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Psychedelic Salon

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Dec 2, 2010 • 1h 14min

Podcast 252 – “How Do Psychedelics Heal?”

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.
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Nov 12, 2010 • 53min

Podcast 251 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 4

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
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Nov 8, 2010 • 1h 22min

Podcast 250 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 3

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
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Nov 2, 2010 • 1h 10min

Podcast 249 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 2

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
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Oct 22, 2010 • 1h 18min

Podcast 248 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The Dawning paradigm of post modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we don't know what is happening at all, that all of the models we have worked out over the past five hundred years or so have now become recursive, and they can no longer be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed." "There is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science." "Having seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small row boat in a dark ocean, and we are being swept we know not where." "Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation of unorganized matter into ideas which human beings carry on." "The Growing Transparency, that's a good idea for what the end of history is. It's that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate, and everything is seen to be of the same stuff." "Life is a hyper dimensional object. All hyper dimensional objects are organisms, whether they be societies or animals." "There seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps al la Bell's Theorem or something like that. And that's what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologramatic space of information, where by sitting still in your room and sending your mind you can cross the universe in an instant." "I've always thought that Christianity, without making any judgment about Christ himself, that Christianity is hands-down the single most reactionary force in human history." "I think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is what technology is." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Oct 14, 2010 • 1h 5min

Podcast 247 – “On Being God and Death”

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.] "Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world." "And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much as the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning." "Indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho-hydraulics’s." "If therefore, the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution." "As Jung once suggested, life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death." "When somebody speaks as an authority it means they speak as the author. That's all it means." "All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures. They contain no information for most of us on how we grow our brains, how we work our nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape our bones. That isn't contained in the sensation, or the image, we call the ego. So, obviously then, the ego is not myself." "And they [fruit flies] in their world think they're as important and as civilized as we do in our world. So that if I was to wake up as a fruit fly I wouldn't feel any different as it were when I do when I wake up as a human being. I would be used to it." "In fact, it's a thoroughly good arrangement in this world that we don't remember what it was before [we incarnated as a human]. Why? Because variety is the spice of life, and if we remembered, remembered, remembered, having done this again and again and again and again, we should get bored." "There comes a point when really, if we consider what is to our true liking, we will want to forget everything that has gone before so that we can have the extraordinary experience of seeing the world once again through the eyes of a baby, whatever kind of baby. So that it's completely new, and we have all the startling wonder that a child has, all the vividness of perception, which we can't have if we remember everything forever." "So death, in a sense, is a tremendous release from monotony. It puts an interval of total forgetting in a rhythmic process of on and off on and off so that you can begin all over again and never be bored." "The universe is really a system which keeps on surprising itself." "You can't experience the feeling you call self unless it's in contrast with a feeling of other. ... Other is necessary for you to feel self." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Alan Watts
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Oct 5, 2010 • 1h 26min

Podcast 246 – “Elves, Egos, and Avatars”

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "In life if you let yourself be ruled by fear life becomes a fearful experience." "If you shake the Earth, all of the loose objects end in the West Coast of North America." "There's nothing useful thinking about the same task fifty times. It's the ego filling the space according to Tolle." "Advertising is heavily ego-driven. ... So why do we have them creating our thoughts, creating our vision of ourselves? Why do we nominate them?"   "And also say, look kids, it feels good to be online and be doing fifty texts and having 10,000 Facebook members, but your brain is going to be mush. How do you explain to them let's tone it down and watch the dosage level of technology." "It's the strength of the survivors that's always going to get you through. So how do we create a critical mass of people ready for the next phase, ready to build that new Earth?" [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of you're hopes, memories, fears, and dreams. It's much more like a parallel continuum. It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data space." "One of the most puzzling things about DMT is does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world one hundred percent with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in 'Oh great. The world has just been replaced by elf machinery.' Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled." "The psychedelic experience, in the best sense of the word, is a religious activity." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More about Bruce Damer A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer Damer.com http://www.digibarn.com/ DigitalSpace.com The Buddhafield Festival Shamanic Freedom Radio Bruce Damer's October Gallery Talk
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Sep 27, 2010 • 59min

