Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.] “We need to move to a post-prohibition world.” “The spiritual/mystical experience has profound implications of the kind that we need now.” “Not in our studies only, but world wide there have now been over 1,100 people who have taken pure MDMA in research since the early '90s. And there's never been anybody who overheated and died. . . . We've never had anybody overheat. We've never had anybody have a heart attack. We've never had anybody have a mental breakdown. So we've shown in a clinical setting MDMA can be administered safely.” “We are currently estimating that MDMA will be a prescription medicine in 2021.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Lorenzo's Interview on the Natural Born Alchemist Podcast /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the final section of a Terence McKenna workshop that took place in February 1991. In addition to more stories about the machine-elves and DMT, Terence covers evolution, the imagination, virtual reality, shamanism, and falling in love. The title of today's podcast comes from my favorite quote by McKenna: “Apparently, if you pursue the weird, it won't take you very long before you get to [psychedelics]. This is the main vein of the peculiar.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast begins with Terence talking about the elephant in the ayahuasca room: purging, puking, barfing, vomiting or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately he moves on and speculates that the human break with nature came about due to a change in the climate. And he ends this part of the workshop talking about the dire state of affairs on the planet on that February day in 1991 as the First Gulf War was raging. Two of my favorite quotes from this talk are: “The modern nuclear family, and I've got one I know whereof I speak, is just a cauldron for neurosis. It makes impossible demands on everybody involved.” . . . and “The way you prove your worthiness is by not wrecking your home planet. You can't join the galactic club if you wreck your home planet. They withdraw your membership application.” 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 don't think you are going to spend very long involved with these things at a deep level without scaring your socks off eventually. One of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle with beginners. And then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans.” “You see, I just don't feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own? How about that you can't do it yourself unless humble yourself to cut a deal with a plant? That seems more logical to me.” 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 great emphasis for the fall into history is this broken connection with this Mind in nature.” “We can move no faster than the envelope of language which we generate to describe our journey.” “We need to take the engineering of our language seriously.” “The poverty of our language, that it's such a low-grade signal, that we're using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and coordinate a global population of six million people. And having media to change that into an electronic signal has not apparently helped us all that much.” “I heard the electronic media described as the ability to spread darkness at the speed of light.” “And somewhere in between eloquence and poetry there is a side tree into demagoguery, which you have to watch out for.” “I think the whole thing about psychedelics is that they synergize cognition, and that cognition allows us to image each other and to understand each other.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast comes in two parts. We begin with the Palenque Norte Lecture that Grover Norquist gave at the 2015 Burning Man Festival. This talk was actually in the form of a question and answer session in which the somewhat liberal audience found several areas in which they held goals in common with the more conservative Mr. Norquist. Following that are two clips dealing with the government's persecution of Ross Ulbrich, who is now a political prisoner serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime of operating a Website based in Iceland. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Danny Sugarman, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features talks by Dr. Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and Danny Sugarman, as well as audio from the trailer for DeepWebTheMovie.com. This is a podcast that you may want to listen to if you value your right to freely use the Internet, among other things. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Alicia Danforth. In her talk, plus a question and answer session, Alicia describes some of the difficulties that a professional woman researcher may encounter in the area of sexism at work. She also discusses what has been called “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”, the psychedelic jerk. At the end of this podcast, Lorenzo explains why he raised the price of the paperback copy of his novel to $350. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option PTSD And Cannabis Study Seeks Veteran Participants

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Boundary-dissolving internal hierophany does in fact reliably occur in the presence of these [psychedelic] plants and compounds.” “We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer that even as a community we have a lot of trouble figuring out how you just fact the answer, how you come to terms with the options that are actually available.” “It is not only possible, but millions and millions of people do go from the cradle to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. To my mind this is just an instance of an appalling infantilism that is culturally sanctioned.” “[Psychedelics are] part of the birthright. This is what religion WAS for the first million years before it fell into the hands of men who insist on wearing dresses. It was the celebration of an ecstatic reality that could be coaxed out of a magical relationship with nature. And it's still there. The portals are still there.” “I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage. And to have a profane government interpose itself between you and that reality, why it's ludicrous.” “The government has never been a major factor in the decisions I made about my program of ingestion.