Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: The Albert Hofmann Papers at Erowid.org The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online) [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet." "So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream." "We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous." "In the future it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth. It is the mark of a barbarous culture." "One doesn't 'just say no' to truth." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Andrew Weil.] "I have to tell you that the majority of human beings that I encounter operate mostly out of fear, guilt, and that when people operate from those emotions they are dangerous to themselves and to others."  "We [the psychedelic community] are a very small minority, a very small minority, and have no illusions about that. And whether our minority will grow fast enough, and be able to influence humanity fast enough to avoid the catastrophe that is certain to come if we persist in the ways that we now persist, I don't know?" "If it may be as it appears that our ability to manipulate the environment, our technological ability, is so disparate with our ability to control our own emotions, that may be a fatal flaw of our species. It may be." "Deep down everything is all right, and that's the way it's supposed to be. And there may be a lot of drama in between [now and the extinction of our species], but it's all all right. ... It's OK with me if something else gets a chance, if the life-force experiments with another form, that's fine, that's OK too." "And here it seems to me is the fundamental absurdity of the way our science has developed: The most obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence. How can you construct a world view, how can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science tries to do." "Often I find, in my experience, that changes in the realm of consciousness must accompany physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] "To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it." "When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?" "Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire to better things, which has been called 'wantlessness', the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot'." "From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels." "And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty." "Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even in those countries where they are free to vote, are prevented by the basic postulates in terms in which they do their thinking and their feeling, from summarily decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations." "Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prisons in which they are now confined." "In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always willing, but it's technical and organizational flesh was generally weak. Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit." "My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective intention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects to the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving. We have to get it into our collective heads that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological." "It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children, who in less than forty years will be six billion, to lead a tolerably human existence without in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment." -Aldous Huxley (November 30, 1962) "All that I meant was, the sort of basic frame of reference in which political activities will take place shall be less culture-bound and more ecology-bound, let's say." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard PROGRAM NOTES: On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org. "There's a central power system, and here's the source. And the guidance system simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source. The closer he gets the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is, the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation, and the more he sees his total responsibility. Now it's inconceivable to me that you could move toward that source without increasing responsibility. And to me, Leary has found a way of moving in that direction but not going toward it, because he's obviously missed his responsibility level." -Myron Stolaroff "From our crowd I think very, very few people get off the beam the way I would consider Leary and Alpert are off the beam, for example." -Myron Stolaroff "[We should use these substances] in a way which will not simply allow us to become aware of what any decent mystical saints have been aware of for a long, long time, but to become aware of how to produce a rise in the social level of communication, which will, indeed, transform the species from a biological animal to a communicating animal, which is what Teilhard had in view." -Humphry Osmond "[The map of the noosphere] is not to be created by mucking up bits of the Book of the Dead and saying how smart chaps were. This is a fraud." -Humphry Osmond "When you most need help is when you least want it." -Myron Stolaroff "This is the life that I've seen: Live or die. Be intelligent enough to get along. Don't walk in two places without knowing where you're going." -Al Hubbard "The ten year delay in our work brought about through our struggle with NIH in Washington and through being unable to cope with a large and powerful power-system there has produced, it's resulted in probably several million people being quite unnecessarily damaged." -Humphry Osmond (November 1, 1964) "You have to understand the specific risks that [using psychedelics] involves. Now the specific risk is that every person involved will be altered whether they like it or not. And that the result of this will, in a sense, alter every other relationship they have whether they like it or not." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Please Support the Archival Efforts for The Stolaroff Collection

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it." -Rupert Sheldrake When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, "No," and then he went on to say, "Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it." "If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?" -Rupert Sheldrake "Not thinking about the World Soul but the individual soul, that the seizure of DMT is almost like a simulacrum of death itself, and that you seem to see into an ecology of souls." -Terence McKenna "The World Soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. This is all being scripted for a purpose and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything." -Terence McKenna "Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage." -Rupert Sheldrake "At the root of many problems is the denial of the problem and the fact that we maintain unconsciousness of the problem." -Ralph Abraham "I hold monotheism responsible for the mess that we're in from Abraham right on down to the present moment. I think it is the metaphor which is responsible for the dominator break-out, and that until we get a more polytheistic, nature-oriented conception of reality we will be pretty much under the gun." -Terence McKenna "For my money, monotheism is the single most reactionary force in all of human history. I don't even know what is running second." -Terence McKenna "Democracy is a step away from anarchy." -Terence McKenna "Perhaps to unify consciousness it isn't a Western hemisphere goddess we need but simply a recognition of Gaia." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.] "The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you're free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim." "Methods are methods are methods. Meditation's a method and psychedelics are a method. Methods are all traps. A method by its nature is a trap. It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end. You just hope it self-ejects." "Psychedelics was one of the major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture." "Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know." "I don't for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard . . . anymore." "All form in the universe, including your mind and your thought, is part of law, it's unfolding lawfully, it's the karma unfolding, just law. And within that there is no freedom. There really is no freedom in form. The freedom comes as the formless creates the form. There's where the freedom is. And that freedom, of the formless coming into form, is a place from which you stand, or you don't stand, in which you experience the creation of your own universe around you." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "[So Emerson] came to Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said, 'Don't look for god in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor in the pulpits, look within, find divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant (translated as do your own thing) and for, I believe thirty-three years, he was not allowed back on this sacred territory. We're back after twenty!" "We were smart enough to know how little we knew." "Once you put that pill in your mouth, YOU were the Principle Investigator ... like it or not." "The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that nobody wants to leave." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Raw Master Files of This Talk la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part2.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track2.mp3 Harvard Crimson Announcement of this Talk The Varieties of Religious Experience By William James (free Project Gutenberg edition)  

Click HERE to see the video of this conversation. This program marks Our 5th Anniversary! Support the Stolaroff Collection Make a contribution to support the archiving of Myron Stolaroff's resources Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: This is a conversation that took place between Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, and a group of friends at the legendary salon that Kathleen hosted on the third Friday of every month in Venice Beach, California. The talk begins with Myron telling stories about the legendary Al Hubbard, also known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.  He then goes on to explain the workings of his research center in Menlo Park, California where they treated over 300 people with LSD in the 1960s in order to help them improve their creativity. He also tells of the historic first trip of Duncan Blewett, which led the Saskatchewan researchers to change the direction of their work. For his part, Gary Fisher expands on some of the comments we heard in earlier podcasts when he talked about his work with autistic and schizophrenic children who were treated with LSD and other psychedelic medicines.  He also tells of a self-experiment he did to study the effectiveness of LSD in reducing severe pain. Here is a sampling of Gary's comments that evening: " 'We didn't have any bad trips because we didn't know you could have bad trips.' [quoting Laura Huxley] So all the input we ever had from anybody was how wonderful the [LSD] experience was. So we didn't have any sense that it was other than positive, and what a blessing that was." "How do you tell kids that the government is fucked?" "When you want people to be just one thing they bite you in the ass." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Research Report by Dr. Gary Fisher An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children HTML Version      PDF version Audio Discussion with Dr. Fisher and Dr. Grob “Treating Childhood Schizophrenia with Psychedelics”

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence's house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain. One of the reasons I think it might be interesting for you to hear this conversation is to get a feel for what it was like to hang around with the bard McKenna. While you might think that he did most of the talking, you will find that the opposite is true, and much like Aldous Huxley, Terence did a lot of questioning and listening. It wasn't only from books that they acquired their particular views of the world. A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer Terence McKenna's comments on NPR about his time with Bruce “I spent last week withBruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future." -Ralph Abraham "In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for "the snap", that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. ... What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history." -Ralph Abraham "The edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It is a special time." -Ralph Abraham "Salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension." -Terence McKenna "This is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. ... What we must become is clear." -Terence McKenna "To the degree that we can change our minds we will escape extinction." -Terence McKenna "If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity you're going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity." -Terence McKenna "I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite." -Ralph Abraham "I think that grass root research, based on phenomena that are actually common sense, that are part of everyday life for many people, could help to wake us up, to give a greater clarity about what's really going on, and make us recognize that there's far more interconnection between us and other species, and us and other people, than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public." -Rupert Sheldrake "What we're saying is that we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions. Someone once said, 'If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth we would stop immediately.' . . . So we have compartmentalized our lives, and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal work that is destroying the planet, destroying communities, and so forth." -Terence McKenna "Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion." -Terence McKenna "As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we're inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and we're going to produce incomplete agendas and answers." -Terence McKenna "The great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? It's the idea that there is no distinction between shit and Shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing." -Terence McKenna "The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community." -Terence McKenna "Yes, well it is an ambitious enterprise, and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever forward!" -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery." "Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined." "What is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense." "As our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate." "Vast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences, including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo." "While we've been waiting for the Palaidians to descend, or for the Face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy." "[Artificial intelligence,] this most bizzare and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation." "Time is defined by how much goes on in a given moment, and we're learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second." "Surely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizeable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ralph Abraham.] "The very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think, even individually, matters enormously in the long run. That's the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory." "In the creation of societies it was altruism, essentially, that was involved in going from where we were to where we are, and it could well be that without love, for example, further evolution is impossible." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "The development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn't changed much for 100,000 years." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. ... It wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world, whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history it was man the huntED." -Rupert Sheldrake "The shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back." -Terence McKenna "The domain in which the change [from animal to human] was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. And this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since." -Terence McKenna "You don't need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind, there's plenty of lower-level minds than the divine mind that could be out there." -Rupert Sheldrake "My notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood, and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious." -Terence McKenna [Rupert disagreed with this.] "The idea that this evolution's equipped us with minds, and language, and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it's come from, where it's going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole seems to me a rather improbable supposition." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's not decided what's going to happen next, there are imaginations of many levels, including human imaginations, at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on what's happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up, but without the goal being fixed in advance." -Rupert Sheldrake "[Evolution] is a game, one of the rules of which is: The rules can change." -Terence McKenna "Time is not a tyranny. It's a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Alan Watts PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Sasha Shulgin.] "So I look upon these materials [psychedelics] as being catalytic, not productive, they do not DO what occurs. The allow YOU to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material." "I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials." [In testing a new substance] "You go with great caution. Decide what is the amount is that would have no effect and take one thousandths of that amount." "How does the mind work? What kind of a probe can you make to look at the function of the mind? To me, it's going to be a psychedelic material, that has very little action in experimental animals, to look into actions in man that are not seen in experimental animals." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Nature has mercifully arranged the principle of 'forgettery' as well as the principle of memory. ... And you begin again. You see, it doesn't matter in what form you begin. Whether you begin again as a human being, or as a fruit fly, butterfly, or a beetle, or a bird, it feels the same way that you feel now. So we're really all in the same place." "So the possibility, even the imagination that there could be such an experience [of the end of the world] in the back of our heads, is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good, feeling that it's all right." 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.] "Newton himself was a man with a foot in two worlds. He was a thorough-going occultist. His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous. And yet he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society." "History itself is a kind of alchemical process. ... History is the catalyst of nature." "If we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage, and our heritage in the shamanism of the archaic, then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate, not to enslave, and somehow we've lost the thread." "You know, Tim Leary used to say, 'When in doubt, double the dose.' " "Capitalism, I can't say this enough, is NOT in our interest." "The Earth is perfectly capable of raising outrageous hell without us triggering a nuclear war." "My faith is that we're just slow to get rolling, and that once the battle is joined, once every person on Earth realizes that we're in a battle for planetary survival, then people will get with the program, it's just that things aren't bad enough yet." "We're lead by jackasses. We [the psychedelic community] don't bother with our political processes." "What we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us makes their way into those positions of power. I mean, you can see that now [1992], those guys are not fit to throw guts down to a bear ... ANY OF THEM!" "What we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state. I mean, what we are are the propagandized masses inside a Fascist dictatorship." "Know your enemy and they probably will not be your enemy." "I think that the Third Reich was a Sunday school picnic compared to the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church. ... In a civilized political environment those people would be placed under immediate arrest." "The way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history." "And so it's up to the creativity of ordinary people, and the strongest weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people is the psychedelic experience, because it allows you to put information together in new and exciting ways. And this is to be then the basis of a new political order. It has to be." "The model of human nature which this society has deified makes it a pathological act, a sin, and a crime to alter your own consciousness. This doesn't make any sense. We are at war with ourselves, and we're losing." "It's all about personal empowerment, and personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place." 