Psychedelic Salon

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!

Guest speaker: Allyson & Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: “If it's a psychedelic family business, then you've got to consider the 'top line' [as contrasted with 'the bottom line']. What's the top line? The top line is: You have one unique life, and what do you love to do? What do you want to spend your life doing? What is the highest impact you can have on the world in a positive way?” -Alex Grey “We know that in the wake of our psychedelic experiences we're awakened to a oneness with the environment and with a sense of the need to protect it. And at least the dream of Eco-sustainability and how could we possibly manage that at this point in our trip. And yet it's up to us to take responsibility for it. All of these things kind of naturally evolve in the wake of the psychedelic experience for many people.” -Alex Grey “If you really want something big to happen in your life you have to make promises that you don't know how you're going to keep, and you have to keep them. That's all. That's all it takes.” -Allyson Grey Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option COSM Allyson & Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors A sanctuary for seeing ourselves and the world as reflections of the Divine

Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's talk features Dennis McKenna in a June 1984 presentation of his research concerning ayahuasca. This is one of the first, if not the first, public presentation of Dennis' early work involving this sacred medicine. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of his professional life, and he is considered one of the world's leading scientific experts in this field. As Dennis says in a recent article in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs: “In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Index of Dennis McKenna Articles (from Erowid.org) The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012) Dennis J. McKenna (Erowid Character Vaults) “Ayahuasca and Human Destiny” by Dennis McKenna Dennis McKenna on the Joe Rogan Experience

Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a better understanding of not just our own local ecosystems, but of the Earth's entire biosphere as well. It is a fascinating talk and is followed by an interesting Q&A session. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2 By John Allen The publishing home of John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder Upcoming Events Books from the Synergetic Press

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.” “Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.” “I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.” “The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.” “We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.” “Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.” “The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a few sound bites from several of the previous podcasts featuring Myron Stolaroff, who departed this life on January 6, 2013. Not only was Myron one of the world's leading psychedelic researchers, earlier in life he was instrumental in helping the Ampex Corporation develop the audio and video tape recorders. Below are a few links, videos, and books that more fully illustrate the life of this Renaissance Man. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Myron Stolaroff Archive on the Psychedelic Salon Donate to The Stolaroff Collection at Erowid Myron Stolaroff memorial video Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher in Dialogue The Gary Fisher Archive on the Psychedelic Salon A Visit with the Stolaroffs The Myron Stolaroff Vault at Erowid.org The Secret Chief: Conversations With a Pioneer of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Movement By Myron J. Stolaroff The Secret Chief Revealed By Myron J. Stolaroff Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness By Myron J. Stolaroff What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry By John Markoff Myron Stolaroff on Wikipedia

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.” “It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.” “It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.” “And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.” “The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.” “In cyberspace things are built out of light.” “Apparently, in the Avesta classical period [early Iron Age and before] no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.” “To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Starmaker The Phenomenon of Man Childhood's End The City and the Stars The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features my friend Daniel Pinchbeck as our guest speaker. As you know, Daniel wrote a book titled “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, also, he is widely known as a speaker and writer about many things psychedelic and esoteric. However, I know him best as a fellow alumnus of the Entheobotany Seminars at Palenque, where Terence McKenna and his merry band of psychonauts would hold forth each January. In this talk, one that he gave at the Palenque Norte lectures during the 2012 Burning Man festival, Daniel follows the format of other psychedelic luminaries and lets the audience guide the direction of the lecture through their questions. Among other topics that Daniel covers are 2012, consciousness, the Occupy Movement, and possibilities for the future. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Direct link to video of this talk

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “[The wide variety of psychedelic plants] are the way in which the Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.” “The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.” “Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!” “Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.” “This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.” “Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.” “The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.” “Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.” “The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Megatripolis Club, London Podcasts featuring Fraser Clark “Rave Culture And the End Of The World…as we know it” “Monkey’s Trip, A Short History of the Human Species” Unify 2012 Project