Psychedelic Salon

Please help the Shulgin's! Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: This is an audio collage of three talks. The first is by Dr. Leary in 1966. That is followed by a 1973 interview with Ram Das on his current feelings about Leary. The final segment is a 1986 appearance by Dr. Timothy Leary on the Larry King show. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic art is the public face, a communication device, of our new religion." "Psychedelic drugs, which include marijuana, should be totally supervised by the state. That is, quality should be established, and you should have to be trained in how to use them, and they should be prescribed, and if you screwed up they'll take your license away. You'd have to show that you knew how to use them like [you do] an automobile." "I would say 90% of the kids who are under the age of 40 who are in computers now, ninety percent of them, have had some kind of experience in brain-change, or neurotransmission. That's why I may

Guest speaker: Dr. Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Cameron Adams.] "It is not really reasonable from a public health perspective to make psychedelics illegal." "[Psychedelics] are biologically safe, far safer than alcohol. Alcohol, ten times the active dose will kill 50% of the people who take it. And something like mescaline, which is the most dangerous classic psychedelic is twenty four times. So that's two and a half times safer than alcohol. And it doesn't even compare to things like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD, which have only been predicted to be between one and five thousand times the active dose." "So there's this relationship to diet, neurotransmitters, and psychedelics which may be involved how the body regulates itself and builds itself." "There might be real biological changes even though it just seems on the surface that psychedelics are working in a psychological way." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psyche

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "This connection between the cow, and the mother goddess, and the mushroom is some kind of a key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity in early man in that part of the Middle East." "This notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness." "But it isn't a missing link, I think, it's a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency toward symbol formation and self-reflection." "A history of the human race could be written analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled. And that's why it's so important to find out what our real wishes are." "A delusion of grandeur is when you're a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be.” “The way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have.” “We feel the dizyness of the things not said.” “The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter. They can deliver their message all by themselves.” “Imagination is the real frontier. This is why the poets and the artists are so i

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What would you have if you could have anything?" "I think that life proceeds through time. It's an effort by organism to map one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a 'something', and the 'now' is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it. And so what being in time is is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And that's why, hopefully, a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get a whole picture." "Yes, well I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history. ... Because your history gives you the power of your convictions." "I think, better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetime." "This is the anguish of the ancestors.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The Dawning paradigm of post modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we don't know what is happening at all, that all of the models we have worked out over the past five hundred years or so have now become recursive, and they can no longer be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed." "There is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science." "Having seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small row boat in a dark ocean, and we are being swept we know not where." "Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation of unorganized matter into ideas which human beings carry on." "The Growing Transparency, that's a good idea for what the end of history is. It's that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate, and everything is seen to be of the same stuff." "Li

Guest speaker: Alan Watts NOTE: This program is still available at the Internet Archive. Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. February 25, 2011 @ 10:15 am · Edit Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege.  ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All qu

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "In life if you let yourself be ruled by fear life becomes a fearful experience." "If you shake the Earth, all of the loose objects end in the West Coast of North America." "There's nothing useful thinking about the same task fifty times. It's the ego filling the space according to Tolle." "Advertising is heavily ego-driven. ... So why do we have them creating our thoughts, creating our vision of ourselves? Why do we nominate them?"   "And also say, look kids, it feels good to be online and be doing fifty texts and having 10,000 Facebook members, but your brain is going to be mush. How do you explain to them let's tone it down and watch the dosage level of technology." "It's the strength of the survivors that's always going to get you through. So how do we create a critical mass of people ready for the next phase, ready to build that new Earth?" [NOTE: The following quotations are by

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna NOTE: This podcast is a "companion" to KMO's podcast #224 "Viral Disclosure", which you may also find quite interesting. [September 27, 2010 PRESS CONFERENCE UPDATE: Aliens 'hit our nukes': They even landed at a Suffolk base, claim airmen Read more: Google News Search UFOs PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The more serious contenders [for explanations of UFO phenomena] as explanations, I think, fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited? Or is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of?" "... and there always seem to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive. . . . If the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron. In other words, the invalidation of the experience is an inimical part of its structure." "So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what i

