Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.” “What you call man is time.” [Quoting the mushroom.] “It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.” “What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the Mandela, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.” “[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.” “History is the siren song of the soul.” “The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is wha

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff and Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording from the spring of 2006, at Kathleen's Salon in Venice Beach, California, where Robert Forte and Myron Stolaroff came to tell their stories about the recent festivities in Basil, Switzerland celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. After telling a little about the Hofmann event, Myron read part of the talk that he gave in Basil. From there, the conversation ranged widely, eventually ending with an argument about the Kennedy assassination. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Dr. Timothy Leary reading a few selected chapters from his autobiography, Flashbacks. Interestingly, he begins this recording with Chapter 19, which details with his departure from Harvard. [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “We agreed that as much as we loved and respected Harvard University, this finishing school for Fortune 500 executives was not the place for philosophic activists bent on changing practically everything.” “The State of California should be run like a successful business enterprise. . . . Anyone smart enough to live in California should be paid a dividend.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by and about Dr. Timothy Leary

Guest speaker: Lorenzo RIP: Zoe7 & Dr. Andrew Sewell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcasts is from the audio book edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation. It consists of a reading of Chapter 9, Catlin's Salon. This is a fictional account of what was once the most fashionable psychedelic salon on the West Coast. Once each month, for more than eight years, an amazing group of people would gather to discuss a mind-numbing array of topics. And while the story line in my novel is obviously fictional, the backdrop of the salon itself is described as best I can . . . and as best that I now remember, looking back after so many years that have passed since those wondrous meetings of the L.A. Chapter of the Albert Hofmann Society. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “Plant medicines have long been the domain of women.” “We are taught to escape in this culture, and so what these [psychedelic] medicines will do is they'll take you to the heart of the truth of who you are and what needs to be addressed.” “I think of myself as a spiritual warrior, and a spiritual warrior seeks to know, they are on a quest to know.” “We still have an Inquisition, it's a Pharmacratic Inquisition, it's still around.” “. . . they say we are wanting you to see and understand what's going on, because when you see, you SEE, then it's game over, right? [Which is] another reason why these medicines are illegal, because if you use them enough, in the right set and setting, then you start to get what's going on, you start to really see.” “We are here to remember the truth of what we are.” “You are not the 'story' of what you think you are.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, se

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History has been the pursuit of a false god, the god of stability, the god of permanence, the god of the unchanging, and we've become just neurotic on this subject.” “What's being said here is re-claim experience. Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future, and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates. Take back your mind and your body.” “You're involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder.” “The suppression of psychedelics has had the unfortunate effect of making it impossible for us to build a linguistically coherent community and have a shared body of experience, because you can't just say this stuff to everybody.” “Coming out of the closet on psychedelics should be part of the political agenda.” “The direct datum for metaphysical sp

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think if we ever tease apart this psychedelic thing, what we'll discover is it's an inter-species communication system.” “I'm at war with the keepers of the secrets.” “One of the motivations for my career is to get other people to check [DMT] out, because here is truly confounding data that you don't have to make an expedition to the heart of the Amazon, or battle your way through hours of waves of nausea and dark spaces, chanting your mantra obsessively. I mean, when you smoke DMT, 30 seconds later you're in the presence of the unspeakable, and the show is going full blast.” “It really frustrates me when people have psychedelic experiences and don't talk about them, because to me, that's what they're for. They're to fertilize the enterprise of communication. It's to be talked about. And if it's not talked about it's sort of like seeds which fall on sterile ground.” “I think that the world is held together

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.” “The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.” “Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.” “The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.” “Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.” “The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the enviro

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The 'banks' of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.” “All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don't run around announcing how they haven't got their act together.” “What the psychedelic thing is about, or at least for me, is it's a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.” “We are, literally, a schizophrenic species. We are at war with our own nature. Civilization, whatever that means, is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it's constantly refusing to come to terms with the context in which it finds itself, which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy, and so we go outside of those things and create a generalized abstraction and reason backward.” “The reason psychedelics, I think, are so frightening to

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a panel discussion with Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer that took place at the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures held at that year's Burning Man Festival. “Women tend to vote against drug law reforms in greater numbers than men, because they're worried about their kids. And without the full participation of women [in the movement to reform drug laws] we will not succeed in gaining our civil rights.” -Annie Oak Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Women's Visionary Congress Palenque Norte 2013 Speakers The Tor Project East Forest What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution By Gar Alperovitz

Guest speakers: Michael Garfield & Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt's novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and musician, Michael Garfield, one of my favorite topics was Michael's very positive take on the long-term impact of the work of Terence McKenna, regardless of the fact that the Timewave theory had obviously been disproven. Michael is also a regular performer on the festival circuit, and his schedule may be found online at Michael Garfield.net Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Salon Magazine Degenerate Art: The Art And Culture Of Glass Pipes “Is Ecstasy the Key to Alleviating Autism Anxiety?” Horizons 2012: CHARLES S. GROB, M.D - “Why Psychedelics Matte

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.” “Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.” “Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.” “National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.” “Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.” “In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.” “The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.” “O

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it's discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there's somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.” “You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn't depend on a state of grace. It doesn't depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn't even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don't have to go to India for ten years. You don't have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.” “If you think that you've got it all figured out, and you haven't ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you're absolutely out to lunch. You don't know what's going on. It's like the opinions of eleven year old

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.” “The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.” “If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.” “So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.” “I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.” “I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversit

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you're never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don't know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.” “The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.” “[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it's letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don't want to become like that. Maybe that's not why

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.” “Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.” “Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.” “I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.” “[Psychedelic experiences are] beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.” “It doesn't matte

Guest speaker: Dr. Naughtilee PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Naughtilee gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of modern medicine with the wisdom of the natural healing arts. In this engaging talk, and through interaction with her audience, Dr. Naughtilee discusses some of the foods, medicines, and poisons that we obtain from plants and helps us to better realize what a deep connection we humans have to the plant world. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence” “These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.” “Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.” “In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.” “To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer /* A brief history of Palenque Norte (video) PROGRAM NOTES: Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of "global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism" where you "put yourself on the shelf" and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says "there is no dominator culture" and that if we aren't careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others' unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop "critical intelligence". If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn't f

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.” “By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.” “The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?” “People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.” “Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state,