Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Daniel Pinchbeck at the Playalogue he led on August 29, 2007 at the Burning Man Festival. This Playalogue was held in the big yurt at the PodCluster in Black Rock City.] "I think there is a lot of evidence that suggests we’re in this kind of very critical sort of evolutionary window for the human species." "I really do feel that one of the critical things that is happening at Burning Man is a kind of conscious and subconscious interrogation of gender and sexuality." "What we have to consider is that if sexuality is this infinite spectrum, and everybody is highly unique in their sexuality, then to just have a social construct of monogamy is going to lead to a lot of anger, and frustration, and hostility." "In a lot of non-Western tribal cultures there is a kind of like a basic happiness that people have. Our culture is all about the pursuit of happiness, but at the core there’s a basic, kind of, general sense of insatiability and unhappiness." "I don’t think that the nuclear family is the natural model, or good model, for raising a child. I think, actually, the tribal community is the proper model." "And I think one question is really like is there a fixed human nature. And if there isn’t a fixed human nature, which I think is quite possible, then we can kind of reconfigure relationship patterns, relationship models, in almost any way." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We know that typically the real changes in human nature, the changes in human politics and economics and society, are brought about by two things: By people who have a map or a vision or a model of where we’re going to go, these are the philosophers. And then the technicians, the people who get together the printing presses, or the compasses, or the high technology that can take us where we want to go." "Viewed in the 1930s, when Einstein came to America, he was considered as far out as a crack dealer." "Heisenberg taught us to take the universe very personally … in both senses of the word." "So who? Who’s gonna prepare a civilization of factory workers and farmers and people who haven’t even got the Model T Ford yet? Who’s gonna prepare them for an Einsteinian, relativistic, quantum physical, ever-changing, probabilistic universe? Who? Well you know who you can count on at every time in human history when we had to make a big philosophic lurch forward. Who always came to the front and saved the day and made us feel happy and comfortable with a new future? I’m talking about those friends of ours who have always been around when we needed them, the musicians, and the artists, and the poets, and the writers, and the bards, and the performers, and the storytellers, and, OK, the minstrels, the rock n’ rollers. Right! The actors, the script writers." "The whole 20th Century, to me, is the story of how artists and writers prepared us to be comfortable in a quantum-physical world." "We’re talking about a generation of people who, since the time they were born, have been inundate by data, electronic data. To the Baby Boomers and subsequent generations electronic data is the ocean they swim in." "Of course, everybody got down on the poor doctor [Benjamin Spock]. He was blamed for the excesses of the sixties, ha ha. I was glad to have him get blamed otherwise I would have gotten blamed." "The psychedelic pudding hit the fan in the sixties when the Spock kids hit high school and college, and they wanted a gourmet education, and they wanted connoisseur sex. … Gee, we said you’re the best, but we didn’t realize that you guys would take us seriously." "The Cyber Society is a society made up of individuals who think for themselves, linked up with other individuals who think for themselves." "The Sixties were the adolescence of the Baby Boom." Following the talk by Dr. Leary I play a short personal message from Eldrige Cleaver to Timothy Leary that was recorded on January 7, 1995. The message Cleaver was so intensely trying to convey to his friend, Tim Leary, was that he believed it was imperative that the U.S. elect a woman president in the year 2000. Unfortunately, neither of these two important historical figures are alive today, and thus we can only speculate as to what they would think about the state of affairs in 2008. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option KMO’S C-Realm Podcasts KMO’S Personal Blog The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference "Flashbacks: An Autobiography"by Timothy Leary "The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time" by Hunter S. Thompson And by William Gibson: Neuromancer Mona Lisa Overdrive Count Zero

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 ...

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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