Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean it’s like a magnet for screwballs." [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . go figure  .] "I’ve seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe." "My technique, which I recommend to you, is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing we’ve got." "Probe the edges." "Psychedelics work. If you think that I’m bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and then we’ll talk. That’s the sine qua non. It’ll work, on demand. I’m not saying, ‘And wait forty years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It’ll work. It’ll blow your mind to shreds. It’s real." "What I’ve decided is that the [DMT] experience is an archetype. It’s the archetype of the circus." "I think where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time. Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen." "The dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else." "Fairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language. And the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication, faries, and language suggests that here we might have a restrictive gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns." "As long as we pursue the destruction of the Earth, and the elaboration of materialist ideology, and the suppression of psychedelic states, and the suppression of the feminine we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology." "The apocalypse is no longer a rumor. It has arrived in many parts of the world." "Do what you think is right. Think about what you think is right, and once you’ve thought about it then do 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.] "I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here." "A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate." "It’s more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we’re not using. They [the machine elves] want us to speak in colored lights." "I think that the subtext of the governments’ fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run. And I think this is true of any society. It isn’t an American phenomenon. It’s that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hassidic Rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises. And you get millions of people questioning the first premises, and then the powers that be become very nervous." "Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state." "This is a heresy for sure, I’m not that fond of LSD. I think it’s a very sloppy drug." "It’s the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala." "We have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present. The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future." "History is not a random walk. It’s not a series of undirected, random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved." "The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the New Age." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Terence McKenna Audio DMT Nexus Index of /audio/McKenna

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The surface of things is not where attention should rest." "I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world." "We’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu." "I came to feel, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it [DMT] is secret. It is not a secret. It is THE secret. There is a secret, and this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is. It’s that the way the world is, is a way that you can’t think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity." "You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told." "Without this [the smoked DMT experience] in the picture, half the world is missing." "What we have discovered in DMT is, literally, a chemical doorway to the bardo." "One thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure, is to convince you that what’s real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what’s real." "The biological object is made of time itself as much as it’s made of space and matter." "I’ve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul." "The Twentieth Century is analogous to the birth canal of human history." "What’s interesting about DMT is that it occurs naturally in the human brain. We all make it all the time. And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all. This is a human metabolite that you’re getting a tremendous of, but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, bio synthetic pathways, that can deal with it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "For the last four or five thousand years, freedom and intelligence and individualism have been moving in an unbroken chain from East to West. So that here on the banks of the Pacific Ocean we obviously have assembled the most advanced nervous systems on the planet." "We all live within the reality bubble that our nervous system projects." "Neurology was the real revolution of the Sixties." "Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re gonna lead." "The old theory, by old I mean the one they’re still teaching in your colleges, says that new speciation takes tens of millions of years to create a new species. Well if that’s so let’s go back to Quaaludes. Why bother?" "The Sixties was a genetically designed and programmed paedomorphic revolt against adult authority." "I’m sure that most of the people who have felt alienated, I think many of the people who are put in mental hospitals, are simply people who were born with nervous systems that we call futique, as opposed to antique." "It’s so simple, that to be in the right place you’re in the right time. Tune the place you are to the vibrations of the brain circuits that you want to activate at the time." "Evolution never tries to change grown-ups." "We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes." "I urge you, at all costs, to avoid terminal adulthood." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Alan Watts Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege.  ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "So we have to think again and try and find out, think deeply, what is fundamentally taboo in this culture and perhaps in other cultures as well. What information, in other words, would really let the cat out of the bag and give away the show?" "But you see, the trouble about deep secrets is they can’t be repressed indefinitely." "And we don’t even think that we had anything personally to do with the fact that our fathers once had an evil gleam in their eyes, but that evil gleam was you … coming on." “And so underneath the opposition, or the polarity, between self and other or between any other pair of opposites you can think of there is something in common.” “This is the description of anxiety: Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other … forever." "So one of the problems of the various chemicals which can change the human mind in certain ways so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together is that they do rather give the show away. And people who take these chemicals and see through the human game cannot be trusted." "What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do." "When you are told, from childhood, that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily you remain permanently mixed-up." "You can’t have pleasure in life without skill, but it isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill." "It’s very bad form if an actor always acts the same way. That’s what’s called a Star, as distinct from an actor. A real actor can become anything." "LSD is simply an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope, except this one’s inside you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge, you can use a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So in the same way, according to your capacity and your knowledge you can use an interior instrument to your advantage … or just for kicks!" "The thing that we’ve learned from history is nobody ever learns from history." "Any law which in a way tries to enforce by the power of the state its private morals, or your own business in looking after your own nervous system, is in a fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization." "The rule for all terrors is head straight into them. … Whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it, and it will disappear." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   The Soft Pack on MySpace iTunes Band Website Spirit Plants Radio on the air 24/7

