Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “I don't even use the word 'United States'. If there is such a thing I'm not a part of it. I'm not an American, I'm a Californian, and maybe I'm a Southern Californian.” “I think any sensible person would do this, but since my 70s I have been planning, thinking about, my dying, because that's going to be the climax, the final going away party. And you can't believe the taboo when you start talking about how you're going to die and the ways of dying. You'll easily clear the cocktail party. No one wants to talk to you.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Archive of Timothy Leary in the Psychedelic Salon The Timothy Leary Archives Timothy Leary in Wikipedia

Guest speaker: Joanna Harcourt-Smith PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Joanna Harcourt-Smith.] “In my childhood, and in those [wealthy] circles, I never encountered compassion. If I ever encountered compassion it was from someone who was serving these people. And I wondered why that is. And this man said to me, 'Well, you see, the very, very rich have to kill compassion in their children. Every child is born innately compassionate, but they have to kill compassion in their children so that they don't give it [great wealth] away.' I mean, how could we own most of what is if we had compassion?” “Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.” “Once the System has you in their clutches there are no laws.” “A lot of times myth is stronger than reality. The mythological story endures. The personal story doesn't really make it, and some peop

Guest speaker: James Fadiman We are saddened to report that long time friend of the salon and psychedelic research pioneer extraordinaire, Gary Fisher has gone on to his next adventure. Archive of podcasts featuring Gary Fisher The Gary Fisher Page PROGRAM NOTES: “There is so much more psychedelic use in this country than any of us, even those of us who think we know a lot, are aware of. . . . According to [the government], 23 million Americans have used LSD since it became illegal. And that figure, because I've been tracking it, goes up 600,000 a year, pretty much rain or shine. So there's 600,000 people this year who are going to be taking, and that just deals with LSD, that doesn't deal with ecstasy or ayahuasca or anything else. But there's this growing, continual large number of people, and they tend to be better educated and brighter, and we do have research on that. So what I'm doing a lot with this book is say, 'Hey, it's OK to admit what is true, which is the person next to you at your work proba

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: In this, the concluding episode of recordings from the workshop titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” and led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo, we hear Bruce's final presentation in which he begins by taking us on a mental voyage around our solar system. From there he tells a fascinating story of his meeting with a somewhat dodgy character who convincingly explained that, although it may appear that way at times, there actually is no cabal secretly controlling human affairs. Following that begins an interesting Q & A session. . . . In the Occupy segment of the podcast I ponder over the pros and cons of the Black Bloc tactics that have become somewhat controversial lately. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “The financial system is a giant hair ball of GO-TO statements and lack of control and out of control pools of assets that flow.” “We do not have real technology compared to what nature does. We're not even close.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click,

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast picks up with the third section of the workshop that Bruce Damer and I led on January 28th. This section features my second presentation of the day in which I try to live up to the advanced billing for the workshop which read: “Lorenzo will take us from 2013 into the emerging era of cyber-enhanced humans, immersed in a meme-space stranger than we can suppose.” In the Occupy segment of the podcast I feature an interview with and a talk by Chris Hedges, including his criticism of the Black Bloc hooligans who are doing their best to destroy the Occupy Movement. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Art by Randal Roberts (who provided the art for this podcast) Description of the elements in “Fawkes” by Randal Roberts Video of today's podcast What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions by John Hoopes, Ph.D.

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: In today’s podcast we pick up with the next part of a workshop that was held on January 28, 2012 titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”. This section features Bruce Damer, who begins with his “Ode to Terence” [ In the Occupy segment I begin with a recap of what went down in Washington, D.C. the day of the eviction from McPherson Square. Also, I play a series of short audio clips. The first one is of a young man from San Diego who was speaking at the General Assembly that was held in the middle of K Street in Washington the evening after the McPhearson eviction. And while this segment also ends with a call to the barricades from Chris Hedges in different interview, between those two Hedges segments I play a three minute pep talk that Tony Benn gave to some of the occupiers in London the other day. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links Mentioned In This Podcast The Adult Autism and MDMA/Ecstasy Study

