan begins her discussion about free will. 24:34 "You can see the readiness potential building up in someone’s brain a long time, a long time in brain terms, before they know they are spontaneously and freely act." 26:56 "We can believe that free will is an illusion. That’s my preferred solution. I don’t want to press it on you, but it seems this way: When you look at these results, and many other results too, consciousness just doesn’t seem to be the thing that starts things off." 51:07 "I suggest, that when you’re walking around in your ordinary life, just realize how much you are not seeing, but you are not seeing it all." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books discussed in this podcast The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human by Susan Blackmore Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett Susan Blackmore’s books on Amazon.com

Guest speaker: Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Andrew Weil 04:41 "There are no good or bad drugs. Drugs are what we make of them. They have good and bad uses." 05:04 "I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances." 06:33 "Alcohol, any way you look at it, is the most toxic and most dangerous of all psychoactive drugs. In any sense, in terms of medical toxicity, behavioral toxicity, there is no other drug for which the association between crime and violence is so clear cut . . . and tobacco, in the form of cigarettes is THE most addictive of all drugs." 08:47 "What could be a more flagrant example of drug pushing than public support of that industry [tobacco and cigarettes]." 12:38 "I see a great failure in the world in general to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse." 16:25 "Another very common use, in all cultures, of psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences. To allow them to transcend their human and ego boundaries to feel greater contact with the supernatural, or with the spiritual, or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms." 17:54 "Drugs don’t have spiritual potential, human beings have spiritual potential. And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction, and the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people." 19:59 "Why is it that the human brain and plants should have the same chemicals in them?" 22:39 "The effects of drugs are as much dependent on expectation and setting, on set and setting, as they are on pharmacology. We shape the effects of drugs. All drugs do is make you feel temporarily different, physically and psychologically." 25:26 "The effects of drugs can be completely shaped by cultural expectations, by individual expectations, by setting as well." 28:22 "The manner of introducing a drug into the body is crucially determinant of the effects the people experience. And especially of its adverse effects, both short term and long term." 31:51 "I think it’s unfortunate that in this culture we have fallen so much into the habit of relying on refined, purified durative of plants, in highly concentrated form, both for recreational drugs and for medicine. And have formed the habit of thinking that this is somehow more scientific and effective, that botanical drugs are old-fashioned, unscientific, messy. In fact, they’re much safer, and sometimes the quality and effects are better." 32:55 "It’s we who determine whether drugs are destructive or whether they’re beneficial. It’s not any inherent property of drugs." 41:36 "The use of yage, or ayahuasca, in Amazonian Indian cultures is often credited with giving people visions that have valid content." 50:25 "But I think healing, like religious experience, is an innate potential of the body. It’s not something that comes in a drug. All a drug can do is give you a push in a certain direction, and I think that even there expectation plays a great role in that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs (Published 1983) From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (Published 2004)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:33 Terence begins with a discussion of "the felt presence of immediate experience." 08:10 Terence McKenna: "The thing I like about the Zippy culture and the house, trance-dance, techno culture is that it’s about feeling. The combination of young people, drugs, a fairly sexually charged social environment, and syncopated music is just all designed to draw you into you and your friends and your scene, and your hood, and your place in the cosmos and not sell you out as a consumer to Hollywood, or Manhattan-manufactured forms of entertainment." 10:01 Terence McKenna: "The culture is so capable of assimilating and disarming its critics through hype and fashion. I mean, I was horrified to see that ad, ‘Alan Ginsberg work kakis’. Did you see that!" 12:28 Terence McKenna: "What Rupert’s [Sheldrake] theory carries as an implication is what Prigogine now proclaims, which is, what we thought were eternal natural laws are simply something more like habits. Habits of Nature." 26:49 Terence begins his discussion of paradigm shift. 