Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Repression of psychedelic drugs Element of risk in taking psychedelics The imagination Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul Death The importance of psychedelics Bell's Theorem [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don't really; there is no degree in shamanism.” “This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.” “There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn't, but I think that the risk is worth it.” “Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.” “The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.” “A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.” “There is no knowledge without risk taking.” “It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind. “Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.” “The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.” “I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.” “We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.” So I believe that a technological re-creation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward. And that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and re-form from, but there is also the self, related to the body image but in the imagination. So that we each would become, in a sense, everyone.” “There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyperdimentional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.” “It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.” “Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.” “On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.” “Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation?

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic UFOs and aliens The end of history – the eschaton The psychedelic experience Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other Death and afterlife Dreams [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.” “Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.” “Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.” “The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'” “Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.” “Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.” [Regarding UFO's] “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.” “But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the overmind. You won't read about it in “Scientific American” or anywhere else. You will carry it out.” “Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.” “All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.” “We are, in fact, hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.” [From the point of view of the shamanic tradition.] “In shamanism and certain yogas, Daoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.” “There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space AND the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.” “The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self int...

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This program is a recording of part of a live event at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. The workshop, titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”, was led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty. This specific recording took place on Saturday morning, June 16th and consists of Bruce's “deep dive” into the mind of McKenna. It begins with Bruce's “Ode to Terence” and is followed by Bruce's readings of parts of the soon-to-be published book by Terence's brother, Dennis . . . the book's title: “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Ode to Terence” by Bruce Damer “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss” by Dennis McKenna

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.” “The ketemine experience is very much like the dying experience. It is a hands-on dying experience.” “If you know how to die, gracefully, and elegantly, and intelligently, why bother with all the foreplay?” [Speaking to the Baby Boomers] “Your generation is a sinking ship. So the intelligent thing to do is to jump ship.” “I'm into the absolute navigational fact that you can only go as far into the future as you understand and are really respectful of the past.” “The key to evolution is the individual, the intelligent individual, the self, finding a self within.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelics and Language The Institute for the Encouragement of Outrageous Ideas

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: strong>[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Since World War II, in the Western societies, the generation you belong to is almost a different species.” “It's a wonderful time in history to be alive when young people are doing things better than grownups. Because that's a key sign that evolution's happening, because evolution only happens with young people.” “I feel that it is necessary, if you want to continue to evolve, that you have to learn and be comfortable with computers.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Juan Enriquez: "Will our kids be a different species?"

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “The way we define intelligence is the amount of information energy you can receive, that you can store and retrieve, and that you can transmit.” “It's very intelligent to be able to live as long as you want to. It's stupid to die.” “It's obvious that the blocks to evolution are anything that keeps you from changing, or discourages you from changing. And almost all the religions tell you, 'Don't change.'” “There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them.” “Drop out means to drop out of any line of conformity to any system.” “Now I'm telling people to Turn on, Tune in, and Take Over.” “Wherever you have the big religions, or the big totalitarian forces, they hide the body. They make you feel ashamed of the body.” “It's hard to have to figure out what do I really feel that I want. It's much harder to be yourself than to be a conforming person.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Sheldon's Kickstarter Campaign Confessions of a Dope Dealer - The Movie “Ready Player One” A Novel By Ernest Cline About Lorenzo

