Psychedelic Salon

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