Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Alex Grey painting in his Manhattan studio Photo credit: Bill Radacinski PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 7, 1998 Today's podcast continues with a series of lectures given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute in early August 1998. It begins with Terence discussing ways in which he sees art evolving. Eventually he transitions into a discussion about the growth of the Internet and the possibility of it becoming a super intelligent entity of some kind. Along the way he touches on science fiction, time, consciousness, Bell's Theorem, and complex systems. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Ayelet Waldman PROGRAM NOTES: Today brings us the first of the Salon2 podcasts, and it is hosted by Lex Pelger, who I have asked to tell you a little about what his psychedelic clan is up to. After Lex's introduction of the Psymposia Team, he will be interviewing Ayelet Waldman about her new book titled "A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna A Sequel to DreamLand PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 6, 1998 Today's podcast features an August 6, 1998 talk about Salvia Divinorum given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute. In addition to many interesting facts that Terence presents about Salvia, he tells how Daniel Siebert became the first person to identify the active ingredient of the plant, which eventually led to its widespread use today. In addition to discussing Salvia, Terence also touches on: Ibogaine, magic mushrooms, psychedelic plants, Australia's psychoactive plants, DMT, Greek mystery religions, Datura, LSD, War on Drugs, and language. "I've not done the pure [salvinorin A] compound. It's somewhat scary. One thing that's scary about it is it creates a profound break with reality. The person who is intoxicated totally loses touch with this world, and unlike people on DMT, or ketamine, or some other short-acting psychoactive or dissociative, they won't stay still. People tend to move around and be active, which is a real pain for the sitter. . . . The protocol for dealing with this is the 'tie 'em to a tree' protocol." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option U.S. State Laws regarding Salvia Divinorum Legal status of Salvia Divinorum worldwide

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This is the first of the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcasts. It is a very short program that answers the following questions: 1. How did the idea of Salon 2.0 come about? 2. Where did the ideas for how Salon2 will work come from? 3. How much input and control will Lorenzo have in selecting the new programs? 4. How do you provide feedback as to format (lectures, interviews, conversations), etc. 5. Psymposia's Blue-Dot tour Psymposia Blue-Dot Tour Information Currently Scheduled Cities 4/06/17 Boston, MA 4/07/17 Philadelphia, PA 4/08/17 Lancaster, PA 4/09/17 Baltimore, MD 4/11/17 Athens, GA 4/13/17 Austin, TX 4/15/17 Boulder, CO 4/21-23/17 Psychedelic Science in Oakland, CA 4/26/17 Los Angeles, CA 4/27/17 San Diego, CA Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4,1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "The nation state is now on the ropes. It's being replaced by something else, the world's one thousand companies, the world corporate state." "The interesting thing about the world corporate state is it has no real moral agenda. It only wants to pick your pocket, which when you think of what's been peddled in the ideological market place in the 20th Century, somebody who only wants to pick your pocket is a welcome and humane addition to the rogues gallery. So I think that fairly quickly, more and more drugs will be legalized and even drug taking encouraged because there's a great deal of money to be made." "So all of these things [adverse reactions to drugs] should just be treated as neurotic responses to the problem of being, and if people want therapy or anti-depressants, or whatever they want to get over this hump should be given to them. But to criminalize this is not to do any favor to the victims. It's simply to turn it into a racket for all kinds of underworld and marginal institutions." "What all these things [psychedelic substances] have in common is that without any great danger to body and mind they produce a profound transformation of consciousness, the processing of language, the way in which we model the world and relate to the past. And do they impact on cultural conditioning? You bet your booties they do, because what they do, essentially, is return you to some primal, per-cultural state of conditioning where the animal body and the unacculturated inputs of perception are directly experienced. This is a model of the psychedelic experience." "Is culture good or bad? Well, I'm coming slowly to the conclusion that, I'm not sure it's bad, but it's certainly a damn nuisance. It's a limitation, is what it is." "The problem is these [world] cultures create less than a full expression of human potential." "To the degree that we are integrated into our culture we are not ourselves." "Could we end up spending most of our disposable income on code rather than fabricated steel, aluminum, glass, and plastic?" "So it's going to be technology, or catastrophe, or fascism. These are the choices, because, of course, because fascism, you know, can just order the liquidation of everybody under five feet, or everybody with brown eyes, or whatever. But the consequences of fascism are the complete distortion and subjugation of the human spirit. When we talk about survival of the human species we're not talking about at-any-cost or under any circumstances. If humanness does not survive with the human species then we're no more than another cannibal ape with a bigger club in the hand." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4, 1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "A certain portion of my audience is flakier than I am comfortable with." "The whole point with psychedelics was to cut through the programming and the cant, and the propaganda of culture to true truth, real reality, not to just initiate an era of intellectual permissiveness where everything in the spiritual marketplace was placed on the same pedestal as Euclidean geometry." "It offends me that psychedelic people are susceptible to this [New Age thinking], because it seems to me that we're the last people who should be susceptible to this. We have no need of spiritual illusions because we have access to spiritual realities through the substances and the plants. So why should we, least of all why should we, buy in to all these unanchored, wholly, fluffed-headed ideas that are being pushed in the spiritual marketplace?" "If you're intelligent and you live past forty you will outgrow your culture. Some people may do it sooner, but you have to be a complete idiot to just buy-in at fifty-five, at sixty, at seventy-five. At eighty what are you still going to be doing, expressing homophobic views, voting Republican, and worrying about the A, B, and C's of phony reality? Most people get to a place where they just see it's a bunch of crap." "It looks to me like ideology is one of these neonatal behaviors that culture downloads on us. In other words, belief is for kids. It's a fairy tale. Marxism is no different than belief in the Easter Bunny. Probability theory is no different than a belief in the Easter Bunny. Everybody needs to get a grip on the uncertainty of the intellectual enterprise." "So the way to live with a human mind in the world is not to believe things, that's childish. It's undignified. The thing to do is to build models." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option This Week in Psychedelics with David Wilder

