Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast begins with Terence talking about the elephant in the ayahuasca room: purging, puking, barfing, vomiting or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately he moves on and speculates that the human break with nature came about due to a change in the climate. And he ends this part of the workshop talking about the dire state of affairs on the planet on that February day in 1991 as the First Gulf War was raging. Two of my favorite quotes from this talk are: “The modern nuclear family, and I've got one I know whereof I speak, is just a cauldron for neurosis. It makes impossible demands on everybody involved.” . . . and “The way you prove your worthiness is by not wrecking your home planet. You can't join the galactic club if you wreck your home planet. They withdraw your membership application.” 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 don't think you are going to spend very long involved with these things at a deep level without scaring your socks off eventually. One of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle with beginners. And then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans.” “You see, I just don't feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own? How about that you can't do it yourself unless humble yourself to cut a deal with a plant? That seems more logical to me.” 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 great emphasis for the fall into history is this broken connection with this Mind in nature.” “We can move no faster than the envelope of language which we generate to describe our journey.” “We need to take the engineering of our language seriously.” “The poverty of our language, that it's such a low-grade signal, that we're using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and coordinate a global population of six million people. And having media to change that into an electronic signal has not apparently helped us all that much.” “I heard the electronic media described as the ability to spread darkness at the speed of light.” “And somewhere in between eloquence and poetry there is a side tree into demagoguery, which you have to watch out for.” “I think the whole thing about psychedelics is that they synergize cognition, and that cognition allows us to image each other and to understand each other.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast comes in two parts. We begin with the Palenque Norte Lecture that Grover Norquist gave at the 2015 Burning Man Festival. This talk was actually in the form of a question and answer session in which the somewhat liberal audience found several areas in which they held goals in common with the more conservative Mr. Norquist. Following that are two clips dealing with the government's persecution of Ross Ulbrich, who is now a political prisoner serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime of operating a Website based in Iceland. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Danny Sugarman, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features talks by Dr. Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and Danny Sugarman, as well as audio from the trailer for DeepWebTheMovie.com. This is a podcast that you may want to listen to if you value your right to freely use the Internet, among other things. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Alicia Danforth. In her talk, plus a question and answer session, Alicia describes some of the difficulties that a professional woman researcher may encounter in the area of sexism at work. She also discusses what has been called “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”, the psychedelic jerk. At the end of this podcast, Lorenzo explains why he raised the price of the paperback copy of his novel to $350. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option PTSD And Cannabis Study Seeks Veteran Participants

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Boundary-dissolving internal hierophany does in fact reliably occur in the presence of these [psychedelic] plants and compounds.” “We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer that even as a community we have a lot of trouble figuring out how you just fact the answer, how you come to terms with the options that are actually available.” “It is not only possible, but millions and millions of people do go from the cradle to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. To my mind this is just an instance of an appalling infantilism that is culturally sanctioned.” “[Psychedelics are] part of the birthright. This is what religion WAS for the first million years before it fell into the hands of men who insist on wearing dresses. It was the celebration of an ecstatic reality that could be coaxed out of a magical relationship with nature. And it's still there. The portals are still there.” “I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage. And to have a profane government interpose itself between you and that reality, why it's ludicrous.” “The government has never been a major factor in the decisions I made about my program of ingestion.” 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.] “The mushroom has a wildness to it because it is wild, just as our minds once were wild.” “I see the mushroom as the ultimate test of the initiate because you're on your own. There's no shaman to guide you, and so it is up to you to determine how this [experience] is about to look.” “What is the point of doing these medicines if you are not going to break the spell of your perceptions, of who and what you think you are, and what you perceive this world to be.” Exploring Psychedelics Conference, 2015 Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 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: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “In the jungle, the ayahuasca is used traditionally to heal what are known as mystical, non-ordinary, problems.” “I came to look at it and realize that what we [North Americans] were looking for wasn't specifically an experience that would produce healing, but we were looking for a shift in consciousness that would produce healing.” “We are self-regulating, universal beings.” “There can be negative effects, and that's very real. The psychedelic plants are crap shoots in their own right, which makes having the presence of someone very trained very important. And that's a departed point out in the world, like, take it and go and see what happens. I'm not of that group of thought. I think it's very important to have people there who really, really know what they're doing, like REALLY know what they're doing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamilton Souther's Website

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the February 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that we began with Podcast 472. When he gets to his overview of habit and novelty and then moves into a discussion of time, his poetic language provides several interesting mental footholds from which we can expand on some of his thinking about the topic of time. As he says, “We are very naieve about the nature of time,” pointing out that the concept of using an average of measurements taken in a science experiment requires that all moments of time must be the same. “Are they?” he asks. “Is every moment just like the others?” From there he takes us on an interesting journey into the I Ching. “We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.” -Terence McKenna “Time is a series of fluctuating variables.” -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Victory for Users: Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Uses