Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] >"Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it’s quite spectacular." "It’s [ayahuasca] essentially ‘brain soup’. There’s nothing in it which doesn’t occur naturally in human neuro-metabolism." "It’s [ayahuasca] the only hallucinogen I know, where if it’s made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn’t done it." "What it [the ayahuasca experience] is is a self-generated, self-controlled immersion in a non-causal, parallel construct of some sort." "This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don’t want to clench, you don’t want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation … most of the time." "In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told." "Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Wrye Sententia PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Wrye Sententia.] "How can we have confidence in what we think we know, in our particular version of reality, in our particular take on the world? … What is real and what is false, and does it really matter if there is a difference." "Mind is built on consciousness. It’s an accumulation of life-experience over time. … Consciousness, for me, is sort of a snapshot in the photo album of the mind." "Cyberpunk, I think, is about altered states of body and altered states of mind." "And the reason I mention the decade of the drug wars [in connection with cyberpunk fiction] is because there are a lot of overlays between altering your mind through drugs and altering your mind through technologies, hard technologies." "Now we can’t protect ourselves from misconceptions. But I think we can keep from evolving them, maybe by taking the doctrine of signs and saying, instead of finding the purpose find the consequence." " ‘Augmented reality’ supplements the physical world, the external world, with additional information." "If we put filters on cameras to enhance the picture, what kinds of filters can we put on our minds to enhance our day-to-day walk?" "If cognitive liberty is the right of each individual to think independently, or autonomously, and to engage in the full spectrum of thought, and to have access to multiple modes of consciousness, if that’s what cognitive liberty is, it’s something that is a political goal." "The cultural machinery never rests." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics

Guest speaker: Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: "Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. No lasting change is effected by politics; it has to come from within." –Nina Graboi "How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies we die. We are that stream." –Robert Forte Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: FREE Mp3 Downloads "Psychedelics, Science, and WTF" (Comment thread with Robert Forte) ">Operation Mockingbird Project MKULTRA Cointelpro  9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press David Ray Griffin shows that the official story about 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true. These contradictions show, therefore, that individuals and agencies articulating the official story of 9/11 have made many false statements. Congress and the press clearly should ask which of the contradictory statements are false and why they were made. This book is purely factual, simply laying out the fact that these internal contradictions exist. As such, the book contains no theory. Politicians and journalists who deal with the issues raised herein, therefore, will not be giving credence to some "conspiracy theory" about 9/11. They will simply be carrying out their duty to ask why the official story about 9/11, arguably the most fateful event of our time, is riddled with so many contradictions.  The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers – who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers – is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 – stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves – and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day p>  9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. 1 Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world’s strongest and most technologically sophisticated country? Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad. Contributors include Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Karin Kwiatkowski, John McMurtry, Peter Phillips, Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Ola Tunander.

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "We have the concept of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal city of Plato’s Republic. So casually we might call that Utopian fantasy. Although Plato did try to actually realize it in the political organization of a particular city. He ended up in jail for that effort. Another thing to kind of keep in the back of your mind as we choose whether or not to associate with this particular strand of the human endeavor [utopianism]."–Ralph Abraham "A restoration of the sense of the life of nature could lead to a new society in which heaven and Earth are mediated through human beings. Human beings would be the mediator of the marriage of heaven and Earth to bring about a harmonious relationship at the whole of nature on this Earth, somehow bringing human society into a right relationship between the Earth and the heavens." –Rupert Sheldrake "If you restrict yourself to the realm of the rational, then you only have two choices: utopia or more history. And more history is beginning to look less and less likely." –Terence McKenna "I see all these Christian fundamentalists running around, they also believe in the millennium. And they are the major anti-progressive force in most advanced societies." –Terence McKenna "We have the money, the scientific knowledge, the communications systems and so forth to solve any of our problems, feeding the hungry, curing disease, halting the destruction of the environment. The problem is our minds, that we cannot change our minds as quickly as we can redesign harbors, flatten mountains, cut rain forests, dam rivers, these things pose no problem. Changing our minds is very difficult." –Terence McKenna "We represent the individual atoms that are flowing together to make the transcendental object at the end of time." –Terence McKenna "The historical record does not support the eschaton." –Ralph Abraham   Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic art is the public face of the communication device of our new religion." "Man’s attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination. There’s hardly anything that hasn’t been used one time or another, or in one culture or another, to get this [psychedelic] experience." "We don’t care what method people use [to turn on]. We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that can turn you on. But we also insist that no one tell us that we can’t use our sacraments that seem to work for us." "We’re convinced, and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in a meaningless, robot, assembly-line series of activities. They don’t really know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but they’re just pushed off to this assembly-line and off they go." "[By drop out] we mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in to the productive." "You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses." "There’s no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers." "We use this word ‘psychosis’ the way we used the word ‘devil’ or ‘devil-possession’ or ‘witchcraft’ two or three or four or five hundred years ago." "When the time comes, let your kids turn you on. That’s my message to the middle-age, middle-class, whiskey-drinking American suburban family." "So jail to us is not a middle class disgrace. Here I am, a former Harvard professor, I’ve been arrested three times in the last year. Isn’t that disgraceful? To me that just means I’m doing my job. And if I don’t get the establishment a little worried, I wonder if my message is not getting through." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Robert Forte, Ann Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "I think it’s extraordinarily important, again, the context of set and setting that we use these drugs in, if we’re going to succeed in the Psychedelic Renaissance, is something that needs to be underlined again and again." –Robert Forte "I would say that, arguably, the oldest use of psychedelics in our Western culture, let’s say, is the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were a psychedelic drug ceremony that occurred every year for 2,000 years in ancient Greece." –Robert Forte "Using appropriate scientific methodologies and naturalistic observations, [Timothy Leary] showed that psychedelic drugs were safe. He showed their clinical effectiveness. He showed their effects on enhancing creativity." –Robert Forte "Personally, I think my most keen friend amongst the various phenethylamines and alkaloids I’ve worked with and synthesized has been 2CB. To me, it’s a vary favorable, warm, and very comfortable compound." –Sasha Shulgin [MDMA] is the most remarkable insight drug, and is a suburb tool for psychotherapy." –Ann Shulgin "Any drug, including MDMA, the most it can do is open up what’s inside you already." –Ann Shulgin "When I have not had a good psychedelic trip for, let’s say, six months, I begin to feel that I’m beginning to get out of balance. … I think that instead of regarding psychedelics as a drain on the system, frankly, they are my favorite vitamin. That’s the effect they have on me." –Ann Shulgin "And for all I know there are three, or four, or seven lives going on that I don’t remember either awake or asleep, but I feel consciousness is my living relationship with the world." –Sasha Shulgin "My belief is that when you get involved in a psychedelic experience you are in a communication with part of yourself that you’ve given up trying to communicate with or forgotten about communicating with. So it’s not something that’s imposed by a drug. It’s something [that is already there and] the drug allows you to experience and to function with. So I look upon it as being a revealing thing from within myself, rather than a thing imposed upon myself by an external drug." –Sasha Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (2008 Conference) Horizons Conference audio online at the Internet Archive The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics “Ghosts I” from Nine Inch Nails The first 9 tracks from the Ghosts I-IV collection available as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF.