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake and Joseph Chilton Pearce PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 28, 1993 Today's podcast features a conversation that was held on August 28, 1993 between Rupert Sheldrake, the originator of the Morphic Resonance theory, and Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of many books including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and other works investigating the brain, the mind, and consciousness. As their discussion proceeds they explore the concept that, as observers, WE actually are creating reality. Their conclusion to this often explored area of quantum physics is that, no, WE don't create the physical world. Rather, we are largely the recipients of it and our job is to learn how to participate with it and go along with it. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality by Joseph Chilton Pearce, Thom Hartmann Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (2nd Edition with Update on Results) by Rupert Sheldrake Very Ape Podcasts Episode Thirty-Nine: Acid Heads w/ Bill Radacinski Episode Twenty-One: Cops for Pot w/ Howard 'Cowboy' Wooldridge

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: February 1982 [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "The belief in certitude, I suspect, is a primate habit." "One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that almost all pessimism results from watching what the government is doing. . . . because the government is the last place that important change is registered. And so if you're looking at the government you're looking at the past." "Certitude only belongs to those people who own just one encyclopedia." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 30, 2017 In today's podcast Lorenzo explains how he came to his decision to not vote in last year's presidential election. He begins by quoting part of a poem by William Butler Yeats which read: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. And by changing a single word in the final two lines of that poem, it would conclude: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Washington to be born? Full Text (PDF) of Lorenzo's remarks Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole" by Jack Lukeman from his new CD, Magic Days

Guest speaker: John Gilmore - - Francis Huxley 1923 - 2016 - - Photo: The Guardian PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016 [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “Don't buy Apple products when they lock you into only using software that Apple approves of. It's really straightforward. It's like, don't buy food that poisons you. Don't buy from companies that try to control you.” [In response to whether one can get their information back from Facebook.] “I don't think there will be a way if you voluntarily hand over your data to a huge corporation that does not have your interest at heart. For you to get the data back, no, I don't think there will be a way.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) HTTPS Everywhere NO SCRIPT Addon PRIVACY BADGER Francis Huxley obituary Anthropologist fascinated by shamanism, myths and religious rites who strove to protect indigenous peoples.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The payoff [of psychedelic experiences] is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.” “And I think that's how we have to act. We have to each choose a small area and then act in that limited area with all the existential commitments we can muster. But not with anxiety.” “Anybody who thinks that you can save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly disabused.” “Politics without responsibility IS fascism.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart. Have you seen that happen?” “The whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing, and that they can't believe it either.” “The one thing they tell you it isn't, it is! It is! It is made of magic, anything can happen.” “There's nothing holding any of us back from becoming unrecognizable, not only to our friends and loved ones, but to ourselves.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Joy Less Pain: The Life of Peter Gorman A documentary film about Peter Gorman by James Michael McCoy.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 In today's talk from a September 1990 workshop, Terence McKenna explains that when speaking about the DMT state he says that what he calls self-dribbling basketballs “are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you're looking at them they're actually sentences. And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way.” That should give you something to think about the next time you come out of a DMT reverie. He also goes on a little riff about why drugs have specific “identities” in the way they present themselves, as well as giving some advice about how best to choose your drugs. [The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This crisis in the Soviet Union and in the East Bloc countries, which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere, and a lot of America's assumptions will be swept away.” “The thing about Czechoslovakia is that if you scratch a Czech you get a Celt.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Shamans of the Global Village”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no closure. There are models, and there are questions. But all models are provisional, and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What's being claimed here [in the psychedelic experience] is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers. And it's different for everybody.” “There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics. If you look at the people who've been involved with it they've said completely different and contradictory things.” “We look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of 'bare' furniture. We fear it and don't want to look at it. And to my mind, most of the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guarantied lack of success. That's what they offer, because the last thing anyone wants is real change, because real change is uncontrolled change.” “Somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state. The two, I feel very strongly, are linked. Of course we can't get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.” “The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience.” “Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about [the psychedelic experience]. It's like not finding out about sex or something. It's just too weird. It's a part of our birthright. It's not a cultural artifact. . . . This is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.” “We have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.” “There was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.” “Human culture has become, charitably, a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous, exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.” “It's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barriers to the solution to our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own minds.” “There is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.” “Then I discovered psychedelic plants, and it was like the descent of an angel into the desert of reason.” “I'm convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact.” “Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious and the substitution of something else.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Second Sunday Salon Information https://genesisgeneration.net/forums/topic/second-sunday-salons/