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the first of the recordings from last weekend's workshop (titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”) that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led in the Los Angeles area on January 28, 2012. In addition to Lorenzo's remarks and some comments by those in attendance, three videos created by Bruce Damer were shown. Those videos are embedded below. The second part of the podcast is the Occupy Movement update, which features a conversation between Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges. During the course of their conversation they debate the relative merits of pushing for a Constitutional Convention verses non-violent civil disobedience. Also included is a sound bite from one of OccupyFreedomLA's live video feeds in which a speaker addresses the actions now being taken by those who are suffering from the foreclosure epidemic that is facing so many people in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny PROGRAM NOTES: The featured audio that I play in this podcast is part of a two-CD collection produced by Joe Matheny and given to the salon to podcast by the distributor, The Original Falcon Press, which you can find via originalfalcon.com. The voices you will here are those of: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option For the Occupy Segment, I first play a few minutes that I've taken from a three hour interview that Chris Hedges gave on CSPAN 2 on the first day of this year, and in it you will hear this Pulitzer Prize winning journalist explain how corporate personhood isn't just a threat to American Democracy, it is a threat to humanity itself. . . . Following that, I play a short speech for you that Senator Bernie Sanders gave on the Senate floor as he introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will s

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “One of the most puzzling things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in 'Oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery. Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled!” “[DMT] is a secret of such magnitude that it's inconceivable how it has ever been kept.” “When you get to DMT you have hit the main vein.” “It has to do with your own intelligence. Truly stupid people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point of it is. It feeds off intelligence. It's a consciousness-expanding drug. If you don't have any consciousness you can't expand it.” “The less intelligent you are, the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes be

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Culture denies experience. We all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things. These are all experiences, which cultures deny.” “We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises.” “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.” “So we're in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.” “Boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People, meaning government institutions, become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.” “I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology.” “We have packed more change int

Guest speakers: David Graeber & Tim Pool PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast takes a look back at some of the roots of the current Occupy Movement on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Today is also the eve of the third anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and so I have put together an audio collage that ranges from some early sounds of the movement to interviews with David Graeber and Tim Pool, as well as some comments by fellow saloner Jaret, and a couple of sound bites from Lawrence Lessig and Senator Bernie Sanders to round things out. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links to topics discussed in this podcast: Battle in Seattle The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - Lawrence Lessig Interview Brian Leher Program with David Graeber Majority Report interview with Tim Pool Jaret Johnston's FEEDBACK ART

Guest speaker: Peter Lamborn Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Peter Lamborn Wilson.] “Why are artists still meddling, or mediating, between people and their desires?” “All livelihoods are arts, from midwifery to war, nothing is mere labor.” [In reference to gift economies.] “The artist sacrifices talent for money. The audience sacrifices money for talent.” “One can no longer distinguish between cops and cop-culture, the media-induced hallucination of a society designed by its lawyers and police.” “Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.” “The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desires.” “I will argue that illegality means more than mere law-breaking. Illegality as a positive attribute of the Temporary Autonomous Zone implies that the very structure, or deepest motivation of the TAZ-group necessitates the overcoming

Guest speaker: Makana Please support MAKAKAMUSIC.COM PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Makana.] “This whole war that we're fighting is a war of consciousness versus ignorance, of controlling human behavior by controlling people's thoughts, by directing their awareness.” “There's always going to be disagreements as to what the solutions are, and even what the problem is, but if people in their own personal process start to face their own fear and let go of the prison that they are in, and that prison is the concern about what someone else thinks of them, if they get over that then they can be free. And then it's up to them to facilitate the change they want to see. But we have to at least help them to get to that point, and that's what I try to do with my music.” “The only way we can bring about a revolution of freedom is to bring about a revolution of perception.” “There are millions of people like me, who care about their future and will say something.” “Aloha isn't about representing yourse

