Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Marina Korsakova PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Dr. Marina Korsakova. Marina is a professional pianist and scholar in music cognition. Her research is focused on emotional responses to music and on the perception of melodic transformation. Currently, Marina teaches Music Cognition at Touro College. She performs regularly as a member of Union City Chamber Players, and she is an author of books and scientific papers. Her latest book, “Music as Magical Journey: A Story of Tonal Gravity, Melodic Objects, and Motion in Tonal Space,” makes a friendly introduction into the science of music. COMMENTS by Marina Korsakova When giving my talk, I was not always clear about important points. Below are some elucidations and corrections. 7:05 When saying a “low level of music perception” I meant the low level of consciousness, which is required for processing the melodic elements that make music. 10:35 Vibration of a string (and an air column) generates a very long tail of soft sounds - overtones. But the consonant quality of different sounds is defined by the relationships among their strongest overtones – those overtones that are in the beginning of the overtone series. 11:58 The pleasant quality of consonant melodic elements (as compared to the dissonant) can be explained by the lesser cost of neuronal energy for their auditory processing. The economy happens thanks to the redundancy of important spectral information for the consonant sounds. Here we are dealing with the law of laziness: the less efforts for processing, the more pleasant an element of perception. 12:50 Music can have different layers of perception. Enjoyment with some of the layers may require an expert understanding, though the essence of emotional communication in music is available for everybody. It is the perception of music’s building material—the melodic elements—that does not require any intellectual efforts. We perceive melodic matter intuitively. 19:40 Everything around us and we ourselves are made of interactions of different force fields. Today we know four fundamental forces of nature: the gravitational force, strong interaction, electromagnetic force, and weak force. 22:40 “Sharing on the top” meant that music and psychotropic drugs might share the same neural substrate. 25:24 Our study found that people we no musical training can have fine understanding of the exquisite details of tonal field and even of musical styles. That data was illustrated with graphs (pictures). 27:05 Music can be explained as artful arrangement of levels of tonal energy along the arrow of time Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marina Korsakova's Website The Universe of Music By Marina Korsakova-Kreyn The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness by Lorenzo Hagerty (HTML format) The Psychedelic Society of Ireland (first announcement) The Women's Visionary Congress

Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bernardo Kastrup.] “It is not the mind that is in the body. It is the other way around. It's the body that is in the mind.” “In the same way that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water, I claim there is nothing to a brain-body system but consciousness.” “The psychedelic trance allows us to 'see the stars at noon' because it simply eclipses the sun of egoic-awareness. It reduces the obfuscation and allows us to see more.” “I believe that the key insight from the psychedelic experience, the key metaphysical insight about it, is not what the nature of the psychedelic realm is. In fact, I think the key insight is about the nature of our everyday reality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bernardo Kastrup's Web Site Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything by Bernardo Kastrup Bernardo Kastrup's Youtube Channel

Guest speaker: Rak Razam PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Rak Razam's 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture, which was originally titled “Cosmic Consciousness To Convergence: Activating the Species.” As you can see, I have shortened it to a phrase that Rak used in his talk, “Consciousness Browsers,” which is an excellent way to describe the psychedelic experience. During his talk, Rak ranges from a discussion of his research into the shamanic use of ayahuasca, to black holes, consciousness as a bit torrent, and the concept of a species swarm. One of my favorite quotes from this talk is: “The heroic thing really is doing what needs to be done, or discovering something of value, and bringing it back and sharing it with the tribe.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option RakRazam.com Ayahuasca Awakenings healing retreats If you've read the book or seen the film, you'll know that 'Aya: Awakenings' takes you on a journey of shamanic discovery into the heart of the Amazon and the powerful plant medicine ayahuasca. Now you can be part of the awakening with these special 10-day healing retreats with Writer-Producer Rak Razam and legendary curandero Percy Garcia Lozano..." Aya: Awakenings DVD by Rak Razam

Guest speakers: Katie Tomlinson & Rachel Hope PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features two of the Palenque Norte Lectures that were given at Burning Man in 2014. The first talk is by Katie Tomlinson, founder of GAPS, the psychedelic student organization at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. For anyone interested in establishing student groups on other campuses this talk has some great pointers for you . Following Katie's talk we hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, introduce Rachel Hope, a participant in one of the MDMA studies sponsored by his organization. Rachel tells her amazing story of a very long struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and how the treatment being perfected by Dr. Michael Mithoefer and his wife Annie has cured her of PTSD. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Evergreen State College The Secret Chief Revealed By Myron J. Stolaroff MIT scientist links autism to Monsanto’s Roundup and predicts HALF of U.S. children will be autistic by 2025 “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”

Guest speaker: Tom Barbalet PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between fellow podcaster Tom Barbalet and his guest. Their discussion centers on what we have all come to think of as that voice in our head. As you will hear, it may not be anything like what you think it is. As Tom's guest says, “The idea for me is really very simple, break the identification with the voice in your head. It's not who you are. It's just your language machine. And you'll be in a much better position to evaluate your experience and formulate new actions if you language machine isn't filling your head with a bunch of stupid, really bad ideas.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Stone Ape podcast Stone Ape Facebook group

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.] “The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.” “LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.” “Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.” “If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Union: The Business Behind Getting High Directed by Brett Harvey The Hasheesh Eater & The Poem of Hashish By Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.” “The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.” “Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.” “A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.” “That's part of the nature of a fractal cosmos, nothing is utterly unannounced.” “History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.” “I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.” “So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.” “The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Best Psychedelic Videos of 2014

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “After you fiddle with psilocybin for a while the question of whether or not there is an alien intelligence becomes moot.” “We are embedding ourselves in a matrix of silicone and glass.” “ We are beginning to embed ourselves into a cultural membrane of some sort.” “What is happening is a globalizing of intelligence.” “The reductionists who want to say these drugs just perturb the brain I don't think have taken enough of these things.” “Our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.” “I think psilocybin three or four times a year definitely means that you are a psychedelic person. For sure it means that your every waking moment is informed and transformed by your relationship to this stuff. It doesn't take very much because it's a way of thinking.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)

Guest speakers: Lorenzo Hagerty & Chris Hedges PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Chris Hedges.] “I think when we speak today about American values what we're really speaking about are corporate-instilled values.” “When you spend over a decade brutalizing people, people become brutal.” “You can't use the word 'liberty' when your government watches you 24 hours a day. That's the relationship of a master and a slave.” “There is no difference between a night raid in Oakland and a night raid in Falluja . . . none!” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hedges v. Obama U.S. Drones kill more people than ISIS: Chris Hedges A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn Industrial Workers of the World A Union For All Workers COINTELPRO

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Once you encounter [the psychedelic experience] you see that this is an aspect or an activity as informing of what it means to be human as something as inimical to our nature as sexuality.” “What we lack is the will to change our minds.” “WE are the anomalous factor in the natural world.” “I think part of what being psychedelic is about, the real shock of psychedelics comes from the realization of the relativity of cultural positions.” “Dissolution of boundary is somehow the precondition for understanding reality.” “The truth about reality is that nowhere is it writ large that monkeys should be able to elicit the final understanding of it.” “No theory of consciousness is going to be worth anything that doesn't come to terms with the perturbation of consciousness by drugs.” “This is how I think of mind, that put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience, and I use this kind of alchemical terminology deliberately, put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience the mind becomes fluid and then is recast in a higher dimensional manifold.” “Culture is about to go hyperdimensional. That's what's creating the crisis at the end of history.” “If consciousness doesn't loom large in the human future then it is not a human future.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option