Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Psychedelics, by metling assumptions, by destroying the expectations of rigid educations creates a fluidity of possibility that may allow answers to emerge. And it's the only thing that I've seen that operates on a time scale sufficiently short to have an impact.” “Language is a strategy for binding time.” “The other thing is that biology works. It's very successful. It's been around more than a billion years. Civilization doesn't work. It's been around 10,000 years, and it's on the brink of meltdown.” “We fabricate ideas out of matter. No other creature does that.” “One of the unique things that is happening on the planet is that the fate of all life is becoming hinged to the decisions made by a single species.” “If there's not free will, then thinking is meaningless.” “But all we have to do is hit one speed bump, and democratic values are down the drain.” 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.] “That's the key thing that the archaic world knew that we don't know: How do you live in equilibrium so that your children may live in equilibrium, because otherwise you get a cycle started that's going to shove somebody over the cliff. And that somebody in the present case is either ourselves, our children, or their children. It's no further away in time than that.” “We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.” “If you look at the fossil record, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on the Earth are extinct. From that point of view it looks as though biology is a process for producing extinction.” “You talk about a well-kept secret that's only two tokes away? How do they keep the lid on this? That's the miracle to me. How do they keep the lid on this?” [smoked NN-DMT] “These chemicals, these plant hallucinogens, are pheromones laden with messages for humanity, but you have to pick up the telephone.” “I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hallucinogens and Shamanism by Michael J. Harner The Terence McKenna Experience by Ken Adams Quasar shines a bright light on cosmic web

Guest speaker: Roland Griffiths PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Roland Griffiths, who is a professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In addition to describing the current psychedelic studies being undertaken there, he also goes into detail about exactly what characteristics researchers consider when evaluating whether a person has actually had a spiritual experience. Among the research participant's comments that he read, one of the most common themes was the interconnectedness of all things and beings. Also, he spoke about their research into the character of one's personality in regards to how a psychedelic experience affected their openness to the experiences of life. Another interesting thing that his research group is investigating is the intersection of psilocybin and meditation, a discussion of which takes up a significant part of this talk. “Psilocybin is a pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. And that's exactly the same of meditation. It's about bringing yourself into the present moment.” -Roland Griffiths Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin & Spirituality Current Psilocybin Research Projects Q&A with Roland Griffiths

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature a Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the 2013 Burning Man Festival. This ground breaking founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress continues to push the envelope of psychedelic discussion into two of the most important issues of all to humans, sexuality and aging. Additionally, Annie issues several challenges to us all as we continue to expand our own consciousnesses. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Woman's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice The Psychological Dark Side of Gmail Google is using its popular Gmail service to build profiles on the hundreds of millions of people who use it. Occupy Madison builds first house in planned eco-village for the homeless Daily Psychedelic Video

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna & Edward Snowden PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Everything flows. Nothing lasts.” “Language is like an informational creature of some sort.” “This problem of language is central, I think, to understanding the psychedelic experience.” “Language is something unfinished in us. It is something that was catalyzed out of animal organization by hallucinogenic activation of brain states, and it is something that is in the act of perfecting itself.” “When you go into a culture, you're going to make a choice. And all cultures represent narrowing of choices.” “We're about to have a chance to create a global culture, to essentially clean our basement and decide what we're going to save and what we're going to keep.” “It's the monotheistic religions that have to take a real knock for the present situation.” “Monotheism, as a philosophical reflex, is understandable but simple minded. It's what an eight year old would get to.” “Taking a psychedelic is an experiment. It's not an act of religious devotion.” 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.] “And now the task changes. It's a completely different kind of spiritual universe that you live in after you found the answer, because the task becomes facing the answer. Facing it!” “What we call history is the fall out of a dynamic hear-and-now, feeling-toned relationship with our environment.” “Gradual change was a luxury of the past.” “The politically most potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them. To give them the facts.” “The spiritual realm in practical terms means the imagination.” “The frontier of our species is the imagination.” “The spiritual realm, in practical terms, means the imagination. The frontier of our species is the imagination.” “And, in fact, the evidence is building that our style of society is the historical equivalent of a temper tantrum.” “A shaman is someone who has seen the end. A shaman is somebody who has seen it all.” 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.] “[It is] a race between education and disaster. "We're going to either burst out into a millennium of freedom and caring and decency, or we're going to toxify the whole thing and turn it into an ash heap. And the responsibility falls largely on us.” “Outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope, which is that the world is whatever you say it is if you know how to say it right.” “Until I went into therapy I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world, and then once you're in therapy you discover that it was the most insane scene you'd ever heard of, and you just didn't notice.” “Science fiction I really consider a proto-psychedelic drug, because what science fiction does is it gives permission to imagine.” “We can't preach to the have-nots the virtue of voluntary simplicity when we're riding around in BMWs and collecting Monets. That doesn't make a lot of sense.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Lorenzo Hagerty PROGRAM NOTES: This relatively short podcast features the audio portion of a film by Tom Huckabee and George Wada in conjunction with “The Starck Project”, a documentary soon to be released. The short film consists primarily of an interview with Lorenzo Hagerty dealing with the introduction of MDMA (Ecstasy) to the street scene in Dallas, Texas during the 1980s. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Starck Project The Starck Project's Facebook Page VIDEO FEATURES /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video) Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate from George Wada on Vimeo. The Cosmic Dance Scene If you aren't already familiar with the world-wide dance scene, this trailer will give you a feeling of where it was in 2011. /*