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "More changes have taken place in the last twenty five years, unquestionably, than in any period of human history. Just as I said an hour on the Greenwich map is a century, a decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?" "If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques in the daily, moment to moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university, you've changed that culture." "The average post-1946 kid by the age of five had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography, more hype, more propaganda, you name it, than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings of the past." "To a 'factory philosopher' a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks." "Information, information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the futu

Guest speakers: Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, and Tom Van Sant Ram Dass & Lorenzocirca: 2001 PROGRAM NOTES: "LSD produces religions experiences, but it's less evident that it can produce a religious life." -Houston Smith [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The origins of most great religions go back to groups of people who made this discovery that you don't look for god, you don't look for power in the Caesars or in the temples or in the churches and all that. You look within." "The fun has hardly begun." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Dass.] "But inside myself, as you all understand, that what you see [during a psychedelic experience] to turn it into what you be is a really subtle and sensitive trip." "And that's part of the integrity of this experience, of growing into seeing the relative nature of reality and the paper mache quality of social institutions and the way in which personalities turn into style rather than substance." "And it's interesting that

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered visa vie the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definition, and the drugs have done that to a great extent." "The notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion." "The fact that we rely on an intellectual method [science] two thousand years old almost precludes our understanding of anything interesting." "The present is the interference pattern caused by the forward and backward flowing causitries inherent in time. Where they meet they form an interference pattern, a standing wave if you will, which is what a hologram is. And it's that which is experienced as the now, and it is half of the past and half of th

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The people who take that position that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis don't realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet." "Civilization is a ten thousand year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes ten to fifteen thousand years, a moment of biological and geological time." "We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time." "Humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own." "So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it, and the planet feel

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "There are several unexplained anomalies. Why is it that fully 80% of the world's known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin, even though the flora of the Old World jungles of Indonesia is equally rich?" "The curing scenario of the ayahuascero is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans world wide." "I think the word 'psychedelic' is maybe too broad, because it includes things which are very different from each other. It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline." "The icaros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination." "It seems very clear that this [ayahuasca] healthcare delivery system is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of psychological disorders." "You must be aware that I have other wrinkles, the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several diff

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna ... recorded in 1996, however, it is current enough to have been given just last night ... maybe it was :-).] "And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them, generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present. And in the present moment we, like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins." "In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept [of alchemy]." "I think the entire message of t

Guest speakers: Albert Hofmann, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. John C. Lilly.] "There is no such thing as drugs. There's no such thing as illegal drugs. They're only chemicals. They can change the molecular configurations within the brain itself and hence change who you are and where you're going and where you come from. This is a profound experience." "The drug problem ought to be turned over to the Surgeon General and taken away from the Attorney General." "I learned long ago that one is a psychotherapist until one is cured of one's own diseases." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Psychology without psychedelics is pissing into the wind." "We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience." [NOTE: The following quotati

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: The Albert Hofmann Papers at Erowid.org The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online) [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet." "So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream." "We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a r

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] "To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it." "When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?" "Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire to better things, which has been called 'wantlessness', the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot'." "From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels." "And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil

Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard PROGRAM NOTES: On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org. "There's a central power system, and here's the source. And the guidance system simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source. The closer he gets the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is, the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation, and the more he sees his total responsibility. Now it's inconceivable to me that you could move toward that source without increasing responsibility. And to me, Leary has found a way of moving in that direction but not going toward it, because he's obviously missed his responsibility level." -Myron Stolaroff "From our crowd I think ve

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it." -Rupert Sheldrake When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, "No," and then he went on to say, "Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it." "If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?" -Rupert Sheldrake "Not thinking about the World Soul but the individual soul, that the seizure of DMT is almost like a simulacrum of death itself, and that you seem to see into an ecology of souls." -Terence McKenna "The World Soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. This is all being scripted for a purpose and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything." -Terence McKenna "Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage." -Rupert Sheldrake "At the root of ma