Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: Please Support Dennis McKenna's Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "But I did [as a child] spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul, and the nature of sin, and all of these imponderables. And, of course, what you end up doing is you end up reading scholars of mysticism.” “To me it's the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience, it's when you get the logos coming out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.” “[Speaking about how to pursue a psychedelic culture.] Well, I'd say the wrongly-packaged version would be something like 'Castenadaism', a formulaic cult. Do these things, take these drugs, follow these instructions and moral obligation will flee from your kin. Nobody can be that foolish. If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff, grow the plants, try to understand it, try to revivify the rituals and figuring out what it's all about, well, that's an authentic push towards spirituality, a very authentic push towards spirituality, and probably fruitful.” “It seems to me that 'the shamanic drug of the month' is not a very appealing idea.” “The basic concept [of alchemy] is that somehow intuition and nature are reflective of each other. Until that hypothesis fails we should probably hang on to it, because look how far we've gotten. I mean it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.” “[I'm hoping] that some lack of resource or vision doesn't reveal that we can't give enough people a bearable life. So we [would then] have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil, and struggle for resources. It doesn't have to be this way.” “Now let's see if information can liberate. That's why I don't want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate. And it will be settled in the next ten or fifteen years. Either they'll get a handle on it, whoever 'they' are, whatever a 'handle means. Or it will slip from their control, and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge, and that nothing can stop it, that some kind of Renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Terence McKenna Vs. the Black Hole by Erik Davis This is Erik Davis' account of the interview heard in this podcast. Excerpt: The following are excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November of 1999, in preparation for a profile that appeared in the May 2000 issue of Wired. These interviews have also been edited and released on a CD, Terence McKenna: The Last Interview. Given McKenna's subsequent demise, I chose selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a craniotomy, and he therefore spoke a bit more frankly about his condition than during November, when I spent a week with him and his wonderful girlfriend Christie Silness during his sort-of recovery in Hawaii. Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise by Dr. Havelock Ellis

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Please Support Dennis McKenna's Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!   Books by Terence McKenna The Missing Chapters of The Invisible Landscape Chapter 20: The Oversoul as Saucer Chapter 21: Open Ending PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 004 of the Paul Herbert Collection. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "In psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens generally we actually have a state of mind that is very similar to the state of mind reported to accompany the UFO contact, and that these things could somehow be co-mapped, one onto the other” “Involvement with these tryptamines as they accumulated in your system, you seem to acquire the ability to inhabit more than one world at once, as though superimposed over reality there was a super-reality, a hyper dimensional world where information was accessible in magical ways.” “History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.” “The extraterrestrial is the human over soul in its general and particulate expression on the planet. . . . The over soul is some kind of field that is generated by human beings, but that is not under the control of any institution, any government, and religion. It is actually the most intelligent thing on the planet, and it regulates human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum of history.” “The myths that are building are like the Messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ.” “I think that science has betrayed human destiny to some degree. And that we are led to the brink of star-flight, but we're also led to the brink of thermonuclear holocaust.” “The political conclusion to be drawn is to preserve your freedom of thought by deconditioning yourself to the flying saucer religion before it happens.” “I think that the flying saucer experience is tremendously powerful. And that it really is somehow linked to the psychedelic experience in a way that perhaps will not be understood for some time.” “Well, see what I'm saying is if we would intelligently examine these dimensions that the psychedelic drugs make available, we could as it were get in touch with the over soul and leave the era when man is disciplined by flying saucers and messiahs and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch just because people can't evolve their ethics and their technology at the same rate of speed.” “The modern epistemological methods are just not up to dealing with an elf, with chattering, elf-infested spaces. I mean, we have a word for those spaces, we call it schizophrenia and slam the door. But, you know, these dimensions have been with us since ten thousand times longer than Freud. And people just have to come to terms with them.” “The discs which haunt the skys of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.” “The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.” “But I think what's being missed is that a whole dimension of communication is being ruled inadmissible as evidence simply because it doesn't conform to the epistemological biases of the people who are asking the question. And that is all these voices in the head that guide shamans, that obsess lunatics, that make poetry, and in other words the muse. The muse is real. . . . Well one could talk endlessly about this subject, I suppose, but until it's resolved all of man's epistemological dealings with reality will be haunted by this faint spookiness, which can't be gotten rid of.” “You see what is happening and why the psychedelic experience is so important is because information is loose on Planet Three. Some kind of very strange thing is going on.”