Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "The development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn't changed much for 100,000 years." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. ... It wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world, whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history it was man the huntED." -Rupert Sheldrake "The shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back." -Terence McKenna "The domain in which the change [from animal to human] was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. And this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since." -Terence McKenna "You don't need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind, there's plenty of lower-level minds than the divine mind that could be out there." -Rupert Sheldrake "My notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood, and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious." -Terence McKenna [Rupert disagreed with this.] "The idea that this evolution's equipped us with minds, and language, and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it's come from, where it's going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole seems to me a rather improbable supposition." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's not decided what's going to happen next, there are imaginations of many levels, including human imaginations, at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on what's happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up, but without the goal being fixed in advance." -Rupert Sheldrake "[Evolution] is a game, one of the rules of which is: The rules can change." -Terence McKenna "Time is not a tyranny. It's a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Alan Watts PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Sasha Shulgin.] "So I look upon these materials [psychedelics] as being catalytic, not productive, they do not DO what occurs. The allow YOU to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material." "I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials." [In testing a new substance] "You go with great caution. Decide what is the amount is that would have no effect and take one thousandths of that amount." "How does the mind work? What kind of a probe can you make to look at the function of the mind? To me, it's going to be a psychedelic material, that has very little action in experimental animals, to look into actions in man that are not seen in experimental animals." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Nature has mercifully arranged the principle of 'forgettery' as well as the principle of memory. ... And you begin again. You see, it doesn't matter in what form you begin. Whether you begin again as a human being, or as a fruit fly, butterfly, or a beetle, or a bird, it feels the same way that you feel now. So we're really all in the same place." "So the possibility, even the imagination that there could be such an experience [of the end of the world] in the back of our heads, is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good, feeling that it's all right." 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.] "Newton himself was a man with a foot in two worlds. He was a thorough-going occultist. His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous. And yet he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society." "History itself is a kind of alchemical process. ... History is the catalyst of nature." "If we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage, and our heritage in the shamanism of the archaic, then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate, not to enslave, and somehow we've lost the thread." "You know, Tim Leary used to say, 'When in doubt, double the dose.' " "Capitalism, I can't say this enough, is NOT in our interest." "The Earth is perfectly capable of raising outrageous hell without us triggering a nuclear war." "My faith is that we're just slow to get rolling, and that once the battle is joined, once every person on Earth realizes that we're in a battle for planetary survival, then people will get with the program, it's just that things aren't bad enough yet." "We're lead by jackasses. We [the psychedelic community] don't bother with our political processes." "What we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us makes their way into those positions of power. I mean, you can see that now [1992], those guys are not fit to throw guts down to a bear ... ANY OF THEM!" "What we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state. I mean, what we are are the propagandized masses inside a Fascist dictatorship." "Know your enemy and they probably will not be your enemy." "I think that the Third Reich was a Sunday school picnic compared to the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church. ... In a civilized political environment those people would be placed under immediate arrest." "The way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history." "And so it's up to the creativity of ordinary people, and the strongest weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people is the psychedelic experience, because it allows you to put information together in new and exciting ways. And this is to be then the basis of a new political order. It has to be." "The model of human nature which this society has deified makes it a pathological act, a sin, and a crime to alter your own consciousness. This doesn't make any sense. We are at war with ourselves, and we're losing." "It's all about personal empowerment, and personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I've never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself." "So what you have to do is just like every other thing, everything you've been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what's really going on, which doesn't mean that you're reckless." "We've been polluted by Disney." "We are living inside a 90% Nineteenth Century world view. And a culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves, because what cannot be said cannot be done. What cannot be said cannot be put in place." "So in a way, one way of thinking about psychedelics is that they empower language. It's a way to force the evolution of language. The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language." "It was very important, I think, to the Establishment to suppress that [hip phrases from the Hippie culture], because new words are the beginnings of new realities." "What holds us together is what holds all sub-cultures together, which is an experience. In this case, the experience of being loaded, and, you know, it's a very powerful and immediate kind of experience." "It's amazing that the world has evolved as far and as fast as it has, the human world, glued together by nothing more than small mouth noises." "The whole history of the evolution of the Western mind is in a sense the birth of the Logos. The Logos is making its way towards self-expression, and it's doing this by claiming dimension, after dimension of manifestation." "The mind is not a form of intelligence. The mind is the theater in which intelligence is manifested. You don't want to confuse the garage with the car. ... Everything goes on within the confines of mind. It's like the light that you switch on when you walk into a darkened room, and then everything else is the furniture within the room. Mind is simply the light which is shed over the landscape of appearances. ... Mind is the inclusive category, I think." "It's very important to try and make some accommodation to the local language, because in a way, only the local language is appropriate to the place. ... Somehow the local language is a part of the local reality." "The one thing you learn taking psychedelics is that nothing is straightforward." "Anybody who starts talking to you about the grandeur that was Rome, should be reminded: The grandeur of Rome was it was a bargain-basement on three floors masquerading as a military brothel. It was not a great civilization." "I'm completely convinced that no one is in control, and that this is very good news." "In a sense, the flying saucer is nothing more than a modern rebirth of the philosopher's stone. The flying saucer is the universal panacea at the end of time. It's the thing which cannot exist, but which does exist, and which if we could obtain it everything would be different." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think, when it's all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C." "The African 'Cradle of Civilization', I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't believe that is going to have to do some fast talking." "They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were." "DMT is this very short-acting hallucinogen that you smoke, but it's a neurotransmitter. It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals. In terms of nature, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens. In terms of impact, it's the strongest of all hallucinogens. It's a completely reality-obliterating experience, and it comes on so quickly that you don't grok it like a drug." "The other thing about DMT that's weird is, it does not affect your mind. In other words, you don't feel gaga with ecstacy. You don't feel relaxed. You feel exactly the way you felt before you did it. It's that the world has just been swapped out, and that's strange. I sort of like that, that it doesn't lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes, instead it just does something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced by a three-, four-, five-dimensional, highly colored moving environment filled with screaming elf-deamons." 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.] "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." "In a Christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command god to act. In other words that in some strange way the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires." "The Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of god. So it's a completely different attitude toward being human. It's an empowering attitude." "In the hermetical, magical view human beings are not tainted by Original Sin." "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." "Had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece, Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did." "Alchemy, and conjuration, and tailsmanic magic, and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished, really, not as a throwback but as a kind of prelude to modern science. Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise." "[John] Dee is the last person to be able to unify into one world view science, and mathematics, and magic, and astrology all together." "Paracelsus was an interesting guy. He's essentially the inventor of drugs because he was the first person extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence." Today's podcast begins a newly uncovered lecture by Terence McKenna. His topic is "Hermeticism and Alchemy" and he begins this 1991 workshop in fine form, making statements such as: "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." And, "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Jonathan Ott.] "It is, of course, absurd for humankind to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet." "A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground." [In reference to releasing violent criminals to make room for small-time, non-violent, simple possession offenders.] "In short, drug prohibition is impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific, unhealthy, immoral, unecological, undiplomatic, and dictatorial." "Drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing paranoia." 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.] "What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing." "Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance. And not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed. Poetry may have been at its climax. Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy, there's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin." "All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later." "What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance." "We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it." "All of them, if you generalized, what these substances do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. ... Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries." "The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder." "We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma." "There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them." "I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself." "I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking." "The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak." "I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster." "We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis, which is the way we may well be headed." "It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another five hundred or a thousand years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created, will be the first to be swept away. So it's very, very important that people take back their minds, and that people analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire h...

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup." "[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists' beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere." "Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life." "The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people's minds more than on the streets. It'll be in the minds first." "The giving response that we have [when natural disasters occur], and through technology the fact that we can sort of be there virtually, and be in the environment that those people are in, and the crisis they're in, the empathic response coming out of support is perhaps the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there's a disaster." "Not only is no one running the world, but it probably isn't possible for anyone to run the world. And once we come to that realization we become human again because we'll say, 'Look everyone's human. Everyone is trying their best. Everyone is going from crisis to crisis, and we'll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I also think will be a healthy thing." "So in a sense, it'll be the geeks that inherit the Earth, but it'll be enlightened geeks we hope." "We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization." "When you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye, and therein you will find your rescue." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer Online Bruce Damer's DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer on the BBC Forum The Planetary Mood Ring Project

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Now the key thing to the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized form." "It's obvious that if any quantum leaps are going to happen in evolution it's best designed to happen in a period of adolescence." "Evolution has always involved people like us getting together as we are tonight, figuring out where we came from, and who's slowing us down, and what's the factual evidence as to how fast and where we can move?" "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The key to neurological navigation is to be able to voyage into exactly the circuits of your brain that you want to be exactly when you want to be there and with whom you want to be there." "The key to the Sixties, as we see it now [1979], was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive over-specialized models." "Show me a taboo and I'm interested in it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option