Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it's discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there's somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.” “You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn't depend on a state of grace. It doesn't depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn't even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don't have to go to India for ten years. You don't have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.” “If you think that you've got it all figured out, and you haven't ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you're absolutely out to lunch. You don't know what's going on. It's like the opinions of eleven year old boys about sexuality.” “You can actually go from birth to the grave and never experience [a psychedelic trip] if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently idiotic culture.” “I think that there is some truth to the notion that the reason we are alive is to learn the path out of the labyrinth, and that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.” “We share this planet with some other kind of entity, and culture is a way of sealing us off from this fact.” “Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to entertain larger perspectives than the completely piss-ant perspective that they're being given by the popular media.” “We must not consume. We must produce, as a community. The psychedelic community must produce art, not consume it. If they get it flowing the other way and we begin to consume it then we are depotentiated.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto The Essential Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.” “The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.” “If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.” “So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.” “I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.” “I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.” “Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.” “The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.” “The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.” “Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.” “In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we're walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn't self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Three Halves of Ino Moxo : Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon by César Calvo (Translated by Ken Symington) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you're never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don't know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.” “The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.” “[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it's letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don't want to become like that. Maybe that's not why you're there.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamilton Souther, Medicine Hunter Blue Morpho Ayahuasca Center

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.” “Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.” “Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.” “I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.” “[Psychedelic experiences are] beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.” “It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.” “We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.” “There is an intelligence in the species that is deeper than the societies and the systems that we erect to rule us, and this wisdom of the species can make enormous changes in the evolution of the mass psyche, such as the Renaissance for example.” “Impressionism [in painting] is simply twenty minutes into LSD.” “Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.” “I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Naughtilee PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Naughtilee gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of modern medicine with the wisdom of the natural healing arts. In this engaging talk, and through interaction with her audience, Dr. Naughtilee discusses some of the foods, medicines, and poisons that we obtain from plants and helps us to better realize what a deep connection we humans have to the plant world. 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.] “Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence” “These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.” “Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.” “In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.” “To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.” “For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.” “And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.” “We need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being.” “Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.” “Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.” [Note: this comment was made a dozen years before the iPhone was released.] “As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.” “The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.” “History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.” “What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.” “To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.” “If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013 Conference Books Mentioned in this podcast Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet By Katie Hafner

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer /* A brief history of Palenque Norte (video) PROGRAM NOTES: Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of "global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism" where you "put yourself on the shelf" and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says "there is no dominator culture" and that if we aren't careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others' unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop "critical intelligence". If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn't feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Check out all of the projects Bruce talks about at his personal site at: www.damer.com Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone Podcast

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.” “By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.” “The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?” “People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.” “Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state, it's that we haven't demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.” “In the last eight years we have undergone like a second Neolithic revolution. The first Neolithic revolution was the invention of agriculture. The second Neolithic revolution was the invention of home fungus cultivation.” (from a November 1983 lecture) “I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.” “The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.” “For all we know, we know nothing.” “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your understanding.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Against the Grain [Kindle Edition] Joris-Karl Huysmans (Author)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.” “Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.” “Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.” (quote from 1983) “Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.” “I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.” “If I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism.” “So it's [shamanism] a kind of a profession. It's almost like clergy. It's to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.” “The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present By Howard Zinn Burr: A Novel By Gore Vidal Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated By Gore Vidal

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women's Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psychedelic community she has these powerful words, “We're not the counter-culture. We are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Women's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice Links mentioned in this podcast The Terence McKenna Legacy Library book list at LibraryThing Dr. Bruce's Levity Zone The Evolver Network BrynStoneBooks.com UKCSC Podcast 006: Please Hire Me, I'm a Cannabis Campaigner!