Guest speaker: Eben Moglen PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Eben Moglen.] “For the policy makers, in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand: How do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity? They do not know the answer to this question, and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.” “Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.” “Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the Net is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy. It proves itself all the time. Somebody's going to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for describing, in formal terms, the nature of disintermediation.” “The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web, an invention less than 8,000 days old. That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.” “The next Facebook should never happen. It's intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people. Which is not to say that social networking shouldn't happen. It shouldn't happen with a man in the middle with tax build into it.” “The way innovation really happens is that you provide young people with opportunities to create on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world and share the results.” “We care about protecting people's right to hack what they own. And the reason that we care about it is if you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.” “We said from the beginning that free software is the world's most advanced technical education system. It allows anybody, anywhere in Earth, to get to the state of the art in anything computers can be made to do by reading what is fully available, and by experimenting with it and by sharing the consequences freely.” “We should move to a world in which ALL knowledge previously available before this lifetime is universally available. If we don't, we will stunt innovation which permits further growth. That's a social requirement. The copyright bargain is not immutable. It is merely convenient.” “The universalization of access to knowledge is the single more important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet. Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout 'copyright'.” “Nobody should be fooled about the prospects for social growth in societies where fifty percent of the people under thirty are unemployed. This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car-building jobs. Everybody sees that.” “And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the world who insist that Internet freedom, and an end to snooping and control, is necessary to their welfare and ability to create and live.” “Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy with whom we are directly in touch. That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.” “And there is a third aspect of privacy, which in my classroom I call autonomy. It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions you make are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communication.” “The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumner is that young people move to them to make new ways of being taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village and the social control of the farm.” “The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living. We are closing it.” “We are on the verge of elimination of the human right to be alone. We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to do your own thi...

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a recording of a talk that I gave in March of 2001 at The Inside Edge, a Southern California association of cultural creatives. The topic was some of the themes in my book, “The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness”. One of the more controversial aspects of this talk is my comparison of a deep Internet experience with a psychedelic experience. . . . Also included in this podcast is some discussion of the growing student strike in Quebec and the mounting student loan debt bubble here in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Full Text of this talk (PDF) The Inside Edge OCCUPY TRACK 1 100,000+ Quebec Students Protest Debt OCCUPY TRACK 2 Student debt: the new slavery? by RTAmerica OCCUPY TRACK 3 Occupy Graduation: US student debt destroying the Future of our Youth - RTNews 10 Things You Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement Huge Montreal Student Protest, March 22 2012 (view from bridge) Howard Bloom's KickStarter project to promote “The God Problem”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.” “What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.” “I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.” “Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.” “Actually, these things [psychedelics] reveal scenarios, modalities hierophanies of emotional and poetic power that are very emotionally moving, and sometimes leave in their wake powerful ideas, ideas as powerful as any of the ideas that have moved and shaped civilization.” “The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.” “History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.” “One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.” “The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.” “The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.” “Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles.” “So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.” “Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.” “Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham discuss “The World Wide Web and the Millennium” Podcasts of Into the Valley of Novelty Workshop

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think it's time to begin to talk very, very frankly about the forced engineering of consciousness, about the re-shamanising of society, about the re-birth of archaic values before it's too late.” “Anyone who loves adventure, and who loves life, and who loves the experience of being, has an obligation, I think, to explore this [the psychedelic realm]. It's as much a part of your identity as your sexuality, your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to choose to play with less than a full deck. Don't do that. Play with a full deck!” “People didn't care for the Holocaust, that was a moral outrage, but the policies of the Roman Catholic Church push more people into early death, disease, and poverty than the Holocaust ever did. And yet, they're perfectly free to run their bingo games and appear among us. Why? They should have to answer for this outrage.” “Millions of people right now are being warehoused by television. Television is the heroin of the electrified middle class.” “I think that technology has been obscenely in the service of profit. And science, too, has whored itself to profit. But what kind of world could we build if these things were in the service of art? It's our cultural values that are out of whack.” “It's ridiculous to criticize a drug you haven't taken. It's sheer, boneheaded, know-nothingism.” “DMT is a reliable method for crossing into a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50,000 years. Is there an invisible, nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet your boots there is. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so and you've smoked 70 milligrams of DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.” “Everything has directions. Whether you are ironing your clothes, tuning up your car, or taking psychedelics. If you don't follow the directions, whose responsibility is it if you screw up? So we have to educate our children, educate ourselves, get these things out of the closet and make them part of the culture. That's the way to deal with sexuality. That's the way to deal with drugs. Maturely! “When I think that I will close my hand into a fist, that's a miracle. That's mind over matter. No philosopher in human history has ever been able to explain how that simple act takes place. That tells you that philosophy has been staying well-away from the world of direct experience, because every day we experience willing our body to act, and yet we say mind cannot affect matter. Why do we have this contradiction? It's because we don't want to admit the primacy of mind.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 "Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012" Esalen Workshop with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo