Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “That's the key thing that the archaic world knew that we don't know: How do you live in equilibrium so that your children may live in equilibrium, because otherwise you get a cycle started that's going to shove somebody over the cliff. And that somebody in the present case is either ourselves, our children, or their children. It's no further away in time than that.” “We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.” “If you look at the fossil record, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on the Earth are extinct. From that point of view it looks as though biology is a process for producing extinction.” “You talk about a well-kept secret that's only two tokes away? How do they keep the lid on this? That's the miracle to me. How do they keep the lid on this?” [smoked NN-DMT] “These chemicals, these plant hallucinogens, are pheromones laden with messages for humanity, but you have to pick up the telephone.” “I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hallucinogens and Shamanism by Michael J. Harner The Terence McKenna Experience by Ken Adams Quasar shines a bright light on cosmic web

Guest speaker: Roland Griffiths PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Roland Griffiths, who is a professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In addition to describing the current psychedelic studies being undertaken there, he also goes into detail about exactly what characteristics researchers consider when evaluating whether a person has actually had a spiritual experience. Among the research participant's comments that he read, one of the most common themes was the interconnectedness of all things and beings. Also, he spoke about their research into the character of one's personality in regards to how a psychedelic experience affected their openness to the experiences of life. Another interesting thing that his research group is investigating is the intersection of psilocybin and meditation, a discussion of which takes up a significant part of this talk. “Psilocybin is a pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. And that's exactly the same of meditation. It's about bringing yourself into the present moment.” -Roland Griffiths Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin & Spirituality Current Psilocybin Research Projects Q&A with Roland Griffiths

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature a Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the 2013 Burning Man Festival. This ground breaking founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress continues to push the envelope of psychedelic discussion into two of the most important issues of all to humans, sexuality and aging. Additionally, Annie issues several challenges to us all as we continue to expand our own consciousnesses. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Woman's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice The Psychological Dark Side of Gmail Google is using its popular Gmail service to build profiles on the hundreds of millions of people who use it. Occupy Madison builds first house in planned eco-village for the homeless Daily Psychedelic Video

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna & Edward Snowden PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Everything flows. Nothing lasts.” “Language is like an informational creature of some sort.” “This problem of language is central, I think, to understanding the psychedelic experience.” “Language is something unfinished in us. It is something that was catalyzed out of animal organization by hallucinogenic activation of brain states, and it is something that is in the act of perfecting itself.” “When you go into a culture, you're going to make a choice. And all cultures represent narrowing of choices.” “We're about to have a chance to create a global culture, to essentially clean our basement and decide what we're going to save and what we're going to keep.” “It's the monotheistic religions that have to take a real knock for the present situation.” “Monotheism, as a philosophical reflex, is understandable but simple minded. It's what an eight year old would get to.” “Taking a psychedelic is an experiment. It's not an act of religious devotion.” 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.] “And now the task changes. It's a completely different kind of spiritual universe that you live in after you found the answer, because the task becomes facing the answer. Facing it!” “What we call history is the fall out of a dynamic hear-and-now, feeling-toned relationship with our environment.” “Gradual change was a luxury of the past.” “The politically most potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them. To give them the facts.” “The spiritual realm in practical terms means the imagination.” “The frontier of our species is the imagination.” “The spiritual realm, in practical terms, means the imagination. The frontier of our species is the imagination.” “And, in fact, the evidence is building that our style of society is the historical equivalent of a temper tantrum.” “A shaman is someone who has seen the end. A shaman is somebody who has seen it all.” 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.] “[It is] a race between education and disaster. "We're going to either burst out into a millennium of freedom and caring and decency, or we're going to toxify the whole thing and turn it into an ash heap. And the responsibility falls largely on us.” “Outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope, which is that the world is whatever you say it is if you know how to say it right.” “Until I went into therapy I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world, and then once you're in therapy you discover that it was the most insane scene you'd ever heard of, and you just didn't notice.” “Science fiction I really consider a proto-psychedelic drug, because what science fiction does is it gives permission to imagine.” “We can't preach to the have-nots the virtue of voluntary simplicity when we're riding around in BMWs and collecting Monets. That doesn't make a lot of sense.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Lorenzo Hagerty PROGRAM NOTES: This relatively short podcast features the audio portion of a film by Tom Huckabee and George Wada in conjunction with “The Starck Project”, a documentary soon to be released. The short film consists primarily of an interview with Lorenzo Hagerty dealing with the introduction of MDMA (Ecstasy) to the street scene in Dallas, Texas during the 1980s. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Starck Project The Starck Project's Facebook Page VIDEO FEATURES /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video) Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate from George Wada on Vimeo. The Cosmic Dance Scene If you aren't already familiar with the world-wide dance scene, this trailer will give you a feeling of where it was in 2011. /*