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Grover Norquist.] “You don't lose something because of partisan fights at the state level.” “States rights is a stupid concept, since states don't have rights. People have rights. States have power they use against people.” “People who have concealed carry permits go to jail or get in trouble with the law one-sixth as often as cops. So they're safer than cops.” “All the groups that want to be left alone have something to teach each other.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option My first Burning Man: Confessions of a conservative from Washington by Grover Norquist in The Guardian Altered Conference 22 October, 2016, at Topics Berlin A conference exploring altered states of consciousness

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Cory Doctorow.] “This world of computers exists in a principle-free environment. The Internet of Things is the Internet of absolute, self-serving bullshit.” “The Internet of Things needs principles.” “The real struggle here, it's not making computers free, it's making people free. The reason we want to save computers is not because computers are more important than racial justice, or gender equity, or getting rid of homophobia and transphobia, or the climate. The reason we want to make computers free and open is because we cannot win those fights without a few and open information infrastructure.” “Considered atomically, one thing at a time all the things computers can do, we live in an age of unparalleled wonders. But all civilizations fall, and we have the shared responsibility to the civilizations that come after us to build the infrastructure that will lead to a future in which technology exists to server its users, not destroy their lives in service to surveillance capital, and the global war on terror, and self-serving bullshit so noxious that you can see it from orbit.” “No one puff [of a cigarette] is going to give you cancer, but statistically given enough puffs you're getting a tumor. If that tumor erupted with the drag there would be no second drag. The reason people smoke is because the tumors happen years later. And the reason people give up their private information is because the privacy stuff that bites them in the ass almost always happens years and years later too.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Cory Doctorow Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org)

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Shannon Clare Petitt, and Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: In this 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture, Annie Oak, founder of the Women's Visionary Congress, teaches how to use Naloxone to help a person who has had an opioid overdose. She is followed by Shannon Clare Petitt who tells us about some of the work being done by MAPS' Zendo Project. Finally, we get to hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, talk about how he first learned about MDMA and what his first experience with that substance was like. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Naloxone John Oliver Blasts Pharma's Role in U.S. Opioid Epidemic:'This Is Happening Everywhere' "Some towns have been devastated," Oliver warned.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we're doing is we're building a nervous system. We're building a nervous system the size of this planet.” “The marketplace has an appetite for lies about the future.” “I cannot conceive of post eschatonic life. I think of it, just to make things simple for myself, as death, because that's the other thing in my life that I have no grip on whatsoever.” “An organism is chemistry abducted into hyperspace.” “If you're a guru these days, you're almost condemned to spending a life with foolish people.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrodinger "Shamans of the Global Village" Episode 1 Launch

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear Terence McKenna's lecture about his TimeWave hypothesis (it never became a true theory). This 1997 talk was given less than three years before Terence's death and thus represents some of his latest thinking about this topic. He defines the TimeWave as a mathematical model of how the world works, as based upon the I Ching. Also, he clearly states that where the end point is set determines all of the other data points fall. However, in true Terence McKenna fashion he points out that even if he was 0.001% off, that gave him a range of 60,000 years in which his prediction would still be valid. He then goes on to discuss his correction to the Watkins objection that was discussed in podcast 472. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We are involved in the most accelerated, asymptotic ascent into change, so far as we can tell, that the cosmos has ever known.” “In the one sample we know of, biology has proven itself to be four times as enduring as the stars themselves.” “I won't defend it [the TimeWave] though. I've decided to get a life after 2012 no matter what happens.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A nature trip is an eyes wide open trip.” “I think LSD is abrasively psychoanalytic.” “I don't see an intellect outside of space and time guiding things, and certainly not watching with baited breath the machinations of the human monkeys. I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.” “The universe is a self-creating mystery of some sort.” “Maybe reality is a far more perishable concept than we ever dared or feared to suppose.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option What Are the Benefits and Boiling Points of Cannabis Vaporization? Matt Lamkin's Bandcamp Site