28:57 Terence McKenna: "So, human freedom is the precondition for the assumption of man’s flaw, man’s fall. You know, what Thomas Aquinas called the felix culpa, the happy flaw." 30:12 Terence McKenna: "A paradigm is a lens through which you see the world, and everything is transformed when you look through this lens." 32:42 Terence McKenna: "If habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism. It’s more like a creature. It learns, It gains experience. As it matures it changes its strategy. As it expands its experience it gains new domains of emergent subtlety." 36:36 Terence McKenna: "The dimension of human freedom is a precondition for guilt. Only the free can be guilty because only the free can be responsible for what they do." 48:37 Terence McKenna: "What we call nature is a novelty-conserving engine, that what nature glories in is novelty." 49:48 Terence McKenna: "Sometimes for ‘novelty’ I’ve used the phrase ‘density of connection.’ " 1:01:13 Terence McKenna:"And when you think about it, if you really believe in eternal laws of nature then you have a philosophical mess on your hands." 1:05:35 Terence McKenna: "Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism there is not consciousness." 1:12:35 Terence begins a discussion about memes. 1:27:49 Terence McKenna: "We are very fortunate to live through an age of enormous reappraisal." 1:30:17 Terence McKenna: "Humor is an admission of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. And in a sense, to take it to a deeper level, magic is a deeper perception than science. Because science believes that the world is truly there it is naive in its emphericism. Magic knows that the world is made of language. That the world is the construct of forceful imagination. And the people who don’t know this are walking around in the world of the people who do." 1:31:27 Terence McKenna: "Do not lease other people’s linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds. Build your own values and your own house of mirrors." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Lorenzo & James PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 07:17 James and Lorenzo begin a discussion about the fortuitous ways in which people come into contact with ayahuasca. 17:30 James describes the preparation of the ayahuasca brew the day of their ceremony. 24:05 Lorenzo and James begin a discussion of purging during the ayahuasca experience. 30:31 James explains the difference between a shaman and a yachak among the indigenous Qechua people of Ecuador. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 10:09 Sasha Shulgin: "First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of balance in all aspects of the human theater." 11:00 Sasha Shulgin: "One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary, a vocabulary that might allow each human being to more consciously — and more clearly — communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche. This may be called a vocabulary of awareness." 17:47 Sasha Shulgin: [After a discussion of nuclear weapons.] "And to have such power leads to the threat to use such power, which – in time – will actually lead to its use. But, as I have said earlier, when one thing develops, there seems to spring forth a balancing, a compensatory counterpart. This balance can be realized with the psychedelic drugs. What had been simply tools for the study of psychosis (at best), or for escapist self-gratification (at worst), suddenly assumed the character of tools of enlightenment, and of some form of transcendental communication." 19:24 Sasha Shulgin: "But I feel — along with many others — that the efforts being invested in the technology of destruction does not allow sufficient time. It is possibly only with the psychedelic drugs that words of vocabulary can be established, which might tunnel through the subconscious between the conflicting aspects of the mind and psyche. It is here that I feel my skill lies, and this is exactly why I do what I do." 31:42 Sasha Shulgin: "My personal philosophy might well be lifted directly from Blake: ‘I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.’ I may be wrong, but I must do what I can. And I will do what I can as fast as I can." 38:44 Terence McKenna: "The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances." 40:15 Terence McKenna: "Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit." [NOTE: Graham Hancock's book, Supernatural, provides a detailed investigation of this subject.] 41:46 Terence McKenna: "The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness." 44:45 Terence McKenna: "The Logos is a voice heard, in the head. And the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion." 47:36 Terence McKenna: "It’s my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it." 49:47 Terence McKenna: "And yet, WE are the culture that is in crisis. When you go to the rain forest you don’t find cultures in crisis except to the degree that they are being impacted by us." 50:24 Terence McKenna: "What he [R. Gordon Wasson] discovered, in the mountains of Mexico, was nothing less than Eros, sleeping but alive. The body of Osiris preserved over an entire astrological age, metaphorically speaking. In other words, that to take the mushroom was to transcend the cultural momentum of the past couple of millennia and return to a world where the Logos was a realized phenomena." 54:00 Terence McKenna: "Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!" 55:05 Terence McKenna: "And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade." 56:15 Terence McKenna: "If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chard

Guest speakers: Richard Glen Boire, Erik Davis, and John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:08 Richard Glen Boire: "What if the government could inoculate you so you couldn’t get high, so if you took a drug it didn’t work in you?" 07:53 Richard begins a discussion about the U.S. Government’s research into anti-drug drugs, which he calls "Neurocops". "So the question is, is it actually possible to treat illegal drug use with other drugs?" 08:25 Richard Glen Boire: "What I think the drug war is about to become is like truly a "drug" war. The war of your favorite drug against the government’s anti-drugs." 09:09 Richard Glen Boire: "One of those ["anti-high"] vaccines that is now under production (they have these for all the major classes of illegal drugs right now, including marijuana), and this is the one that’s been tested now in humans, is only known as SR141716." 10:10 Richard Glen Boire: "The most recent Drug Control Strategy Report, this year’s, has this term, ‘compassionate coercion’. This is a real government publication. [quoting] ‘Compassionate coercion requires the use of innovative techniques for fighting addiction, such as specialized pharmeceuticals." 15:40 Richard Glen Boire: "What makes this kind of thinking by the government possible: That we’re going to create a vaccine, and you druggies are going to get it so you don’t continue to transmit your disease, is what’s made the drug war itself possible, which is the government’s total disrespect for what we call Cognitive Liberty. And that is the right to control your own neurochemistry, to think the thoughts you want to think triggered by whatever inputs those may be as long as you’re not causing harm to others." 16:43 Richard Glen Boire: "I think we need in this country a Roe v. Wade of the mind." 17:11 Introduction of Erik Davis who talks about "Waking Up In The Matrix" 20:16 Erik Davis: "What I talk about in Techgnosis is the way this sort of Gnostic hunch, this sense that there is some kind of false construct that I’m in is really part and parcel of technological society." 21:02 Erik Davis: "By ’spirituality’ I really mean something very simple, which is the process of inquiry. And I mean inquiry on multiple levels. . . . Constant inquiry, such as ‘what is going on here?’ " 30:14 Erik Davis: "As Dale Pendell said in a line that has just stuck with me, ‘When one learns to face the gods directly one no longer fears facing a king." 30:37 Introduction of John Gilmore who talks about our Constitutional rights of anonymous travel and speech. 32:48 John Gilmore: "When the government says, ‘Terror . . . danger . . . evil . . . trouble,’ people sort of zoom in and look at that stuff. Instead, I kind of back away and say, ‘What are they doing around the edges while they’re trying to get your attention over here?’ " 34:10 John Gilmore: "If you focus on the ability of individuals to do evil you forget about the ability of individuals to do good." 36:40 John Gilmore: "The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, these are memes. They’re not alive. They’re not self-executing. They require human hosts to carry them and spread them around, and I’ve been infected by that meme, and I’m carrying it around." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:20 Gary tells about his encounter with an extraterrestrial. 07:11 Stories of another encounter with otherworldly entities, this time in the desert. 09:40 The story about a man who always longed for a UFO experience. 11:36 Gary tells why he thinks extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth. 14:33 Gary tells the story of when Timothy Leary was driving him to their compound in Mexico, and Gary suddenly had an intuition that reflected back to both a psilocybin experience and a past life experience. 17:07 Gary Fisher: "In the esoteric world those are called ’sleeping karmas’, and you’ll run into a person who’s happy all the time, everything goes well for them. They don’t have any hysterics in their life, and they’re having sleeping karma. They just come in to relax." 18:15 Gary tells the story of his Caribbean adventure with Tim Leary and company. 26:55 Beginning of a discussion about Alan Watts and the time he went to Mexico for a psychedelic mushroom session with Maria Sabina and ended up getting married to Mary Jane on the spur of the moment. 29:46 Gary Fisher: "At one dinner this very proper lady said, ‘Well Doctor Watts, what do you hope to gain from your next experience with LSD?’, and Alan said, ‘Another book!’ " 35:29 We begin a brief discussion of Tim Leary. . . . Gary Fisher: "Well, he was a drunken Irishman with a silver tongue. . . . He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. Those were his two goals in life." 44:26 Gary discusses several issues relating to the age at which it may be appropriate to begin using psychedelics. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) Our conversation began by looking at photos of some of Gary’s former students, patients, and famous friends. 13:12 We begin a discussion of Gary’s work in the 1960s with severely emotionally disturbed children suffering from variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism who he treated with LSD and psilocybin. 16:36 Al Hubbard is discussed 18:23 Gary Fisher: "All our model was from Hubbard, because Hubbard was the guy who taught my brother-in-law and Duncan Blewett. . . . He was the father of all this stuff. . . . He was the one who introduced Osmond and Hoffer to this whole approach." 25:45 Gary provides more details about his work with the severely disturbed children, beginning with the story of Nancy’s nearly miraculous improvement after being treated with LSD. 35:59 Gary describes the deplorable conditions in the public hospital wards where severely disturbed children were being held. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option THE LINKS BELOW will take you to several articles by Dr. Fisher that have been posted on the Web stie of the Albert Hofmann Foundationin The Gary Fisher Collection: Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia Utilizing LSD and Psilocybin by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. A Note of the Successful Outcome of a Single Dose LSD Experience in a Patient Suffering from Grand Mal Epilepsy Gary Fisher, Ph.D. Some Comments Concerning Dosage Levels Of Psychedelic Compounds For Psychotherapeutic Experiences [Print-friendly copy] by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. Death, Identity, and Creativity by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. Successful Outcome of a Single LSD Treatment in a Chronically Dysfunctional Man by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. The Psychotherapeutic Use Of Psychodysleptic Drugs by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. and Joyce Martin M.D. Psychotherapy for the Dying: Principles and Illustrative Cases with Special Reference to the use of LSD by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.; Assistant Professor, Division of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, School of Public Health. University of California, Los Angeles Counter-Transference Issues in Psychedelic Psychotherapy by Gary Fisher, PH.D

Guest speaker: Charles S. Grob, M.D. PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:20 Charlie talks about how he got into psychedelic research. 07:47 Charlie: "My interest has always been in studying the potential therapeutic effects of MDMA. I’ve always had concerns about use and abuse of the recreationally drug ecstasy. Now early on in the history of this drug, ecstasy was almost always MDMA, but over the years there has been more and more drug substitutions, to the point where now with ecstasy I think there’s less reliability in regards to it being the drug you think it is than for any other drug I’m aware of." 09:25 Charlie describes the process of obtaining approval to conduct clinical research using psychedelic drugs. 16:29 Charlie:"If you have some ambition to work in this area you have to develop certain character qualities, like having a lot of patience and persistence." 18:13 Charlie discusses the relative merits of MDMA vs. psilocybin in the treatment of end stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety. 22:33 Charlie: "So MDMA might turn out to be a very valuable compound to use with a chronic PTSD patient group, but in a medically ill group, over the years I began to question that and decided that psilocybin would be significantly safer." 20:43 Charlie begins his discussion of the human safety study of MDMA that he conducted. 23:03 Charlie: "A relative risk in regards to recreational use of MDMA is that a lot of people are oblivious to the fact that different drugs can interact with one another, and people who may have medical conditions, on medication, who then take ecstasy, which is often, though not always, MDMA, that there may be a drug-drug interaction which can cause injurious effects." 28:50 Lorenzo changes the subject by asking, "What do you tell your kids other than ‘just say no’?" . . . Charlie: "Often the most helpful thing you can do is simply be honest, and to provide the young people with the information we know today." 29:28 Charlie explains ways that the street drug ecstasy can cause significant medical problems when not properly used. 34:11 Charlie talks about the work done my Humphry Osmand, Abram Hoffer, Duncan Blewett, and others in Canada when they successfully treated and cured alcoholics using LSD as a catalyst that changing their lives. 36:17 Charlie: "It seems to me there are some very interesting implications here for Osmand’s old work with alcoholics as well as some of our more recent observations with the ayahuasca church as well as others who have observed a similar process in the Native American Peyote Church." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Jon Hanna PROGRAM NOTES: Jon Hanna enjoying an energy dring while visiting the Shulgins.Photo credit: Marc Franklin (Lordnose) (c) 2007 (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:19 Jon tells about starting the publication of The Psychedelic Resource List. 08:32 Lorenzo and Jon discuss articles in the current issue of Entheogen Review, including "DMT for the Masses" and "Security Issues in the Underground". 13:14 Jon talks about the problem of mis-labeling of botanicals that are sold on the Internet. 18:29 The discussion turns to security issues in the psychedelic community. 23:33 Halperngate and John Halpern as a DEA snitch discussed at Burning Man. 28:08 Jon Hanna: "Kind of the Golden Rule in our community is ‘Thou shallt not snitch.’ That’s the glue, the trust, that holds us all together as a community." 31:54 Jon talks about his current research into energy drinks. 46:11 The horrors of a $6.57 a day energy drink habit?!? 50:06 Jon reads the warning label on an energy drink can 1:04:46 Jon raves about the apocalyptic visionary painter,Joe Coleman. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Mind States Conferences (click) Psychedelic Resource List by Jon Hanna Essays Discussed in this Podcast "Halperngate" "Halperngate II" "The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc" "Bogus Kratom Market Exposed" Psychedelic Shamanism by Jim DeKorne

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:38 Rupert Sheldrake: quot;The primary metaphor is the magnetic field, that’s what gives you the sense of a field. But if you look at the type of physics that would be appropriate for describing these fields it would not be magnitism, it’s quantum field theory. 07:23 Ralph Abraham:"I’m extremely suspicious of the application of quantum mechanical concepts in the arena of psychology, consciousness, sociology, and so on. To me that’s much fuzzier than the face on Mars." 12:28 Terence McKenna: "Part of the problem is that physical models break down when prosecuted to quantum mechanical levels." 21:15 Ralph begins his explanation of the physics of the nimbus, otherwise known as a halo. 30:47 Terence: "The more successful psychoanalytic theories, it seems to me, are the least mathmatically driven, and depend really on this mysterious business that we call the gifted therapist." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:25 Rupert Sheldrake: "And so in human family groups we’d expect the same kind of morphic fields [as in other animal family groups]. . . . It would mean that family fields, with their morphic fields, would have a kind of memory from the families that contributed to them. The father’s and mother’s families of origin would come together in a family." 12:12 Rupert: "Whatever the merits or demerits of [Bert] Hellinger’s system, which I think is very interesting and apparently very effective, the idea of making models of the family field seems to me something that one could address in a more general sense." 20:29 Terence McKenna: "The family thing works because people really are complex chemical systems with genetic affinity." 22:16 Rupert: "There are amazing cases where young people commit suicide in a way that mimics the unacknowledged death of an ancestor, like suicide by drowning when an ancestor one or two generations before have committed suicide by drowning, but they’ve never been told about it because it was never acknowledged. And you get these extraordinary patterns that repeat." 26:58 Rupert: "We don’t have adequate models for these family systems, nor the influence of ancestors within them, which my interest in morphic resonance makes me very keen on." 49:27 Rupert (describing an indigenous belief): "But you have to be on good terms with the ancestors. And what being on good terms, above all, means acknowledging them. . . . that you name and acknowledge the key ancestors, you acknowledge all the dead in your lineage. And if you miss anyone out they’re going to be angry, and if they’re angry that means trouble." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:29 Myron Stolarofftalks about writing "The Secret Chief", a biography of Leo Zeff. 06:06Lorenzodescribes Dr. Michael Mitthoefer’s research where he is using MDMA to treat victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 12:52 Myron tells how he strikes up conversations about psychedelics with strangers he meets while traveling. 18:00 Myron: "The DEA, they’ve been the toughest ones. To a man they’re really refuting these things with all the power that they have, and they’re not interested in learning anything about them. They’re not interested in learning if anything [positive] is possible." 25:31 Myron: "Even though it’s painful, you’re much better off, if you’re willing to experience the pain, be with it and let it go, because once it breaks through and is gone you’re at a whole new level." 30:51 Myron: "And so you try to pretend that it’s [pain] not there, but it is there. And as long as it’s there it’s going to control you." 35:32 Myron: "I used the phrase ‘worked on that’, and the working is not really struggling and trying to make things happen. It isn’t that at all. What it is is learning to just be still, to just let everything go, just absolutely be still and let our hearts open." 54:43 Myron tells about instigating, along with Al Hubbard, the meeting between Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. 58:31 Myron (in a conversation with Timothy Leary)"I don’t have it in my heart to tell you not to do what you’re doing, but, really, what you’re doing isn’t going in the right direction." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "The Secret Chief Revealed" by Myron Stolaroff "Thantos To Eros" by Myron Stolaroff

