Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 07:18 Rupert Sheldrake: “If there were to be a true Mother Earth religion develop, it would obviously have priestesses rather than priests because its central figure was a goddess. It would be relating human life to the Earth, first and foremost . . . it wouldn’t have much emphasis on the stars or the heavens.” 08:49 Terence McKenna: “But if this Anima Mundi thing got going, this is not a fine tuning of Christianity this is, at last, the overthrow of it. . . . no more this patriarchal, masculine, dominator thing that has descended down through monotheism.” 13:36 Terence: “Why not psychedelicize and sacrilize green politics? . . . Science and green politics can be sacrilized through the psychedelic experience.” 14:33 Terence: “I think that green politics, what makes it so wishy-washy, is its lack of a forthright metaphysics. . . . A green party that used a mystical language, a psychedelic language…would have, I think, a tremendous appeal.” 15:51 Terence: “It has to be understood that this [using psychedelic medicines] is the way to the Gaian mind. These things are sacraments, not metaphors for sacraments, real sacraments.” 16:13 Terence: “Everybody is going to try and out-green everybody else. The trick will be to tell the weasels from everybody else.” 21:50 Terence: “If it’s to be a psychedelicized green movement, the people who could lead this have been training themselves for years. They just didn’t understand that that was what they were training themselves for, but called upon to do so they could step forward and operate in those positions.” 25:00 Ralph Abraham: “The entire promise of the intellect has failed us if it’s necessary for the catastrophe to actually be upon us before people will act, and yet that seems to be the case.” 35:18 Terence: “Well they are psychedelic experiences. The authenticity is going to come from the thing itself. We’re not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.” 40:09 Terence: “The only competition for that focus on the need to save the Earth is this stupid anti-drug thing, which is the need to preserve the purity of your precious bodily essences, or something like that. . . . It’s the issue of how we relate to the vegetable matrix” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:48 Ralph Abraham: "So eventually the 60s happened, and probably my first experience that I would now identify as a real religious experience was the experience of LSD." 07:17 Ralph: "What’s gone wrong in the world now is a loss of connection to the sacred within and without organized religion." 13:30 Ralph: "The revascularization of music, I think, is very important. If I had to point to a single factor that I thought was destroying society faster than any other I think it would be evil music." 18:28 Ralph: "The value of getting the true partnership into the church would mean that we then wouldn’t have to replace the church just because it had been on the wrong track for 5,000 years." 18:48 Terence McKenna: "But isn’t this a little like trying to reform the Soviet Union and keeping the Communist Party around? I think the momentum of these institutions makes them hard to reform." 23:27 Rupert Sheldrake: "I think the most important aspect of this process really, because I agree with Terence about the archaic revival, is to find behind the existing forms and existing festivals the pre-Christian roots, which in all cases are the ones that feed the timing of the particular festivals and the particular locations of the sacred places, and which ground the new religion in the old." 32:39 Terence: "In America attendance at church is much higher, and it convulses the body politic because, unable to fulfill it’s sacral function, the church has become simply a lobbying force for fundamentalist social policy. . . . I think we should level [churches] to the ground and start over." 35:13 Rupert: "There is little way in which the political life in America could be sacrelized, since by definition it’s secular." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:52 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his concept of "Cannabis Day" 06:18 Terence McKenna: "One day in each lunar cycle would be Cannabis Day, I think." 10:22 Terence: "Time and attention used creatively banish the unconscious." 13:42 Ralph Abraham: "Shopping malls are actually the modern equivalent of the medieval abbeys." 20:04 Rupert: "The idea that time has its qualities is already something that has a popular following in the millions who study astrology in a vague or a professional way." 24:22 Rupert: "Drugs have qualities, and they open up different realms of experience. . . . And so what would happen, for example, if one took a powerful psychoactive that opened one to the astral realm, in the starry sense, and then invoked a particular star by name and tried to journey, or connect with, or become open to influences from that star? . . . I’d be rather frightened to try it, myself." 29:09 Ralph: "Denial [of various experiences] I think is a recent phenomenon, and here there is a serious danger for evolution because once experience is denied then evolution is shunted off its track." 35:50 Ralph: "We may have great powers that aren’t being used since we don’t believe in them." 41:20 Ralph: "A dangerous hypothesis: The first one we want to transcend is the seperation of the human unconscious from the other unconscious." 42:32 Ralph: "So associated with this animal domestication and eating habit, addiction, is denial of consciousness of the animal." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:48 Ralph Abraham: Explains his bifurcation theory of the unconscious 08:01 Ralph: "We can speak of the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of plants, the consciousness of Mother Earth." 