Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program consists of ten separate pieces from a June 2012 workshop at the Esalen Institute, eight of which are by Bruce Damer. Here are the titles that Bruce has given to these short talks: --Are we all becoming autistic astronauts? --On our dual bonobo and chimp nature --The things I loved about Terence --Esalen @ 50 --"Procreate only once" (and we will have a future) --The wellspring of human consciousness --Terence's greatest Rap: Its all about Love, and where to now, Butterfly Hunter? Following that we will be hearing the two closing segments of the workshop. The first is the “Rap for Terence” by Earth Girl and following that comes Galen Brandt singing her tribute to Terence titled “Aho Terence floating in the sky” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at Burning Man 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"

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features the final community discussions at the June 2012 Esalen workshop led by Lorenzo and Bruce Damer. Among the topics discussed were: -Creating a new myth for our community -The genesis of the Occupy Movement -Are psychedelic “mutants” among us? -Cultural Creatives -Freeing our food supply from money -Timebanks -What the mushroom has to say about the future -The Importance of myth -Developing a “Medicine Circle” app -Building new cultures through shared global experiences -The 'superfood' revolution and our connection to the Earth -Indra's Net -The Temple at the Burning Man Festival Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option FindTheOthers.net

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “In my function as a [college] lecturer, it's my obligation, it's my task, it's my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority.” “And that's one of the things that is kind of amazing today, the junk information that we're being inundated with, the cloud, the atmosphere, the smog of disinformation.” “Reagan is a certifiable lunatic” “The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” “We're getting to one of those moments, one of those great moments in history, when evolution is going to happen.” “At all costs avoid terminal adulthood.” “You are as old as the last time you reprogrammed your brain or changed your mind.” “You're as old as the people you hang out with.” “There is no reason why any human being should work. Robots work, humans perform.” “The sensible thing to do about drugs is this, get yourself a really good dealer.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Myron Stolaroff's Lone Pine Stories The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25 by Malden Grange Bishop (Dodd, Mead & Company: New York, 1963) Reviewed by Lorenzo Hagerty Mavericks of the Mind - Elizabeth Gips (read online) Thought Provoking Interviews on Consciousness by David Jay Brown

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the next installment of the workshop that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. The majority of this program features comments by some of the workshop's participants who bring up topics that include: -Heroic doses -Body load with psychedelics -Techniques for using psychedelics -What exactly is the psychedelic state -The perfect answer when a cop asks, “Were are you at, buddy?” -The re-introduction of psychedelics to our species -How do we tell the psychedelic story -The Occupy Movement and the banking system -The need for a parallel system of money Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and friends PROGRAM NOTES: In this follow-up session after Bruce Damer's “Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna”, Lorenzo leads the discussion of the participants in a workshop held at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. Topics of the conversation include: - Consciousness, not drugs were the focus of McKenna's work - Heroic doses are not as important as bringing back information - The healing and love value of teaching plants - We all contributed to making Terence McKenna a cultural icon - Building a new civilization in the shell of the old - The Eschaton as another step in human evolution Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: “Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.” -Terence McKenna According to Wikipedia, the Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world's most mysterious manuscript”, and so far it's secret code has never been broken . . . including attempts by top U.S. Government cytologists. And this is the subject of today's talk by Terence McKenna from an April 1983 lecture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.” Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedemia: Integrating Psychedelics in Academia September 27 – 30, 2012 On the campus of the University of Pennsylvania

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 into the overself.” “I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.” “Now your question about the dialogue. I mean this very literally. It speaks to you. You speak to it. It says things.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More quotes from this talk may be found in Podcast 267. Women's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice July 27 - 29, 2012 IONS Retreat Center, Petaluma, California

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