Podcast 245 – “UFOs: Angels Aliens & Archetypes”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna NOTE: This podcast is a "companion" to KMO's podcast #224 "Viral Disclosure", which you may also find quite interesting. [September 27, 2010 PRESS CONFERENCE UPDATE: Aliens 'hit our nukes': They even landed at a Suffolk base, claim airmen Read more: Google News Search UFOs PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The more serious contenders [for explanations of UFO phenomena] as explanations, I think, fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited? Or is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of?" "... and there always seem to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive. . . . If the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron. In other words, the invalidation of the experience is an inimical part of its structure." "So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what is it, and what is it for?" "I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem, like many subtle problems, is haunted by our own naivete concerning language." "There is a curious fuzziness about the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them in the clear light of consciousness." "To my mind, if the UFO phenomena is something arising out of the super-ego of the human psychic organization, then we should ask why. What is it doing?" "[UFOs] are an antidote to the scientific paradigm that has evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe." "The fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts." "I believe that that is the purpose of the UFO, to inject uncertainty into the male-dominated, paternalistic, rational, solar myth under which we are suffering." "[Science] is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down." "What assurance do we have that the several million life forms that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here? Do we have any assurance?" "I think we are discovering in our own psychic structure the potential, the possibility, of a relationship with an intelligent species outside ourselves, and this raises for us all the tensions, all the issues, that accompany an adolescent love affair." "What is happening on this planet is the self-reflecting genesis of communication for itself. It is language, somehow, that is loose in our species, on our planet, within and without the flying saucer." "So, communication, which we take astonishingly for granted considering the very basic kinds of needs that we communicate to each other, is actually the great frontier of our spiritual becoming." "Radical freedom doesn't mean giving someone the vote. Radical freedom means the right to take over and control our own destiny and the destiny of this planet. Radical freedom means recovering our birthright." "What would you think if somebody attempted to take your sexuality away from you. In the suppression of the psychedelic experience the masters who make the rules have taken away a major slice of what it is to be a human being." "We have been robbed of our birthright by the frightened, the constipated, the narrow minded, the stupid, and the afraid. Take back your mind. Take back your mind. That is the message." "The psychedelic experience is the replay of human history in the individual mind." "What virtual reality holds out is the possibility that we can create a language where we see what we mean. If we could see what we mean we would have a kind of telepathy." "Ego is something invented by frightened people 20,000 years ago as a way to suppress women, as a way to suppress sexuality,
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Sep 20, 2010 • 1h 13min

Podcast 244 – “From Mind to Supermind”

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "More changes have taken place in the last twenty five years, unquestionably, than in any period of human history. Just as I said an hour on the Greenwich map is a century, a decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?" "If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques in the daily, moment to moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university, you've changed that culture." "The average post-1946 kid by the age of five had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography, more hype, more propaganda, you name it, than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings of the past." "To a 'factory philosopher' a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks." "Information, information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the future." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics Alcyon Massive ... "Dreaming The World Awake"
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Aug 27, 2010 • 55min

Podcast 243 – “Beyond the Doors of Perception”

Guest speakers: Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, and Tom Van Sant Ram Dass & Lorenzocirca: 2001 PROGRAM NOTES: "LSD produces religions experiences, but it's less evident that it can produce a religious life." -Houston Smith [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The origins of most great religions go back to groups of people who made this discovery that you don't look for god, you don't look for power in the Caesars or in the temples or in the churches and all that. You look within." "The fun has hardly begun." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Dass.] "But inside myself, as you all understand, that what you see [during a psychedelic experience] to turn it into what you be is a really subtle and sensitive trip." "And that's part of the integrity of this experience, of growing into seeing the relative nature of reality and the paper mache quality of social institutions and the way in which personalities turn into style rather than substance." "And it's interesting that it's taken many years to grow into the kinds of visions that [Leary] was having in those days and to appreciate how much what happened to me through psychedelics transformed my consciousness in such a way that death meant something different to me that allowed me to be in the presence of somebody that was dying in a way that honored the drama of the process without getting lost in it." "What I have experienced in the past twenty five years, if I were to look at what the essence of the matter is, is that having touched the unconditioned and having seen the relative nature of reality and the way the mind creates the dream, that has given me a faith in the possibility of who we are." "And it feels to me that as long as I live I will still be growing into what happened to me on the first psychedelic experience." "And allow my heart to be open, like keeping your heart open in hell, keeping your heart open in the presence of suffering, because even at the moment when the suffering is most intense, right behind it inside you is an incredible equanimity, because one of the things that I touched through acid was an extreme appreciation of the perfection of the laws of form, the perfection of the unfolding of the law." "But I can feel, when I look at what our spiritual journeys are on this plain, it feels so obvious to me, that the stuff we are handed is the grist for the mill of awakening out of the illusion until we can be in the form without being entrapped by it so that we can play lightly. We can dance sweetly. We can have joy in the presence of the hell-realms and do what we can do to relieve the suffering without getting burned out and lost and bitter and cynical and frustrated. And we have the tolerance to deal with chaos and uncertainty." "What has happened is that the Sixties unleashed something extraordinarily powerful that is still reverberating and echoing in this culture, and actually in the world. And what that released was a recognition in people that they were free to change, institutions and themselves." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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