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Psychedelic Salon

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Mar 21, 2008 • 1h 16min

Podcast 132 – McKenna: “Shamanism”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Matt Pallamary NEW! ... Two of Matt Pallamary's books are now available on Kindle: Spirit Matters ... Kindle Edition Land Without Evil ...
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Mar 19, 2008 • 1h 15min

Podcast 131 – “A Model for Sustainable Psychedelic Therapy”

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Alicia Danforth, who is Dr. Charles Grob’s research assistant, leads a Playalogue at the 2007 Burning Man Festival. In this wide-ranging group conversation, Alicia skillfully guided our eclectic audience through the intricacies of FDA-approved psychedelic research. "I’m hoping to spark ideas in other people’s minds about what can be done to get a foothold in advancing psychedelic research." –Alicia Danforth "I tend to think of music [in a therapeutic psychedelic session] as a little boat you can hop on when you’re journeying and ride to wherever you need to go." –Alicia Danforth. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: Ecstasy : The Complete Guide : A Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits of MDMA by Julie Holland, M.D.
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Mar 5, 2008 • 1h 19min

Podcast 130 – Timothy Leary 1966 Radio Interview

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic drugs are to the human mind today what the discovery of the microscope was to medicine and biological science three or four hundred years ago. Psychedelic drugs expand and speed up consciousness. They are going to bring about a tremendous change in our society, in our view of man and our way of life in the future." "When you take LSD you do go on a trip. It’s a voyage. It’s the most ancient voyage that man has ever known, the one beyond your mind and your current tribal situation into the incredible possibilities which lie inside. So it’s a fair statement to say an LSD voyage is a trip." "A chemical age is going to have a chemical sacrament." "Every great breakthrough in religion and science has always involved a new method of bringing into consciousness what you couldn’t see before, the telescope, the microscope. And you remember, the fellow that developed the telescope back in Florence a few hundred years ago got into the same sort of trouble with society that we’re in today. Any new instrument which opens up consciousness threatens the establishment." "It takes a long time to learn to use LSD. It’s no shortcut. It’s no instant mysticism. It’s no instant psychoanalysis. It’s tough, hard work." "Stay away from it unless you’re willing to take LSD in a state of grace for serious and important purposes." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Mar 2, 2008 • 1h 36min

Podcast 129 – “The Imagination and the Environment”

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Erik Davis.] "The imagination is a key, and pivotal interface, between human beings and the natural world." "Any kind of restorative, sustainable renewal of our planet has to exist on the imaginal realm as well as the realm of technical solutions, political developments, and technological fixes. It’s a multi-dimensional problem." "So the imagination is really the core, the source, the matrix of our multi-dimensional experience." "The creative imagination functions in a different way than religious beliefs allow us to engage with." "If we’re into integration now, with science and technology, that means that we can’t avoid that skeptical voice [of scientific, existential materialism]. We have engage and learn to integrate that skeptical voice as well. [To think] it’s our job to just say ‘No. Those science people they don’t understand. They’re locked in rationality. It’s actually this mystical world, this magical world’, is a profound failure, in my opinion, of our role. And the more we go into loosy-goosy mystic New Age stuff as a concretized belief system, rather than as an open, playful world that adds richness to our lives the way that poetry does, or the way that religious imagery does, drawing us to those higher realms but holding them lightly so that we can still engage a skeptical materialist, for me, that’s what integration means." "The new paradigm is that there’s not a paradigm." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Erik Davis’ Web Site: Techgnosis
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Mar 1, 2008 • 1h 27min

