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Psychedelic Salon

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Feb 4, 2010 • 1h 7min

Podcast 212 – “The Genesis Generation”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo NOTE: This chapter was revised for the paperback edition that was released in February 2015. Please see the Kindle edition for the current version of this chapter. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Lorenzo.] "Forget getting a permanent job. Forget careers and the quest for financial stability. They are all false gods, sent to you by the Capitalist elite on Wall Street, whose primary goal is to trap you into a life of servitude." “You still haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” began Shadow. “It should behoove us all to take the words of the Empire’s leaders at face value. They have declared what they call a War on Drugs. Of course, that’s a lie on its face, because they aren’t putting drugs into prison cages, they’re putting people in them. This is no war on drugs, William, this is a war on consciousness, as Richard Glen Boire says. It’s a war on people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo. It is a war on the very people that we are going to need to get us humans out of this mess we’ve created for ourselves. And if this is really a war, as they want to call it, then you and I, young William, you and I are their sworn enemies." "We are at what many believe to be the most pivotal moment in human history that we know of. The arrow of unsustainable consumption, powered by the bow of credit, has reached the top of its flight. There is nowhere for that arrow to go now but down, and where it is going to land is anyone’s guess." “A thousand years from now, humans will most likely still be walking the Earth, as we have done for over a million years already. Some of those future humans will have genetic links to us. . . . And those people of the future will be alive because they had at least one ancestor, maybe you, who was a part of what their historians will call the Genesis Generation. "We are raising our children to become serfs!" "Our families are detaching from the monetary system and applying their energy in different directions, like raising some of their own food, and entertaining ourselves without spending exorbitant amounts of money." “Unlike that insidious John Galt, I am advocating that We the People go on strike and remove our minds from their System of servitude. For we are fully aware that it isn’t the handful of CEOs who are the producers. No, in fact, they are the looters now. It is time to keep our best ideas to ourselves, here in our own community." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Jan 29, 2010 • 1h 30min

Podcast 211 – “Empowering Hope in Dark Times”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?" "Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances." "We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings" "[We] often feel like hapless atoms, running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever. We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else." "There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it." "Every society, in the moment of its existence, has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation (good alchemical word), a distillation of what has preceded before." "Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball." "What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it." "The mushroom said to me once, ‘Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage,’ and I said, ‘What’s the payoff on that?’ And it said, ‘It shows you it loves courage because it removes obstacles.’ You make a commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up." "It is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites." "It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas." "We are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery if we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer. Then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast that says, ‘May ye be alive at the end of the world.’ " Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Leo Plaw at the Temple of Visions Gallery (Los Angeles) Fantastic Visions Exhbition Berlin the sun blindness
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Jan 22, 2010 • 1h 24min

Podcast 210 – “From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower”

Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled "From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking." "The suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic thinking, began roughly two thousand years ago. And you get more intense socio-economic and socio-spiritual hierarchies … until you get to where we are today where there is state control of consciousness as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life." -Anna Waldstein "They’re incredibly good at convincing us that we need a new car, and that new shirt, and the toys for our kids, or whatever, but very good at also convincing us that we don’t need this type of thing any more, this psychedelic thinking. But despite the Powers’ attempts to eradicate this, it bubbles up. … The power elite doesn’t want us to think like this because it disengages us from consumerism, it connects us with the environment, and makes us question what’s going on." -Ivan Casselman "Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact the box itself is figmentary and illusory . And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates one cannot be truly original in thought. So once we are stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on top of the groove or the bottom of the groove, its still going down that same path." -Cameron Adams Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Jan 12, 2010 • 1h 13min

Podcast 209 – “An Audio Collage of Aldous Huxley”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control." "I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do." "That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy." "Democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time." "Ulysses is obviously a very extraordinary book. I mean, I don’t exactly know why he wrote it, because I mean, a great deal of Ulysses seems to me to be taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The complete recordings of the Aldous Huxley 1961 London interview may be found at: The Grey Lodge Occult Review
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Jan 5, 2010 • 1h 4min

Podcast 208 – “It’s Time To End The War on Drugs”

Guest speaker: Ethan Nadelmann PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Ethan Nadelmann.] "The War on Drugs, this policy of punitive prohibition, is a horror in our society, something that cannot be morally justified, cannot be justified in terms of health, can certainly not be justified in terms of public safety, that cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that I’ve ever heard of." "The War on Drugs is a cancer in our society, in our American society and in global society." "There’s never been a drug-free society, and there’s never going to be a drug-free society. We are moving increasingly into a world in which there will be ever-more psychoactive drugs available." "The stand-bys, you know, the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol and marijuana and coca cocaine and opium, they’ve been with us for thousands of years in one way or another, and they’re going to continue to be part of our society and our lives, whether we like it or not." "When drug treatment gets owned by the criminal justice system, drug treatment simply becomes a synonym for coerced abstinence." "We need to aim to cut America’s incarcerated population in half, to pick a rough number." "We need to get that term, over-incarceration, into the popular dialogue, into the popular language." "One of the definitions of power is when somebody tells you to do something, and you do it without asking why. That’s the definition of power. Somebody tells you to do it and you do it without even asking why, that’s the power of the prison-industrial complex today." "California used to be known as the state of higher education and is now known as the state of higher incarnation." "When you live in a society where one of the most powerful political forces is the organization which earns its livelihood from keeping its fellow citizens behind bars, I don’t know of any other free society in which that is the case. That’s a distortion." "I define recovery as getting to the point where your drug use, if you use drugs, is no longer impairing your life. … That’s the objective, to get on with your life." "It’s about accepting that each one of us, who have struggled with drugs, has to find their own path. And that the role of the state should certainly not be to get in the way and optimally to facilitate this." "That we are each sovereign over our own minds and bodies, that is the core principle that we have to keep putting out there." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Drug Policy ACTION Network Drug Policy Alliance Network A New PATH Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing
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Dec 21, 2009 • 1h 6min

Podcast 207 – “A Tribute to Alan Watts”

Guest speakers: Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and others PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast begins with a short clip of Alan Watts speaking about human consciousness. Then we join Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and a few other friends who are discussing the life of Alan Watts a few months after his death in November 1973. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alan Watts in Wikipedia List of books by Alan Watts
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Dec 10, 2009 • 1h 23min

Podcast 206 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 6

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you." "If I want a more intense drug experience I take more of one drug." "Low doses of psychedelics, or moderate doses of psychedelics, transform the quality of thought. You think faster, think deeper, think odder, think broader, but you need more for that to burst through into hallucination." Terence McKenna’s ‘Private’ List of Most Influential Books The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/039484484X The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0916870480 "The world is something to look at, and that attitude in the presence of psychedelics will throw open a cornucopia of riches." "I don’t know what life is like without cannabis. I hear there is such a thing." "The thing about DMT, and we didn’t talk about it much this weekend, is it is an inhabited space. A HUGE percentage of people who take it encounter entities of some sort in there. Not entities like wombats and foxes, but entities with intelligence of some sort, with language of some sort." "I think that in service to the principle of parsimony, preferring the simplest explanation, these things [beings encountered in DMT space] must be human souls. "Now I dare to hope that maybe there is some kind of existence beyond the grave." "I’ve looked at the literature of near-death experience. What those people are describing is far more mundane than a DMT trip." "I would suggest, with great heat, that if we want to study the near-death and after-death experience, that actually you come far closer to dying, whatever that means, on DMT than you do in drownings and things like that." "If you’re living right, your life should get just more and more baroque, beautiful, complicated, mysterious … and then you die." "I prefer to think that it [2012] is not a planetary catastrophe, or a mass dying." "Perhaps what enlightenment is is it happens to an entire universe when it drops its matter and anti-matter out of its structure, and it becomes entirely made of light. That would certainly fulfill the Novelty Theory [sic]." "It’s a bit baroque for my taste." [Speaking about the concept of parallel universes. Of course, Terence never lived to read: April 14, 2003, Scientific American, Parallel Universes Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations http://www.krabach.info/astro/parallel_universe/parallel_universe.html "The universe is a series of impediments to the expression of novelty." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option So You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher? (PDF) by R. Andrew Sewell, M.D. • McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School
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Dec 2, 2009 • 1h 4min

Podcast 205 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 5 (Timewave)

Terence McKenna, a speaker and philosopher, discusses the concept of time, the dissolution of boundaries, and the correlation between historical events and the Time Wave theory. He explores the mystery of novelty and time travel, and reflects on the unique nature of his ideas. The podcast also explores the Maya calendar, its origins, and end dates, as well as the brilliance of the Maya civilization. McKenna also discusses the potential connection between the Time Wave theory and astrology.
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Nov 18, 2009 • 1h 12min

Podcast 204 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity." "Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process." "Feelings are primary. The primary datum of experience is feeling, and then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience. And then still lower on the rung, and I maintain lower on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience." "I think it’s really important to keep things as simple as possible because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly baroque. So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of Great Atlantis only further exacerbates the problem." "We know that behind all this constipated sociability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience. It’s important to keep it in mind in very psychedelically situations. But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality and commit crimes based on delusion about what is and isn’t reality." "The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of the culture. It is literally the response to toxic cultures. The more toxic the culture the more ego is revered as a natural value within that culture." "People are clueless, and they’re being used and abused. Seemingly intelligent people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconsciousable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous towards the Earth. … Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decomodify experience. … What is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?" "Novelty is that quality of nature that seeks complexity. It’s countervailing force is called habit." "The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it these past 500 years, because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true; the intuition that every moment is unique [time is not uniform]. It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysics of being." "The way you investigate time is by moving inward, by investigating metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "It is as though the Winter Solstice of 2012 was some kind of dwell point out of which the temporal continuum is being generated." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "The more of a mind you have, the more fun you can have when it’s fucked-up." -Nick Herbert (Wikipedia entry about Nick)
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Nov 11, 2009 • 1h 30min

Podcast 203 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it." "If you aren’t ‘cool’ then you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means, by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed. But it can’t really be faked. But the whole engine of marketing is designed to make you think that it can be faked. I don’t know if I’m cool or not, but I am incredibly resistant to any effort to make me think I’m uncool." "You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears." "It’s very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked. … This nobody ever criticizing anybody else brings the intellectual enterprise and the refinement of human knowledge to a screeching halt. The way in which the intellectual enterprise moves forward is by being critiqued, analyzed, subjected to tests." "Scientists really respect each other for proving that they are wrong. If you have a theory that you’ve defended for fifteen years, and then you publish a paper saying, ‘I’ve been over it again. I’ve looked at the data again, and you know what fellow colleagues, I botched it. I was wrong.’ They promote you for this. They say, ‘This is the essence of intellectual honesty.’ … Religion doesn’t work like this. In the religious domain you never admit you’re wrong. You further elaborate the story to save whatever preposterous notion has been exposed. … And so what you get is error based on error based on delusion based on illusion based on lie based on half-truth based on supposition based on somebody thought it would be nice IF." "Somewhere after the Sixties, when the government decided that universal public education only created mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights, education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry. And instead we took an authoritarian model. The purpose of education [today in the United States] is to produce unquestioning consumers with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is." "If you turn cannabis into a Schedule I drug, a felony, suddenly all of these people who never felt inspired to dissent, never felt the heavy hand of the government, are automatically members of a criminal class. And what this does is thus radicalize the people so persecuted, and in a feedback loop of paranoia drive the government then into a frenzy of trying to understand and control this minority group. The idea that states of mind are matters for legal manipulation, it’s amazing that that discussion is even taking place in a democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson." "In the whole Marxist episode nobody was ever required to piss in a cup in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China to establish their loyalty to the government or the corporations, and yet that went down here with barely a murmur." "Once you find psychedelics there’s nothing between you and a complete check-out from your cultural heritage. The only cost to you is the complete abandonment of everything you’ve ever known and loved." "You can choose to be free, but it’s the last choice you’ll ever make." –Kafka [McKenna's Five Percent Rule] "As long as any school of dissent remains below five percent of the population no money is budgeted to destroy it." "I think that no one is in charge, and this is a very good thing because it allows the internal dynamic of the situation to express itself. Everybody who wants to control the situation is fighting a loosing battle." "I don’t feel this need for intellectual closure. I don’t see why things should make sense." [McKenna's Law] "As you advance in social hierarchy the percentage of smart people does not increase. … Every human situation is bedeviled by morons. No matter how high you rise you’re surrounded by fools,

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