Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Kathleen "Kat" Harrison Big Island, Little Planet March 17–28, 2012 A Travel Intensive in Polynesia on the Big Island of Hawaii Ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and Hawaiian cultural teacher Momi Subiono will lead this travel intensive, open to all who have a desire to immerse themselves in the story of plants, nature, and a deep cultural awareness of place. PODCAST PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Kat Harrison.] "The role of conscious, intentional behavior that is described by culture or subcultural rules of behavior with reflected meaning is sort of a way of describing ritual generally, and we draw these forms out of a number of traditions.” “I think when we go into thinking about how to do psychoactive medicines it's very valuable to look deeply, to look seriously, at the traditions that have attended these medicines through time.” “Repeated behavior in the same mode over a long time generates a kind of an etheric possibility of it recurring and being potentized by its ongoing, indefinite repetition.” “I feel that it's really valuable to look into the ritual history of the place where you live or the place where you're working.” “Pay homage to the history of ritual that is coming through the place.” “Why one [psychedelic medicine] may be your best friend's ally and not your ally is a mystery. And maybe you can solve that mystery and maybe not. But you should honor the fact that some things work for you and some things are not your medicine, even though everyone around you appears to be having a good time.” “You don't lead with your head. You let your heart and your body tell you what to do in these [introspective psychedelic] moments. Then if you think it's time to get up and bolt out into the street, you let your head come in and tell you, 'Don't! Sit down. You're not going anywhere.' ” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Thank you to The Turtles for "Eve of Destruction"

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 003 of the Paul Herbert Collection. This talk was given in December 1982 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.” “It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth.” “The demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.” “There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things [psychedelics] on your feet. And that means that you have an I/thou relationship, and you say … 'you're long on talk, but what can you show me?” “These things [psychedelic medicines] invoke the Logos, which means they work directly on the language centers. So that the important aspect of the experience is the dialogue.” “I think if someone tells you they've every drug you know they're confessing they're a dilettante. It's much better to lean hard on a few.” “I think one of the interesting things about judging a drug is to see how eager people are to do it the second time. If they're eager to do it the second time it's probably not worth bothering about, because what is necessary to have validity in these experiences is the terror. The terror is a stamp of validity on the experience, because it means this is real.” “Friends, right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is trans human, hyper dimensional, and extremely alien.” “The most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul.” “As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded.” “As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of active intelligence that is on a galactic scale.” “In other words, shamanic experience, drug experience, this is ruled out of bounds. And it is because it is the source of novelty. The cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being is happening there. I mean, think about it for a moment. If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us?” “So I am saying we are at the beginning of human thought. This is the birth crisis of intelligence. And intelligence is something which is moving through the higher primates now at greater and greater speed.” “The fact is that the densest organizational material in the universe is the human cortex. And the richest experience in the universe is the experience you're having right now.” “The testimony that I want to give today is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you don't have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that except form a relationship with these plant drugs.” “There is some surety that you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant, but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully.” “DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once you know about it, it's very hard for anyone to understand you when you're talking about it.” “The future is bound to be psychedelic because the future belongs to the mind.” “The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily technique, not ritual.” “The only intellectual, or noetic, or spiritual path worth following seems to me to be the one that builds on your own experience.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option TRANSCRIPT OF THIS TALK FROM EROWID.ORG

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: This is a talk that Jonathan Ott gave in September 2004 at the Mind States Conference in Oaxaca, Mexico. From the program for Mind States 2004: Jonathan Ott will give a talk titled “From Octli/Pulque and Xochioctli to Mezcal and Vino de Mezcal Tequila”. The ethnopharmacognosy of inebriating pre-Columbian potions based on octli or pulque, wine of various species of Agave, with special reference to numerous inebriating additives; traditional foods and beverages made from mezcal Agaves; and colonial development of distilled mezcal from fermented, cooked mezcal Agaves. Finally, more recent development of Vino de Mezcal Tequila or Tequila, a regional type of mezcal brandy, from cooked hearts of Agave tequillense or blue agave. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More about: Agave and Mescal Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise by Dr. Havelock Ellis

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy This program is another selection from the Timothy Leary archive. It features an October 23, 1990 debate at Penn State University between Dr. Leary and his arch-enemy, the scandalous G. Gordon Liddy. One of my favorite segments in this debate, which wasn't all that polite at times, is when Leary pointed out the fact that he had spent more time in the U.S. Military service than Liddy had, but that Liddy had spent more time in prison than Leary had. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “My advice to you is: 1) don't rely on politicians to solve you problems; 2) work to the fullest of your power to decentralize and to take power away from the central government in Washington, bring it back to the villages, to the cities, to the neighborhoods.” "It politics, scum rises to the top. Let me say it again, in politics mediocrity rises to the top.” “As far as this election is concerned, I urge you, don't vote for either a Democrat or a Republican. It just encourages the bastards.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST The Maze Game by Diana Reed Slattery

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! PROGRAM NOTES: This lecture was recorded in November 1982. A more complete version of this talk may be found in Podcast 317.] [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.” “Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they're metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.” “What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.” “Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright.” “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.” “[UFOs are], in other words, something which in order not to alarm us has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche signaling a profound historical crisis.” “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.” “Eternity does not have a temporal existence, even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed. It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity.” “We are not primarily biology with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. And the shadow in matter is the body.” “The whole purpose of shamanism, and of life correctly lived, is to strengthen the soul and strengthen the relationship to the soul, so that this passage [death] can be cleanly made.” “Technology is the real skin of our species.” "There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliacosoms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.” “An Aquarian science, or a science that places psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation, should move toward a practical realization of the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the overself.” “This [psilocybin] is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.” “We can release this thing once again. The logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenadies and Hericlitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people. And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.” “But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens, is information,

Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and David Ellenbogen Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.]  "The brain is essentially a communications network … all this complex network of neurons that cross-talk to each other through these neurotransmitters.” “We think of ourselves as separate from the environment. We're kind of here, and our skin separates us from the environment, but we're not like that at all. We're semi-permeable membranes. Things are coming in all the time in the form of food, drugs, smoke, other things that we absorb, and we're putting out things all the time at the same time. So we're part of this chemical communication system.” “If it weren't for the linkage to symbols, or significance, which are abstractions, we wouldn't be conscious. That is the sine qua non of consciousness, is that we're immersed in this world of ideas and abstractions, and dreams. And this kind of experience is as real as the external world for us. And not really separated from us. That's what sets us apart from animals.” “Consciousness is something you detect, like tuning a television set to different channels, as much as it is something that the brain generates. I think the brain modulates signals that come from outside, but consciousness is probably more primal than matter.” “It's not only up to us. Life probably permeates the universe, and that means intelligence permeates the universe. And that's good. So if we blow it, and it looks like we're probably going to, others will carry on. And if we wake up in time maybe we can be part of that. Our challenge is to propagate these understandings through enough people that people do wake up and they realize that we've got to get cracking.” “Ayahuasca is now a global phenomenon, and this is part of the plants' reaching out, trying to reach out to larger groups of people and basically hit us upside the head with a two by four and say, “Hey you monkeys wake up! You're fucking it up! You have to wake up.” “I think humility is essential for doing this [working with psychedelic plants]. This is the other thing that to me personally, and I think to a lot of people I think this is the message of the plant teachers, not only 'You monkeys need to wake up,' but 'You monkeys need to get over yourselves. You monkeys only think you're running the show. You're not running the show.' If anything, the plants are running the show.” “Religions, established religions tend to want you to take a lot of things on faith for which there's not a shred of evidence. And so the doctrines and the dogmas become essentially political institutions, they become instruments for keeping people in line, don't ask too many questions, just accept it.” “One of the maybe adverse side effects of psychedelics is that they'll make you think you're the messiah, or you somehow have to play a role in this.” “I think ayahuasca is perfectly capable of finding the people it needs, and the people who need to find ayahuasca will find it. And there's no need for cults or movements or very much human intervention, although a lot of people will be convinced that we must do this.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

We are saddened to report that Eric Hart suffered a heart attack and died quite suddenly on December 9, 2011. He will be deeply missed. Guest speakers: Eric Hart and Matthew Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: “[If you are in police custody] Never say a word. Don't ever talk to the cops under any circumstance. If you're a suspect, or you're being arrested, nothing can be gained from it. They will twist whatever you say. It can only be used against you, just like the famous Miranda advisement. You have a right to remain silent. So remain silent. Even if they're yelling and screaming at you to talk, refuse to talk. That's a basic right that you have. It's one of the only effective rights we have left from the Bill of Rights. So exercise that right, or else whatever you say will be twisted around, and it will end up leading to your conviction.” -Eric Hart, Attorney ... Email: LawyersLie (at) ymail (dot) com ... Web site: www.EricDHart.com Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Lawyers Lie (paperback) Lawyers Lie (Kindle edition)   Spirit Matters (paperback)      Land Without Evil (paperback) Spirit Matters ... Kindle Edition Land Without Evil ... Kindle Edition

Program moderator: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a recording from the Timothy Leary archive. According to the label on the file, this is a recording of a television show that originated in Toronto, Canada. It was called Enterprise, or something like that, and this program took place sometime in 1983. The guest host that night was none other than Dr. Timothy Leary, and his topic for discussion that evening was Artificial Intelligence. … For me, one of the highlights was to hear a famous MIT professor predict that home computers would never catch on! Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Fall & Winter (the movie)   The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era Vernor Vinge Department of Mathematical Sciences San Diego State University (c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge BB's Bungalow Number 44 Remembering the "Bear" (Note: There is no direct link to the above podcast. You will have to search for in after clicking the link above.]

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Erik Davis Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The trick to making the shamanic virtual world compelling is to fairly and truly convey it. You can't cut corners. You can't fake it. . . . So that this stuff really does blow people's minds, so that people see, well, human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul. It doesn't leave you feeling like you're wearing too tight a pair of shoes.” “We have no idea how strange the world we can create in the near term will be.” “Given the circumstances as we find them, what rational momentum is there to think that life is unique and arose on this planet only?” “I think that's the question that remains unanswered, you know, that's the grail of the thing. What is the nature of the Other, is basically what you're asking. Is it a construct, a projection or a discovery? It's not clear to me what it is.” “ You can't believe everything you hear. They are of many kind, some are made of ions, some of mind, the ones of DMT, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.” “I think [ketamine] is an inter-uterine memory drug. I think there are things about it that cause you to recapture some kind of inter-uterine state.” “The psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing. It isn't just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed or something like that.” “Mathematics is really what it's all about when you finally get it sliced thin, I think.” “All doubt means is that 'I'm shopping, thank you.'” [Before I had cancer] I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind were naturally available to people, and non-lethal. In other words that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures and experience very bizarre states of body/mind dislocation and have it not kill you. So now I see that the spectrum of human experience is a lot broader than I previously imagined.” “The mind can adjust to a great deal more than that which simply kills it.” “Given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death. It's bound to be mighty strange, life was mighty strange, and I'm curious. … It's an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life left, because it composes your mind for you, wonderfully.” “What psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises. I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle. The fact that that can happen to your mind. So it means that all kinds of things are possible.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Animations Mentioned in this Podcast Asparagus [1979] Quasi at the Quackadero

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