Podcast 128 – “The State of the Stone”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "I’m very pleased … to see how much of the youth culture has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue. Because it really means that after 20, 30 years of unstinting distortion and misrepresentation by the media and some of the powers that be, that nevertheless the curiosity is intact, the opportunity is available, and people have not been fooled by the effort to denigrate, dumb-down, sideline, water down, sell out, whitewash and screw over the idea that psychedelic plants are an excellent and necessary part of any program of spiritual self-exploration." "Our evolutionary heritage lies in the use of psychedelics. It was in all probability that psychedelics called forth our humanness." "For all of its capacity to razzle dazzle, science has some serious drawbacks, some serious limitations that psychedelic experiences make more starkly evident, I think, simply because psychedelic people then compare the full spectrum of their experience to the paradigm they’re being offered." "Nature is self-similar across scale." "We can extrapolate towards cosmic processes by thinking about our own lives." "In other words, we represent the quintessential gathering together of novelty. We are more than mere matter. We are more than mere biology. We are more than mere aboriginal culture. We are all of those things plus we are our skin of technical connections." "The Big Bang is completely improbable, utterly improbable. It is the most improbable of all improbabilities. So just remember that when the fascism of science is telling you that astrologers don’t know what they’re talking about, and somebody else doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I mean, science has built a house of cards on worse than sand, quicksand!" "I’m willing to say I’m convinced that history is the annunciation of the nearby presence of a transformational event. . . . History is what happens when an animal species has its genome distorted by the nearby presence of a transcendental object." "Love, in the heart of a monkey, which is what we are, is an effort to image this transcendental thing at the end of time. To love is to open to the presence of the Other, and that’s a very, very profound boundary dissolution." "Ultimately at death, I think probably the only way you can meet death fully in command of your faculties is to love it, to surrender to it." "What it might take you forty years to do through a process of rational analysis, and psychotherapy, and deconstruction, and so on and so forth, it can happen literally overnight on a sufficiently alarming dose of a psychedelic substance." "One of the great things about psychedelics that is so corrosive to capitalistic values is that psychedelics show you that the best stuff is in your own head, better than walking down Madison Avenue looking in the windows is sitting in your shabby apartment on six dried grams [of psilocybin mushrooms] looking in the windows." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Feb 14, 2008 • 1h 6min

Podcast 127 – Leary: “The Cooper Union Speech”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "You have to go out of your mind to use your head." "Now, in taking this eccentric position, of taking the brain seriously, you run the risk of getting out of touch with your professional colloquies." "Now from the standpoint of the strategy of the genetic material, every living species is simply a creative solution to a packaging problem." "This [early imprinting of young ducklings on orange basketballs instead of mother ducks] is both funny and tragic, because it raises the question, in the case of the human being, what accidental orange basketball have you and I been exposed to early in life?" "At times it seems to us that one of the functions of the mind is to rationalize and protect an accidental early imprint." "We suggest that psychedelic drugs may be seen as chemical agents which temporarily suspend your old imprints." "The thing which excites us these days is the corollary concept of psychedelic RE-imprinting." "I think that anyone who doesn’t experience, at some moment during their psychedelic sessions, and intense awe-full fear has been cheated by their psychiatrist or their bootlegger." "LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever known to man." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Jan 30, 2008 • 1h 41min

Podcast 126 – “Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are from a conversation held in September 1991.] Terence McKenna: "But in fact it seems that the ouroboros has taken its tail in its mouth and these two concerns psychedelics and computers] are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge." Terence McKenna: "The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic." Terence McKenna: "Yes, I mean television certainly has an influence on the mass mind, but on the creative, cutting-edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture, but if you watch television it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television." Terence McKenna: "As a global society, possessing DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting wooly mastedons and that sort of thing, but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded." Terence McKenna: "Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward ‘outing’ the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this, as are psychedelic drugs." Terence McKenna: "High definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point on-the-ropes linear uniform unitarians, because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography. And it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within society." Ralph Abraham (in 1991): "Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation but because it’s not interactive. Interactive computer graphic games where you can watch the soap opera but also play with it to change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema." Terence McKenna: "So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Jan 25, 2008 • 1h 42min

Podcast 125 – Trialogue: “Crop Circles”