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “The mushroom has a wildness to it because it is wild, just as our minds once were wild.” “I see the mushroom as the ultimate test of the initiate because you're on your own. There's no shaman to guide you, and so it is up to you to determine how this [experience] is about to look.” “What is the point of doing these medicines if you are not going to break the spell of your perceptions, of who and what you think you are, and what you perceive this world to be.” Exploring Psychedelics Conference, 2015 Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “In the jungle, the ayahuasca is used traditionally to heal what are known as mystical, non-ordinary, problems.” “I came to look at it and realize that what we [North Americans] were looking for wasn't specifically an experience that would produce healing, but we were looking for a shift in consciousness that would produce healing.” “We are self-regulating, universal beings.” “There can be negative effects, and that's very real. The psychedelic plants are crap shoots in their own right, which makes having the presence of someone very trained very important. And that's a departed point out in the world, like, take it and go and see what happens. I'm not of that group of thought. I think it's very important to have people there who really, really know what they're doing, like REALLY know what they're doing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamilton Souther's Website  

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the February 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that we began with Podcast 472. When he gets to his overview of habit and novelty and then moves into a discussion of time, his poetic language provides several interesting mental footholds from which we can expand on some of his thinking about the topic of time. As he says, “We are very naieve about the nature of time,” pointing out that the concept of using an average of measurements taken in a science experiment requires that all moments of time must be the same. “Are they?” he asks. “Is every moment just like the others?” From there he takes us on an interesting journey into the I Ching. “We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.” -Terence McKenna “Time is a series of fluctuating variables.” -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Victory for Users: Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Uses

Guest speakers: Borka Cafuk & Shonagh Home Today's program features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Borka Cafuk, who is a remarkable medicine woman. Not only does Borka provide interesting details about plant medicines such as ayahuasca, sapo, and nu-nu, she also tells the fascinating story of her transition from working as an environmental journalist from Europe into a South American medicine woman. And she minces no words in talking about the difficulties that she has encountered being accepted by the indigenous people, and in particular the male ayahuasceros, where she now lives. Much plant knowledge is being lost as traditional healers are being subsumed into the Western culture that is now seeping into the Amazon basin, and so it has fallen to people like Borka to help the local medicine men and women hold together the threads of this important work. Yana Puma Healing Center Yana Puma (Black Jaguar) is a plant medicine healing and educational center located on river Momon in Loreto, Peru. The center offers traditional healing treatments using a variety of Amazonian plants, ayahuasca, sapo, nu-nu and tobacco ceremonies, as well as plant diets. 
Our primary objectives are to preserve the jungle and its biodiversity, and to preserve the incredible knowledge and culture of the indigenous people. The mission of Yana Puma Healing and Educational Center is to help people on the path towards spiritual, physical and mental healing and growth, to ultimately reach their true purpose in life. This is done through unparalleled support on all levels, healing and education while simultaneously preserving and spreading the knowledge, culture and traditions of the indigenous people, who are in danger of being lost forever. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow cory (at) eff (dot) org PROGRAM NOTES: Update! October 27, 2015 Victory for Users: Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Uses   Today's podcast features a 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Cory Doctorow at this year's Burning Man Festival. Cory is a well-known science fiction writer and lecturer who warns us about how much of our freedom has already been assumed by rich corporations through their manipulation of the law through the use of technology. Whether you realize it or not, your personal freedom has already been significantly compromised in the digital domain, and unless you become aware of what is taking place, and then do something about it, Orwell's world of “1984” will continue to encroach on your life. “We have not reached peak surveillance . . . but we have reached peak awareness of surveillance.” -Cory Doctorow Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) 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.] “We deliberately keep kids dumb by treating them like kids.” “We all know that if voting would change anything it would be illegal.” “The future belongs to those who can see the future.” “The smarter you are, the higher you want to be.” “The key to the Sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive's over-specialized models.” “Show me a taboo, and I'm interested in it.” 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.] “An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.” “In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.” “I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?” “If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.” “My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.” “I think of the mainland as Blade Runner Land.” “Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.” “I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hyperborea - Terence McKenna's Website Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination? by Matthew Watkins Introduction by Terence McKenna 2012 and the "Watkins Objection" to Terence McKenna's "Timewave Theory" . . . by Matthew Watkins Terence McKenna's Reading List

