Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's impossible to stop the forward march of information.” “This is the chaos at the end of history.” “Because our culture crisis is so much deeper [than during the Renaissance], we are casting back to 20,000 or 30,000 years back into the past.” “I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is a task of recognizing it when you find it.” “When talking about evolution it is important to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics is that there is no teleology. That means that evolution is not moving toward something. All notion of purpose has to be given up. It isn't that things evolve or move toward higher forms. It's just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher form.” “Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.” “One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is because they catalyze the evolution of language.” “I see the whole world we're living in as basically the legacy of LSD.” “The dreams of the alchemists of the 16th Century have been entirely realized in the technical accomplishments of the 20th Century.” “[Acid] heads are in charge of designing the cutting edge of culture.” “But there are no professionals in the field of self-exploration. That's everybody's job. I mean, you all are Ph.D.s in consciousness exploration, or if you're not you should be, because what else have you got going?” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Occupy Video Streams Livestream.com Ustream.com OccupyStream.com Links to David Graeber's Work Wikipedia entry about David Graeber Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination by David Graeber A conversation with anarchist David Graeber about anthropology on the Charlie Rose program Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no scientific truth, or new paradigm, can arrive in a vacuum vis-à-vis the opinions of the general informed public. If it doesn't fly with the general informed public it doesn't matter what degree of internal rigor it has, an idea is probably doomed to a kind of , or a kind of obscurity." “How are we to relate to the plants which intoxicate? Do they drive us mad, or do they return us to the “religio”, to our own origins? Are we to see the states of mind which they invoke as tremendously alien, or are we to see them as, in fact, a way of going back to the primary situation in which everything that we call human found genesis?” “If you want to change people's minds about something you have to get scientists to change their minds.” “It's actually cooperation is what nature seeks to consolidate and conserve. And it is the species which can make itself most user-friendly to its neighbor species which actually survives.” “The de-sacrilizing of natural space is the process of cutting it into grids and erecting flat, planer surfaces along those grids to cut out the influx of energy that is part of the natural world.” “Whatever Christianity was, it was a historical episode where the most patriarchal wrath extant on the planet was suddenly pumped full of so much energy that everything else was just shoved to the wall.” Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Homeless Land 9” by permission of singer/songwriter John A. Tackett OccupyStream.com

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it's basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what's to come.” “There's perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn't. It's a neurological experience. It's a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it's basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.” “To summarize, I'm an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are 'leave the planet', 'get smarter', and 'learn how to live as long as you want'.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Looked at it pragmatically, the trick of taking intelligence tests is to get the highest score possible in terms of intelligence as defined by middle class intellectuals who designed the test.” “It's the nature of the game that a philosopher who's proposing radical new ideas will be opposed by 80% of society.” “My responsibility is to the genetic process and evolutionary process as I see it.” “We have to be gentle with each other because we are going through a period of mutations.” “I think, though, that there has never been a cultural change in history that was as profound, as pervasive, and as bloodless as the cultural revolution of the Sixties. . . . By and large it was a smiling revolution.” “By and large I'm very proud of what happened in the Sixties, every aspect of our culture was reformed and revised and reviewed and improved.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now By Naomi Klein, The Nation Posted on October 6, 2011 Occupy Wall Street Links Interview with Lorenzo on Joe Matheny's G-Spot Podcast

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “From my earliest years I wanted to figure out what life was about. I wanted to find out why I was here so that my actions and my desires would have some meaning. I don't understand why everyone isn't mainly and centrally a philosopher, because if you aren't trying to figure that out for yourself you're borrowing, or begging, or passively taking on someone elses philosophy, and this may lead to situations that are unsatisfactory.” “A philosopher never gets in trouble if his ideas are not new.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Tom Barbalet and Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today we are taking a slightly different tack and heading into the cyber world of Artificial Life, which may sound like a contradiction or may sound like life in the hectic Western world these days. While this field may be controversial to old-line scientists, of late it has gained more traction and is proving to be the source of much new understanding about the way life has come to be. Our hosts for this conversation are Tom Barbalet and Bruce Damer, two leaders in the field of AL and who are the cornerstones of Biota.org, the Web's leading site for AL information. Surprisingly, their discussion quickly turns from things only true geeks can love to speculations about the work of Terence McKenna, psychedelics, and the possibility that all of us may be in the process of becoming machine elves. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Biota.org Noble Ape.com Damer.com Evogrid.org

