Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart. Have you seen that happen?” “The whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing, and that they can't believe it either.” “The one thing they tell you it isn't, it is! It is! It is made of magic, anything can happen.” “There's nothing holding any of us back from becoming unrecognizable, not only to our friends and loved ones, but to ourselves.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Joy Less Pain: The Life of Peter Gorman A documentary film about Peter Gorman by James Michael McCoy.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 In today's talk from a September 1990 workshop, Terence McKenna explains that when speaking about the DMT state he says that what he calls self-dribbling basketballs “are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you're looking at them they're actually sentences. And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way.” That should give you something to think about the next time you come out of a DMT reverie. He also goes on a little riff about why drugs have specific “identities” in the way they present themselves, as well as giving some advice about how best to choose your drugs. [The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This crisis in the Soviet Union and in the East Bloc countries, which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere, and a lot of America's assumptions will be swept away.” “The thing about Czechoslovakia is that if you scratch a Czech you get a Celt.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Shamans of the Global Village”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no closure. There are models, and there are questions. But all models are provisional, and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What's being claimed here [in the psychedelic experience] is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers. And it's different for everybody.” “There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics. If you look at the people who've been involved with it they've said completely different and contradictory things.” “We look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of 'bare' furniture. We fear it and don't want to look at it. And to my mind, most of the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guarantied lack of success. That's what they offer, because the last thing anyone wants is real change, because real change is uncontrolled change.” “Somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state. The two, I feel very strongly, are linked. Of course we can't get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.” “The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience.” “Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.” 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.] “I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about [the psychedelic experience]. It's like not finding out about sex or something. It's just too weird. It's a part of our birthright. It's not a cultural artifact. . . . This is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.” “We have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.” “There was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.” “Human culture has become, charitably, a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous, exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.” “It's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barriers to the solution to our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own minds.” “There is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.” “Then I discovered psychedelic plants, and it was like the descent of an angel into the desert of reason.” “I'm convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact.” “Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious and the substitution of something else.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Second Sunday Salon Information https://genesisgeneration.net/forums/topic/second-sunday-salons/

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Grover Norquist.] “You don't lose something because of partisan fights at the state level.” “States rights is a stupid concept, since states don't have rights. People have rights. States have power they use against people.” “People who have concealed carry permits go to jail or get in trouble with the law one-sixth as often as cops. So they're safer than cops.” “All the groups that want to be left alone have something to teach each other.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option My first Burning Man: Confessions of a conservative from Washington by Grover Norquist in The Guardian   Altered Conference 22 October, 2016, at Topics Berlin A conference exploring altered states of consciousness

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Cory Doctorow.] “This world of computers exists in a principle-free environment. The Internet of Things is the Internet of absolute, self-serving bullshit.” “The Internet of Things needs principles.” “The real struggle here, it's not making computers free, it's making people free. The reason we want to save computers is not because computers are more important than racial justice, or gender equity, or getting rid of homophobia and transphobia, or the climate. The reason we want to make computers free and open is because we cannot win those fights without a few and open information infrastructure.” “Considered atomically, one thing at a time all the things computers can do, we live in an age of unparalleled wonders. But all civilizations fall, and we have the shared responsibility to the civilizations that come after us to build the infrastructure that will lead to a future in which technology exists to server its users, not destroy their lives in service to surveillance capital, and the global war on terror, and self-serving bullshit so noxious that you can see it from orbit.” “No one puff [of a cigarette] is going to give you cancer, but statistically given enough puffs you're getting a tumor. If that tumor erupted with the drag there would be no second drag. The reason people smoke is because the tumors happen years later. And the reason people give up their private information is because the privacy stuff that bites them in the ass almost always happens years and years later too.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Cory Doctorow Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org)

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Shannon Clare Petitt, and Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: In this 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture, Annie Oak, founder of the Women's Visionary Congress, teaches how to use Naloxone to help a person who has had an opioid overdose. She is followed by Shannon Clare Petitt who tells us about some of the work being done by MAPS' Zendo Project. Finally, we get to hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, talk about how he first learned about MDMA and what his first experience with that substance was like. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Naloxone John Oliver Blasts Pharma's Role in U.S. Opioid Epidemic:'This Is Happening Everywhere' "Some towns have been devastated," Oliver warned.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we're doing is we're building a nervous system. We're building a nervous system the size of this planet.” “The marketplace has an appetite for lies about the future.” “I cannot conceive of post eschatonic life. I think of it, just to make things simple for myself, as death, because that's the other thing in my life that I have no grip on whatsoever.” “An organism is chemistry abducted into hyperspace.” “If you're a guru these days, you're almost condemned to spending a life with foolish people.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrodinger "Shamans of the Global Village" Episode 1 Launch