11:57 Ralph: "Chaos goes to the basement, and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness, giving us the unconscious, which appears to be gaining ever since." 17:02 Ralph: "I think we want Saint George and the Dragon getting it on together in a May Day celebration where Dionysian elements are accepted." 18.21 Terence McKenna: "The orgies driven by the psychedelic religion completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity." 21:21 Terence: "Basically the choice was between fun [through orgies] and full knowledge of the flow of your genes, and once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue, then the concept of ‘mine’ comes into existence. . . . And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundry-disolving mushroom religion was holding at bay. It was literally a pharmacological intervention to keep that kind of a psychology [patriarchal] from getting going." 23:33 Terence: "They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy to a drunken reverie of warriors and whores." 30:16 Ralph: "And in this sense, a restrictive society which narrows the choice of addictions is somehow anti-evolutionary in that it promotes the growth of unconsciousness, insensitivity, is a danger to the biosphere and so on." 31:11 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his proposal to legalize psychedelics in an ‘age-related manner’. 33:55 Rupert: "And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit. However conscious we think we become we don’t become fully conscious of the unconscious embryonic habits that formed us." 40:03 Ralph: "And so we would have to work at maintenance of consciousness as we work at maintenance of the garden." 46:47 Terence: "It [coffee] is the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of the coffee break." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:40 Terence McKenna: "Going back to this thing about language, you get this same peculiar emphasis on language and letters in the esoteric doctrine that surrounds the chakras." 06:57 Terence: "Linearity in print conferred upon language an inability to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology, but now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this and move it forward." 09:55 Ralph Abraham: "There is very little discussion of the intelligent science, mythology, and so on of these 100-, 200-, 300-thousand B.C., what is going on during these previous interglacials, and it could be that there was agriculture. There would be no way to rule that out." 15:30 Rupert Sheldrake: "If that’s possible [communicating with a star entity], what kind of information would such beings impart?" 17:27 Ralph: "Myth is from mythos. Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the song from the rituals. Myth gained the power it now has in our conscious and unconscious life through its secondary role in the ritual. The ritual and the myth together, I think, is one of the most important things for us to regain." 19:11 Ralph: "Peace [in Crete], I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm in a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm. There was also the conscious interaction with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere in bringing peace down." 22:12 Terence: "I think when you go to the edges . . . then you discover there is an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomenon around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors." 25:02 Rupert: "The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm. . . . So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a demon. It’s in fact a Satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles. . . . How seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money?" 28:34 Rupert: "If we take seriously these entities, how much can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities, like Mammon or Satanic powers or fallen angles, which are actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology?" 30:50 Terence: "Probably the process of civilization is going to reveal the final status of this shadow within us." 36:12 Ralph: "I think we need the Gaian, and we need the Chaotic, that is the celestial sphere, to be re-connected, to be coupled, to the human spirit . . . that is the ultimate partnership." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:24 Terence McKenna: "When you start looking at the question of these disincarnate entities, the first thing that strikes you is their persistence in human experience and folklore. This is not something unusual or statistically rare." 07:57 Terence: "The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal concomitant with the rise of modern science." 10:01 Terence: "If we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science by disincarnate entities." 12:59 Terence: "The aversion to the irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity." 17:59 Ralph Abraham: "I think it was in 879 in the council of Byzantium that spirit was made illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul . . . and this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the difference between spirit and soul and thinks that they’re the same." 21:01 Terence: "Did you know that the dogma of purgatory, in Christian theology, was not created by theologians in Rome. It was created by Saint Patrick in an effort to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk beliefs in the process of converting Ireland to Christianity?" 22:12 Terence: "The major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is psychedelic compounds, especially DMT and the tryptamines. And those sort of experiences seem to line up pretty well with the Celtic fokelore." 