Guest speaker: Jae Starfox PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features Jae Starfox's 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture, which was delivered at the Burning Man Festival. In their talk, Jae provides a candid look into some of the issues that transgender people are faced with as they make their way through a sometimes less than friendly world. As more and more people are beginning to deal with their own gender related issues, this talk provides some little discussed but very important information. Following Jae's talk I play a short segment from my interview on the Joe Rogan podcast in which we also discuss gender issues. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: Intersex women speak out to protect the next generation Lorenzo on the Joe Rogan Experience Joe Rogan's Podcasts What is the Plan? The Plan Today

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A psychedelic point of view means a point of view which honors consciousness.” “You do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate.” “Our role is not to understand but to appreciate.” “It's ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality, because we don't even know where we want to go.”J “We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane.” “Once nature is taken as the ground of being then permission to inflate the image of the ego is denied.” “Intuition must be given prominence in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world.” “Science is really the, it's the plumbing level of reality. It doesn't catch the integrated nature of language, the evolution of fairy tales, the dynamics of love affairs, the quintessence of genius, these are the things, that as human beings, structure and constellate and guide and inform our world. And science has nothing to say about these things.” “Intuition is the unifying of experience into a gestalt image of the world.” “We are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing.” 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.] “In the matter of deeper things, deductive reasoning rests only on the appeal that hope can lend to its case.” “In the felt domain of experience called 'living', intuition is how most of us, even the most self-defined as non-intuitional, are operating.” “[Nature] seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness, mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it's the species that can make itself indispensable to all others.” “Culture, as it is in a sense, the software of the infrastructure of the global civilization, which is the hardware.” “Culture can be redefined as software and radically re-written so that it runs much more smoothly.” “I did not say that we were software or hardware. We are neither. We are the user, and this is the important thing to remember. We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future. We are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have.” “To offer instead a potential calendar in celebration of flux, change, growth, and feminism, which are the values that are going to have to be maximized if we are going to open a dialogue with our souls and [the] soul of the planet and save ourselves from the lethal momentum that so many hundreds of years of dominator culture have imparted to the machinery of our civilization. We must awaken.” “The path out of the Dark Wood in which we find ourselves is cognition, thought, getting smart fast. We have to dance, sing, calculate, and drum our way out of the circumstances into which we have fallen.” “To the degree that we can celebrate the irrational, the feminine, the unconscious, the transpersonal, and even the psychedelic, to the degree that we can celebrate these things we are giving permission for the order that is in nature to manifest. The plan wants to come to be. We have to get out of the way.” “Life is some kind of opportunity. It's an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos, for twenty, forty, seventy years we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum. It is a puzzle. It is something to be figured out.” “The path with heart is the path which astonishes.” “All of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention.” “My own private opinion about this is, I think that what psychedelics in these high-dose, correct set/setting situations carry us into is an ecology of souls. . . . Those 'things' in that place are our ancestors.” “Do we know what we behold? We need to know what we behold because inevitably we become what we behold.” Download MP3MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Minecraft: The Story of Mojang

