Psychedelic Salon

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)

Click HERE to see the video of this conversation. This program marks Our 5th Anniversary! Support the Stolaroff Collection Make a contribution to support the archiving of Myron Stolaroff's resources Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: This is a conversation that took place between Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, and a group of friends at the legendary salon that Kathleen hosted on the third Friday of every month in Venice Beach, California. The talk begins with Myron telling stories about the legendary Al Hubbard, also known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.  He then goes on to explain the workings of his research center in Menlo Park, California where they treated over 300 people with LSD in the 1960s in order to help them improve their creativity. He also tells of the historic first trip of Duncan Blewett, which led the Saskatchewan researchers to change the direction of their work. For his part, Gary Fisher expands on some of the comments we heard in earlier podcasts when he talked about his work with autistic and schizophrenic children who were treated with LSD and other psychedelic medicines.  He also tells of a self-experiment he did to study the effectiveness of LSD in reducing severe pain. Here is a sampling of Gary's comments that evening: " 'We didn't have any bad trips because we didn't know you could have bad trips.' [quoting Laura Huxley] So all the input we ever had from anybody was how wonderful the [LSD] experience was. So we didn't have any sense that it was other than positive, and what a blessing that was." "How do you tell kids that the government is fucked?" "When you want people to be just one thing they bite you in the ass." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Research Report by Dr. Gary Fisher An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children HTML Version      PDF version Audio Discussion with Dr. Fisher and Dr. Grob “Treating Childhood Schizophrenia with Psychedelics”

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence's house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain. One of the reasons I think it might be interesting for you to hear this conversation is to get a feel for what it was like to hang around with the bard McKenna. While you might think that he did most of the talking, you will find that the opposite is true, and much like Aldous Huxley, Terence did a lot of questioning and listening. It wasn't only from books that they acquired their particular views of the world. A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer Terence McKenna's comments on NPR about his time with Bruce “I spent last week withBruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future." -Ralph Abraham "In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for "the snap", that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. ... What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history." -Ralph Abraham "The edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It is a special time." -Ralph Abraham "Salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension." -Terence McKenna "This is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. ... What we must become is clear." -Terence McKenna "To the degree that we can change our minds we will escape extinction." -Terence McKenna "If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity you're going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity." -Terence McKenna "I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite." -Ralph Abraham "I think that grass root research, based on phenomena that are actually common sense, that are part of everyday life for many people, could help to wake us up, to give a greater clarity about what's really going on, and make us recognize that there's far more interconnection between us and other species, and us and other people, than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public." -Rupert Sheldrake "What we're saying is that we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions. Someone once said, 'If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth we would stop immediately.' . . . So we have compartmentalized our lives, and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal work that is destroying the planet, destroying communities, and so forth." -Terence McKenna "Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion." -Terence McKenna "As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we're inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and we're going to produce incomplete agendas and answers." -Terence McKenna "The great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? It's the idea that there is no distinction between shit and Shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing." -Terence McKenna "The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community." -Terence McKenna "Yes, well it is an ambitious enterprise, and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever forward!" -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery." "Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined." "What is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense." "As our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate." "Vast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences, including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo." "While we've been waiting for the Palaidians to descend, or for the Face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy." "[Artificial intelligence,] this most bizzare and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation." "Time is defined by how much goes on in a given moment, and we're learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second." "Surely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizeable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ralph Abraham.] "The very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think, even individually, matters enormously in the long run. That's the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory." "In the creation of societies it was altruism, essentially, that was involved in going from where we were to where we are, and it could well be that without love, for example, further evolution is impossible." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option