27:37 Terence: "The irrational, in this objectified form, is very active in the process that we call history. It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry." 33:57 Rupert Sheldrake: "The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly journeying into these realms of other entities." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:38 Ralph Abraham: "It does seem very attractive to think of the electromagnetic field as some kind of favored intermediary among all the physical fields." 07:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "There’s this mystery of light. I still think Maxwell’s electromagnetic formulations of light are much too simple." 10:56 Ralph: "I think that we ought to think about the possibility that this effect [the paranormal] will not be confirmed in laboratories." 15:39 Rupert: "There is some sense in which our imagination, our image-making facility, is self-luminous." 25:54 Ralph: "We have therefore in our individual consciousness a particular affinity with the electromagnetic field . . . as epitomized by vision." 30:41 Terence McKenna: "Why is divine omniscience a necessary concept? Can’t the universe get along just being partially aware of what’s going on? . . . What problems are solved by hypothesizing that notion?" 33:36 Rupert: "I find it more reasonable to find that our minds are in touch with larger minds and are in many ways shaped by larger mental systems." 33:57 Terence: "The mind of the whole universe seems unnecessary to hypothesize and unlikely to be encountered." 45:14 Rupert: "I think that the cosmic mind may be largely unconscious because I think that most things that happen in the cosmos are habitual and therefore unconscious." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:52 Rupert Sheldrake begins a discussion about light. 10:55 Rupert "What kind of influence could be moving outward through the eyes as part of the image-forming perceptive process, and in this outward projection in some sense project the image we see, the image we see is part of this outward flux." 14:17 Terence McKenna begins his commentary on Rupert’s ideas about light, expanding them into the realm of imagination. 21:08 Ralph Abraham challenges Terence and Rupert on some of their points. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:29 Terence McKenna: "The ego is essentially paranoia institutionalized." 03:53 Ralph Abraham: Considers the possibility that ego became strengthened when psychedelic usage became less frequent. 05:29 Terence: Talks about a "psychedelic rebirth." 08:15 Terence: "A calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing, and I have just the calendar all worked out." 09:48 Terence: "It’s an effort to deny man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and what we actually want is a calendar that says ‘all is flow, all is flux, all relationships are in motion to everything else. It’s a truer picture of the world." 13:22 Rupert Sheldrake: Comments on the fact that the Islamic calendar fits the definition of Terence’s suggested calendar. 16:22 Rupert: "One of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine, and creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb, coming out of darkness." 20:56 Terence: "I think it’s the notion of as above so below." . . . "In talking about these things you can’t force closure." 22:14 Ralph: Explains how the painting in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the black virgin) is actually a representation of the goddess chaos. 26:19 Terence: Explains how the Faustian pact with the physical world that humans have made by adopting the "deadly cultural forms" of written language, moveable type, etc. have had a negative impact on our self-image. . . . "In the absence of this boundary-dissolving ecstasies, and replacing that with the machinations and plottings of the ego leads very, very quickly into a cultural cul de sac. . . . This was the wrong-turning." 29:15 Terence: Explains the difference between dominator and partnership. 33:17 Terence: "You cannot trust the dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end." . . . "Who is it who has the power to pry the dead fingers of the dominator culture from the instrumentality of power?" . . . "Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor." 39:14 Terence: Discusses the question of whether there can be consciousness without an object. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:29 Ralph Abraham: "So I should like now to speak about the chaos of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination." 05:41 Ralph: "Chaos, Gaia, and Eros are the gods, or concepts, of the primitive types." 13:56 Ralph: "People have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base." 20:55 Terence McKenna: "Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language." 22:16 Terence: "The birthright that connects us to the divine is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination." . . . "We have a secret history. Knowledge of which has been lost to us and only now is recoverable . . . " . . . "We are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species." 24:34 Terence: "Once we lived in dynamic balance with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost." . . . and then he explains what it is that we have lost and how it was lost. 27:46 Terence: "There are certain episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving." 29:00 Terence: "The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s going on." . . . "For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and the attempt to bring out of it ideas." 32:37 Terence: "For me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams." 37:30 Terence: "There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left us no choice." 45:01 Terence: "Fear it is that guards the vineyard." . . . "So the fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option