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:25 Rupert Sheldrake describes how one could go about creating a "consumer’s report" for odd-ball theories. 06:23Terence McKenna:"Ninety-five percent of the scientists who have rejected astrology cannot cast a natal horoscope, and that the ability to actually cast a horoscope never seemed to be required of these high-toned scientific critics of astrology. It was something they felt perfectly free to dismiss without understanding." 07:26 Ralph Abraham: "Well, the hypothesis of causative formation, of course, favors deeper fluff. . . . The thing about astrology is that people say it works. An argument could be made that even though the Zodiacal reference frame that it is based on no longer has any basis in the sky that it works because people believe in it, and because it is in the N-field, and that because it’s deeper fluff, basically." 08:27 Ralph: "I think it could be that scientific research, done according to the best principles, has a greater weight in impressing itself upon the morphogenic field." 12:53 Rupert: "This internalization of the use of blind techniques has, in fact, gone farthest in parapsychology, where 85% of experiments are double blind in recent journals. In medicine and psychology where everyone pays lip service to blind techniques, in practice the number of blind papers, or double blind, is in the region of six to seven percent of all published papers in the top journals." 17:09 Terence: "Well, speculation and skepticism begin to sound like novelty and habit. So maybe these things are just counter-flows in the intellectual life of the culture that redress each other. And though we do have certain long-running forms of fuzz, it does tend to correct itself over time." 19:47 Rupert: "The fact is that in the mainstream of our culture skepticism reigns supreme." 22:27 Terence:"New kinds of people are making their voices heard, people from outside the male patriarchal, usual membership in the club." 25:34 Rupert: "In most walks of life skepticism is normal. We expect it in politics, courts of law, etc." 27:30 Rupert: "[Science] is the only universal system which is not open to the normal processes of challenge from competing points of view, having to justify itself in terms of evidence." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Also mentioned in this podcast Cross-cultural Medical Ethnobotany by Nat Bletter The Ayahuasca Monologues with Jonathan Philips, Jamye Waxman, Bill Kennedy, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Nat Bletter

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:09 Terence McKenna: "Somehow as a part of the agenda of political correctness it has become not entirely acceptable to criticize, or demand substantial evidence, or expect people, when advancing their speculations, to make, what used to be called, old fashioned sense." 04:10 Terence: "These phenomenon, which we know exist, and which we find rich in implication, would simply not be allowed as objects of discourse, they would be ruled out of order. So there’s something wrong on one level with what’s called empiricism, skepticism, positivism, it has different names." 08:09 Terence:"[Empherical science] is a coarse-grained view of nature, and what it mitigates against seeing are the very things that feed the progress of science, which is the unassimilated phenomenon, the unusual data, the peculiar result of an experiment." 11:04 Terence: "What I have a problem with is unanchored, eccentric revelations." 13:39 Terence: "Nonlocality, accepted, permits some of the things we’re interested in." 15:26 Rupert Sheldrake: "Weirdness and cults and most of the phenomenon you’ve named are phenomenon of Hawaii and California. When you live in England, things take on a rather different perspective. There’s a general level of popular skepticism, such that the general tone of an English pub is one of sort of skepticism." Terence: "Well, but aren’t crop circles, and Graham Hancock all homegrown British phenomenon?" 20:33 Rupert: "There is the possibility to return to a more common sense approach, common sense of the British pub type, and probably of standard American kind too, will often deal quite satisfactorily with the probono proctologists from outer space." 21:59 Terence: "You speak from your knowledge of the calculus and world history, and this person speaks from their latest transmission from fallen Atlantis. And this is all placed on an equal footing, and it’s crazy-making, and it also guarantees the trivialness of the entire enterprise. I just don’t think any revolution in human history can be made by fluff-heads." 23:49 Ralph Abraham: "In other words, there is no simple measuring stick of simplicity." 23:49 Ralph says he wishes we could create a measuring stick to measure the truth of something and then goes on to describe how one could be designed. 31:31 Terence: "The history of alchemy is far older than the history of science. It has always been in existence. It’s thinkers have always evolved and adumbrated their field of concern. So that’s one kind of fluff. Fluff with punch, because it has historical continuity." 34:51 Ralph: "The problem with this ’strict parent’ approach to fluff, is that some important discoveries may be shuttled aside." 39:13 Terence: "What we have to legitimize is critical discussion. So that when someone stands up and starts talking about the face on Mars people behave as they apparently behave in British pubs and just stand up and say, ‘Malarkey mate.’And force people to experience a critical deconstruction of their ideas." 48:13 Rupert: "If [scientific research] priorities were set by popular opinion, pet research would be at the top of the biological agenda, not the sequencing of more proteins, the cloning of more sheep to help the biotechnology industry. But instead, pet research isn’t even on the agenda. So it’s set by a small elite who bear no relation in their interests to the voters in a democracy who actually provide the money." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:48 Matt: "Ayahuasca doesn’t hide anything. . . . It can amplify perceptions, but it can also amplify fears or shadow aspects of yourself, the dark you’ve been avoiding. Ayahuasca has an intelligence to it that seeks out your fear and exploits it, and it’s a wonderful teaching tool." 08:39 Matt explains how the ayahuasca brew is made. 10:19 The legend of how ayahuasca was first discovered. 15:44 Preparation for an ayahuasca experience, beginning with the diet and what prescription medicines to avoid before the journey. 17:56 Details about the ayahuasca diet. 26:03 Lorenzo: "While this is true of all psychoactive substances, medicine like ayahuasca is sort of like nitroglycerine. You have to handle it with care." 27:16 Matt: "What it comes down to, ultimately, is that you have to respect it, and you have to respect its innate intelligence. That’s why, generally speaking, the closer you stick to the diet the better experience you have." 29:51 Tips for planning a trip to the Amazon for an ayahuasca experience. 32:19 Matt: "There’s a lot of responsibility that goes with this, because it’s a very powerful plant. And one of the things that I learned is that power, power in and of itself, is neutral, but the intention you put behind the power is what makes things happen." 33:58 Matt: "It has to come down, ultimately, to integrity. Integrity is the core of everything." 34:41 A discussion of chemical analogues to ayahuasca. 38:49 Matt: "It’s made to be done in a circle, and in a circle you join the energy collectively as a group. So if one particular person in the group is getting healed, everyone in the group is helping to heal that person." 39:58 Matt: "I heard it said once that ayahuasca is the river, and the icaros and songs and things are the boats that carry you on the journey." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Where to find podcasts mentioned in this program: The Cannabis Podcast Network This is where you will find the DopeCast, The Sounds of World Wide Weed, Story Time With Lefty, Zandor’s Grow Report, and Psychonautica Also, don’t miss The C-Realm podcast hosted by KMO. Books mentioned in this podcast Psychedelic Shamanism: The Cultivation, Preparation & Shamanic Use of Psychoactive Plants by Jim DeKorne Land ithout Evil by Matthew J. Pallamary Matt Pallamary’s Web Site

Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:56 Preet describes the study he is working on at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center where he and Dr. Charles Grob are giving psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) to end-stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety. 05:17 A description of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study. 11:01 Preet takes us through a typical session with a study participant. 12:04 "According to some of the research that was done before prohibition, it was found that people who had more internal experiences were more likely to get the psychological intervention we’re going for with this." 24:03 "In my treatments as a psychiatrist I’ve never treated a psychedelic addiction. I’ve treated a lot of addicts who are addicted to a lot of stuff and who also used psychedelics, but that [psychedelic addiction] has never come into my emergency room or office." 29:39 "I think it’s kind of ridiculous to be a scientist and a doctor and not investigate and try to understand how we can use these tools in a Western culture safely." 36:11 "I think that ultimately the true wisdom about these plants comes from shamanic tradition, however, in today’s Western society people will often come to a psychiatrist to address the issue that in a different tribal kind of society they would seek out the shaman." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Mentioned in this podcast "Counter-Transference Issues in Psychedelic Psychotherapy" by Gary Fisher, PH.D Additional papers by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.