We were saddened to learn of the untimely death of Daniel Jabbour on April 13, 2014. Celebrating The Life Of Daniel Jabbour: An Intersection Of Psychedelics, Activism And Technology A transcript of this podcast is being created at https://www.fanscribed.com/transcripts/7-376-jabbor-coming-out-of-the-psychedelic-closet/ — we’ll finish it with a handful of volunteers but the more who can help, the faster it will be completed. PROGRAM NOTES FOR THIS PODCAST: Guest speaker: Daniel Jabbour For anyone under the age of 30, this may be the most important podcast in the salon. Daniel Jabbor is a young entrepreneur and drug policy activist who, among many other accomplishments, and in a very short period of time, founded the now 4,000+ strong Psychedelic Society of San Francisco. Today's podcast features two of Daniel's talks, one from the recent Palenque Norte Lecture Series at the 2013 Burning Man Festival, and another from a psychedelic conference at which he detailed some of the successes of the SSDP, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. No matter what your age, this is an important message for you to think about. If you know history, you know that quite often it is the young people who are the ones to change its course. These talks by Daniel Jabbor will give you more positive hope for the future than you have had in a long time. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Daniel Jabbour.] “The War on Drugs was started as a way to control and segregate various groups of society.” “The drug war is increasingly a war on youth. Over 50% of marijuana arrests in this country [the U.S.] are people under 29 years old.” “We desire to alter our state of consciousness. It's an evolutionary thing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Society of San Francisco Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) is the only international network of students dedicated to ending the war on drugs. At its heart, SSDP is a grassroots organization, led by a student-run Board of Directors. We create change by bringing young people together and creating safe spaces for students of all political and ideological stripes to have honest conversations about drugs and drug policy. Founded in 1998, SSDP comprises thousands of members at hundreds of campuses in countries around the globe. Be sure to visit

Guest speaker: Ken Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear another of the Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the 2013 Burning Man Festival. This talk features the artist, experimental film maker, micro-publisher, and media developer, Ken Adams, who for many years was a close friend and neighbor of the late Terence McKenna. You will be delighted with some of the true stories Ken tells as we get to wander with him through the mind of a uniquely creative artist. Also, I tell a couple of my 'grandfather stories', and we finish with Ron Shock telling the greatest dope story ever. “We have shared experiences that the entire world knows about, like 9-11 and all the catastrophes in Japan and Haiti and all over the world, the Gulf. We're being introduced to a level of experience that's post tribal, post national, where we're all sharing the same emotional experiences and beginning to develop the persona of a new human being, a human being that's never been here before. It's something that's completely unique in human history.” -Ken Adams Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Terence McKenna Experience ceremonial cinema by Ken Adams (pay-what-you-can movie download)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Ego is the absolute impediment to Tao.” “We live in a domain of triviality that we have created.” “Do we embody the radiant correctness of what we say we are pursuing.” “I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.” “I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.” “If you're interested in drugs, the first stop is the library. And it's a long stop. And you educate yourself.” “In order to be free I must not believe anything. Then all things can be freely commanded in the mind.” “It takes months to assimilate a large psychedelic trip.” “I think the worst thing you can do is diddle with low doses. The nibblers of this world are no friends of mine. It should be overwhelming, and it should be an act of courage” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast Amazing Dope Tales by Stephen Gaskin Russell Brand Sounds Off!

Guest speaker: Terence McKennna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A single chemist can produce ten million hits [of LSD]. Well this is not some guy getting rich, this is about changing history, when you're talking about ten million consciousness-expanding experiences.” “One of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience is to see that it dissolves conventional wisdom. It dissolves adherence to group values, because it dissolves all structure, because it dissolves syntax. It shows the provisional nature of syntax.” “Try and look at consciousness as a resource for want of which we are going mad.” “And that what we really want, in the domain of planning, is an abandonment of ideology, that ideology is poisonous, all ideology is poisonous.” “You just can't go wrong as a heretic, because they're always vindicated.” “Permission for heresy is never a bad idea.” “Television is not reality. Television is the cultural myth about reality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the RG Veda to Plato by Ernest G. McClain Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.” “Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.” “Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.” “Once they pledge allegiance to a given model of reality, then that absolves all necessity for further thought.” “Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.” “I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.” “I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “Marijuana, it turns out, is three-quarters of the illegal drug problem, because it's three times as popular as all the other drugs put together. So if you can move marijuana out of the black market and into a legal and regulated market you've gotten rid of three-quarters of the crime, three-quarters of the violence, and three-quarters of the black market money. It changes the dynamics for the other drugs. It makes it much more of a small potatoes thing.” “If you move away from [Google's] free services you can move away from the part of the Net that's the most heavily surveilled.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)Defending Your Rights in the Digital World John Gilmore's Home Page Google has been secretly harvesting the passwords of all Wi-Fi devices everywhere