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The only path in to the supernormal that I've found are the psychedelics. Everywhere else I found chicanery and fraud.” “It's fun to be a free person. It's fun to not depend upon an institution, an ideology, an other person, a place, a time. And it's very hard to sell this form of fun. People are afraid. People have been dis-empowered, I think, through the process of juvenilization.” “Millions and millions of people live larval, low-awareness lives warehoused in the burbs, plugged in to Costco and the tele. And as long as the magazine subscriptions stay subscribed and the credit cards continue to be serviced the illusion that there is life happening here is allowed to continue.” “I think that every single one of us should be learning how to expand our communications skills.” “It's not about rejecting the media or the marketplace. It's about changing your relationship to it. Do not consume. Produce! . . . Inject your own art.” “I don't believe alien spaceships are visiting Earth to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, or to do anything much else of interest, but I do think there is an alien presence. It's non-material. You contact it in the psychedelic experience. . . . Its nature is informational.” “What the alien needs to manifest among us is a suitable landing zone.” “In a sense, the Internet is a net to catch an alien.” “In other words, the imagination is like a field of data that is at the Bell level of connectivity in the quantum mechanical universe.” “Physically, we are alone, physically. But in the imagination we're surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our religions, our culture.” “We have exhausted the exterior world, and yet the interior world beats like an enormous ocean. And what is ordinary, historical consciousness but a tiny island protruding above that ocean.” “There was a period in my life where I formed my taste by saying I liked what I didn't like.” “I think the worst setting for taking drugs is complex social environments, especially public social environments.” “I believe in large doses . . . rarely.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Book Listing

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The real news is no one is in control, not the central bank, not the Jews, not the communist party, not the pope. Nobody's in control.” “I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models. You have to be incredibly naive about what people are to believe that a role model is in fact worthy.” “If you want to talk to the Dali Lama close the door of your bedroom and have a dialogue with the mirror. You're as good as the Dali Lama for crying out loud. Who could suppose otherwise?” “Buddhism without psychedelics is armchair Buddhism. How can you possibly know anything about these modalities if you sit there, shastras to the eyebrows, and never actually push off into the ocean of mind?” “Crop circles are the con that will not die.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia By Paul Devereux Entheogens and the Future of Religion Edited by Robert Forte

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it's a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we're basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our social systems, our religious ontologies, our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing, all of this is 19th Century at best. And so, really whether we live or perish as a species probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise from any source available.” “If consciousness is not part of our future then what kind of future can it be?” “Culture is an intelligence test.” “I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology.” “I think primates are most interesting when cornered.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Salon 2.0

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Democracy is this innate belief in people. It's a psychedelic way of doing it. It's the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy to my mind is, of course, the ideal. But anarchy has to be mediated with policy, and the way you do that is through democracy.” “The Earth is in far worse shape than we think.” “This notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics is, as far as I can see, the only way out.” “The most dangerous habits in the world today are not drug habits. They're idealogical habits, unexamined ways of thinking about reality.” “Besides the monotheistic thing, the really odd thing about Western religion is the persistent idea that god will come tangential to history.” “People think psychedelic consciousness is a permission to escapism. I don't think so. I think it's an invitation to a high degree of awareness.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken's right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn't done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?” “I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a week. And it's really changing how they look at the world.” “Isn't it interesting that the 'fix' turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we're just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There's an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego.” “Psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area. The area of thought and cognition.” “I've seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning.” “The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics, in a generalized sense, is that they are inspiration for ideas. And when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto an ocean of ideas.” “What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?” “If mind were not constrained by the rules of physics we don't know what we are. We don't know the castles we would build in the air.” “I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination. The imagination is a place. It's a world. It's a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we somehow have to marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it's the only safe haven there is.” “What we are cannot be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet.” “I think, based on the Timewave and based on reading the newspaper, that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane, global agenda is religious fundamentalism.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option It's All Happening With Zach Leary

Guest speakers: Ellen Brown, Letitia Pepper, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features insights from Ellen Brown and Latitia Pepper in regards to California's upcoming ballot measure Proposition 64. As you will hear, this measure will eliminate the current medical marijuana laws in the state. And while anyone over the age of 21 will be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, the days of medical patients going to a local dispensary will be over. Also, medical patients will need to obtain a new recommendation by January 1, 2018, and that can ONLY come from your personal physician . . . PLUS you will need to purchase a $100 permit to be a medical patient, but you will have no rights that anyone over 21 also has. This is a terrible proposition that basically puts Monsanto in charge of the marijuana business in California. Vote NO on Prop 64. NOTE: The original version of this podcast also included comments by a person whom I call "your typical uninformed voter." This apparently has caused him some discomfort, and so I have removed all of his comments from the podcast. Sorry about that.] Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Annotated Copy of AMUA, Prop 64 Ellen Brown's Website Latitia Pepper Interview (full) The Joe Hemp Network

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: “The whole history of Buddhism in the West, the whole thing in the post war period as Buddhism starts to become really popular, is inextricable from psychedelics.” -Erik Davis Today's podcast features a talk that was given by Erik Davis in which he unravels the history of both the Tibetan Book of the Dead and its psychedelic sister, the Psychedelic Experience, that was written by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner during their infamous Harvard years. Erik Davis, who holds a Ph.D. from Rice University's Gnosticism, Esotericism and Mysticism program, is a well known author and lecturer who has written books such as Techgnosis and Led Zeppelin IV. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Erik Davis' Website The Expanding Mind Podcast with Erik Davis Erik Davis on Twitter @erik_davis The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary

Guest speaker: Professor David Nutt PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2016 talk that Professor David Nutt gave at the annual Glastonbury Festival. His topic was “Do psychedelics matter?”. Although demonised, and attracting severe criminal penalties for users during the half century of the “war on drugs”, psychedelics are now undergoing a renaissance – both in terms of scientific research and in people’s personal and spiritual worlds. It is once again a time of oriented explorations of the mystery of consciousness. As we all know, when it comes to the war on drugs, “the emperor has no clothes”, and there is no one in a better position to say this than a man who once was the UK's “Drugs Czar” but who lost his position when he began speaking the truth about drugs and refused to continue supporting the establishment's party line. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Professor David Nutt's Twitter handle: @ProfDavidNutt Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt Island by Aldous Huxley

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: In today's podcast Jonathan Ott unfolds a parade of history setting out the use and prohibition of psychedelic medicines throughout the course of human history. Although this talk was originally given at a 1996 entheobotany conference, it remains as current as if it were given yesterday. After Jonathan describes human uses of psychoactive plants stretching back into prehistory, he goes on to explain how what he calls “the overdeveloped world” has used religious morality to impose a pharmacratic inquisition that has essentially caused “the spiritual bankruptcy of our Western Civilization.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Shamans are Technologists of Myth” -Lorenzo The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley Reality by Peter Kingsley Peter Kingsley Interview – Western Civilization was intentionally created

Guest speaker: Michael Garfield PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features Michael Garfield who went to school for paleontology and then psychology before leaving academia to embark on a decade-long "trans-disciplinary" independent study of the intersections between art, science, and philosophy. As an experimental acoustic-electronic guitarist-singer-songwriter, as a scientific illustrator turned performance painter, and as a writer and speaker, Michael's work is an attempt to help articulate a vision for the best possible future for us – one that doesn't suffer the insane delusions of our separation from nature, technology, and each other. According to Cap Blackard, writing for “Consequence of Sound” this talk by Micheal rates in the top 25 of the 333 performances at this year's version of the Future Music/Future Thought Festival. He goes on to say: "Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer – a multidisciplinary monologue that rivaled Brian Eno’s Moogfest 2011 keynote for all the unexpected twists and turns it took. This one-man show saw artist-musician Michael Garfield take a captive audience on a vision-quest through the lands where metaphysics and emerging technology meet. Make no mistake – it was a ramble, but an insightful and fascinating one from start to finish that traveled from the ancient dragon god Tiamat to the Victorians laying the transatlantic telegraph cable to the Manhattan Project giving birth to a new age of fear and awareness. The “psychedelic century”? That’s the here and now that’s just beginning, and the more our technology graduates us to the alchemical act of creation, the closer humanity comes to confronting “the cosmic mystery that we are.” Heavy and heady stuff, and a pleasant counterpoint to the doom and gloom of the average transhumanist cybergrumps whose future-thinking seems improbably grounded in the limited perceptions of the present." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Michael Garfield's music on Bandcamp Michael Garfield's talks on Bandcamp Michael Garfield's Art The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness by Lawrence "Lorenzo" Hagerty

Guest speakers: Shonagh Home and Sally PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and a cannabis grower in the State of Washington, where both medical and recreational cannabis are now legal. Among other things, we learn how cannabis can be grown without the use of any chemicals to keep the pests away, thus providing their customers with truly healthy medicine. We also learn about an organization named Certified Natural Cannabis, which is uniting farms that use clean cultivation techniques and that meet or exceed national organic standards. Their mission is to keep cannabis nontoxic and to represent producers and products that use no synthetic chemicals. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Contact Sally at: synesthesia (dot) sally (at) gmail (dot) com Certified Natural Cannabis To get up to speed with Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and blockchain technology, here are some links that may be of interest to you: Understand the Blockchain in Two Minutes About “The” DAO Blockchain Explained, What is Blockchain?