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've never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself." "So what you have to do is just like every other thing, everything you've been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what's really going on, which doesn't mean that you're reckless." "We've been polluted by Disney." "We are living inside a 90% Nineteenth Century world view. And a culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves, because what cannot be said cannot be done. What cannot be said cannot be put in place." "So in a way, one way of thinking about psychedelics is that they empower language. It's a way to force the evolution of language. The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language." "It was very important, I think, to the Establishment to suppress that [hip phrases from the Hippie culture], because new words are the beginnings of new realities." "What holds us together is what holds all sub-cultures together, which is an experience. In this case, the experience of being loaded, and, you know, it's a very powerful and immediate kind of experience." "It's amazing that the world has evolved as far and as fast as it has, the human world, glued together by nothing more than small mouth noises." "The whole history of the evolution of the Western mind is in a sense the birth of the Logos. The Logos is making its way towards self-expression, and it's doing this by claiming dimension, after dimension of manifestation." "The mind is not a form of intelligence. The mind is the theater in which intelligence is manifested. You don't want to confuse the garage with the car. ... Everything goes on within the confines of mind. It's like the light that you switch on when you walk into a darkened room, and then everything else is the furniture within the room. Mind is simply the light which is shed over the landscape of appearances. ... Mind is the inclusive category, I think." "It's very important to try and make some accommodation to the local language, because in a way, only the local language is appropriate to the place. ... Somehow the local language is a part of the local reality." "The one thing you learn taking psychedelics is that nothing is straightforward." "Anybody who starts talking to you about the grandeur that was Rome, should be reminded: The grandeur of Rome was it was a bargain-basement on three floors masquerading as a military brothel. It was not a great civilization." "I'm completely convinced that no one is in control, and that this is very good news." "In a sense, the flying saucer is nothing more than a modern rebirth of the philosopher's stone. The flying saucer is the universal panacea at the end of time. It's the thing which cannot exist, but which does exist, and which if we could obtain it everything would be different." 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 think, when it's all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C." "The African 'Cradle of Civilization', I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't believe that is going to have to do some fast talking." "They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were." "DMT is this very short-acting hallucinogen that you smoke, but it's a neurotransmitter. It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals. In terms of nature, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens. In terms of impact, it's the strongest of all hallucinogens. It's a completely reality-obliterating experience, and it comes on so quickly that you don't grok it like a drug." "The other thing about DMT that's weird is, it does not affect your mind. In other words, you don't feel gaga with ecstacy. You don't feel relaxed. You feel exactly the way you felt before you did it. It's that the world has just been swapped out, and that's strange. I sort of like that, that it doesn't lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes, instead it just does something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced by a three-, four-, five-dimensional, highly colored moving environment filled with screaming elf-deamons." 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.] "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." "In a Christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command god to act. In other words that in some strange way the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires." "The Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of god. So it's a completely different attitude toward being human. It's an empowering attitude." "In the hermetical, magical view human beings are not tainted by Original Sin." "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." "Had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece, Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did." "Alchemy, and conjuration, and tailsmanic magic, and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished, really, not as a throwback but as a kind of prelude to modern science. Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise." "[John] Dee is the last person to be able to unify into one world view science, and mathematics, and magic, and astrology all together." "Paracelsus was an interesting guy. He's essentially the inventor of drugs because he was the first person extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence." Today's podcast begins a newly uncovered lecture by Terence McKenna. His topic is "Hermeticism and Alchemy" and he begins this 1991 workshop in fine form, making statements such as: "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." And, "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Jonathan Ott.] "It is, of course, absurd for humankind to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet." "A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground." [In reference to releasing violent criminals to make room for small-time, non-violent, simple possession offenders.] "In short, drug prohibition is impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific, unhealthy, immoral, unecological, undiplomatic, and dictatorial." "Drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing paranoia." 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.] "What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing." "Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance. And not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed. Poetry may have been at its climax. Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy, there's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin." "All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later." "What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance." "We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it." "All of them, if you generalized, what these substances do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. ... Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries." "The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder." "We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma." "There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them." "I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself." "I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking." "The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak." "I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster." "We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis, which is the way we may well be headed." "It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another five hundred or a thousand years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created, will be the first to be swept away. So it's very, very important that people take back their minds, and that people analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire h...

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup." "[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists' beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere." "Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life." "The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people's minds more than on the streets. It'll be in the minds first." "The giving response that we have [when natural disasters occur], and through technology the fact that we can sort of be there virtually, and be in the environment that those people are in, and the crisis they're in, the empathic response coming out of support is perhaps the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there's a disaster." "Not only is no one running the world, but it probably isn't possible for anyone to run the world. And once we come to that realization we become human again because we'll say, 'Look everyone's human. Everyone is trying their best. Everyone is going from crisis to crisis, and we'll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I also think will be a healthy thing." "So in a sense, it'll be the geeks that inherit the Earth, but it'll be enlightened geeks we hope." "We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization." "When you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye, and therein you will find your rescue." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer Online Bruce Damer's DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer on the BBC Forum The Planetary Mood Ring Project

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Now the key thing to the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized form." "It's obvious that if any quantum leaps are going to happen in evolution it's best designed to happen in a period of adolescence." "Evolution has always involved people like us getting together as we are tonight, figuring out where we came from, and who's slowing us down, and what's the factual evidence as to how fast and where we can move?" "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The key to neurological navigation is to be able to voyage into exactly the circuits of your brain that you want to be exactly when you want to be there and with whom you want to be there." "The key to the Sixties, as we see it now [1979], was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive 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: Claudia Little, BSN, MPH PROGRAM NOTES: Below you will find the list of links to Web sites that Claudia Little refers to in her presentation about the safety, benefits, and importance of the cannabis plant. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marijuana – Why it Works Supporting Studies and Articles Growing Acknowledgments from Health Organizations regarding the Medical Benefits of Cannabis Health Organization Endorsements AMA Calls for Scientific Review of Marijuana’s Prohibitive Status How Cannabis Works The Brain’s Own Marijuana (Get link to complete article from Scientific American at this link) Cannabis and the Brain Marijuana Compounds Possess Synergistic Anti-Cancer Effects, Study Says Marijuana Extracts Relieve Intractable Cancer Pain Better than THC, Study Says Books on Specific Conditions Aging, Arthritis, Cancer, Chronic Pain, Gastrointestinal Disorders, HIV/AIDS, Movement Disorders, Multiple Sclerosis (Americans for Safe Access) Comprehensive Reviews of Recent Research Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids Some of the Most Significant Research Results of 2009 ‘Gold Standard’ Studies show that Inhaled marijuana Is Medically Safe and Effective (CA Center for Medical Cannabis Research) Feds’ Top Pot Researcher Says Marijuana Should be Legal (UCLA’s Taskin/Lung Cancer Risk) If Pot Prevented Cancer You Would Have Heard About It, Right? (Boston University re: Head/Neck CA) Smoke Has Contrasting Effects On Lung Function Compared to Tobacco, Study Says Moderate Marijuana Use Not Associated with Altered Cognitive Shills, Study Says Opposite Relationships Between Cannabis Use and Neurocognitive functioning in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia Review: Supposed Marijuana and Schizophrenia Link "Overstated" Weeding Through the Hype: Interpreting the Latest Warnings About Pot and Schizophrenia THC Shown to Help Patients with Schizophrenia Safety of Cannabis Addictive Properties of Popular Drugs Conant vs Walters (Safety for your MD) Marijuana compounds may offset alcohol-induced toxicity, study says Marijuana Users Substitute Pot in Place of More Dangerous Substances, Study Says Marijuana Ingredient Blocks Opiate Dependence, Study Says Federal Agency in Charge of Marijuana Research Admits Stifling Studies on Medicinal Cannabis Organizations to Join: Drug Policy Alliance National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Americans for Safe Access Marijuana Policy Project Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Extras 2009: The Year in Review NORML’s top 10 Events that Shaped Marijuana Policy Annual Marijuana Arrests in the US Top 10 Cannabis Studies the Government Wished it had Never Funded Ashland Alternative Health, LLC The Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP) is a state registry program within the Public Health Division, Oregon Department of Human Services. Ashland Alternative Health’s team of physicians and professional staff will successfully guide you through the OMMP process of acquiring an Oregon Medical Marijuana Card. Our mission is to be the foremost medical marijuana advocate for patients in the state of Oregon by providing a clinic that sets the gold standard in professional, compassionate and private care while upholding the guidelines of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. Please call us at 541-488-2202 for more information. Vaporizer Information