Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting." "The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis." "And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature." "… of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern. The pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity, no one you would invite to your garden party." "Technique [in taking entheogens] to me is a kind of a … I’m reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark r

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.] "What  Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral." "So if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis." "If you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You! by Bruce Damer DigitalSpace’s Educational Spacewalk Simulation for NASA’s upcoming Hubble Servicing Mission The DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer’s Personal Web Site Mind States Conferences

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Timothy Leary.] "The people who were teaching us about consciousness-expanding drugs were people like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, even Henry Luce, the respectable conservative founder of ‘Time’ magazine. There was a large group of thoughtful people who told us that the doors of perception were going to open and an avalanche of change would happen." "Harvard is there to train Ivy Leaguers to go to Washington and Wall Street and keep the wasp establishment going. They’re not supposed to be turning out new Buddhas and a new brand of science fiction neuronaughts." "The history of America is the history of those of us that belong to this wonderful brotherhood and sisterhood of avant-garde inner voyagers. We believe that we’re the American tradition. And so we really weren’t that surprised when the thing exploded in the Sixties. That’s what we’d signed up for." "I personally now feel that the concept of generation, the generati

Guest speaker: Missy & Andre Nobels, Mateo Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: MATEO: "Here’s the thing about divine creativity, and that really pegs it because creation is divine, and we are creators. And when we tap into that cosmic oneness and unity, spirit comes through, and we give ourselves up to spirit and allow spirit to move us instead of trying to move spirit." MATEO: "So, when you tap into divinity the ego basically disappears, and you’re in the sweet spot, you’re in the zone, and then you’re listening to yourself, and you’re blowing yourself away with what’s coming through, because it’s beyond you. It’s beyond us. It’s spirit talking." MATEO: "Time is just a thing that the mind does to try to make sense out of reality." MISSY: "I know it’s heart, for me it’s heart, whatever that is. And because the heart’s in the body, if I get in my body I can feel my heart. And I let my heart move my body so that’s my way of finding, or taping into that creative divine, or that spark." ANDRE: "You get to that point

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is the Question and Answer session following the talk heard in the previous podcast. In it, Terence answers questions from the audience, such as, "Can you talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness in layman’s terms?" [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "It doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope, or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean, processes always occur in the same way. And this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature. These things are as it were simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff." "Thinking means something. It’s not just something we do. It means something. It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong." QUESTION: What is the nature of magic, or wh

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? I mean it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? … I think so." "I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy, and I forget that not everyone is so fortunate." "What I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "An added wrinkle [to the story of ever-increasing complexity] is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound." "I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game. If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. We

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The first very dangerous side effect of psychedelic drugs is long term memory gain. And the second is short term memory loss. And I forget the third." "The time has come for us as a species, and for you all as individuals, to move into the post industrial society." "We all create our own reality." [Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre] "You can make up all the abstract gods or leaders that you want, and theories and so forth, but you’re just whistling in the dark. The existential facts of the matter are that you are in the nose cone of your own time ship, hurtling at the speed of light into a dark future, and you don’t have a clue or navigational map. And if you’re scared, well, grow up." "The sillier a religion is the more passionately fanatic people will defend it, if you know what I mean. So you’d better be careful when you buy a god, because it can get you in a lot of shit." "Quantum physics is

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I don’t want to legalize drugs. It’s not the government’s business to legalize anything we do privately in our own homes. Are they going to legalize masturbation." "By far, the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men. And it starts in the home." "The concept of a generation implies that young people are doing something different." "Each of these generations, my generation and the so-called hippie generation, we’re heroic. We were thrown into the future where there was no map, where there were no guidebooks." "Hippies, to be honest, were not very hip, compared to the beatniks." "The function of the 21st century is to learn how to operate our brains." "The human brain is designed to design realities." "You have to face the fact that people

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties." "In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’." "Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology." "Nothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough." "So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It’s a very Talmudic notion. It’s a very psychedelic notion. It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century." "The reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things, clearly. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic/eschatological." "What I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character, per se. You never know who is speaking." " ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries." "Joyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this." "It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get." "Anna Livia Plurabelle is Molly Bloom on acid, basically." "People say the psychede