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.” “Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.” “The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.” “We are caught in a tremendous historical crisis. And what we lack, in this crisis, is consciousness, whatever that means, the ability to integrate data about the situation we are in.” “We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.” “Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.” “The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?” “What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast The Great Drug War: And Rational Proposals To Turn The Tide Arnold S. Trebach

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary & Terence McKenna Invitation to the opening of the Timoty Leary Archive at the New York Library. (Held on the second anniversary of the Occupy Movement.) :-) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I know that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Tim Leary. He was the pathfinder. He cut the way through the woods. He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.” “Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.” “What 'psychedelic' means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.” “Mind conjures miracles out of time.” “You've been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you, fall of man, original sin, and so forth and so on. It's bullshit. It's absolute bullshit.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast One Foot in the Future Nina Graboi Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition By Frances A. Yates Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History) D.P. Walker

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.” “It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.” “What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.” “I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.” “We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].” “The world isn't this unbelievably strange thing which is 'out there'. The world is this stranger-than-we-can-suppose thing which begins from the core of us out. That means nothing can be taken for granted. It can be taken apart. It can be put together many, many ways.” “[DMT] is pure, one hundred per-cent magic. MAGIC. It's not a drug. It's an event. It's not something you do. It's something that happens to you.” McKenna also describes a DMT experience as, “A collision with another modality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books Mentioned in this podcast The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future Riane Eisler The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (Cornell paperbacks) The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series) Richard Evans Schultes Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite..” “In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.” “Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.” “One of the core elements of this psychedelic thing is freedom, on the broadest scale.” “Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.” “I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.” “Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.” “The archaic revival is an invitation to historical humanity to view itself as a kind of a prodigal son.” “What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Symbiosis Gathering 2013 The Transcendent Nature of Symbiosis Festival

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.” “What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.” “I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.” “Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.” “The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Terence's List (1987) Psychedelics Encyclopedia Peter Stafford Hallucinogens : Cross-Cultural Perspectives Marlene Dobkin De Rios Hallucinogens and Shamanism (Galaxy Books) Michael J. Harner The Hallucinogens A. Hoffer; H. Osmond Science and Romance of Selected Herbs Used in Medicine and Religious Ceremony Anthony K. Andoh Narcotic Plants William A. Emboden The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series) Richard Evans Schultes A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance Rupert Sheldrake Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future Riane Eisler Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts O. T. Oss, O. N. Oeric Codex Seraphinianus Luigi Serafini True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise Terence McKenna The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution Terence McKenna A few more suggestions from Lorenzo The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Citadel Underground) Timothy Leary Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman Pablo Amaringo, Luis Luna Be Here Now Ram Dass Entheogens and the Future of Religion Edited by Robert Forte Hallucinogens: A Reader (New Consciousness Reader) Charles S. Grob Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics Charles S. Grob LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science Albert Hofmann One Foot in the Future Nina Graboi Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience From Park Street Press The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge Jeremy Narby The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications Christian Ratsch, Albert Hofmann The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia Paul Devereux

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.” “We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.” “The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.” “I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.” “And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.” “The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.” “The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.” “I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.” “Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.” “Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.” “You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.” “We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.” “What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.” “The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.” “Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Palenque Norte Lecture Schedule at the 2013 Burning Man Festival Erowid Extracts (PDF) Erowid Prospectus (PDF)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.” “What you call man is time.” [Quoting the mushroom.] “It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.” “What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the Mandela, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.” “[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.” “History is the siren song of the soul.” “The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.” “I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.” “The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.” “And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future By Riane Eisler One Foot in the Future By Nina Graboi

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff and Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording from the spring of 2006, at Kathleen's Salon in Venice Beach, California, where Robert Forte and Myron Stolaroff came to tell their stories about the recent festivities in Basil, Switzerland celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. After telling a little about the Hofmann event, Myron read part of the talk that he gave in Basil. From there, the conversation ranged widely, eventually ending with an argument about the Kennedy assassination. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Dr. Timothy Leary reading a few selected chapters from his autobiography, Flashbacks. Interestingly, he begins this recording with Chapter 19, which details with his departure from Harvard. [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “We agreed that as much as we loved and respected Harvard University, this finishing school for Fortune 500 executives was not the place for philosophic activists bent on changing practically everything.” “The State of California should be run like a successful business enterprise. . . . Anyone smart enough to live in California should be paid a dividend.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by and about Dr. Timothy Leary

