Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program consists of ten separate pieces from a June 2012 workshop at the Esalen Institute, eight of which are by Bruce Damer. Here are the titles that Bruce has given to these short talks: --Are we all becoming autistic astronauts? --On our dual bonobo and chimp nature --The things I loved about Terence --Esalen @ 50 --"Procreate only once" (and we will have a future) --The wellspring of human consciousness --Terence's greatest Rap: Its all about Love, and where to now, Butterfly Hunter? Following that we will be hearing the two closing segments of the workshop. The first is the “Rap for Terence” by Earth Girl and following that comes Galen Brandt singing her tribute to Terence titled “Aho Terence floating in the sky” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at Burning Man Podcasts featuring Fraser Clark "Rave Culture And the End Of The World…as we know it" "Monkey’s Trip, A Short His

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features the final community discussions at the June 2012 Esalen workshop led by Lorenzo and Bruce Damer. Among the topics discussed were: -Creating a new myth for our community -The genesis of the Occupy Movement -Are psychedelic “mutants” among us? -Cultural Creatives -Freeing our food supply from money -Timebanks -What the mushroom has to say about the future -The Importance of myth -Developing a “Medicine Circle” app -Building new cultures through shared global experiences -The 'superfood' revolution and our connection to the Earth -Indra's Net -The Temple at the Burning Man Festival Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option FindTheOthers.net

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “In my function as a [college] lecturer, it's my obligation, it's my task, it's my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority.” “And that's one of the things that is kind of amazing today, the junk information that we're being inundated with, the cloud, the atmosphere, the smog of disinformation.” “Reagan is a certifiable lunatic” “The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” “We're getting to one of those moments, one of those great moments in history, when evolution is going to happen.” “At all costs avoid terminal adulthood.” “You are as old as the last time you reprogrammed your brain or changed your mind.” “You're as old as the people you hang out with.” “There is no reason why any human being should work. Robots work, humans perform.” “The sensible thing to do about drugs is this, get yourself a really g

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the next installment of the workshop that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. The majority of this program features comments by some of the workshop's participants who bring up topics that include: -Heroic doses -Body load with psychedelics -Techniques for using psychedelics -What exactly is the psychedelic state -The perfect answer when a cop asks, “Were are you at, buddy?” -The re-introduction of psychedelics to our species -How do we tell the psychedelic story -The Occupy Movement and the banking system -The need for a parallel system of money Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and friends PROGRAM NOTES: In this follow-up session after Bruce Damer's “Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna”, Lorenzo leads the discussion of the participants in a workshop held at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. Topics of the conversation include: - Consciousness, not drugs were the focus of McKenna's work - Heroic doses are not as important as bringing back information - The healing and love value of teaching plants - We all contributed to making Terence McKenna a cultural icon - Building a new civilization in the shell of the old - The Eschaton as another step in human evolution Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: “Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.” -Terence McKenna According to Wikipedia, the Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world's most mysterious manuscript”, and so far it's secret code has never been broken . . . including attempts by top U.S. Government cytologists. And this is the subject of today's talk by Terence McKenna from an April 1983 lecture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Repression of psychedelic drugs Element of risk in taking psychedelics The imagination Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul Death The importance of psychedelics Bell's Theorem [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don't really; there is no degree in shamanism.” “This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.” “There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn't, but I think that the risk is worth it.” “Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, whi

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic UFOs and aliens The end of history – the eschaton The psychedelic experience Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other Death and afterlife Dreams [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.” “Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.” “Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.” “The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horiz

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This program is a recording of part of a live event at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. The workshop, titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”, was led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty. This specific recording took place on Saturday morning, June 16th and consists of Bruce's “deep dive” into the mind of McKenna. It begins with Bruce's “Ode to Terence” and is followed by Bruce's readings of parts of the soon-to-be published book by Terence's brother, Dennis . . . the book's title: “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Ode to Terence” by Bruce Damer “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss” by Dennis McKenna

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.” “The ketemine experience is very much like the dying experience. It is a hands-on dying experience.” “If you know how to die, gracefully, and elegantly, and intelligently, why bother with all the foreplay?” [Speaking to the Baby Boomers] “Your generation is a sinking ship. So the intelligent thing to do is to jump ship.” “I'm into the absolute navigational fact that you can only go as far into the future as you understand and are really respectful of the past.” “The key to evolution is the individual, the intelligent individual, the self, finding a self within.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psych

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: strong>[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Since World War II, in the Western societies, the generation you belong to is almost a different species.” “It's a wonderful time in history to be alive when young people are doing things better than grownups. Because that's a key sign that evolution's happening, because evolution only happens with young people.” “I feel that it is necessary, if you want to continue to evolve, that you have to learn and be comfortable with computers.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Juan Enriquez: "Will our kids be a different species?"

