Psychedelic Salon

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

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

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

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,

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"

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

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered visa vie the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definition, and the drugs have done that to a great extent." "The notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion." "The fact that we rely on an intellectual method [science] two thousand years old almost precludes our understanding of anything interesting." "The present is the interference pattern caused by the forward and backward flowing causitries inherent in time. Where they meet they form an interference pattern, a standing wave if you will, which is what a hologram is. And it's that which is experienced as the now, and it is half of the past and half of the future." "And this is why the drugs are so controversial, because they free you from the myth of the tribe." "It's trying to make sense of our intuitions in the light of the enormous pressure to accept prepackaged ideologies that makes neurotics of us all." "And it isn't necessary for everybody to go out and get loaded. It's more about participating in a new language of self-reflection. This is what we need to do. Some of us should take drugs. It's a professional kind of obligation. That's what a shaman is. He's a guy whose professional obligation is to take drugs, but we all have an obligation to create a language that values us and the people around us." "We cannot afford the unconscious anymore. This is a concept that has to take its place with the high-button shoe. We must be entirely conscious because we have the power to shatter the Earth like a rotten apple with a stick of dynamite inside of it." 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.] "The people who take that position that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis don't realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet." "Civilization is a ten thousand year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes ten to fifteen thousand years, a moment of biological and geological time." "We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time." "Humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own." "So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it, and the planet feels it." "Our imagination is really the sail of the soul, and the question is, where will that sail take us if we will but let it?" "That's why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology, because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tenancies does not give a true picture of the future. That the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty." "We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious but we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive, it's not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing. It is more like an entelechy, it guides, it opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices." "One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality. People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them they will work, and this is not true at all, especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you're attempting to conjure." "I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been." "So it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship between certain plants and certain monkeys, and that you don't have humanness unless you have the plants and the monkeys together. This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture." "And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing, it's providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor." "The word psychedelic has been attached to the drugs and confined, but many things are psychedelic. Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids, and supports consciousness is psychedelic if we take the word down to its Greek roots." 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.] "There are several unexplained anomalies. Why is it that fully 80% of the world's known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin, even though the flora of the Old World jungles of Indonesia is equally rich?" "The curing scenario of the ayahuascero is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans world wide." "I think the word 'psychedelic' is maybe too broad, because it includes things which are very different from each other. It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline." "The icaros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination." "It seems very clear that this [ayahuasca] healthcare delivery system is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of psychological disorders." "You must be aware that I have other wrinkles, the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things, but all of these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us." "But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings. It is simply a modality, an interior landscape, and large portions of it are not human." "As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness, these trans-human, non-human dimensions slowly come into view. It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity, which our cultural and linguistic programming has blinded us to rather severely." "[The mushroom] is not a drug of acceptance, you know. It want's transformation of a very radical sort. The ayahuasca seems to integrate." "Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these other things sometimes can't be." "What does it mean that on a psychedelic drug one person can see more art in an hour than the species has produced in 10,000 years? What does that say about how effectively we are accessing our souls?" "If you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at." "I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life that life occupies to death." "I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination." 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 ... recorded in 1996, however, it is current enough to have been given just last night ... maybe it was :-).] "And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them, generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present. And in the present moment we, like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins." "In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept [of alchemy]." "I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate." "Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone." "Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena [as alchemy]." "All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact." "The psychedelics have brought us back to this alchemical mystery, shorn of any vocabulary for dealing with it, shorn of any real living notion of the spirit." "Shamanism and alchemy are a seamless enterprise." "If you look around you, the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort. The prima materia to be transformed are the nuclear stockpiles, the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands, the populations devoid of hope, the populations in threat of infectious and fatal epidemic disease. There is a great deal of prima materia to be worked on at the historical level of the alchemical process." "In the 60's, we thought that all that had to happen was that everybody would take LSD and the obvious right things to do would be done. And we expected no opposition to this because its rightness was so obvious. We didn't realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into the waiting jaws of its oppressors. But the spirit doesn't die." "In the 60's then, LSD was not sufficient, even coupled with rock and roll it only brought repression [oppression?]. It was like a failed alchemy. Instead of the dissolving and recrystallizing at a higher and more angelic level thousands of prisons were built, and the entire thing failed. But this spirit is THE spirit, the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself, and it will not be suppressed for long in any time or place. So now again it comes. ... It's a spirit of dissent that says we will not serve the values of materialism, the values of the ego, and the values that separate and break down the community. So here it is again." "We are not an army. So our strategy must be stealth. It's an alchemical strategy, and what do I mean by stealth? I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, by vision. And what is new is that there are massive technologies available to us, not available in the 60's. They were not designed for us. They were not intended for us. It was never ever thought that such power should flow into the hands of freaks such as ourselves. Never-the-less,