Guest speaker: Lorenzo RIP: Zoe7 & Dr. Andrew Sewell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcasts is from the audio book edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation. It consists of a reading of Chapter 9, Catlin's Salon. This is a fictional account of what was once the most fashionable psychedelic salon on the West Coast. Once each month, for more than eight years, an amazing group of people would gather to discuss a mind-numbing array of topics. And while the story line in my novel is obviously fictional, the backdrop of the salon itself is described as best I can . . . and as best that I now remember, looking back after so many years that have passed since those wondrous meetings of the L.A. Chapter of the Albert Hofmann Society. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “Plant medicines have long been the domain of women.” “We are taught to escape in this culture, and so what these [psychedelic] medicines will do is they'll take you to the heart of the truth of who you are and what needs to be addressed.” “I think of myself as a spiritual warrior, and a spiritual warrior seeks to know, they are on a quest to know.” “We still have an Inquisition, it's a Pharmacratic Inquisition, it's still around.” “. . . they say we are wanting you to see and understand what's going on, because when you see, you SEE, then it's game over, right? [Which is] another reason why these medicines are illegal, because if you use them enough, in the right set and setting, then you start to get what's going on, you start to really see.” “We are here to remember the truth of what we are.” “You are not the 'story' of what you think you are.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Interview with Shonagh Home on Shamanic Freedom Radio Shonagh Home Web Site Love and Spirit Medicine By Shonagh Home The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values By Thomas B. Roberts

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History has been the pursuit of a false god, the god of stability, the god of permanence, the god of the unchanging, and we've become just neurotic on this subject.” “What's being said here is re-claim experience. Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future, and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates. Take back your mind and your body.” “You're involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder.” “The suppression of psychedelics has had the unfortunate effect of making it impossible for us to build a linguistically coherent community and have a shared body of experience, because you can't just say this stuff to everybody.” “Coming out of the closet on psychedelics should be part of the political agenda.” “The direct datum for metaphysical speculation should be ones own experience.” “I believe that the boundary dissolving quality of these psychedelics makes them social dynamite.” “The real message of psychedelics, I think, is to reclaim experience and to trust yourself. Your perceptions are primary. Your feelings are correct. Everything must constellate out and make sense and parse with what you know. If you don't start from that assumption then you are off center to begin with. And the psychedelics will dissolve the cultural programming that has potentially made you a mark and restore your authenticity.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth By Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen Process and Reality By Alfred North Whitehead Childhood's End By Arthur C. Clarke When Prophecy Fails By Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, Stanley Schachter Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think if we ever tease apart this psychedelic thing, what we'll discover is it's an inter-species communication system.” “I'm at war with the keepers of the secrets.” “One of the motivations for my career is to get other people to check [DMT] out, because here is truly confounding data that you don't have to make an expedition to the heart of the Amazon, or battle your way through hours of waves of nausea and dark spaces, chanting your mantra obsessively. I mean, when you smoke DMT, 30 seconds later you're in the presence of the unspeakable, and the show is going full blast.” “It really frustrates me when people have psychedelic experiences and don't talk about them, because to me, that's what they're for. They're to fertilize the enterprise of communication. It's to be talked about. And if it's not talked about it's sort of like seeds which fall on sterile ground.” “I think that the world is held together by a misunderstanding.” “The real trick with an extraterrestrial is to know when you're in the presence of one.” “If you want the real thing, it's just five dried grams away. The REAL THING!” “The New Age, generally I find, is somewhat obnoxious, because it's a flight from the psychedelic experience.” “I love science. I just think it's incredibly pretentious and has claimed too much.” “It's astonishing the cul de sacs into which the human mind has wandered.” “The psychedelic thing speaks to freedom, and so you can shine that on a number of issues.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Contact in the Desert "The Planet's Premier UFO Convention"

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.” “The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.” “Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.” “The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.” “Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.” “The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Complete Listing of Salon Podcasts at Archive.org Dennis McKenna on the Dr. Future show