Guest speaker: Jae Starfox PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features Jae Starfox's 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture, which was delivered at the Burning Man Festival. In their talk, Jae provides a candid look into some of the issues that transgender people are faced with as they make their way through a sometimes less than friendly world. As more and more people are beginning to deal with their own gender related issues, this talk provides some little discussed but very important information. Following Jae's talk I play a short segment from my interview on the Joe Rogan podcast in which we also discuss gender issues. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: Intersex women speak out to protect the next generation Lorenzo on the Joe Rogan Experience Joe Rogan's Podcasts What is the Plan? The Plan Today

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A psychedelic point of view means a point of view which honors consciousness.” “You do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate.” “Our role is not to understand but to appreciate.” “It's ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality, because we don't even know where we want to go.”J “We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane.” “Once nature is taken as the ground of being then permission to inflate the image of the ego is denied.” “Intuition must be given prominence in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world.” “Science is really the, it's the plumbing level of reality. It doesn't catch the integrated nature of language, the evolution of fairy tales, the dynamics of love affairs, the quintessence of genius, these are the things, that as human beings, structure and constellate and guide and inform our world. And science has nothing to say about these things.” “Intuition is the unifying of experience into a gestalt image of the world.” “We are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing.” 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.] “In the matter of deeper things, deductive reasoning rests only on the appeal that hope can lend to its case.” “In the felt domain of experience called 'living', intuition is how most of us, even the most self-defined as non-intuitional, are operating.” “[Nature] seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness, mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it's the species that can make itself indispensable to all others.” “Culture, as it is in a sense, the software of the infrastructure of the global civilization, which is the hardware.” “Culture can be redefined as software and radically re-written so that it runs much more smoothly.” “I did not say that we were software or hardware. We are neither. We are the user, and this is the important thing to remember. We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future. We are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have.” “To offer instead a potential calendar in celebration of flux, change, growth, and feminism, which are the values that are going to have to be maximized if we are going to open a dialogue with our souls and [the] soul of the planet and save ourselves from the lethal momentum that so many hundreds of years of dominator culture have imparted to the machinery of our civilization. We must awaken.” “The path out of the Dark Wood in which we find ourselves is cognition, thought, getting smart fast. We have to dance, sing, calculate, and drum our way out of the circumstances into which we have fallen.” “To the degree that we can celebrate the irrational, the feminine, the unconscious, the transpersonal, and even the psychedelic, to the degree that we can celebrate these things we are giving permission for the order that is in nature to manifest. The plan wants to come to be. We have to get out of the way.” “Life is some kind of opportunity. It's an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos, for twenty, forty, seventy years we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum. It is a puzzle. It is something to be figured out.” “The path with heart is the path which astonishes.” “All of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention.” “My own private opinion about this is, I think that what psychedelics in these high-dose, correct set/setting situations carry us into is an ecology of souls. . . . Those 'things' in that place are our ancestors.” “Do we know what we behold? We need to know what we behold because inevitably we become what we behold.” Download MP3MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Minecraft: The Story of Mojang

We were saddened to learn of the untimely death of Daniel Jabbour on April 13, 2014. Celebrating The Life Of Daniel Jabbour: An Intersection Of Psychedelics, Activism And Technology A transcript of this podcast is being created at https://www.fanscribed.com/transcripts/7-376-jabbor-coming-out-of-the-psychedelic-closet/ — we’ll finish it with a handful of volunteers but the more who can help, the faster it will be completed. PROGRAM NOTES FOR THIS PODCAST: Guest speaker: Daniel Jabbour For anyone under the age of 30, this may be the most important podcast in the salon. Daniel Jabbor is a young entrepreneur and drug policy activist who, among many other accomplishments, and in a very short period of time, founded the now 4,000+ strong Psychedelic Society of San Francisco. Today's podcast features two of Daniel's talks, one from the recent Palenque Norte Lecture Series at the 2013 Burning Man Festival, and another from a psychedelic conference at which he detailed some of the successes of the SSDP, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. No matter what your age, this is an important message for you to think about. If you know history, you know that quite often it is the young people who are the ones to change its course. These talks by Daniel Jabbor will give you more positive hope for the future than you have had in a long time. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Daniel Jabbour.] “The War on Drugs was started as a way to control and segregate various groups of society.” “The drug war is increasingly a war on youth. Over 50% of marijuana arrests in this country [the U.S.] are people under 29 years old.” “We desire to alter our state of consciousness. It's an evolutionary thing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Society of San Francisco Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) is the only international network of students dedicated to ending the war on drugs. At its heart, SSDP is a grassroots organization, led by a student-run Board of Directors. We create change by bringing young people together and creating safe spaces for students of all political and ideological stripes to have honest conversations about drugs and drug policy. Founded in 1998, SSDP comprises thousands of members at hundreds of campuses in countries around the globe. Be sure to visit

