Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves." "If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being. But given a more advanced nervous system and a more advanced cultural tool kit the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love." "The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a position like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion, the illusion created by the local language." "The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being." "Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste." "The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil." "Nature seems to be in the business of building systems that transcend themselves." "We are all just swarms of personalities. The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea." "Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over." "We’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner." "What shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals." "The keeper of the values [of his culture] is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit. … The shaman at the top realizes that, my god we stare out onto an abyss. We do not know." "Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness." "Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises." "Sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideology." "Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion, not a feeling to be drawn from that observation, the conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt present of the immediate moment must be what life is for." "I would say the bouquet of life is this moment." "I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever you miss the point." "We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children." "Life is what you get when a hyper dimensional object protrudes into ordinary space." "We clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter." "In my highest states I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this [human existence] is the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than this. This is the bottom line, and so the good news is it’s only up from here." "The last dance you dance alone, and nobody will be watching." "I don’t think you should live in anticipation of the drama of your death-bead scene, better to repair to the moment." "The real message of the psychedelic experience and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique we’ve been carrying out here is to take the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience, this is all you know. It’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibilities, fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope, who knows?

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present." "If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it’s paranoia." "Art is like the footprint of where the imagination has been." "Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception, not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be." "Who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore when there were saber toothed cats walking around that weighted 1100 pounds?" "Imitation is an act of the imagination." "What is a city but a complete denial of nature? … Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho." "What this [virtual reality] should tell us, in the domain of light the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will." "Shamanism didn’t use matter to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind, in the presence of unusual neurochemicals, to produce unusual phenomenon and unusual sensoria of experience." "A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination." "We now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this." "Clearly we [humans] view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion." "The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow … and our best people are working on that very problem." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #1 Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #2

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: SASHA SHULGIN: "So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive, they do not do what occurs, they allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get into and express yourself without the help of the material." "My main argument for continuing to use the term [psychedelic] is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about." ANN SHULGIN: "My interest in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche. They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be." "The psychedelics, the visionary plants, allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning, because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge." "The ’shadow work’ is, perhaps, the most important use of these materials, as far as I’m concerned, that there is. Because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it’s not a monster, that it’s not a terrible, horrible beast, that it is the uncultivated, the unsophisticated and slightly, sometimes, unlawful part of ourselves, which can be one of our greatest allies as long as we can find the courage to do the work necessary to discover it and become one with it and to negotiate with it." "I consider them [psychedelics] basically spiritual tools." BABA RAM DAS: "The place we share is that place that stands nowhere, not the place that’s caught in these spirals that involve intellectual advance, or ‘Now we know it!’, and so on. That’s all like little ripples on the ocean." "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised." TIMOTHY LEARY: "…neuro-geography that tells us that where you are determines who you are, habitat determines species." "We are literally at a position where collectively, working in harmony, we can do most of the things, and take the responsibilities, which in the past have been attributed to the great deities of the past. I think the Golden Age is ahead. It’s the age of humanist science, humanist technology, pagan science, pagan technology, high tech, high touch." "I think it’s our duty as explorers and as frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminology. … I really feel that words are tremendously important. . . . We’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years because more people have been killed in the name of god that any other word around." TERENCE MCKENNA: "Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment." “Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!” "On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It’s crawling all over you! And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy, because it’s all a play of energy that we’re involved in." "Now the message I have is an old one, the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It’s those six words: Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in. It’s a rhythm." "Now how do you turn on? Well, I’ll tell you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking. You can’t think your way out of this sticky black checker board of an American education. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on you’ve got to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament." "Now with all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Viet Nam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house." "The educational system, at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug." "The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully because you’re likely to get hooked." "You, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out, and by drop out I mean all the way. You can’t vote, I urge you not to do politics, don’t picket, don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference." 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.] "Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences." "For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status." (This was in response to a question about legal highs.) "Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them." (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.) "Science fiction is the gateway drug." "I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … 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." "Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist." "I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I’m interested in finding one doorway that works." "Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced, free house calls in our homes. This could almost be a litmus test for sanity." "Whether achieved through some yogic or some quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways." "It’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight [that we are creatures of language] is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. … Code is the primary reality." "I’ve always felt in a way that the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was ‘We’ll try anything as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work,’ and that automatically exempts psychedelics." "Once you find psychedelics you’re not looking for the accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine, or oneness, or something like that." "Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously, since the sixteenth century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language, and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on." "Computer code is magical language. It’s language which when executed causes something to actually happen." "So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis." "Drug-taking and drug-using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap we...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "It seems to me that it [Nature] is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language." "Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity." "Nature is actually the goal at the end of history." "Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination." "And what we’re looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization." "We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what’s going on or that the generation which follows us will know what’s going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what’s going on?" "It’s no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other." "Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong." "Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society." "Living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding. So that every day you know more, and see into things with greater depth, than you did before." "Culture is another dimention." "The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Of course, what the politicians debate about is really irrelevant because they’re in basic agreement. They believe in the system. They just want the power to run it. So they give us the illusion about fighting fiercely about words and tactics and promises, but we know, don’t we, that there’s no choice there." "What’s it all about? What’s life all about? Why are we here? To build bigger and bigger machines? To do things faster and faster and think more and more? In fifty years everyone will know what I’m telling you tonight. That the only reason for being here is to get on this glorious adventure of finding the Divine, unraveling the great conscious mystery story. That’s the only point, ecstatic being, that is, get high and stay high." "Dope is going to be the religion of the future." "You just can’t drop LSD the way you slug a beer. It’s much too intricate" "Once you start playing around with reality you are never the same." "Most of you aren’t ready to take psychedelic drugs now because you haven’t done much work on the yoga of the senses. To put it in a word, most of you are senseless." "It may not come as a surprise to an audience of Catholics that the sensory realm has, since the dawn of human history, been recognized as one of the great sacramental approaches to the divine. And any religion that has lasted for any time at all has utilized the sensual experience as a way of turning on the beholder, getting him high, getting him ameliorated to a god-intoxicated state." "If you don’t have a sacred place stick to beer." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Robert Anton Wilson, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: "Creativity has a touch of the bizarre" –Robert Anton Wilson "Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate." –Robert Anton Wilson "We need something to replace death as an intelligence increaser. Generally, the only way that intelligence could grow was to get rid of the people who haven’t taken any new imprints since adolescence, as Tim would say." –Robert Anton Wilson "The bizarre, the unthinkable is where creativity comes from." –Robert Anton Wilson "In that process [Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures], we are dissipating, collapsing, out of all the structures we know, not into chaos, not into the collapse of civilization, but into a higher level of coherence." –Robert Anton Wilson "There seem to be more optimism about psychedelics. They seem to be treated now with more rationality, as I was hoping they would be back in the Sixties, but they couldn’t be then. We were too ignorant." –Dr. John Lilly "The dumb people in the Sunbelt have all gone to Washington and New York to seek their fortunes there, people like Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. He’s just plain dumb. He’s got a track record not where everything he touches is turning wrong simply because he’s betting on the past." –Timothy Leary "The doomsday sayers, the people who are warning of and hoping for some sort of apocalyptic crisis, an earthquake, an end to everything. Now anyone who lays that trip on you, just look at them and smile and say, ‘Listen, the world isn’t coming to an end. You have come to an end of your vision. It’s you who feel that your end is at hand. The evolutionary picture is moving along beautifully.’ " –Timothy Leary Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: This recording was made at a conference held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981. Panelists include: Dr. Timothy Leary, Frank Baron, Dr. Andrew Weil,Walter Houston Clark, Robert Anton Wilson, and Paul Krasner [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I think it’s all about the brain, or certainly the brain as the key to consciousness and intelligence. The brain, as we well know, is the taboo organ of the 20th century." "The introduction of a new technology, a new paradigm, a new world model to a primitive society takes a lot of delicate doing. You can’t spook them too quickly. … You have to attach the new model to some of the old theories." "It is now possible to access your brain. It is now possible to activate circuits that were undreamed of before. … There’s no limits to the creativity, and imagination, and novelty, and intelligence that can be generated by this instrument, the brain, whose function we are now realizing is to fabricate reality." "The more you understand about the complexities of the brain, and the psychopharmeucedicals which activate it, the more cautious, the more careful, the more experimental, the more scientific you are before you rush around activating this instrument." "The function of human life from now on is to learn how to access, to activate, to direct, manage, and control your own brain." "It’s not the survival of the fittest. It’s the survival of the people with a sense of humor who can say, ‘Hey, look at those dinosaurs. We won’t go that way." "You can only evolve and mutate when you can laugh at your old form and go beyond it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Allen Cohen PROGRAM NOTES: "The Houseboat Summit" was held in February 1967, and has been documented in several places on the Web. In addition to the quotes below, which are from this podcast, you can read a more complete transcript of this historic meeting here. "I think that, thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership." -Alan Watts "What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed." -Alan Watts "My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it’s always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form." -Timothy Leary "Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life." -Alan Watts "That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality." - "And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom." -Alan Watts "Increasingly, we’re developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it." - "Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with." -Timothy Leary "What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks." -Alan Watts "Half the things I’ve done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn’t have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat." -Timothy Leary "In other words, when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting. See, we’ve left this game and it bores us." -Alan Watts, February 1967 "I would agree to change the slogan to ‘Drop out. Turn on. Drop in.’ " -Timothy Leary Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Matt Muirhead’s e(n)tymology