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The 'banks' of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.” “All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don't run around announcing how they haven't got their act together.” “What the psychedelic thing is about, or at least for me, is it's a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.” “We are, literally, a schizophrenic species. We are at war with our own nature. Civilization, whatever that means, is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it's constantly refusing to come to terms with the context in which it finds itself, which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy, and so we go outside of those things and create a generalized abstraction and reason backward.” “The reason psychedelics, I think, are so frightening to the guardians of social order is because they represent a direct addressing of experience.” “What the psychedelics show, that is a secret that some people don't want told, is that we can redesign our behavior. We can change very, very quickly.” “The whole history of humanness is a history of unexpected adaptive response to unusual circumstances.” “Whatever the imagination is, psychedelics catalyze it, psychedelics enhance it.” “If we could feel the consequences of what we are doing we would stop doing it. . . . We're like someone half-awake inside a burning building.” “Everywhere where reason has shown its light the greater darkness has been revealed.” “The truth, for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn't you should seek a deeper truth.” “History is the necessary distortion of an animal species to lead it to the brink of an ontological transformation.” “The magic, if that's the word, or the grandiosity, the power of ecstatic exultation that resides in the psychedelic is because it is literally a change of dimensional perspective.” “The real test of your psychedelic authenticity is your ability to write a novel.” “The quintessence of understanding is the ability to occupy other people's points of view.” “Not reckless dose but committed dose. Not to see if it works. It works, other people have established that. You don't need to do research to confirm that it's psychoactive.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a panel discussion with Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer that took place at the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures held at that year's Burning Man Festival. “Women tend to vote against drug law reforms in greater numbers than men, because they're worried about their kids. And without the full participation of women [in the movement to reform drug laws] we will not succeed in gaining our civil rights.” -Annie Oak Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Women's Visionary Congress Palenque Norte 2013 Speakers The Tor Project East Forest What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution By Gar Alperovitz

Guest speakers: Michael Garfield & Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt's novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and musician, Michael Garfield, one of my favorite topics was Michael's very positive take on the long-term impact of the work of Terence McKenna, regardless of the fact that the Timewave theory had obviously been disproven. Michael is also a regular performer on the festival circuit, and his schedule may be found online at Michael Garfield.net Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Salon Magazine Degenerate Art: The Art And Culture Of Glass Pipes “Is Ecstasy the Key to Alleviating Autism Anxiety?” Horizons 2012: CHARLES S. GROB, M.D - “Why Psychedelics Matter” Videos from the Festival Circuit Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.” “Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.” “Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.” “National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.” “Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.” “In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.” “The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.” “Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics [Paperback] by Nick Herbert Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics [Paperback] by Nick Herbert A Vision by W. B. Yeats

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it's discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there's somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.” “You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn't depend on a state of grace. It doesn't depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn't even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don't have to go to India for ten years. You don't have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.” “If you think that you've got it all figured out, and you haven't ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you're absolutely out to lunch. You don't know what's going on. It's like the opinions of eleven year old boys about sexuality.” “You can actually go from birth to the grave and never experience [a psychedelic trip] if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently idiotic culture.” “I think that there is some truth to the notion that the reason we are alive is to learn the path out of the labyrinth, and that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.” “We share this planet with some other kind of entity, and culture is a way of sealing us off from this fact.” “Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to entertain larger perspectives than the completely piss-ant perspective that they're being given by the popular media.” “We must not consume. We must produce, as a community. The psychedelic community must produce art, not consume it. If they get it flowing the other way and we begin to consume it then we are depotentiated.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto The Essential Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.” “The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.” “If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.” “So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.” “I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.” “I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.” “Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.” “The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.” “The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.” “Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.” “In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we're walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn't self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Three Halves of Ino Moxo : Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon by César Calvo (Translated by Ken Symington) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you're never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don't know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.” “The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.” “[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it's letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don't want to become like that. Maybe that's not why you're there.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamilton Souther, Medicine Hunter Blue Morpho Ayahuasca Center

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.” “Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.” “Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.” “I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.” “[Psychedelic experiences are] beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.” “It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.” “We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.” “There is an intelligence in the species that is deeper than the societies and the systems that we erect to rule us, and this wisdom of the species can make enormous changes in the evolution of the mass psyche, such as the Renaissance for example.” “Impressionism [in painting] is simply twenty minutes into LSD.” “Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.” “I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Naughtilee PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Naughtilee gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of modern medicine with the wisdom of the natural healing arts. In this engaging talk, and through interaction with her audience, Dr. Naughtilee discusses some of the foods, medicines, and poisons that we obtain from plants and helps us to better realize what a deep connection we humans have to the plant world. 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.] “Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence” “These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.” “Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.” “In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.” “To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.” “For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.” “And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.” “We need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being.” “Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.” “Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.” [Note: this comment was made a dozen years before the iPhone was released.] “As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.” “The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.” “History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.” “What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.” “To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.” “If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013 Conference Books Mentioned in this podcast Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet By Katie Hafner