Guest speaker: Ken Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear another of the Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the 2013 Burning Man Festival. This talk features the artist, experimental film maker, micro-publisher, and media developer, Ken Adams, who for many years was a close friend and neighbor of the late Terence McKenna. You will be delighted with some of the true stories Ken tells as we get to wander with him through the mind of a uniquely creative artist. Also, I tell a couple of my 'grandfather stories', and we finish with Ron Shock telling the greatest dope story ever. “We have shared experiences that the entire world knows about, like 9-11 and all the catastrophes in Japan and Haiti and all over the world, the Gulf. We're being introduced to a level of experience that's post tribal, post national, where we're all sharing the same emotional experiences and beginning to develop the persona of a new human being, a human being that's never been here before. It's something that's completely unique in human history.” -Ken Adams Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   The Terence McKenna Experience ceremonial cinema by Ken Adams (pay-what-you-can movie download)  

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Ego is the absolute impediment to Tao.” “We live in a domain of triviality that we have created.” “Do we embody the radiant correctness of what we say we are pursuing.” “I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.” “I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.” “If you're interested in drugs, the first stop is the library. And it's a long stop. And you educate yourself.” “In order to be free I must not believe anything. Then all things can be freely commanded in the mind.” “It takes months to assimilate a large psychedelic trip.” “I think the worst thing you can do is diddle with low doses. The nibblers of this world are no friends of mine. It should be overwhelming, and it should be an act of courage” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast Amazing Dope Tales by Stephen Gaskin Russell Brand Sounds Off!

Guest speaker: Terence McKennna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A single chemist can produce ten million hits [of LSD]. Well this is not some guy getting rich, this is about changing history, when you're talking about ten million consciousness-expanding experiences.” “One of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience is to see that it dissolves conventional wisdom. It dissolves adherence to group values, because it dissolves all structure, because it dissolves syntax. It shows the provisional nature of syntax.” “Try and look at consciousness as a resource for want of which we are going mad.” “And that what we really want, in the domain of planning, is an abandonment of ideology, that ideology is poisonous, all ideology is poisonous.” “You just can't go wrong as a heretic, because they're always vindicated.” “Permission for heresy is never a bad idea.” “Television is not reality. Television is the cultural myth about reality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the RG Veda to Plato by Ernest G. McClain Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.” “Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.” “Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.” “Once they pledge allegiance to a given model of reality, then that absolves all necessity for further thought.” “Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.” “I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.” “I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “Marijuana, it turns out, is three-quarters of the illegal drug problem, because it's three times as popular as all the other drugs put together. So if you can move marijuana out of the black market and into a legal and regulated market you've gotten rid of three-quarters of the crime, three-quarters of the violence, and three-quarters of the black market money. It changes the dynamics for the other drugs. It makes it much more of a small potatoes thing.” “If you move away from [Google's] free services you can move away from the part of the Net that's the most heavily surveilled.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)Defending Your Rights in the Digital World John Gilmore's Home Page Google has been secretly harvesting the passwords of all Wi-Fi devices everywhere

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.” “Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.” “The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.” “We are caught in a tremendous historical crisis. And what we lack, in this crisis, is consciousness, whatever that means, the ability to integrate data about the situation we are in.” “We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.” “Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.” “The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?” “What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast The Great Drug War: And Rational Proposals To Turn The Tide Arnold S. Trebach

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary & Terence McKenna Invitation to the opening of the Timoty Leary Archive at the New York Library. (Held on the second anniversary of the Occupy Movement.) :-) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I know that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Tim Leary. He was the pathfinder. He cut the way through the woods. He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.” “Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.” “What 'psychedelic' means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.” “Mind conjures miracles out of time.” “You've been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you, fall of man, original sin, and so forth and so on. It's bullshit. It's absolute bullshit.”   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast One Foot in the Future Nina Graboi Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition By Frances A. Yates Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History) D.P. Walker

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.” “It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.” “What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.” “I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.” “We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].” “The world isn't this unbelievably strange thing which is 'out there'. The world is this stranger-than-we-can-suppose thing which begins from the core of us out. That means nothing can be taken for granted. It can be taken apart. It can be put together many, many ways.” “[DMT] is pure, one hundred per-cent magic. MAGIC. It's not a drug. It's an event. It's not something you do. It's something that happens to you.” McKenna also describes a DMT experience as, “A collision with another modality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books Mentioned in this podcast The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future Riane Eisler The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (Cornell paperbacks) The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series) Richard Evans Schultes Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite..” “In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.” “Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.” “One of the core elements of this psychedelic thing is freedom, on the broadest scale.” “Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.” “I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.” “Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.” “The archaic revival is an invitation to historical humanity to view itself as a kind of a prodigal son.” “What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Symbiosis Gathering 2013 The Transcendent Nature of Symbiosis Festival