Psychedelic Salon

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

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

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: Today’s program features the second tape in a series of trialogue tapes that were recorded in September 1991 at a private recording session with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna. It begins with a wrap-up of their previous conversation, titled "Grass Roots Science". And then they begin with a new topic, introduced by Terence McKenna and his plan for "Saving the World". [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "If mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago." "As I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin, the one I come back to again and again as being central to any social program which would create a sane and caring future for our children and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment is the problem of over-population. All other social problems can be seen as being driven by the excess of human population on the Earth." "First of all, let’s just take it at face value: Each woman should bear only one natural child. Now what would be the demographic consequences of this? Startlingly, within fifty years the population of the Earth would be cut in half, without war, epidemic, forced migration, government programs of sterilization, and so forth and so on." "A child born to a woman in a high-tech, industrial society, in the upper class of that society, will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often told." "Notice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman, ‘How would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero? All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.’ " "I don’t think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future." . . . and from there, Ralph and Rupert point out a few of the problems with Terence’s plan and go on to propose yet another clever solution for saving the world. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Rupert Sheldrake: "Especially in Brittan, this declining confidence in science, and this declining funding of science has let to a reduction of scientific morale. Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students. . . . It looks as if the great golden days, the golden age of the sixties and seventies of endless expansion, is over, perhaps forever." Rupert Sheldrake: "So morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap, indeed, almost free in some cases. And much of the leading research has been done by students as projects. And this has made it clear to me that students, who do tens of thousands of projects around the world are quite capable of doing leading-edge research. They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance." Terence McKenna: "I think that science has not only moved from the easy problems to the hard problems, in its evolution over the past thousand years, it’s also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems." Terence McKenna: "Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature. Science is done to make money on a vast scale." Terence McKenna: "I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military/industrial complex." Terence McKenna: "And I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified scientific data. That’s an obscene concept." Rupert Sheldrake: "The vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999% at least, which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree, about the nature of consciousness, the range of imagination, and the powers of the human mind, etc. is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact, every effort is made to suppress it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Grass Roots Science Report mentioned in this podcast: An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Essentially, today’s podcast is a series of short notes to myself, little things that I don’t want to forget" [The following quotes are by Lorenzo] "As my Mexican friends sometimes say, ‘If you don’t change your direction, you are going to wind up where you’re heading.’ " " My problem, I discovered, was that there had been far too much DOING in my life and not nearly enough BE-ing." "I didn’t own my stuff. It owned me. … I now finally understand that nothing I possess is more precious to me than the opportunity to be able to appreciate a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day." "When I stopped trying to save the world I also stopped trying to save myself . .. and THAT was a big mistake." "Perhaps we all will have to first revolutionize our own lives, and then, on the foundations of our individual revolutions, will a new global consciousness arise." "It seems to me that our beliefs are what ultimately shape our personalities. So who OWNS those beliefs? If I do, then I am a freethinker, in charge of my own destiny. But if my beliefs own me, well, then the institutions that formulate and promulgate those beliefs, they own me." "I have finally come to grok the fact that the purpose of my life is not to reach a destination. Nor is my life a journey. No, for me at least, the purpose of life is to dance. A dance with no beginning and no end, just an endless dance." "Here and now. Here and now. All else is but memory and fantasy." TERENCE McKENNA QUOTES FROM THIS PODCAST: [The following quotes are by Terence McKenna] "People don’t take enough [psychedelics], that’s all." "When we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing." "The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting." "The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal." "These boundry-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past." "Get it straight. This is about an experience. Not my experience, your experience. This is about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard." "This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution, you are a free and indipendent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MUSIC USED IN THIS PODCAST: "Miss About You" (with vocals by Sharon), "Counting Days", "Long Distance" LiquidAlchemy with Queerninja … queerninja@doepfiend.co.uk "Velvet Apple" the sun blindness "Anything Can Happen" Catal Huyuk Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert "the Zahir" by Paulo Coelho