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] “I think we're in a period of fractal chaos, and the whole system is collapsing, and every week is a new surprise.” (1990) “Things are happening so fast that the only prediction I'll make is that everything is going to happen faster than we expect it.” “That's why I don't believe in monolithic conspiracy theories, there's one group that runs everything. If there was one group that runs everything the world would make a little sense.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option This program was made possible by the copyright owner, Joe Matheny, and the publisher, The Original Falcon Press. Tim Pool, Journalist Extraordinaire, (link to his live video feed from Occupy Wall Street) GENERAL STRIKE, by Moe Shinola /* Click image to see video "The Bat Signal" /* Click image to see video

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] “There actually have been studies done at many schools in the big cities where IQ has measurably decreases from the entering of grammar school to graduation from high school. The longer they're there they dumber they get. And some people think that's an accident, or an oversight, or a mistake, but that is the function of the public schools. The function of the public schools is to stop thinking.” “I perforce had to invent this style of paradoxes to prevent people from thinking they're getting the truth out of my books. What you're getting out of my books is my guesses, my hunches, sometimes my prejudices. … I don't claim to know the truth.” “And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.” Download MP3 PCs – Rig

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] “You know what family values means, that's hating the same people your grandfather hated.” “Information intrinsically tends to produce more information, and it breeds faster than rabbits.” “We never do reach limits. That's one of the big fallacies of our time, is the idea of limits. There are no limits.” “We are graduating from being terrestrial mortals to becoming cosmic immortals. We are becoming the gods that we imagined a long time ago. I think that's where evolution has been pointing.” “I think we've passed over the Abyss. Getting through the Hitler and Stalin eras and Auschwitz and Hiroshima and all those horrors we've gone over the Abyss, and now we are graduating into cosmic immortals, as startling as it sounds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links mentioned in this podcast Occupy Movement eMail: lorenzo (at) occupysalon (dot) us TERENCE MCKENNA:

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's impossible to stop the forward march of information.” “This is the chaos at the end of history.” “Because our culture crisis is so much deeper [than during the Renaissance], we are casting back to 20,000 or 30,000 years back into the past.” “I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is a task of recognizing it when you find it.” “When talking about evolution it is important to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics is that there is no teleology. That means that evolution is not moving toward something. All notion of purpose has to be given up. It isn't that things evolve or move toward higher forms. It's just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher form.” “Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.” “One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is be

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no scientific truth, or new paradigm, can arrive in a vacuum vis-à-vis the opinions of the general informed public. If it doesn't fly with the general informed public it doesn't matter what degree of internal rigor it has, an idea is probably doomed to a kind of , or a kind of obscurity." “How are we to relate to the plants which intoxicate? Do they drive us mad, or do they return us to the “religio”, to our own origins? Are we to see the states of mind which they invoke as tremendously alien, or are we to see them as, in fact, a way of going back to the primary situation in which everything that we call human found genesis?” “If you want to change people's minds about something you have to get scientists to change their minds.” “It's actually cooperation is what nature seeks to consolidate and conserve. And it is the species which can make itself most user-friendly to its neighbor species which actua

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it's basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what's to come.” “There's perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn't. It's a neurological experience. It's a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it's basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.” “To summarize, I'm an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are 'leave the planet', 'get smarter', and 'learn how to live as long as you want'.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Looked at it pragmatically, the trick of taking intelligence tests is to get the highest score possible in terms of intelligence as defined by middle class intellectuals who designed the test.” “It's the nature of the game that a philosopher who's proposing radical new ideas will be opposed by 80% of society.” “My responsibility is to the genetic process and evolutionary process as I see it.” “We have to be gentle with each other because we are going through a period of mutations.” “I think, though, that there has never been a cultural change in history that was as profound, as pervasive, and as bloodless as the cultural revolution of the Sixties. . . . By and large it was a smiling revolution.” “By and large I'm very proud of what happened in the Sixties, every aspect of our culture was reformed and revised and reviewed and improved.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select optio