Guest speaker: Lorenzo NOTE: This chapter was revised for the paperback edition that was released in February 2015. Please see the Kindle edition for the current version of this chapter. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Lorenzo.] "Forget getting a permanent job. Forget careers and the quest for financial stability. They are all false gods, sent to you by the Capitalist elite on Wall Street, whose primary goal is to trap you into a life of servitude." “You still haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” began Shadow. “It should behoove us all to take the words of the Empire’s leaders at face value. They have declared what they call a War on Drugs. Of course, that’s a lie on its face, because they aren’t putting drugs into prison cages, they’re putting people in them. This is no war on drugs, William, this is a war on consciousness, as Richard Glen Boire says. It’s a war on people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo. It is a war on the very people that we are going to need to get us humans out of this mess we’ve created for ourselves. And if this is really a war, as they want to call it, then you and I, young William, you and I are their sworn enemies." "We are at what many believe to be the most pivotal moment in human history that we know of. The arrow of unsustainable consumption, powered by the bow of credit, has reached the top of its flight. There is nowhere for that arrow to go now but down, and where it is going to land is anyone’s guess." “A thousand years from now, humans will most likely still be walking the Earth, as we have done for over a million years already. Some of those future humans will have genetic links to us. . . . And those people of the future will be alive because they had at least one ancestor, maybe you, who was a part of what their historians will call the Genesis Generation. "We are raising our children to become serfs!" "Our families are detaching from the monetary system and applying their energy in different directions, like raising some of their own food, and entertaining ourselves without spending exorbitant amounts of money." “Unlike that insidious John Galt, I am advocating that We the People go on strike and remove our minds from their System of servitude. For we are fully aware that it isn’t the handful of CEOs who are the producers. No, in fact, they are the looters now. It is time to keep our best ideas to ourselves, here in our own community." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?" "Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances." "We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings" "[We] often feel like hapless atoms, running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever. We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else." "There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it." "Every society, in the moment of its existence, has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation (good alchemical word), a distillation of what has preceded before." "Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball." "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." "The mushroom said to me once, ‘Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage,’ and I said, ‘What’s the payoff on that?’ And it said, ‘It shows you it loves courage because it removes obstacles.’ You make a commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up." "It is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites." "It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas." "We are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery if we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer. Then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast that says, ‘May ye be alive at the end of the world.’ " Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Leo Plaw at the Temple of Visions Gallery (Los Angeles) Fantastic Visions Exhbition Berlin the sun blindness

Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled "From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking." "The suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic thinking, began roughly two thousand years ago. And you get more intense socio-economic and socio-spiritual hierarchies … until you get to where we are today where there is state control of consciousness as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life." -Anna Waldstein "They’re incredibly good at convincing us that we need a new car, and that new shirt, and the toys for our kids, or whatever, but very good at also convincing us that we don’t need this type of thing any more, this psychedelic thinking. But despite the Powers’ attempts to eradicate this, it bubbles up. … The power elite doesn’t want us to think like this because it disengages us from consumerism, it connects us with the environment, and makes us question what’s going on." -Ivan Casselman "Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact the box itself is figmentary and illusory . And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates one cannot be truly original in thought. So once we are stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on top of the groove or the bottom of the groove, its still going down that same path." -Cameron Adams 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.] I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control." "I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do." "That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy." "Democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time." "Ulysses is obviously a very extraordinary book. I mean, I don’t exactly know why he wrote it, because I mean, a great deal of Ulysses seems to me to be taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The complete recordings of the Aldous Huxley 1961 London interview may be found at: The Grey Lodge Occult Review