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [Note: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "These are the two things we don’t have: As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves." "We have not, in this culture, awakened to the depths of the crisis that surrounds us." "Our culture is in trouble. Not trouble! We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways, horror beyond your wildest imagination, or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination." "The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs but plants. It’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way." "When you talk about Gaia, it’s only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women. It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals." "We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I’m sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing, basically, to do enough hallucinogens in the diet." "It is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally. Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in." "Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behavior are acceptable." "There are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell. One of the other." "What we deny, as a culture, as a culture of materialist positivist reductionists, it the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature." "I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence. But that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. V.S. Ramachandran PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes are by V.S. Ramachandran.] "Let’s think about what the standard explanations were [before the late 1990s] for synesthesia. The most common explanation, which we used to hear until about five or ten years ago was, ‘Oh they’re just crazy, they’re nuts,’ because it doesn’t make any sense. And this is a common reaction in science. If it doesn’t make any sense you brush it under the carpet." "It turns out that synesthesia is more common among acid users, but that to me makes it more interesting, not less interesting." "You cannot solve one mystery in science by using another mystery." "Synesthesia my even hold the key for understanding the emergence of language and abstract thought." "It turns out that it [synesthesia] is much more common among artists, poets, and novelists." "One of the things you know as a physician is that when you think something is crazy it usually means you’re not smart enough to figure it out." "Art is not about copying. It’s about distortion and exaggeration, but you cannot randomly distort an image and call it art." "There is only one pattern of neural activity that can exist at one time, and it will destroy any other competing patterns of neural activity. This means there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes are by Terence McKenna] "Culture denies experience." "We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to its surface." "We’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason, and science, and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm." "We’re in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it." "All the boundaries we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved [when using psychedelics]. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. Government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them." "The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the slave-driven agricultural projects, in the corporate office, whatever it is." "Madness, basically, up until the level of physical violence, means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore there is something wrong with you." "I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology." "History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing. We have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years." "What psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise. Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas." "The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego." "The key, on one level, to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding. That’s where it begins." "We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort. . . . You don’t get serial killers in the chipmunk population." "What the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable." "It seems to me that culture, at least this culture, is a shabby lie." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:40 – Mark Pesce: "I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t to escape into another dimension but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can’t always see because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us." 06:29 – Mark Pesce: "Because where we’re going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry." 15:13 – Terence McKenna:"Obviously, from the first time I had a major [psychedelic] trip on it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications." 17:09 – Terence McKenna:"Whatever it was that psychedelics were doing, it was taking anybody’s notion of reality, anybody’s mindset, and radically extending it. And if they found that comfortable they were ecstatic. And if they found it horrifying they were traumatized. But the common thread was, takes ordinary minds, makes them bigger, stranger, more grotesque, less predictable, more bizarre." 24:22 – Terence McKenna: "Our ideologies are probably lethal, obviously lethal I would say. But they are, fortunately, a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving." 27:16 – Terence McKenna: "Occasionally you flop on the seamy side. It gives a literary quality to life that’s lacking among the tight-assed." 32:24 – Terence McKenna: "If anything undoes us this will be it, that our language has failed, that we misread each other’s intent, that we could not understand each other. So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history. I mean, history is the story of languages that failed, and when language grows perfect history will end." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Mark Pesce.] 11:35: "The singularity is how Terence’s idea of the Eschaton is working its way now into popular cultures through scientists." 16:42: "There are periods of time when your DNA isn’t doing anything at all, when it’s quiescent. And at that time, when it’s not interacting with the world around it, it can enter what physicists call superposition. When it’s not interacting it can enter a quantum state. That quantum state says that it can be in this universe, and this universe, and this universe, and this universe. Well, it can be in a lot of different universes. In fact, it can be in ten with five hundred zeros following it, possible universes." 30:33: "The ability for you to react to your environment from your genetic code verses being able to react to your environment because you can communicate using language is probably at least ten million to one times faster. That means at the same time we acquired the ability to speak everything about us in terms of humanity, and human culture, and human thought, and human understanding suddenly went ten million times faster." 47:22: [talking about nanotechnology] "The world we’re going to, the entire physical world, can now start to look a lot more like Legos that get snapped together at will. And if you think about the difference between building a castle out of sand and building a castle out of Legos, you’re starting to understand the difference that we’re about to be presented with in the material world. So at the atomic scale level of the material world is about to become linguistically pliable. This is an ability we have never had before." 52:01: "It’s my belief, and I want you to prove me right, that the psychedelic community represents the authentic search for a middle path, because what’s happening in the psychedelic experience is that there’s a stretching of being. There’s a stretching of being that allows new forms of language and new ideas to enter. We all understand this intuitively because we come back from a psychedelic experience with some expanded sense of awareness, that we’ve been opened up to an understanding we didn’t have before." 54:08: "You can argue about the specifics of when it’s going to happen, but what you can’t argue about is that there are three waves. We can take a look at the shape of these three waves and the fact that these three waves seem to be concrescening on a single point, and that this single point is where Homo sapiens is going to be left behind, and we’re going to see the emergence of a new species." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option