Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When I say think for yourself, I don’t mean think selfishly for yourself. I mean think independently." "If you’re going to think for yourself, you gotta learn to think clearly." "The person who thinks for herself or himself has to have a sense of humility, and of modesty, and of relativity because you have to realize that I’m thinking for myself, but hopefully you are too, and you’re bound to come out with something a little different from me. So there has to be an ability to listen, compassion, plus the modesty. No matter how smart we are there’s a lot we aren’t going to be able to figure out tonight." "I’m glad we’re laughing together because that’s a key. A sense of humor is the key. … That ability to laugh together certainly goes along with the ability to think together." "Any time you introduce a new technology of thought processing, or of thought communication, you change everything else." [Speaking about the biblical Eve] "I’m really pleased that the first member of my species was a woman who had the courage to stand up on her feet and think for herself." "The idea that any human being should be forced by economics, forced to do work that can be done better by a machine or a computer is totally humiliating to any concept of our human dignity and worth." "Now in the Industrial Age, a good person was someone who was prompt, reliable, dependable, productive, efficient, and replaceable." "It’s always the artists, by the way, I think. The artists, and the entertainers, and the writers, and the musicians whose job it is to prepare society, to become a comfortable way for changes that otherwise would be too frightening." "The point of the 20th century, you can argue, is to get us to accept knowledge, processing, and reality on screens." "To me, a computer is a thought processor." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A case in defense of Salvia divinorum Mythic Imagination Fred Johnson and Michael Meade Johnson sings an introduction for Ari Berk "What Was Said to the Rose" Mythic Journeys (preview trailer)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think disease is (and I don’t want to be held to this entirely, but) largely more linguistic than people think." "The story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living." "Nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power. And it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism. Nothing is unannounced. If you’re paying attention, stuff comes down the pike, first the little waves, then the medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami. But you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected." "What it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always say. But THAT something is coming at you is usually pretty clear, pretty clear." [In response to the possible evolution of artificial intelligence] "It’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclineith toward bodhisattva-hood, then the bodhisattva are on their way. If on the other hand, intelligence doesn’t incline toward bodhisattva-hood, then probably the house-cleaning of all time is on its way. Because when these AIs come to consciousness and realize what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed, indeed." "Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiratualized the world, but we didn’t tame it." "It’s very interesting, how the re-animation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding it. That you could pass through the reductive phase of science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, and still not have a handle on what does it mean to be a being, what does it mean to be a human being, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow we got to this place without answering any of those questions." "Connectivity is the pre-condition for love." "My view of, let’s say, the last thousand years, is that it’s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it, more soul-searching afterwards, more questioning ‘Why? Why did we do that?’ " "People are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estate. But instead they’re invited to fetishize, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest. And all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own ends: The accumulation of capital investment, or the acquisition of land, or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that. Our human-ness is constantly being eroded." "The image I have of our community is, we’re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship." "Sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience." "If psychedelics don’t secure a moral community, then I don’t see what the point of it is. Otherwise we’re just another cult." "It’s good to dry out occasionally. Very occasionally." "It’s always puzzled me how this community has never really understood its roots in American Transcendentalism, or why we never used that hammer against the establishment. Because this sort of secular-mystical-Theosophical brand of thinking is just as American as mom and apple pie, and yet you rarely hear it invoked by our people. And yet it’s where our roots grow deepest, with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorn. I mean, my god, these are the people who put together 19th century America." 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.] "I think reason can take us only a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination." "There have been many episodes in the history of science where great hope gave way to paranoia." "The [UFO] hysteria has become more explicit and has wandered in first one direction and then another, but if this is a contact it’s the most peculiarly un-contact-like contact it’s possible to imagine." "And this is something I’m going to try and convince the UFO community of, what we drug people have that you don’t is repeatability." "The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity." "Reason, but a willingness to explore the edges has been [my] method. … I have never seen a violation of physics that was not connected somehow with a psychedelic experience." "Not all psychedelics are alike. And this very small family of compounds, called the tryptomine hallucinogens, bear careful examination if we’re seriously interested in this question of exterrestial penetration of the human world." "Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff [psilocybin], Gordon Wasson, Richard Shulties, Albert Hofmann, the giants know that this stuff is animate. This is not a drug. It’s something that’s disguising itself as a drug in order not to spread alarm." "I think that the alien will be so alien that your jaw will hang in the air. And expecting to meet an anthropoid-like alien with an interest in your reproductive machinery and gross industrial capacity is as culture-bound a concept as searching NGC-321 for a good Italian restaurant. It’s absurd on the face of it." "All of human history is the signifier of the presence of the alien. Human history is what happens to an advance animal species when it is inner-penetrated on a scale of a million years by a mind in another dimension." "The flying saucer, the alien, the other is what is sculpting us out of animal organization as we move toward it in time. This is what shamanism is all about. This is what the psychedelic people are discovering as they descend into these trances." "A shaman, and a psychedelic person, and a UFO contactee, is someone who has seen the end. They simply didn’t know what they were looking at, because who knows what the end looks like." "The world is not what it appears to be." "Psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was to the re-defining of astronomy." "I think that the ‘real other’ need not be guarded by the frail efforts of a cults apologists." "Now you may have thought telepathy was you hearing somebody else think. Apparently, that’s not what telepathy is. Telepathy is you seeing what somebody else means. It’s the visual acquisition of meaning rather than the audio acquisition of meaning." "I think that we are on a collision course with a planet-transforming event, and that we have been for a very, very long time. I also believe that it lies below the horizon of rational apprehension at this point in time." "That’s where the frontier of this hyper-technical fantasy is headed, toward a revivification of knowledge systems that were ancient when the pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye." "I think we’re on the brink of a tremendous evolutionary adventure, and that it will involve physically re-designing ourselves." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Conference on Precession & Ancient Knowledge Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 117: Aliens are ‘Real’

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth." –Rupert Sheldrake [Speaking of the past:] "So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways." –Rupert Sheldrake "The basic idea I’m proposing is that the so-called ‘Laws of Nature’ may be more like habits. They may depend on what’s happened before and on how often it’s happened. So there may be a cumulative memory in nature, largely unconscious, which gives rise to habits and things, which accounts for the stability of nature as we know it. But this is not all governed by eternal laws that were there at the Big Bang." –Rupert Sheldrake "The English couldn’t bear this void for long, caused by the suppression of pilgrimage [by the Protestant Reformation], and within a few generations had invented tourism, which is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage." –Rupert Sheldrake "I think a great move forward would happen when astronomy and astrology link up once again." –Rupert Sheldrake "If the Sun has a kind of consciousness, then what about the entire galaxy, with this mysterious center?" –Rupert Sheldrake "What we call the imagination is actually the universal library of what is real, that you couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real, somewhere, sometime. And that to me is very empowering because that’s the truth that you learn at the center of the psychedelic experience that’s so mind boggling that you can’t really return with it, that it’s real." –Terence McKenna "Now it’s time to realize that trying to reason upward from the laws of atomic physics to organism is not going to work. That there are … emergent properties at every level." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Galaxy Map Hints at Fractal Universe

Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Preet Chopra.] "The ’set’ is talking about what the individual who ingests a psychedelic brings to the table in terms of their life experience, their mood, expectations, family history, their personality structure, significant relationships, and their systems of belief. ‘Setting’ accounts for all the other factors that are not internal to the person, the physical environment, location, all sorts of sensory stimuli that might be present during intoxication, and the other participants, particularly a therapist or facilitator." "A term that’s out there among recreational psychedelic users is ‘psychonaut’, which really means, from Greek, ’sailor of the mind’, and I think this is kind of the experience those folks are going for." "In terms of reducing risk, I certainly feel that anybody with certain medical contra indications, and taking prescription drugs, should really avoid taking a psychedelic." [In response to a question about the fact that there was very little dialogue between the study participant and the attending psychatrists:] "Minimal dialogue during the actual experience. And that is based on the work that Grof did, and Panke saying, hey, let this medicine do its own work." "There are some people who believe that by putting on eyeshades and listening to music there is less incidence of sensual kinds of phenomena, and that allows for more of a psychological benefit." Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Scientists Who Revived Magic Mushroom Research Hallucinogen Gives Lasting Spiritual Boost "Spiritual" effects of mushrooms last a year Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms’ Transcendent Effect Lingers

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Most people are living in a world they can’t understand. And when people can’t understand something they tend to go for sinister explanations of it." "I prefer to think that, at minimum, there are about 24 conspiracies afoot. . . . I cannot find any proof of any conspiracy that really existed, that was brought into court and convicted, that lasted more than ten years before everybody double-crossed everybody else, and the conspiracy fell apart." "He [John von Newman] realized that most of our perceptions are in the ‘maybe’ mode. They’re not yes or no, they’re not true or false, they’re just ‘maybes’. I think ‘maybe logic’ is probably the greatest invention of the 20th century." "I regard religion and patriotism as the two major mental illnesses afflicting this planet." "The CIA/Tsarist/Nazi Alliance began to me to seem more and more the key to everything that’s been crazy and bizarre and incomprehensible about American foreign policy in the last fifty years. I think the central thinking of the ruling class of the United States is basically within the Tsarist paradigm." "Patriotism is loyalty to a gene pool." "I would say faith is the chief fomenter of war in the whole history of the world. Even in comparatively secular societies it becomes an article of faith that the government is justified. The other side is all wrong. We’re all right. And nobody’s supposed to think about the question at all. That becomes despicable. I believe we should think about the despicable." "It absolutely stops thinking entirely if you’ve got enough faith." " ‘Faith is believing what you know aint so’. That’s why they put lightening rods on their churches." 