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,

Guest speakers: Albert Hofmann, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. John C. Lilly.] "There is no such thing as drugs. There's no such thing as illegal drugs. They're only chemicals. They can change the molecular configurations within the brain itself and hence change who you are and where you're going and where you come from. This is a profound experience." "The drug problem ought to be turned over to the Surgeon General and taken away from the Attorney General." "I learned long ago that one is a psychotherapist until one is cured of one's own diseases." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Psychology without psychedelics is pissing into the wind." "We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. Albert Hofmann.] "Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I obtained as a fundamental understanding from all my LSD experiences that what one commonly takes as the reality by no means it defines anything fixed but represents a thing that's ambiguous, that there is not only one but there are many realities, each compromising a different consciousness also of the ego." "Consciousness defies scientific definition. . . . All attempts to define consciousness are pathological. Consciousness can only be described as the [unintelligible] and creative spiritual dance of the ego at the very core of what we call 'I' ". "Consciousness remains a mystery, the very central mystery of our existence." "The perception of color is a purely psychological and subjective event taking place in the inner space of [unintelligible]. The brightly colored world as we see it does not exist on the outside." "The seemingly objective picture of the world surrounding us, that which we call reality, is actually a subjective picture. ... We all carry in life our own personal image of reality created by our own private receiver." "Just like sound and colors, touch, smell and taste don't exist objectively. They too represent purely subjective phenomena, occurring only in the inner space of individual humans." "Our understanding [born of intense direct experience of alternate realities] makes us aware of the fact that each individual is the creator of his or her own world, for it is in each individual mind and ONLY there, that the world and the abundance of life it contains . . . that the stars and the sky become real, become human reality. Our real true freedom and responsibility is founded in our ability to create our own individual world." "Once I have recognized what part of reality is objectively on the outside and what is subjectively taken place within myself, then I am more aware of what I can change in my life, where I have a choice, and thus what I am responsible for. Conversely, I become aware of what is beyond my will power and has to be accepted as an unalterable fact. This clarification of my potential and my responsibilities can be of invaluable help. I have the ability to choose what I want to receive from the endless, infinite program of 'the great transmitter', from creation." "That means I can let those aspects of creation, or the cosmos, that make me happy enter into my consciousness and thus imbue them with reality . . . or I can let in other aspects, those that depress me. It is I who creates the bright and the dark picture of the world. It is I who invests the objects that are only shaped matter in the outer world not only with their color, but with my affection and my love -- and also their meaning. This applies not only to my inanimate surroundings, but also to living beings, to the plants and animals and to my fellow humans. With this insight,