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “The way we define intelligence is the amount of information energy you can receive, that you can store and retrieve, and that you can transmit.” “It's very intelligent to be able to live as long as you want to. It's stupid to die.” “It's obvious that the blocks to evolution are anything that keeps you from changing, or discourages you from changing. And almost all the religions tell you, 'Don't change.'” “There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them.” “Drop out means to drop out of any line of conformity to any system.” “Now I'm telling people to Turn on, Tune in, and Take Over.” “Wherever you have the big religions, or the big totalitarian forces, they hide the body. They make you feel ashamed of the body.” “It's hard to have to figure out what do I really feel that I want. It's much harder to be yourself than to be a conforming person.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click,

Guest speaker: Eben Moglen PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Eben Moglen.] “For the policy makers, in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand: How do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity? They do not know the answer to this question, and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.” “Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.” “Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the Net is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy. It proves itself all the time. Somebody's going to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for describing, in formal terms, the nature of disintermediation.” “The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web, an invention less than 8,000 days old. That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.” “The next Facebook should never happen. It's inte

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a recording of a talk that I gave in March of 2001 at The Inside Edge, a Southern California association of cultural creatives. The topic was some of the themes in my book, “The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness”. One of the more controversial aspects of this talk is my comparison of a deep Internet experience with a psychedelic experience. . . . Also included in this podcast is some discussion of the growing student strike in Quebec and the mounting student loan debt bubble here in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Full Text of this talk (PDF) The Inside Edge OCCUPY TRACK 1 100,000+ Quebec Students Protest Debt OCCUPY TRACK 2 Student debt: the new slavery? by RTAmerica OCCUPY TRACK 3 Occupy Graduation: US student debt destroying the Future of our Youth - RTNews 10 Things You Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement Huge Montreal Student P

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.” “What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.” “I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.” “Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.” “Actually, these things [psychedelics] reveal scenarios, modalities hierophanies of emotional and poetic power that are very emotionally moving, and sometimes leave in their wake powerful ideas, ideas as powerful as any of the ideas that have moved and shaped civilization.” “The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think it's time to begin to talk very, very frankly about the forced engineering of consciousness, about the re-shamanising of society, about the re-birth of archaic values before it's too late.” “Anyone who loves adventure, and who loves life, and who loves the experience of being, has an obligation, I think, to explore this [the psychedelic realm]. It's as much a part of your identity as your sexuality, your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to choose to play with less than a full deck. Don't do that. Play with a full deck!” “People didn't care for the Holocaust, that was a moral outrage, but the policies of the Roman Catholic Church push more people into early death, disease, and poverty than the Holocaust ever did. And yet, they're perfectly free to run their bingo games and appear among us. Why? They should have to answer for this outrage.” “Millions of people right now are

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] This is the first part of an evening lecture given by Terence McKenna in early February, 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Maui. “Our [Western] civilization touches everyone on this planet. We are involved in a species-wide crisis, and it's a crisis of adaptation and intelligence. If we can meet the crisis, if we can re-design the cultural machinery so that it can glide in to the new value systems that a limited Earth, and an electronically activated population demands, then we can use the crisis as a stepping stone to further exploration of the universe, further evolution, further unfolding.” “Nature is an engine for the production of extinct species.” “The contradiction that history confronts us with is a deeper exploration of the psychedelic experience. And the psychedelic experience is something incredibly alien to the Western mind. It is, in fact, taboo.” “The psychedelic experience is not built in to your b

Guest speakers: Matt Pallamary, Wild Bill, & Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features, first of all, a conversation between Matt Pallamary and Wild Bill, who begin by reminiscing about the legendary Palenque Entheobotany Seminars, but who then go on to other wild tales, some of which may actually be true. After that is the first of our long-awaited Global Trialogues in which Bruce Damer answers a question from a young man in Australia. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BRUCE'S BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS Books by Eckhart Tolle Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012 A workshop at Esalen Institute led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 Global Trialogue No. 1 . . . On Facebook The “October Gallery” talk by Bruce Damer (MP3 files) Part 1 Part 2 A Basic Theory of Neuropsychoanalysis by W. M. Bernstein Thought Nachos

Guest speakers: Ram Das, Terence McKenna, and Angeles Arrien PROGRAM NOTES: “The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.” --Terence McKenna “Psychedelics are a miracle, yes. They may not be the only miracle. I think they may have already done what they were to do. I think what is done is so much more powerful than anybody recognizes.” --Ram Das "I see all this destruction as just the process of transformation. The question is whether we'll keep it together in the process of transformation.” --Ram Das "So I really see the psychedelics as directly intervening in the core process, which is running us over the edge, which is our inability to connect with the consequences of what we're doing.” --Ram Das [Speaking of the Sixties: “The fact that they noticed us was because we were busy making

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “I think it's clear to everyone on the left, the right, the center, every walk of life, that we have to undo a mess that's been created, a tangled mess. And we have to remake the System. There's no way to reform the System. We must re-do it.” “If you put out a powerful vision, the universe just lines up the stones and the pebbles and allows you to walk toward it. As long as you're pure in that vision and you really vision it, and you really share it, it's amazing how these things come to pass.” “Silicon Valley and its progeny have reinvented the world, and [the tools they have created] are now the tools by which we will reinvent politics and the economy.” “The Occupy Movement is like the tip of an iceberg, but underneath the water is 95% of the volume of the discontent and of the volume of the powerful organizing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Radical Remake Wi