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: These comments were recorded on September 3, 1991, and the opinions expressed by the participants in this podcast may have changed in subsequent years.] Rupert Sheldrake: "If it were just one (crop circle), the hoax theory would be very plausible, but a phenomenon over such a long time period, now with ones turning up in other parts of the world as well, increasing levels – 400 of them last year [1990] in different parts of Britton, this requires quite a large effort." Rupert Sheldrake: "The alien theory [about the formation of crop circles] is a very rare one among the theories encountered. The one I think is most popular among people who take seriously the phenomenon and think that the hoax theory is not the only possible explanation is that the spirit of the land itself, or Earth mysteries long embedded in these ancient megalithic monuments are sort of coming back to life again and somehow are being reactivated in Brittan’s hour of need, or that Gaia or the Gaian intelligence or the Gaian mind itself is involved in some ongoing dialogue or communication which principally has the effect, year by year, of attracting more and more attention. And the message year by year seems to be ‘Watch This Space’." Ralph Abraham: "I think we should bet on the red and we should bet on the black. Probably you are right. Probably it’s a hoax. In case it’s a hoax, probably military, all right. But just as the fanatics of this phenomenon can’t dis the hoaxes theory to zero, neither can we reduce the non-hoax theory to zero, therefore, we have to keep our eyes open in case it actually begins to say some understandable intelligence to us. We can’t dismiss it completely." Rupert Sheldrake: "I think this is the only rational position to adopt, namely to treat it as a natural historical phenomena, or at least a phenomenon. Let’s just say a phenomenon, to investigate it emphatically, I think, is Bacon Ian science." Terence McKenna: "I’m claiming that orthodoxy is defending itself against magic. It’s a war between reason and magic. … It’s a desperate struggle between rational orthodoxy and magic." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Crop Circle Links 1. Why real crop circles cannot be hoaxed:http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html 2. http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/ Her photos can be found here: http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/photos/ 3. Andreas Mueller’s Interview with African Shaman on Crop Formations http://www.kornkreise-forschung.de/textCredoMutwa.htm 4. Interactive site: http://www.cropcircle-archive.com/archive/index.php?language=en 5. http://swirlednews.com/index.asp 6. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/index2.html Crop Circle Videos Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 1 (This link was broken the last time it was tested.) Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 2 http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7441333249846634309&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Unsigned Circles http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=2802311361701974260&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Alien Signs http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5043378172083766362&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Star Dreams – The Crop Circle Phenomena http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=966639197455233571&q=crop+circle&hl=en Julia Set http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6223143790883248313&q=crop+circle&hl=en Book mentioned in this podcast Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults by : Jacques Valle’e Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 118: 21st Century Koans
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Jan 18, 2008 • 1h 29min

Podcast 124 – Trialogue: “Cannabis”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: Terence McKenna: "In the absence of cannabis the dream life seems to become much richer. This causes me to sort of form a theory, just for my own edification, that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. … And if you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication." Terence McKenna: "And what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas." Terence McKenna: "Alcohol, on the other hand, is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits. What a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead." Terence McKenna: "For the 19th century, and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. … For the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology." Terence McKenna: "To my mind, the whole of Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish." Terence McKenna: "Hashish, cannabis, has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenic field you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world." Terence McKenna: "There’s a deeper issue which is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude." Ralph Abraham: "It [cannabis] is medicine for cultural evolution." Terence McKenna: "If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity." Terence McKenna: "It can turn you into a stupor, sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it, and I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it." Terence McKenna: "We [the U.S.A.] represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans." Terence McKenna: "Governments have always been, and continue to this day to be, the major purveyor of drugs, worldwide." Terence McKenna: "The day the Russians left [Afghanistan], the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
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Jan 16, 2008 • 1h 16min

Podcast 123 – “Opening the Doors of Creativity”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured." "The precondition for creativity is, I think, is disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos." "The prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman." "This really is the bridge back to the archaic, shamanic function of the artist, permission to explore the irrational." "And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human beings, first in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone, within 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us and points us toward the kind of extra-planetary mega-civilization that we can feel operating on our own present like a kind of great attractor." "This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal, is the production and condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the human animal is language. … Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude with anything else going on on this planet." "Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language." "Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys. It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream." "The glory of the human animal is cognitive activity, song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent." "The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in fifteen or twenty thousand years." "The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act." "Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness." "Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. … If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found." "Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics." "The civilization that was created out of the collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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