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “I would say it's no more than 500 people in the United States who cause a vast amount of the grief.” “A crescendo involves everyone. The singularity seems to be this nerd idea of reaching some kind of Omega Point. It's very much the Christian idea of the second coming. It's apocalyptic, etc., a bit of a downer because everything comes to an end, but it's incredibly unlikely.” “The crescendo will throw off all the old religions. It will throw off the conspiracy theories. It will throw off crusty old corporate jobs. And replace them with self-sufficiency, direct communication with nature, with other human beings, with media, and the creation of opinions directly. “So if you think of the computing, it's not really computing, but the computing nature is doing all the time, it outstrips all our largest supercomputing grids.” “So if we can't do even one neuron [computer simulation] how are we going to upload consciousness exactly?” “You're here not because something put you here and fabricated you and guided the evolution and created the whole planet. It's an emergent phenomenon and so are you. And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes, but it is also written in your mind. And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomenon.” “You don't need religion for miracles. The fact that you exist in all this existence is stacked upon miracles, turtles all the way down. So if we grok that, we don't need religious stories any more.” “The virtual worlds and avatar spaces and multi-player games of now are the Keystone Cops of what virtual worlds will be in twenty or thirty years through AR [Augmented Reality], and big home holodecks, and stuff like that.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "What's interesting is the difference, or the counter-ballast, between the dialogue of doom and the voices of hope, and the innovators of hope for the future. And it's something that you could refer to almost as like a great crescendo.” “I think that in this year of 2011 and heading into the auspicious year of 2012 and 2013 and beyond we are in the great crescendo of humanity.”  “I think in a sense it's the dialogue, it is the control of the dialogue that is the problem here. It's the battle of the airwaves. It's the people we didn't nominate to talk back to us and tell us what our culture is and what our future is and what our politics are. That is the problem. That's the primary problem.” “There can't just be protests, it can't be like the Sixties. You can't be just against. You have to find out what you are for, not just what you are against. That's the key to getting through the Crescendo. “To some extent, the future is being made around us.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer's Web site Submit a question for the Global Trialogue ‘Fall & Winter’ is a documentary that explores the origins of our global crisis in order to better understand the catastrophic transition we have now entered. Breaking Convention: A Multidisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness Planet Radio London: The voice of the Dopetribe

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.” [COMMENT by Lorenzo: This statement was made before Terence discovered virtual reality in cyberspace.] “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.” “This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.” “I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.” “It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.” “There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.” “It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.” “I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what's going on.” “The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.” “I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.” “I don't believe that the world is made out of quarks, or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe that the world is made out of language.” “The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.” “Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.” “ Certainly neoPlatonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.” “The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.” “Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.” “I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.” “We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin Ways to help the Shulgins For non-tax-deductible contributions, Paypal $ to [annandsashashulgin@comcast.net] or snailmail: Sasha Shulgin, c/o Transform Press, PO Box 13675, Berkeley CA 94712. For tax-deductible online donations to support the completion of Shulgin publishing projects that are underway: http://www.erowid.org/donations/project_shulgin.php Please spread this information. Read the story of a member of our community who needs your help PROGRAM NOTES: In his next to last talk at the legendary Entheobotany Conferences in Palenque, Mexico, Sasha Shulgin holds forth on a host of topics ranging from his experiences in the navy during World War II, to how he first developed an interest in psychedelic chemistry, and on to a description of the processes and protocols he uses to develop new psychoactive compounds. The talk was given in January 2001. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [From Wikipedia] Jonathan Ott has written eight books, co-wrote five, and contributed to four others, and published many articles in the field of entheogens. He has collaborated with other researchers like Christian Rätsch, Jochen Gartz, and the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson. He translated Albert Hofmann's 1979 book LSD: My Problem Child (LSD: Mein Sorgekind), and On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko, into English. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Entheogen Review, The Entheogen Law Reporter, the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (AKA the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs), the MAPS Bulletin, Head, High Times, Curare, Eleusis, Integration, Lloydia, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, and several Harvard Botanical Museum pamphlets. He is a co-editor of Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, along with Giorgio Samorini. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A sampling of books by Jonathan Ott Pharmacophilia, or, The Natural Paradises Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History< Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion   By R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott   Shamanic Snuffs or Enthogenic Errhines   By Jonathan Ott   Ayahuasca Analogues Pangean Entheogens   By Jonathan Ott