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Sasha Shulgin in 1996. In many ways this is a perfect Shulgin talk for a podcast because he didn't use any photos or the chalkboard to assist in his presentation. This talk is also one of Sasha's best presentations as for not just the chemistry but also for some of the personal stories he tells. Also, he clarifies the Urban Legend about LSD occurring in nature. “I suddenly realized the fatuousness of people saying that 'mescaline taught me this', and I think the same, in a funny way, applies to plants, that 'the plants taught me this.' What it is, you use the plant, you use the compound as a facilitator, as a catalyst, to see within yourself what's there. And I think this is the heart of psychedelic drugs.” Sasha Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin Tihkal: The Continuation By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the third section of a Terence McKenna workshop that was held in December of 1989. An interesting feature of this session is a report that Terence asked one of his friends to give about the state of ayahuasca use in Amazonian Peru. As one of the earliest accounts of what a Westerner will encounter when searching for an ayahuasca experience, we get to hear what it was like in the jungle before the plague of ayahuasca tourism took hold. One of the interesting ways in which he describes an ayahuasca vision is this it is a manifestation of one's own intuition. We also get to hear Terence describe what he calls “tingling-lip ayahuasca”. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “If you take tingling-lip ayahuasca then you are one macho hombre.” “I don't like the drugs that absolutely destroy the witness. I think the witness is important.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I tend to think that there is a kind of unconscious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture but of humanism itself is in Africa.” “[The psychedelic experience] is about what is real, not what is culturally sanctioned.” “The ego lives by constraint. It draws lines, and this drawing of lines is a denial of the primary truth of the world, which is that it is seamless and one. Once you start drawing distinctions you're off into dualism, and it's no joke to say that dualism is the root of all evil.” “The Eleusian Mysteries are Cretan Mysteries that have been transplanted to Greece, and that's really where the psychedelic religion died.” “The major political task for people like ourselves is to be more stoned, is to find out more about the dimensions of the psychedelic experience.” “The drugs of the future are likely to be these non-invasive electronic drugs.” “Virtual reality is very important to creating a sane human future.” “The human visual apparatus is unbelievably forgiving of error. In fact, the human visual apparatus is set up to suppress error.” “Computers are becoming more like drugs. Drugs are becoming more like computers. The computers of the future will be taken orally, and the drugs of the future will probably be jacked into.” “What I think virtual reality is good for is showing each other the insides of our minds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Marian Goodell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a Palenque Norte Lecture given at the 2015 Burning Man Festival by Marian Goodall who is Burning Man's Chief Engagement Officer (CEO). This was actually a focused Q&A session during which many of the community's most pressing issues were discussed. Even if you aren't interesting in attending Burning Man yourself, this discussion may hold some important answers if you are considering becoming involved in producing large events yourself. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is, in fact, the quenching and the withdrawal of this relationship of symbiosis to the rest of nature.” “Hedonists are people who don't take hallucinogens, to my mind, because it largely is very hard work. I mean it isn't always hard work, but as a life, as a path, it's extremely hard work.” “The issue of psychedelics, of plant transformation, of losing the ego, is the most closely held facet of reality in a dominator society.” “There is no rational way to save the world. Our only hope is a miracle. And the only place a miracle is going to come, so far as I can tell, is from psychedelics. That's the only miracle in town.” “I really think that the major political obligation upon all of us is to get more stoned. Take larger hits.” “Most things in the world are hyped. Most things are over-sold and under-delivered, but in my experience sex, music, and psychedelics deliver. They are actually better than advertised.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Third Eye Drops podcast with Bruce Damer Inner Vision with Greg Friedman The Novelty Generators Podcast