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear Terence McKenna's lecture about his TimeWave hypothesis (it never became a true theory). This 1997 talk was given less than three years before Terence's death and thus represents some of his latest thinking about this topic. He defines the TimeWave as a mathematical model of how the world works, as based upon the I Ching. Also, he clearly states that where the end point is set determines all of the other data points fall. However, in true Terence McKenna fashion he points out that even if he was 0.001% off, that gave him a range of 60,000 years in which his prediction would still be valid. He then goes on to discuss his correction to the Watkins objection that was discussed in podcast 472. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We are involved in the most accelerated, asymptotic ascent into change, so far as we can tell, that the cosmos has ever known.” “In the one sample we know of, biology has proven itself to be four times as enduring as the stars themselves.” “I won't defend it [the TimeWave] though. I've decided to get a life after 2012 no matter what happens.” 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.] “A nature trip is an eyes wide open trip.” “I think LSD is abrasively psychoanalytic.” “I don't see an intellect outside of space and time guiding things, and certainly not watching with baited breath the machinations of the human monkeys. I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.” “The universe is a self-creating mystery of some sort.” “Maybe reality is a far more perishable concept than we ever dared or feared to suppose.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option What Are the Benefits and Boiling Points of Cannabis Vaporization? Matt Lamkin's Bandcamp Site

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The only path in to the supernormal that I've found are the psychedelics. Everywhere else I found chicanery and fraud.” “It's fun to be a free person. It's fun to not depend upon an institution, an ideology, an other person, a place, a time. And it's very hard to sell this form of fun. People are afraid. People have been dis-empowered, I think, through the process of juvenilization.” “Millions and millions of people live larval, low-awareness lives warehoused in the burbs, plugged in to Costco and the tele. And as long as the magazine subscriptions stay subscribed and the credit cards continue to be serviced the illusion that there is life happening here is allowed to continue.” “I think that every single one of us should be learning how to expand our communications skills.” “It's not about rejecting the media or the marketplace. It's about changing your relationship to it. Do not consume. Produce! . . . Inject your own art.” “I don't believe alien spaceships are visiting Earth to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, or to do anything much else of interest, but I do think there is an alien presence. It's non-material. You contact it in the psychedelic experience. . . . Its nature is informational.” “What the alien needs to manifest among us is a suitable landing zone.” “In a sense, the Internet is a net to catch an alien.” “In other words, the imagination is like a field of data that is at the Bell level of connectivity in the quantum mechanical universe.” “Physically, we are alone, physically. But in the imagination we're surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our religions, our culture.” “We have exhausted the exterior world, and yet the interior world beats like an enormous ocean. And what is ordinary, historical consciousness but a tiny island protruding above that ocean.” “There was a period in my life where I formed my taste by saying I liked what I didn't like.” “I think the worst setting for taking drugs is complex social environments, especially public social environments.” “I believe in large doses . . . rarely.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Book Listing

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The real news is no one is in control, not the central bank, not the Jews, not the communist party, not the pope. Nobody's in control.” “I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models. You have to be incredibly naive about what people are to believe that a role model is in fact worthy.” “If you want to talk to the Dali Lama close the door of your bedroom and have a dialogue with the mirror. You're as good as the Dali Lama for crying out loud. Who could suppose otherwise?” “Buddhism without psychedelics is armchair Buddhism. How can you possibly know anything about these modalities if you sit there, shastras to the eyebrows, and never actually push off into the ocean of mind?” “Crop circles are the con that will not die.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia By Paul Devereux Entheogens and the Future of Religion Edited by Robert Forte

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it's a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we're basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our social systems, our religious ontologies, our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing, all of this is 19th Century at best. And so, really whether we live or perish as a species probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise from any source available.” “If consciousness is not part of our future then what kind of future can it be?” “Culture is an intelligence test.” “I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology.” “I think primates are most interesting when cornered.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Salon 2.0

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Democracy is this innate belief in people. It's a psychedelic way of doing it. It's the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy to my mind is, of course, the ideal. But anarchy has to be mediated with policy, and the way you do that is through democracy.” “The Earth is in far worse shape than we think.” “This notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics is, as far as I can see, the only way out.” “The most dangerous habits in the world today are not drug habits. They're idealogical habits, unexamined ways of thinking about reality.” “Besides the monotheistic thing, the really odd thing about Western religion is the persistent idea that god will come tangential to history.” “People think psychedelic consciousness is a permission to escapism. I don't think so. I think it's an invitation to a high degree of awareness.” 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.] “The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken's right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn't done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?” “I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a week. And it's really changing how they look at the world.” “Isn't it interesting that the 'fix' turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we're just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There's an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego.” “Psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area. The area of thought and cognition.” “I've seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning.” “The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics, in a generalized sense, is that they are inspiration for ideas. And when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto an ocean of ideas.” “What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?” “If mind were not constrained by the rules of physics we don't know what we are. We don't know the castles we would build in the air.” “I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination. The imagination is a place. It's a world. It's a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we somehow have to marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it's the only safe haven there is.” “What we are cannot be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet.” “I think, based on the Timewave and based on reading the newspaper, that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane, global agenda is religious fundamentalism.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option It's All Happening With Zach Leary