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer /* A brief history of Palenque Norte (video) PROGRAM NOTES: Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of "global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism" where you "put yourself on the shelf" and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says "there is no dominator culture" and that if we aren't careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others' unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop "critical intelligence". If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn't feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Check out all of the projects Bruce talks about at his personal site at: www.damer.com Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone Podcast

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.” “By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.” “The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?” “People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.” “Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state, it's that we haven't demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.” “In the last eight years we have undergone like a second Neolithic revolution. The first Neolithic revolution was the invention of agriculture. The second Neolithic revolution was the invention of home fungus cultivation.” (from a November 1983 lecture) “I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.” “The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.” “For all we know, we know nothing.” “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your understanding.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Against the Grain [Kindle Edition] Joris-Karl Huysmans (Author)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.” “Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.” “Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.” (quote from 1983) “Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.” “I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.” “If I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism.” “So it's [shamanism] a kind of a profession. It's almost like clergy. It's to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.” “The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present By Howard Zinn Burr: A Novel By Gore Vidal Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated By Gore Vidal

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women's Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psychedelic community she has these powerful words, “We're not the counter-culture. We are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Women's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice Links mentioned in this podcast The Terence McKenna Legacy Library book list at LibraryThing Dr. Bruce's Levity Zone The Evolver Network BrynStoneBooks.com UKCSC Podcast 006: Please Hire Me, I'm a Cannabis Campaigner!

Guest speaker: Allyson & Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: “If it's a psychedelic family business, then you've got to consider the 'top line' [as contrasted with 'the bottom line']. What's the top line? The top line is: You have one unique life, and what do you love to do? What do you want to spend your life doing? What is the highest impact you can have on the world in a positive way?” -Alex Grey “We know that in the wake of our psychedelic experiences we're awakened to a oneness with the environment and with a sense of the need to protect it. And at least the dream of Eco-sustainability and how could we possibly manage that at this point in our trip. And yet it's up to us to take responsibility for it. All of these things kind of naturally evolve in the wake of the psychedelic experience for many people.” -Alex Grey “If you really want something big to happen in your life you have to make promises that you don't know how you're going to keep, and you have to keep them. That's all. That's all it takes.” -Allyson Grey Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option COSM Allyson & Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors A sanctuary for seeing ourselves and the world as reflections of the Divine

Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's talk features Dennis McKenna in a June 1984 presentation of his research concerning ayahuasca. This is one of the first, if not the first, public presentation of Dennis' early work involving this sacred medicine. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of his professional life, and he is considered one of the world's leading scientific experts in this field. As Dennis says in a recent article in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs: “In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Index of Dennis McKenna Articles (from Erowid.org) The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012) Dennis J. McKenna (Erowid Character Vaults) “Ayahuasca and Human Destiny” by Dennis McKenna Dennis McKenna on the Joe Rogan Experience

Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a better understanding of not just our own local ecosystems, but of the Earth's entire biosphere as well. It is a fascinating talk and is followed by an interesting Q&A session. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2 By John Allen The publishing home of John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder Upcoming Events Books from the Synergetic Press

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.” “Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.” “I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.” “The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.” “We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.” “Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.” “The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a few sound bites from several of the previous podcasts featuring Myron Stolaroff, who departed this life on January 6, 2013. Not only was Myron one of the world's leading psychedelic researchers, earlier in life he was instrumental in helping the Ampex Corporation develop the audio and video tape recorders. Below are a few links, videos, and books that more fully illustrate the life of this Renaissance Man. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Myron Stolaroff Archive on the Psychedelic Salon Donate to The Stolaroff Collection at Erowid Myron Stolaroff memorial video Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher in Dialogue The Gary Fisher Archive on the Psychedelic Salon A Visit with the Stolaroffs The Myron Stolaroff Vault at Erowid.org The Secret Chief: Conversations With a Pioneer of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Movement By Myron J. Stolaroff The Secret Chief Revealed By Myron J. Stolaroff Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness By Myron J. Stolaroff What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry By John Markoff Myron Stolaroff on Wikipedia