Psychedelic Salon

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

Guest speaker: John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “I thank medical marijuana for breaking down social resistance to recreational marijuana.” “In medical marijuana states it was the gay community that developed political skills in working for their own liberation that then applied those skills to liberate marijuana in a medical context in the aids fight. Those people blazed a trail for us.” “I think encouraging courage among people who are in the know to actually say what they know is a way to have positive social change. It's a way that the powerful are vulnerable to the ordinary people.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option HTTPS Everywhere HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure. Encrypt the web: Install HTTPS Everywhere today. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry By John Markoff

Guest speakers: Shonagh Home & Diana Reed Slattery PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Diana Reed Slattery who is a practicing xenolinguist and psychonaut. She has been investigating linguistic phenomena in the psychedelic sphere for over 15 years. Her website, Psychedelics & Language, details this research. Her science fiction novel, The Maze Game, tells the story of one such language, Glide. Her latest book, Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness comes out in January, 2015, from North Atlantic Press. 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: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.” “[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.” “You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.” “Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants” “Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.” “The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.” “We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.” “Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Niles Heckman PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Niles Heckman.] “The visual component of the psychedelic experience is for the most part the final frontier for what computer graphics still have yet to replicate faithfully.” “Art isn't really important unless it helps you grow in creating it, or it helps others grow through its consumption.” “Computer graphics are, and will continue to be, the tool used to visualize what is essentially unlanguageable.” “It's really fascinating that indigenous people have essentially been uploading themselves to much more advanced organic realms for potentially thousands of years, if not more, seeing imagery that's much more complex than what you can see in a Hollywood summer blockbuster today.” “Psychedelic experiences, whether real or future replicated, if done responsibly, aren't negative escapism but could be a true awakening process for more people, because we are not human beings that can have spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings having human experiences.” “Ambitions are competitive, aspirations are not. Aspirations take nothing from anyone else and injure no one else and allow you as a sovereign individual to grow, because that's why we're all here.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Niles Heckman's contact information: Twitter Production Company Podcast Post-Burning Man companion interview with Rak Razam and Niles Heckmen for his podcast “In A Perfect World.” Blue Morpho.tv Foundation Upcoming Events What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The world is magic, not a little bit, one hundred percent. Every atom from one end of this cosmos to the other is magic, magic, magic.” “Fate has chosen you to hear about [DMT]. . . . If you now go ahead and live in your mundane, stock portfolio, BMW existence, it's because you're making a choice.” “To go from birth to the grave without ever encountering DMT is to my mind like going from birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience. It means you skated through life. You never got it!” “We're accepting a kind of society where millions and millions of people have very simple thoughts and spend all their time in a larval state imbibing manufactured data streams that come to them over the boob tube. This is not a pretty picture, actually. I mean these people are not entirely human beings.” [A shaman] “is a creature of the Interzone. And this is the power of shaman, that they can come and go from the Interzone.” “I think that culture is the program within the monkey species that is an attempt to make language visible.” “At the operational level, what virtual reality is is it's a way of showing somebody the inside of your mind.” “People didn't know what an ego trip was until they took LSD [in the Sixties]. There was no word in the language for that.” “Psychedelics are like the quintessential essence of this aesthetic of the weird. Once you get to psychedelics it's like you've hit the main vein of weird.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten by MD James S. Ketchum

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: The final speaker at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures, which are held at Burning Man each year, was Grover Norquist. According to Wikipedia, “... he is an American political advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases and a co-founder of the Islamic Free Market Institute. A libertarian-leaning Republican, he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” While to those who haven't yet had an opportunity to attend Burning Man, his attendance at such an event may seem unlikely, in the extensive Q&A that followed his brief talk, it is quite evident that he has many admirers on the playa. I think that you will be fascinated as he very candidly discusses not just tax matters but also touches on what he thinks about Burning Man itself, as well as his position regarding psychedelics, legalizing cannabis, and mandatory minimum sentencing. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Nese Devenot Photo credit: Randy Mayfield PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation with Nese Devenot who pose a number of challenging questions. One of the issues they raise regards the reluctance of some of us in the psychedelic community to discuss some of the serious problems that arise out of a false sense of protecting the reputation of us all. Hopefully this will be the beginning of an ongoing discussion of this important topic. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Neşe Devenot is a founder the Psychedemia psychedelics conference and a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies and teaches psychedelic philosophy and the literature of chemical self-experimentation. Website: https://upenn.academia.edu/ndevenot Contact: ndevenot (at) sas (dot) upenn (dot) edu