Guest speakers: Ellen Brown, Letitia Pepper, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features insights from Ellen Brown and Latitia Pepper in regards to California's upcoming ballot measure Proposition 64. As you will hear, this measure will eliminate the current medical marijuana laws in the state. And while anyone over the age of 21 will be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, the days of medical patients going to a local dispensary will be over. Also, medical patients will need to obtain a new recommendation by January 1, 2018, and that can ONLY come from your personal physician . . . PLUS you will need to purchase a $100 permit to be a medical patient, but you will have no rights that anyone over 21 also has. This is a terrible proposition that basically puts Monsanto in charge of the marijuana business in California. Vote NO on Prop 64. NOTE: The original version of this podcast also included comments by a person whom I call "your typical uninformed voter." This apparently has caused him some discomfort, and so I have removed all of his comments from the podcast. Sorry about that.] Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Annotated Copy of AMUA, Prop 64 Ellen Brown's Website Latitia Pepper Interview (full) The Joe Hemp Network

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: “The whole history of Buddhism in the West, the whole thing in the post war period as Buddhism starts to become really popular, is inextricable from psychedelics.” -Erik Davis Today's podcast features a talk that was given by Erik Davis in which he unravels the history of both the Tibetan Book of the Dead and its psychedelic sister, the Psychedelic Experience, that was written by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner during their infamous Harvard years. Erik Davis, who holds a Ph.D. from Rice University's Gnosticism, Esotericism and Mysticism program, is a well known author and lecturer who has written books such as Techgnosis and Led Zeppelin IV. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Erik Davis' Website The Expanding Mind Podcast with Erik Davis Erik Davis on Twitter @erik_davis The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary

Guest speaker: Professor David Nutt PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2016 talk that Professor David Nutt gave at the annual Glastonbury Festival. His topic was “Do psychedelics matter?”. Although demonised, and attracting severe criminal penalties for users during the half century of the “war on drugs”, psychedelics are now undergoing a renaissance – both in terms of scientific research and in people’s personal and spiritual worlds. It is once again a time of oriented explorations of the mystery of consciousness. As we all know, when it comes to the war on drugs, “the emperor has no clothes”, and there is no one in a better position to say this than a man who once was the UK's “Drugs Czar” but who lost his position when he began speaking the truth about drugs and refused to continue supporting the establishment's party line. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Professor David Nutt's Twitter handle: @ProfDavidNutt Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt Island by Aldous Huxley

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: In today's podcast Jonathan Ott unfolds a parade of history setting out the use and prohibition of psychedelic medicines throughout the course of human history. Although this talk was originally given at a 1996 entheobotany conference, it remains as current as if it were given yesterday. After Jonathan describes human uses of psychoactive plants stretching back into prehistory, he goes on to explain how what he calls “the overdeveloped world” has used religious morality to impose a pharmacratic inquisition that has essentially caused “the spiritual bankruptcy of our Western Civilization.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Shamans are Technologists of Myth” -Lorenzo The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley Reality by Peter Kingsley Peter Kingsley Interview – Western Civilization was intentionally created

Guest speaker: Michael Garfield PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features Michael Garfield who went to school for paleontology and then psychology before leaving academia to embark on a decade-long "trans-disciplinary" independent study of the intersections between art, science, and philosophy. As an experimental acoustic-electronic guitarist-singer-songwriter, as a scientific illustrator turned performance painter, and as a writer and speaker, Michael's work is an attempt to help articulate a vision for the best possible future for us – one that doesn't suffer the insane delusions of our separation from nature, technology, and each other. According to Cap Blackard, writing for “Consequence of Sound” this talk by Micheal rates in the top 25 of the 333 performances at this year's version of the Future Music/Future Thought Festival. He goes on to say: "Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer – a multidisciplinary monologue that rivaled Brian Eno’s Moogfest 2011 keynote for all the unexpected twists and turns it took. This one-man show saw artist-musician Michael Garfield take a captive audience on a vision-quest through the lands where metaphysics and emerging technology meet. Make no mistake – it was a ramble, but an insightful and fascinating one from start to finish that traveled from the ancient dragon god Tiamat to the Victorians laying the transatlantic telegraph cable to the Manhattan Project giving birth to a new age of fear and awareness. The “psychedelic century”? That’s the here and now that’s just beginning, and the more our technology graduates us to the alchemical act of creation, the closer humanity comes to confronting “the cosmic mystery that we are.” Heavy and heady stuff, and a pleasant counterpoint to the doom and gloom of the average transhumanist cybergrumps whose future-thinking seems improbably grounded in the limited perceptions of the present." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Michael Garfield's music on Bandcamp Michael Garfield's talks on Bandcamp Michael Garfield's Art The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness by Lawrence "Lorenzo" Hagerty