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson REMOVED per REQUEST by alleged copyright holder. Download from the Internet Archive MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson REMOVED per REQUEST by alleged copyright holder. Download from the Internet Archive MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher and Charlie Grob PROGRAM NOTES: In 1963, Dr. Gary Fisher wrote a paper titled Interim report on Research project: An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children (This link will take you to the full report.) Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option [From the Report] We have given treatment to 12 patients. They have ranged in age from 4 years, 10 months to 12 years, 11 months. The average age is 9 years, 10 months. All patients are severely emotionally disturbed and are considered variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism. Nine Children are considered to be childhood schizophrenics, one case of symbiotic, infantile psychosis and one case of manic-depressive psychosis. . . . We have found that the patients who have responded best to the treatment are those who: have speech; are more schizophrenic than autistic; older (10 to 12 yrs.); exhibit more blatant psychotic symptomatology . . . The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feeling and effectual states. The experiences that have produced such painful and frightening affect have been repressed and the feelings produced by such traumas have been denied. Consequently, the individual has built a massive control system wherein all experience is denied and he exists in an isolated, unfeeling condition which renders him helpless and incapacitated. The psychedelic drugs have the potential of breaking this psychotic control which then allows the individual to re-experience his trauma and to again experience his feelings. This phenomena has been amply proven with our work with these severely disturbed children, wherein they return to traumatic experiences and re-live and re-experience them. By working through these painful episodes the patient is then able to rid himself of the horror of them, to reevaluate their significance and be freed of the psychic effects of their repression. This process has been repeatedly observed in our psychotic children. The transcendental experience, often described in the literature, has occurred with 4 of our children. It might be added that we were very surprised to see this experience occur in such disturbed and young children.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "As you well-know, I never wanted any credibility. I’m more concerned with incredibility." "I believe in change. I’m a change agent. I want to keep changing myself. … Change is going to be the norm from now on, and we’re not changing from A to B, we’re changing in an explosive, multi-directional way." "Yeah, there are forces which slow down change. Certainly, you are aware of the fact that every educational institution, from first grade up to the high altitude of The College of Marin, every institution that’s supported by taxpayers and administered by politicians is carefully designed to keep young people serenely and productively stupid." "It’s necessary to have the conservatives, but it’s also necessary to have the mutants, the migrants, and the people with new ideas." "It’s always the intelligent that move. It’s always the intelligent that migrate, because it’s simply smarter to move out than to stay back in the village and quarrel over cobblestone streets and neighborhood territory. Quarreling over territory is lower mammalian and lower primate [behavior], and it’s the smart, the evolutionary people who always move out." "Now they say that there was a counter-culture [in the Sixties]. There was no counter culture. This was a left-wing, partisan statement. There were 100 counter-cultures. There were as many counter-cultures as there were groups of friends and lovers meeting together to look into each others’ eyes and smile. That’s the point of the Sixties, there was not one orthodoxy being replaced by another orthodoxy. … You make your own world. Don’t blame your parents and don’t blame society. Figure it out for yourself." "You would not have had the drug culture movement of the Sixties if you did not have the do-it-yourself psychology movement of the Fifties." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Coalessence Festival (October 3, 4, 5, 2008) For the best drug information available online, be sure to visit Erowid.org. Dr. Timothy Leary in WikiPedia.org The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana