Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I don’t want to legalize drugs. It’s not the government’s business to legalize anything we do privately in our own homes. Are they going to legalize masturbation." "By far, the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men. And it starts in the home." "The concept of a generation implies that young people are doing something different." "Each of these generations, my generation and the so-called hippie generation, we’re heroic. We were thrown into the future where there was no map, where there were no guidebooks." "Hippies, to be honest, were not very hip, compared to the beatniks." "The function of the 21st century is to learn how to operate our brains." "The human brain is designed to design realities." "You have to face the fact that people born between 1946 and 1964 are a new species." "The way evolution, as I understand it, works is DNA, biological intelligence, Gaia wisdom, egg intelligence does not like final forms. … You’ll see the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘grow’. In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing, and it is also someone who has reached their final form. And if there is one thing you can say about evolution, she does not like final forms." "There really is an awesome epidemic of deliberate stupidity that is laid upon us by the media, by the press, by magazines and so forth. They simply do not raise any of the issues that challenge our interests or intelligence." [Quoting Abbie Hoffmann] "We may have been young, and we may have been silly, and we may have been idealistic, and we may have been too romantic, but god damn it, we were right!" "I have one cause, and that’s the goal of the performing philosopher, is to encourage you, and inspire you, and empower you, to the extent I can, to Think for Yourself and Question Authority." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Timothy Leary Archive Cody & Sancho’s Podcasting Tutorial The Conversations Network (Levelator)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties." "In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’." "Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology." "Nothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough." "So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It’s a very Talmudic notion. It’s a very psychedelic notion. It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual. And this is in fact how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science." "The idea of the individual is a post-Medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers." "The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea." "Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. … Nobody opens a book and looks at print … We read print, but we look at manuscript, because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it." "[Quoting Marshall McLuhan] High definition is the state of being well-filled with data." "Print is the least invisible of all media. Print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information."We are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-tone kind of thing." "A perfect media is an invisible media, and print is the least invisible of all media." "Those who read, do not see, even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world. They read. They attempt to read nature. And you can’t read nature. You must look at nature. You must see nature." " ‘The Medium is the message’ means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference." "Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century." "The reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things, clearly. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic/eschatological." "What I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character, per se. You never know who is speaking." " ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries." "Joyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this." "It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get." "Anna Livia Plurabelle is Molly Bloom on acid, basically." "People say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience." "The character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that you are supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that." "What all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language." "We are living in a terminal civilization. I don’t want to say dying, because civilizations aren’t animals. But we are living in an age of great self-summation. … Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation underway." "The purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future." "Somehow, complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Oracle Gatherings … June 2009 … The Fountain

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have." "The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow." "American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently." "He [William James] later wrote the book "Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide." "The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden." "The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly." "As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some more information on exactly how evolution got started." "All of you in this room have experienced more realities, more crisis, more of life, you’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers in the past." "The generation you belong to is of key importance." "Nobody died for my sins, man. I did my time for ‘em." "Let me give you an example of set and setting. If you take LSD under the following conditions: you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber, and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention, that is bad set and bad setting." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place." "Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may never know what hit us." "If I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the Net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull." "All time is is how much change you can pack into a second." "You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise." "It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you." "Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected." "It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is." "This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?" "To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination." "Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating." "I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago." "It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense." "Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity, and beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences." "The momentum now is inevitable. Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable." "What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all." "When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let’s be frank about it, it is enslavement." "The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Transcript of this Talk Video of Bruce Damer’s EvoGrid This is the book Terence spoke about in this podcast.

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The two quotations below are by Sasha Shulgin.] "Internally, no one’s an elder. Internally everyone’s kinda around 35 or so." "The people at the industry said, ‘Gee, if you have that kind of imagination that you can look at a structure and guess at another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do.’ And I did." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Earth & Fire Erowid, Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Nick Sand, and Dave Nichols PROGRAM NOTES: Erowid’s LSD Vault LSD and Drug Testing LSD FAQ Part 1 LSD FAQ Part 2 "I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event." –Ralph Metzner "The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture." –Ralph Metzner "The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943." –Ralph Metzner "Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state." –Ralph Metzner "It [the prohibition of psychedelics] puts the industrial civilization in a very unique position. It’s just about the only society in the whole history of humanity that doesn’t have any use for non-ordinary states of consciousness." –Stanislav Grof "We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimention in the psyche. It’s a legitimate dimention in the universal scheme of things. It doesn’t mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously." –Stanislav Grof Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Party of Israel

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Many people are afraid to be free. They’re afraid that if liberty were to seep through the land then they would loose something. The just don’t trust themselves enough to be free." "Prison is a luxury. Unfortunately it is wasted on people who don’t know how to use it." "The objective is to get as far away from The Man as you can." "There’s only one technology of freedom. It’s the human brain." "You’ve got to be smart to be free, and most people don’t want to take the responsibility to be free." "You are as old as the last time you changed your mind." (Anon quoted by Leary?) "Liberty is inexorably intertwined with intelligence." "Every time you hear that word ’security’ watch out, because somebody’s going to take some of your freedom away." "One way to become more intelligent is to migrate to where people are as intelligent or more intelligent than you." "I’m basically pro-drugs. Drugs give you more options. Now I’m not pro any one drug. I’m pro-freedom-of-drugs." "We can only go as far outward as we have gone inward." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Timothy Leary Archives ONLINE

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s me in Hawaii sometime in 1994. "I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it!" –Ralph Abraham "Notice that throughout history the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the blacks, they’ve taken their hits, but the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history have been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people [the Internet] utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb." –Terence McKenna "Chaotic as the Web is, what it is is a controlled psychedelic experience spreading through the populace at the highest levels of intelligentsia." –Terence McKenna "What it [the Internet] will be in the future will depend on what kind of people with whatever motives would actually go there." –Ralph Abraham "I think it’s [the Internet] built into the evolutionary morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos in that it could no more be stopped than mitocondria or societal organization."–Terence McKenna "I think it [the Internet] will supersede us. I don’t know how much monkey meat will be connected to the World Wide Web when the Web is complete. It may shed the monkey meat."–Terence McKenna "The population explosion could end, let’s say, because of the World Wide Web. This is my greatest dream." –Ralph Abraham "Nature is a world wide web. That was the first world wide web." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcasts 19 (Part 1) & 20 (Part 2) “The World Wide Web and the Millennium” a conversation between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham (August 1998)

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by J. Krishnamurti.] "Give your heart and your mind with every thing that you have to find out a way of living differently." "Where there is love, do what you will it will be right action, but never bring conflict to one’s life." "We are talking about a revolution, not physical, but a psychological revolution in which there is no, at the depth, conformity. … Conformity exists when there is comparison. For a mind to be totally free from comparison, that is to observe your whole history which is embedded in you." "What’s your answer to this question that human beings have lived this way for millenia upon millenia, why haven’t they changed? . . . Why don’t you, if you’re at all serious in this matter, why don’t you ask yourself that question? Why am I, a human being who has been through all of this, why haven’t I changed?" "To go into this question of bringing about a total revolution in what is, one must have an extraordinary sense of awareness." "And when observed through history, through our life, all that hope and faith have no meaning at all, because what is important is what we are, actually what we are, not what we think we are, or what we think we should be, but actually what is." "What we are trying in these discussions and talks here is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind. Not accept things as they are." "To understand is to transform what is." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More information about Krishnamurti Krishnamurti Founda.tion of America .J. Krishnamurti Online Books by Jiddu Krishnamurti