Psychedelic Salon

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