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have." "The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow." "American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently." "He [William James] later wrote the book "Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide." "The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden." "The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly." "As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some mor

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place." "Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may never know what hit us." "If I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the Net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull." "All time is is how much change you can pack into a second." "You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise." "It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Aven

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The two quotations below are by Sasha Shulgin.] "Internally, no one’s an elder. Internally everyone’s kinda around 35 or so." "The people at the industry said, ‘Gee, if you have that kind of imagination that you can look at a structure and guess at another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do.’ And I did." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Earth & Fire Erowid, Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Nick Sand, and Dave Nichols PROGRAM NOTES: Erowid’s LSD Vault LSD and Drug Testing LSD FAQ Part 1 LSD FAQ Part 2 "I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event." –Ralph Metzner "The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture." –Ralph Metzner "The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943." –Ralph Metzner "Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state." –Ralph Metzner "It [the prohibition of psychedelics] puts the industrial civilization in a very unique position. It’s just about th

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Many people are afraid to be free. They’re afraid that if liberty were to seep through the land then they would loose something. The just don’t trust themselves enough to be free." "Prison is a luxury. Unfortunately it is wasted on people who don’t know how to use it." "The objective is to get as far away from The Man as you can." "There’s only one technology of freedom. It’s the human brain." "You’ve got to be smart to be free, and most people don’t want to take the responsibility to be free." "You are as old as the last time you changed your mind." (Anon quoted by Leary?) "Liberty is inexorably intertwined with intelligence." "Every time you hear that word ’security’ watch out, because somebody’s going to take some of your freedom away." "One way to become more intelligent is to migrate to where people are as intelligent or more intelligent than you." "I’m basically pro-drugs. Drugs give you

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s me in Hawaii sometime in 1994. "I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it!" –Ralph Abraham "Notice that throughout history the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the blacks, they’ve taken their hits, but the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history have been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people [the Internet] utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb." –Terence McKenna "Chaotic as the Web is, what it is is a controlled psychedelic experience spreading through the populace at the highest levels of intelligentsia." –Terence McKenna "What it [the Internet] will be in the future will depend on what kind of people with whatever motives would actually go

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by J. Krishnamurti.] "Give your heart and your mind with every thing that you have to find out a way of living differently." "Where there is love, do what you will it will be right action, but never bring conflict to one’s life." "We are talking about a revolution, not physical, but a psychological revolution in which there is no, at the depth, conformity. … Conformity exists when there is comparison. For a mind to be totally free from comparison, that is to observe your whole history which is embedded in you." "What’s your answer to this question that human beings have lived this way for millenia upon millenia, why haven’t they changed? . . . Why don’t you, if you’re at all serious in this matter, why don’t you ask yourself that question? Why am I, a human being who has been through all of this, why haven’t I changed?" "To go into this question of bringing about a total revolution in what is, one must have an extraordinary s

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s home in Hawaii sometime in 1994. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think what life on islands brings home to us is that Earth itself is an island." "I think the technological principle on which the next century [21st] will operate is a mimicking of nature, solid-state, micro-miniaturized, solar-based, no moving parts, and so forth." "Any theory which has us gathering together in large crowds to chant should look back at the Third Reich before it proceeds too far with its agenda." "America is a cultural bulldozer. It just tramples and destroys everything in its path." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "The evolution of intelligence: Now this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter. "I think it’s time to dust off the word pagan again. The word pagan seems to mean one who loves life. A pagan is someone who loves humanity and would never dream of oppressing humanity with Original Sins and other life sentences, which distract from self-esteem and courage and self-confidence." "We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes, we are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes that didn’t grow up and develop tails and swing around in trees. . . . In many aspects, the human species is an immature species. We haven’t committed ourselves to a final form, and therein, perhaps, lies our great usefulness to the DNA code and the biological wisdom." "If you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve, and grow, and go through the changes, the many c

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] "The good. What is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky. The true. What is it? Trickier, even trickier. The beautiful. What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste." "Beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams." "On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving, the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces, near the levers of the human machine is immense." "When I say psychedelic I have something very specific in mind that a substance or a plant should do. It should not inhibit clarity, in other words not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out or confusion. It shouldn’t interfere with that, and it should transform thought. And it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed." "The biggest danger with psychedelics is that whil