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: The Albert Hofmann Papers at Erowid.org The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online) [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet." "So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream." "We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous." "In the future it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth. It is the mark of a barbarous culture." "One doesn't 'just say no' to truth." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Andrew Weil.] "I have to tell you that the majority of human beings that I encounter operate mostly out of fear, guilt, and that when people operate from those emotions they are dangerous to themselves and to others."  "We [the psychedelic community] are a very small minority, a very small minority, and have no illusions about that. And whether our minority will grow fast enough, and be able to influence humanity fast enough to avoid the catastrophe that is certain to come if we persist in the ways that we now persist, I don't know?" "If it may be as it appears that our ability to manipulate the environment, our technological ability, is so disparate with our ability to control our own emotions, that may be a fatal flaw of our species. It may be." "Deep down everything is all right, and that's the way it's supposed to be. And there may be a lot of drama in between [now and the extinction of our species], but it's all all right. ... It's OK with me if something else gets a chance, if the life-force experiments with another form, that's fine, that's OK too." "And here it seems to me is the fundamental absurdity of the way our science has developed: The most obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence. How can you construct a world view, how can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science tries to do." "Often I find, in my experience, that changes in the realm of consciousness must accompany physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] "To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it." "When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?" "Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire to better things, which has been called 'wantlessness', the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot'." "From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels." "And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty." "Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even in those countries where they are free to vote, are prevented by the basic postulates in terms in which they do their thinking and their feeling, from summarily decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations." "Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prisons in which they are now confined." "In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always willing, but it's technical and organizational flesh was generally weak. Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit." "My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective intention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects to the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving. We have to get it into our collective heads that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological." "It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children, who in less than forty years will be six billion, to lead a tolerably human existence without in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment." -Aldous Huxley (November 30, 1962) "All that I meant was, the sort of basic frame of reference in which political activities will take place shall be less culture-bound and more ecology-bound, let's say." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard PROGRAM NOTES: On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org. "There's a central power system, and here's the source. And the guidance system simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source. The closer he gets the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is, the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation, and the more he sees his total responsibility. Now it's inconceivable to me that you could move toward that source without increasing responsibility. And to me, Leary has found a way of moving in that direction but not going toward it, because he's obviously missed his responsibility level." -Myron Stolaroff "From our crowd I think very, very few people get off the beam the way I would consider Leary and Alpert are off the beam, for example." -Myron Stolaroff "[We should use these substances] in a way which will not simply allow us to become aware of what any decent mystical saints have been aware of for a long, long time, but to become aware of how to produce a rise in the social level of communication, which will, indeed, transform the species from a biological animal to a communicating animal, which is what Teilhard had in view." -Humphry Osmond "[The map of the noosphere] is not to be created by mucking up bits of the Book of the Dead and saying how smart chaps were. This is a fraud." -Humphry Osmond "When you most need help is when you least want it." -Myron Stolaroff "This is the life that I've seen: Live or die. Be intelligent enough to get along. Don't walk in two places without knowing where you're going." -Al Hubbard "The ten year delay in our work brought about through our struggle with NIH in Washington and through being unable to cope with a large and powerful power-system there has produced, it's resulted in probably several million people being quite unnecessarily damaged." -Humphry Osmond (November 1, 1964) "You have to understand the specific risks that [using psychedelics] involves. Now the specific risk is that every person involved will be altered whether they like it or not. And that the result of this will, in a sense, alter every other relationship they have whether they like it or not." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Please Support the Archival Efforts for The Stolaroff Collection

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it." -Rupert Sheldrake When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, "No," and then he went on to say, "Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it." "If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?" -Rupert Sheldrake "Not thinking about the World Soul but the individual soul, that the seizure of DMT is almost like a simulacrum of death itself, and that you seem to see into an ecology of souls." -Terence McKenna "The World Soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. This is all being scripted for a purpose and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything." -Terence McKenna "Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage." -Rupert Sheldrake "At the root of many problems is the denial of the problem and the fact that we maintain unconsciousness of the problem." -Ralph Abraham "I hold monotheism responsible for the mess that we're in from Abraham right on down to the present moment. I think it is the metaphor which is responsible for the dominator break-out, and that until we get a more polytheistic, nature-oriented conception of reality we will be pretty much under the gun." -Terence McKenna "For my money, monotheism is the single most reactionary force in all of human history. I don't even know what is running second." -Terence McKenna "Democracy is a step away from anarchy." -Terence McKenna "Perhaps to unify consciousness it isn't a Western hemisphere goddess we need but simply a recognition of Gaia." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.] "The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you're free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim." "Methods are methods are methods. Meditation's a method and psychedelics are a method. Methods are all traps. A method by its nature is a trap. It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end. You just hope it self-ejects." "Psychedelics was one of the major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture." "Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know." "I don't for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard . . . anymore." "All form in the universe, including your mind and your thought, is part of law, it's unfolding lawfully, it's the karma unfolding, just law. And within that there is no freedom. There really is no freedom in form. The freedom comes as the formless creates the form. There's where the freedom is. And that freedom, of the formless coming into form, is a place from which you stand, or you don't stand, in which you experience the creation of your own universe around you." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "[So Emerson] came to Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said, 'Don't look for god in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor in the pulpits, look within, find divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant (translated as do your own thing) and for, I believe thirty-three years, he was not allowed back on this sacred territory. We're back after twenty!" "We were smart enough to know how little we knew." "Once you put that pill in your mouth, YOU were the Principle Investigator ... like it or not." "The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that nobody wants to leave." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Raw Master Files of This Talk la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part2.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track2.mp3 Harvard Crimson Announcement of this Talk The Varieties of Religious Experience By William James (free Project Gutenberg edition)