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no catalog of psychedelic effects, and so how does one know what the full spectrum is? It's a very tricky matter.” “At five dried grams (of magic mushrooms) it's very easy to invoke a voice, a kind of logos-like phenomenon, which operates as the typical hierophant. It's the teaching voice. It's Virgil to Dante. It's a very large and superior force which takes you by the hand and then narrates the various scenarios that you're conveyed through. … The trick is to get something out of it and get away clean.” “Human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts in your head by simply uttering small mouth noises.” “It is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man which is evolving. Culture carries along. At the present moment we are able to speak 21st centuries ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at about the 1950s level.” “We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language.” “I believe that people have deeper and subtler senses of humor. I think that people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity. I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction simply because so much LSD was taken in the Sixties. And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.” “We're very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding. But has anyone stopped to notice that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding, necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown becomes larger and larger. It's like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that there's an awful lot of darkness.” “You can discover [using psychedelics] actually that the adventure of being is not a cultural adventure. It's not a societal adventure. It's a personal adventure, and that this is what you really need to be involved in.” “There is always a low level of mutants in a population, but they are of no consequence as long as the selective parameters remain the same. But when the selective parameters change suddenly these individuals, who were previously masked in the general population, the selective advantage that they have now comes immediately to the fore. And they act very quickly, and critically, to send the evolution of a given species off in a different direction. . . . It's that the new types were always there but not with any advantage. It's that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them, and they are moving then into positions of dominance in the population, or the society if we're talking about human beings. I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level. There is a population of different people in the general population, and as conditions change these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages.” “What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery and put you right up against the human essence.” “I think there is a potential for immortality, but it isn't assured. It is something that comes to the courageous. And somehow in the historical experience we've gotten the idea, through orthodox religions, that salvation comes to the subservient, and this is totally wrong. It is more like the Greek ideal of the hero, that if you're heroic enough once you're dead you'll be a god. And I think this is what these things summon us all to.” 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

Guest speakers: Eileen Workman and Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Matt Pallamary interviews Eileen Workman, co-founder of the Universe Project who spent sixteen years working in the financial services industry, most recently as a First Vice President of Investments with a major Wall Street investment firm. Her new book, Sacred Economics: The Currency of Life has been praised by many, including Barbara Marx Hubbard, co-founder and chairperson of the board of The Foundation for Conscious Evolution who says of it: Occasionally in human history a clear voice of good sense and compassion rises from the multitudes caught in the memetic mud of obsolete ideas about current reality. Thomas Jefferson was such a voice when he stated: "All men are created equal" at a time when there was no equality, at all. So now Eileen Workman sends a clear and intelligent message: We can live beyond the current monetary economy better, longer, kinder and more joyfully, and here is how to begin. Even though it might seem impossible, as the system continues to breakdown and the inequalities grow, her voice increasingly serves us as a guide to the next stage of evolutionary economics. We should all read it and place our faith and actions in the good sense it offers us, guiding us toward the next era of economics in the coming age. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eileen's Blog

Guest speakers: Dr. Albert Hofmann and Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Albert Hofmann.] “I reported about this bicycle ride because I had the feeling that time would stand still. It was a very strange feeling that I had never had before, this change in the experience of time.” “It [my first LSD experience] became such a strange experience that I feared to have become insane.” “At the climax I had the feeling to be already out of my body.” “It [LSD] works on the very center of our psychic existence.” “Nobody has died from toxic doses of LSD, not one case. All of the fatal cases were by accidents due to the disturbances of the consciousness of the senses.” “They did not see any special effect on animals, because LSD works only on very high spiritual centers, on consciousness, which animals don't have.” “[Research with morning glory seeds] shows us that LSD is not just a laboratory product. It is closely related chemically, and pharmalogically, psychologically with [morning glory seeds], with this old Indian magic drug. That means that LSD belongs, pharmalogically chemically, with a group of the sacred magic plants of Mexico. That's a very important finding.” “I never believed it [LSD] would become a pleasure drug on the streets.” “I think, of course, the story of LSD is not yet finished at all. If we learn to use it with respect and under the right conditions I am sure the beneficial effects are enormous.” “In antiquity they had institutions where people who liked to have a [psychedelic initiation] could go and have a very well elaborated condition to have a beneficial effect. But we have not this. We have not. Doesn't exist.” “I think the next thing that can be reasonably asked is that LSD and the psychedelics should be legally available in psychiatry. As doctors have access to morphine, they have access to cocaine, they have no access to LSD. This must be changed. This should be changed.” “That is also important, that LSD produces no addiction.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman, Writer, Explorer, Naturalist LSD Testing on British Troops

Guest speakers: Allen Ginsberg, Ram Das, Laura Huxley, Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: As us Monty Python fans love to hear, “Now for something completely different.” Well, not really. But today's program is a little different in that instead of featuring just one speaker we have an audio collage that includes Allen Ginsberg, Ram Das, and Laura Huxley. A finer collection of psychedelic elders you would be hard-pressed to find. First of all is a rare recording of a telephone interview of Allen Ginsberg by then “High Times” editor, Peter Gorman. When Gorman asked for a story about Timothy Leary, Ginsberg tells of the time that Leary came to his New York apartment to meet Jack Kerouac and they took psilocybin together Next is a brief conversation that Peter has with Ram Das during which we learn some more of the background of the early days at Millbrook and the interesting series of events that led up to going there. The last segment is another Peter Gorman interview, this time with Laura Huxley in which she tells of some of her own experiences with LSD. It's a short program but packed with interesting historical ancetdotes. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Personal Message from Eldridge Cleaver to Timothy Leary Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary A Kickstarter campaign for Joanna Harcourt-Smith