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.] "What I’ve observed, and I think it’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine." "If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance." "Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. . . . Time is, in fact, speeding up." "No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night." "Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck." "What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use ‘higher dimensional’ in the mathematical sense." Definition of ‘eschaton’: "Eschaton comes from the Greek word ‘echatos’, which just means the end." "The ‘hard swallow’ built into science is this business about the Big Bang. … This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. … Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It’s the limit case for likelihood." "We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event." "Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us." "[The psychedelic experience] is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind." "The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery." 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.] "For as long as I can remember I have been influenced by a role model who has guided me through my navigation of this amazing life. I am a great follower of Socrates." "Corrupting the minds of the young is a difficult job, god knows it’s ill-paid, somebody has to do it." "I do feel this is a wonderful time for change-agents to be alive." "I ended up growing up thinking that everybody was like me, and that is, obviously, a mistake." "As soon as you belong to a system where you’re not known individually, and where you don’t know, individually, the other people, you are by definition depersonalizing yourself, a robot cog of the Big Machine." "This [1946] was the peak of the industrial age, and the aim of psychology was to help people be ‘adjusted’. Remember? If you were well-adjusted that was it. And the worst thing you could say was someone was maladjusted, which means they were thinking for themselves. "I see Ram Das two or three times a year. He comes by my house and we split a bottle of wine or a six-pack and have a joint or two." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: (This program marks our third anniversary of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon!) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Aldous Huxley.] "Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows." "We are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions." "Given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country." "If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government." "The really interesting thing about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered." "Man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature." "You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect." "And then again, in the case of these very strange substances like psilocybin and lysergic acid, I think there is a great deal to be said for doing what William James talked about, which was getting people to realize that their ordinary, sort of common sense view of the world is not the only view. The universe they inhabit is not the only possible universe." NOTE FROM LORENZO: A few minutes after I posted this podcast on the Net, I checked my email and discovered that fellow saloner John H. sent me a link to the following video. After you listen to the talk by Aldous Huxley you may find it rewarding to view the following video and then do a little thinking about what is really going on in the U.S. today while you re-read "Brave New World". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Link mentioned in this podcast: The Center for Cognitive Liberty

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [Quoting a friend] " ‘The apocalypse is already happening.’ The slow apocalypse is unraveling all over the world." –Terence McKenna "If it’s all on automatic, if the world is either undergoing some kind of mass extinction and soul migration into the Elysium realm, then very little has to be done. If, on the other hand, it isn’t on automatic then what is the nature of the political and social world that we should construct for ourselves and our children?" –Terence McKenna "What we have is a future-phobic society that places a great deal of stress on the preservation of a pseudo-tradition called "Family Values" by some people, but it has many names. It’s not an archaic social model, or anything rooted in long-term human organization. It’s basically the 19th century industrial model of the couple with some children fitted into an industrial economy." –Terence McKenna "It seems to me that a whole re-thinking of the notion of freedom has to come, and that it isn’t strictly a matter of more freedom." –Terence McKenna "I think we’re going to have to go back to Plato. Plato did not trust the poets, and the heirs of the poets in our hell bard are Madison Avenue." –Terence McKenna "The interesting ideas have to do with touching the taboos."–Terence McKenna "I’m basically an optimist, but not because I have faith in human institutions. But because I think there is a transcendental attractor that will eventually pull our chestnuts out of the fire." –Terence McKenna "I do believe that history is the proof of the presence of a hyperdimensional something or other, which is acting on ordinary biology." –Terence McKenna "The government follows. It doesn’t lead. We need leadership now, and leadership comes from people, that’s us." –Ralph Abraham "We’re not being led by evil people. We’re being led by jackasses at this point." –Terence McKenna "Pretending that this catastrophe [a coming global ice age] is not probable will almost certainly guarantee that it takes place real soon." -Ralph Abraham "Let’s avoid the disease of denial, because if we don’t admit a problem then there is no solution." –Ralph Abraham "What free trade means is the right to sell crap everywhere. The right to deal Coca Cola in Afghanistan, that’s what free trade is, the right to sell Volvos in Turkmenistan. It’s a bad idea, free trade. We don’t want to make trade easier. We want to make the manufacture of objects and excruciatingly expensive process and the moving of them from one market to another damn near impossible, because what we want is the de-materialization of culture." –Terence McKenna "The Great Leveling, which the Left always called for has in fact taken place in part, and that’s why you have less money. When the leveling took place did you think it was going to kick back into your pocketbook? You haven’t visited Bangladesh recently." –Terence McKenna "The Nation State has become a Fascist tool, all Nation States. What these companies stand for is unbridled gangsterism." –Terence McKenna "What we need to do is dematerialize our interphasing with nature. If we’re going to keep the body then we have to jettison material culture. We cannot have both the body and material culture." –Terence McKenna "Yes, I think that we’re going to a grand destiny, and that the planet will survive this, but consciousness is the flashlight to throw on the path." –Terence McKenna "History is an agitation in biology that proceeds the Eschaton, and it only takes it 25,000 years to rise out of the sea of chaos." –Terence McKenna "Love is what lies at the end of the historical descent into novelty. It has to be." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option