Psychedelic Salon

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

Guest speaker: Dr. Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Cameron Adams.] "It is not really reasonable from a public health perspective to make psychedelics illegal." "[Psychedelics] are biologically safe, far safer than alcohol. Alcohol, ten times the active dose will kill 50% of the people who take it. And something like mescaline, which is the most dangerous classic psychedelic is twenty four times. So that's two and a half times safer than alcohol. And it doesn't even compare to things like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD, which have only been predicted to be between one and five thousand times the active dose." "So there's this relationship to diet, neurotransmitters, and psychedelics which may be involved how the body regulates itself and builds itself." "There might be real biological changes even though it just seems on the surface that psychedelics are working in a psychological way." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelia Collection on the Internet Archive The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "This connection between the cow, and the mother goddess, and the mushroom is some kind of a key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity in early man in that part of the Middle East." "This notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness." "But it isn't a missing link, I think, it's a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency toward symbol formation and self-reflection." "A history of the human race could be written analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol, and psychedelics." "That these foods and drugs and spices, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They are regulating human history and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation, all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants." "Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation, and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs, and the teachers are merely the pipeline for ideas, and the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction." "I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself." "The imagination may be, in fact, a three dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen." "The triumph of Socialism will be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context, that there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of information." "You see, what's going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled. And that's why it's so important to find out what our real wishes are." "A delusion of grandeur is when you're a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be.” “The way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have.” “We feel the dizyness of the things not said.” “The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter. They can deliver their message all by themselves.” “Imagination is the real frontier. This is why the poets and the artists are so important." "The interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go 'through' space to other worlds, that will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space means going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves." "Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It's a vast, unfilled void into anything whatsoever can be projected." "The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species five hundred years from now." "The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know, and, of course, it has facets that they never imagined." "It is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself, and if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents (this is what they were originally called, consciousness-expanding drugs) if you that that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean, obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible, at all costs, in all times and places, because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available." "The thing that really interest me, or draws me back, to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there is something you can learn that would somehow have an impact on society at large." "Time is not simply the dimention of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words."  "The culmination of man's god-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it's not that we are 'doing' it, you see. It's that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding." "The richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful." "And this is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years, to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being, and have everything fused into a super numinous concrescence that is time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Information Theory Shamanism in the Age of Reason by James Kent MAPS’ 2010 Los Angeles Conference

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What would you have if you could have anything?" "I think that life proceeds through time. It's an effort by organism to map one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a 'something', and the 'now' is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it. And so what being in time is is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And that's why, hopefully, a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get a whole picture." "Yes, well I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history. ... Because your history gives you the power of your convictions." "I think, better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetime." "This is the anguish of the ancestors. This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed. The pogroms, and the invasions, and the atrocities conducted across history can only be, somehow, redeemed if we, who are the living wavefront of this genetic experience do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do." "The 'other' is just a way of thinking about all of these things that we name spirit, god, demon, void. It's that there just necessarily is a place off our map. Whenever you have a map it implies the part that is not on the map, and the other, the truly other, lies outside the domain of language. It's like the unspeakable. All you can do it point at it." "That's the challenge. You see, that's the weird thing about the psychedelics. It is a path, but in a sense it's the end of the path. And then what do you do? Now it's up to you." "The way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option