Guest speaker: Neşe Devenot Help Neşe complete her Psychedelic Humanities Research PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features three short talks by Neşe Devenot who is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches classes on psychedelics and literature. Nese received her PhD in 2015 in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the study of psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (what you and I call “trip reports”). She is a founder of the Psychedemia interdisciplinary psychedelics conference and is the former editor of “This Week in Psychedelics” (a Reality Sandwich column that reported on psychedelic news in the media between 2011 and 2013). And Nese is a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association . . . and as you will hear in the second short talk that I play, Nese has also earned her wings as a psychonaut as well. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Neşe Devenot Website: www.chemicalpoetics.com Twitter: @NeseLSD eMail: ndevenot (at) pugetsound (dot) edu Online academic work: https://ups.academia.edu/ndevenot Psychedemia Conference Documentary /* #PsychedelicsBecause (video) Psymposia Psymposia, LLC is a group of collaborative social activism projects on psychedelics, plants, and policy, that includes live events productions, Psymposia Magazine, and the Palo Santo Project. We’re an active network of entrepreneurs, students, activists, researchers, organizations, progressive businesses, artists, musicians, comedians, designers, and fresh voices. We create projects that build community, have a positive social impact, and change perceptions of plants, psychedelics, and psychoactives. Our live storytelling, Psychedelic Stories, could be described as “The Moth Radio Hour… On Acid,” and is hosted by drug writer Lex Pelger. People have the opportunity to share compelling experiences, peculiar underground exploring, or scientific research from The Academy. We have organized social networking events, conferences, parties, fundraisers, and live streaming at lofts, universities, and venues in Amherst, Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Montreal, Florida, Vermont, and Oakland. Simply, we work with people, organizations, and companies who do positive work, within and without the psychedelic community. (See Friends) We are based on the East Coast, USA. Psychedelic Mysticism: The Good Friday Experiment & Beyond Shamanic Graffiti: 100,000 Years of Drugs, 100 Years of Prohibition By Frank Ogden, Marcus Rummery

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, & Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a retrospective of some of the highlights of podcasts with several of the elders who are no longer with us. These clips include talks by Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, and Sasha Shulgin. Interspersed with these clips Lorenzo tells a few stories of his own. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Neal Goldsmith PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Neal Goldsmith.] “Personality is a strategy devised by a two year old.” “Parenting is like that. You don't want to be directing your child. You want to be more like a forest ranger than a farmer, making sure that if lightening strikes and there's fires you go put it out. But other than than you let the bramble grow, beautifully, and wholly, and healthfully.” “If you have a psychedelic experience, then your meditation practice is illuminated, and understood better, and aerated, if you will, conceptually aerated. You see it more clearly. It's not as musty, and the two go together, because mediation without psychedelics is kind of blind, but psychedelics without meditation is rootless.” “Ritual instantiates what works.” “Spirituality is not some big supernatural thing. It's just the advanced stage of normal human development.” “Psychedelics and meditation go together.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development By Neal M. Goldsmith Neal Goldsmith's WebSite Neal Goldsmith's Contact Information A recent, wide-ranging interview with Neal Goldsmith for the Comcastro podcast A recent write-up/interview with Neal Goldsmith in Brooklyn Magazine A recent interview with Neal Goldsmith in Bedford and Bowery magazine An interview on "Psychedelics as a Healing Modality" with Neal Goldsmith for the Questions for People podcast A six-minute video interview with Neal Goldsmith on psychedelic ecology called Fusion of Spirit and Science An hour talk by Neal Goldsmith on Psychedelics, Psychotherapy, and Change from the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference

Guest speakers: Nathan Ehrlich & Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today the first feature is a story by Nathan Ehrlich which first appeared on the Israel Story Podcast this past January. This is a story of healing, both physically and psychologically by two men from different countries who discovered the healing properties of psychedelic medicines. We then close with a short rap by Terence McKenna who explains what he believes to be the best method for smoking NN-DMT. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Nathan Ehrlich, Multimedia Journalist Shamanic Journeys in Peru with Sergey Baranov Israel Story Podcasts on iTunes TAKE THE THIRD HIT Terence Mckenna (HD) by Collective Awakening This campaign aims to actively: -Increase awareness around the benefits of psychedelics -Share stories humanizing the diversity of psychedelic users -Reverse decades of negative stigma surround psychedelic and psychoactive drugs -Educate people about current scientific research -Promote psychedelic harm reduction by understanding the true risks and how to manage them -Help end arrests, incarceration, and criminalization associated with global drug prohibition -Unite psychedelic, drug policy reform, and harm reduction movements We'd love for your organization to join us. Ways to get involved: In April, spread the message through your network encouraging everyone to use #psychedelicsbecause on social media Join us in New York during the UN General Assembly Special Session on Bicycle Day, 4/19: facebook.com/events/540226032823475 Reply back with your organization's logo attached if you would like to be included and featured on our upcoming website, psychedelicsbecause.org Submit a 2-sentence video for our promo: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j4jhXO_qO3fWN1ygrf_uQE2n4b4DbAk8dmPF70DweXA/edit Or if you have other ideas to contribute, let us know :-)

Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a lengthy reading by Bernardo Kastrup from his new book, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief. This reading comes from Part 3 of the book, which is a fictional account of a young scientist who participated in a research program that is investigating the nature of reality through the use of psychedelic medicines and brain scans during the experience. During the course of the experiments this fictional scientist uncovers the many layers of consciousness upon which our consensus reality is based. People who have had the good fortune to experience what Sasha Shulgin called a Plus 5 experience will most likely be amazed at how well Bernardo has captured the essence of such experiences. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief by Bernardo Kastrup Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a series of raps by Bruce Damer who is backed up by the Faye Steen House Band led by: Joe Oppenheimer on loops, FX, and acoustic, with Darcy Davis on keys, and Aengus Donald on percussion. The recording was made in Melbourne, Australia in 2015. This is followed by Lorenzo giving a few of his thoughts about the state of the world today and a way in which alchemy may be applied to heal it. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alien Dreamtime Directed by Ken Adams Boss Drum Shamen An army of none: The U.S. military is more powerful, less accountable and more dangerous than ever before A World War Has Begun - Break The Silence

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Trust your perceptions. Trust your intuition. And then accept the consequences, because this is what existential validity must be.” “Must it not be that humanity is the yeast of of the Gaian alchemical rarefaction, and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation.” “Speciation of a single plant can occupy fifty or sixty thousand years. It never happens more quickly than that, and the grinding down of glaciers from the poles, these are processes that take hundreds of thousands of years. With the advent of human beings an entirely new ontos of becoming, an entirely new category of becoming is introduced into the entire cosmos, as far as we know, because we cannot verify that there are other self-reflecting beings in the universe.” “Memory is a time-binding function. It's a way of somehow taking the past and calling up its essential properties so that they are co-present with the given moment of experience.” “Our bridges are burning behind us. We see no way back.” “If you believe in something you have precluded the possibility of believing in its opposite, and you have hence limited your freedom.” “Every belief has consequences.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Terence McKenna and Hermeticism Podcast 223 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 1 Podcast 224 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2 Podcast 225 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 3 Podcast 226 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we would call manic depression, despair, and that chaotic, near psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness is the precondition then for the alchemical work.” “An angel chartered modern science. It's the alchemical angel, which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and people toward an unimaginable conclusion.” “The alchemical spirit lives on. It never really died. It's just that it has taken peculiar forms in our own day.” Podcast 319 - "The Voynich Manuscript" by Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rose Kiseato & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Rose Kiseato Shepherd Davis, who is a Navajo-Hopi water woman of the Native American Church of North America. She is from the tobacco clan and is a 5th generation grandmother in her maternal line. Rose is an accomplished artisan bead-worker who teaches classes on this ancient craft. She is recognized both by her tribe and by the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, and many people consider her to be their spiritual mother and grandmother. She has been participating in the peyote ceremony for over 25 years, and she lives on the Navajo Reservation in Sanders, AZ. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Cannabis Nurses Magazine Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Modern philosophy is a desert for my money, and who cares about it? Nobody cares about it. Who's living their life according to the conceptions of modern philosophy, nobody as far as I can see.” “We live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.” “We're like people who don't remember who we are or where we came from. And we just wander mumbling through the streets of our cities, foraging in garbage cans and frightening other people.” [Quoting another] “Coming into being is nothing else than presentation through sense.” “Too much light is trapped in the organic matrix.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it.” “Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root.” “Modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of Cartesian rationalism.” “The imagination is central to the alchemical opus, because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical dimension.” “We cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination.” “Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism.” “Authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That's what they're talking about, authentic being.” “Somehow it's possible for an informing voice to come into cognition that knows more than you do. It is a connection with the collective unconscious, I suppose, that is convivial, conversational, and just talks to you about the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates

Guest speakers: Veronica Hernandez & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Veronica Hernandez and Shonagh Home. Veronica Hernandez, is a clinical psychologist and shamanic practitioner. Born in Peru, since 2006 she has been trained on shamanic facilitation. She received her clinical training at the Institute of Rational-Emotive Therapy, New York, under the supervision of Dr. Albert Ellis. She was assistant professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and research assistant at the Hospital Psiquiátrico Noguchi de Lima (Peru). In the United States, she worked as a Social Services Clinician at John Muir Health Hospital’s Inpatient Psychiatric Adolescent Unit, California. Currently she is completing her doctoral degree at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, where she is carrying out research on the healing and transformative benefits of entheogens, especially Ayahuasca. Among other topics, Veronica and Shonagh talk about children using pharmaceuticals, personal growth, spirituality, Jung's concept of a shadow, and processing psychedelic experiences. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the Burning Man Festival. In her talk, Annie takes us on a tour of the various factors involved in organizing events such as festivals, dance parties, and theme camps. As a co-founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress, now in its 10th year, and as a co-founder of a major theme camp at Burning Man, not to mention numerous other events that Annie has helped organize. Also, in this podcast the tragic death of fellow saloner Kai Wingo is discussed. Women's Visionary Congress Camp Soft Landing Kai Wingo Obituary Go Fund Me Contributions to help Kai's family Podcast 458 – “Practical Mushroom Activism” featuring Kai Wingo Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option