Guest speaker: Alan Watts NOTE: This program is still available at the Internet Archive. Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. February 25, 2011 @ 10:15 am · Edit Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege.  ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Christianity is, of all religions in the world, the one uniquely preoccupied with sex." "Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world are, frankly, sexual regulation societies." "So we have, in a very special way, got sex on the brain, which isn't exactly the right place for it." "There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it." "That the physical world is transient, it seems to me, to be part of its splendor." "Neither the church nor the opponents of the church have clearly understood that the secret, or unconscious, motivation of sexual repression is to make it all the more interesting. And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that sexual biology and all that goes with it is a figuring force, on the level of biology, of what the whole universe is about, ecstatic play." "If you've got a prudish father and mother you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting." 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.] "I still don't believe that people who deal with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is." "The evolution of the human species is the evolution of the human mind. These consciousness-expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution of the human mind. And so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape. It is they which generate religions, and physics, and messianic careers, and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment and disgrace." "The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed." "It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind." "It is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug. It is not a thing which mixes well with the politics of any institution." "I think [taking psychedelic drugs] is very dangerous. I do not tell people that it's safe because I don't have the faith that it's safe. I know what the pharmacological literature says, and it says that it's safe. That at the doses where these effects occur there can't possibly be a problem, but this seems to me to be the naivete of materialists, and we shouldn't be in a hurry to believe them even though it might make us more comfortable to do so. In other words, it's saying the drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience." "I think it's fine to take drugs for pleasure, but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure. And the high doses of psilocybin that are necessary to elicit entry into these places it requires, as it says in Hamlet, 'You must screw your courage to the sticking place.'" "I think that the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred 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." "There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyper dimensional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunities for us to be happy hunters and gathers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured." "The entirety of human history has been the story of the monkey becoming the flying saucer. . . . And we, for some strange reason, happen to be living through the final moments of that process right now, and it is a turbulent, chaotic, multidimensional metamorphosis." "Evil is anything which trivializes a mystery." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Please help the Shulgin's! Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: This is an audio collage of three talks. The first is by Dr. Leary in 1966. That is followed by a 1973 interview with Ram Das on his current feelings about Leary. The final segment is a 1986 appearance by Dr. Timothy Leary on the Larry King show. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic art is the public face, a communication device, of our new religion." "Psychedelic drugs, which include marijuana, should be totally supervised by the state. That is, quality should be established, and you should have to be trained in how to use them, and they should be prescribed, and if you screwed up they'll take your license away. You'd have to show that you knew how to use them like [you do] an automobile." "I would say 90% of the kids who are under the age of 40 who are in computers now, ninety percent of them, have had some kind of experience in brain-change, or neurotransmission. That's why I may be misunderstood or not liked among certain segments of the country. But computer people really understand where I'm coming from and they welcome me." "The only defense against totalitarianism has always been, Jefferson said it too, constant vigilance on the part of the individual. There ain't no one going to protect us against Big Brother and Big Sister except ourselves linked up as free agents." "So go over there [India]. Try it all. Don't get hooked. Don't follow leaders. Watch your parkin' meters, and stay away from gurus. But try it all out!" "The basic trajectory of my life, no matter whether you agree with me (you don't have to agree with this) is to free yourself, to think for yourself, to question authority." "I love institutions. They're intelligence tests. Institutions are prisons that you have to escape from. . . . The only thing is don't get trapped in them. The most addictive, dangerous, mind-screwing thing in the world is conformity to an organization." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eldridge Cleaver denouncing Timothy Leary in 1971 Listen Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eldridge Cleaver's friendly private message to Timothy Leary in 1995 Listen Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Khadoma & Kevin: Deer Harbor Live -- Autumn 2010 Axis Mundi's Online YouTube Channel