Guest speakers: Janine Sagert, Saj Razvi, Ryan LeCompte, & Shonagh Home FROM SHOCK TO AWE (Indiegogo Campaign) /* Click image to see video From Shock to Awe is a feature-length documentary that will chronicle the journeys of military veterans as they seek relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with the help of ayahuasca, MDMA (“Ecstasy”), and cannabis. It will be an intimate look at how these substances can be used to heal our wounded warriors—and, by extension, their loved ones. Our intention with this film is to raise awareness of the healing properties of, and help change the laws regulating, ayahuasca, MDMA, and cannabis so that these substances can be legally available for responsible use in therapeutic, and spiritual, settings—especially for veterans with PTSD. Because we believe that all vets have the right to choose their own path to healing. PROGRAM NOTES: “What we're finding is that after three full dose MDMA sessions, with each session lasting about a day and spread three to four months apart, we're finding that 83% of chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD sufferers no longer qualify for the diagnosis.” -Saj Razvi If you are (or know) a military veteran (or anyone else) who has PTSD, then you owe it to yourself to listen to the conversation featured in today's podcast. In this program Shonagh Home interviews Janine Sagert, the content producer of “From Shock to Awe”, Saj Razvi, who is an MDMA clinical therapist, and Ryan LeCompte, an ex marine who now runs an organization called Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy. Their discussion focuses on ways in which veterans and others suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders can get relief, and in some cases even be cured, through the use of MDMA, ayahuasca, and cannabis. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy   From Shock to Awe: Healing PTSD with Ayahuasca, MDMA, and Cannabis brand, web, and crowdfunding by awakemedia.com Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature Shonagh Home from a talk that she gave at the recent Women & Entheogens Conference that was held in Cleveland, Ohio. The focus of Shonagh's presentation has to do with breaking the spell of our cultural constructs that are preventing us from living informed and satisfying lives. She begins with an excellent overview of how, over the centuries, the ruling elite have conditioned society in ways that keep most of us from being truly free to pursue our lives in ways that suit us. She then introduces the ancient concept of the medicine woman and suggests ways in which we can embrace their return. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BBC Documentary: The Century of the Self John Taylor Gatto: The Pathological Methodology of Forced Schooling Documentary: Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We don’t produce enough seritonin for living above 20 degrees latitude.” “I’m not a big advocate of mixing drugs, anyway. If you really want to get out into unknown territory, where there is the potential for danger, then start pouring these things together.” “It’s a funny thing the way people relate to drugs. Many people take them in environments that couldn’t be better designed to suppress the effect of the drug. For instance, crowded singles bars, noisy social environments with everybody hitting on each other, and loud music, and lots of activity, and maybe lots of vigorous dancing. Well, this is an environment designed to suppress drug effects. . . . To really see what these things do, you need and atmosphere of quite, sensory deprived darkness.” “My attitude is always if it’s legal it ain’t gonna work.” “People have trouble saying a lot about many of these things. I think that’s a learned skill; narrative ability and to keep your wits about you in those places, and to try and bring back some kind of coherent metaphor.” “The strange thing about opium is that it’s so endlessly fascinating while it’s happening, and there’s just nothing to be taken out of it. It apparently does not transcript into short term memories.” “It’s as important to tell the trip as to have the trip.” In answer to the question, “How do you regain yourself when having a difficult trip?” Terence answered, “I always have cannabis ready. It’s the rudder of the boat.” “The key when you’re having a bad trip is to make your mind wander from the bummer.” Legal status of Salvia divinorum Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: “I have never gone to bed in Peru without having learned something new that day.” -Peter Gorman Today’s podcast features the second part of an interview with Peter Gorman, one of the larger-than-life figures to be found among our psychedelic elders. The program begins by picking up with a story about river pirates in the Amazon, migrates to tales of running a bar in the jungle town of Iquitos, Peru that was frequented by DEA agents, and continues with Peter talking about his interactions with luminaries such as Albert Hofmann, Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna. Also, Peter talks about his new book “Sapo In My Soul”, which is the first book to be published about this interesting medicine. Of interest to our younger saloners will be his telling of how, as a young man himself, he financed his trips to the Amazon and the methods he used to search for medicinal plants in the jungle. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman’s Web Site Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine By Peter Gorman Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming By Peter Gorman