Guest speaker: Ethan Nadelmann PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Ethan Nadelmann.] "The War on Drugs, this policy of punitive prohibition, is a horror in our society, something that cannot be morally justified, cannot be justified in terms of health, can certainly not be justified in terms of public safety, that cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that I’ve ever heard of." "The War on Drugs is a cancer in our society, in our American society and in global society." "There’s never been a drug-free society, and there’s never going to be a drug-free society. We are moving increasingly into a world in which there will be ever-more psychoactive drugs available." "The stand-bys, you know, the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol and marijuana and coca cocaine and opium, they’ve been with us for thousands of years in one way or another, and they’re going to continue to be part of our society and our lives, whether we like it or not." "When drug treatment gets owned by the criminal justice system, drug treatment simply becomes a synonym for coerced abstinence." "We need to aim to cut America’s incarcerated population in half, to pick a rough number." "We need to get that term, over-incarceration, into the popular dialogue, into the popular language." "One of the definitions of power is when somebody tells you to do something, and you do it without asking why. That’s the definition of power. Somebody tells you to do it and you do it without even asking why, that’s the power of the prison-industrial complex today." "California used to be known as the state of higher education and is now known as the state of higher incarnation." "When you live in a society where one of the most powerful political forces is the organization which earns its livelihood from keeping its fellow citizens behind bars, I don’t know of any other free society in which that is the case. That’s a distortion." "I define recovery as getting to the point where your drug use, if you use drugs, is no longer impairing your life. … That’s the objective, to get on with your life." "It’s about accepting that each one of us, who have struggled with drugs, has to find their own path. And that the role of the state should certainly not be to get in the way and optimally to facilitate this." "That we are each sovereign over our own minds and bodies, that is the core principle that we have to keep putting out there." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Drug Policy ACTION Network Drug Policy Alliance Network A New PATH Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing

Guest speakers: Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and others PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast begins with a short clip of Alan Watts speaking about human consciousness. Then we join Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and a few other friends who are discussing the life of Alan Watts a few months after his death in November 1973. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alan Watts in Wikipedia List of books by Alan Watts

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you." "If I want a more intense drug experience I take more of one drug." "Low doses of psychedelics, or moderate doses of psychedelics, transform the quality of thought. You think faster, think deeper, think odder, think broader, but you need more for that to burst through into hallucination." Terence McKenna’s ‘Private’ List of Most Influential Books The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/039484484X The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0916870480 "The world is something to look at, and that attitude in the presence of psychedelics will throw open a cornucopia of riches." "I don’t know what life is like without cannabis. I hear there is such a thing." "The thing about DMT, and we didn’t talk about it much this weekend, is it is an inhabited space. A HUGE percentage of people who take it encounter entities of some sort in there. Not entities like wombats and foxes, but entities with intelligence of some sort, with language of some sort." "I think that in service to the principle of parsimony, preferring the simplest explanation, these things [beings encountered in DMT space] must be human souls. "Now I dare to hope that maybe there is some kind of existence beyond the grave." "I’ve looked at the literature of near-death experience. What those people are describing is far more mundane than a DMT trip." "I would suggest, with great heat, that if we want to study the near-death and after-death experience, that actually you come far closer to dying, whatever that means, on DMT than you do in drownings and things like that." "If you’re living right, your life should get just more and more baroque, beautiful, complicated, mysterious … and then you die." "I prefer to think that it [2012] is not a planetary catastrophe, or a mass dying." "Perhaps what enlightenment is is it happens to an entire universe when it drops its matter and anti-matter out of its structure, and it becomes entirely made of light. That would certainly fulfill the Novelty Theory [sic]." "It’s a bit baroque for my taste." [Speaking about the concept of parallel universes. Of course, Terence never lived to read: April 14, 2003, Scientific American, Parallel Universes Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations http://www.krabach.info/astro/parallel_universe/parallel_universe.html "The universe is a series of impediments to the expression of novelty." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option So You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher? (PDF) by R. Andrew Sewell, M.D. • McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "You don’t conquer time by building vast instrumentalities and seeking a primary particle and all that. The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "I live in a kind of waking hallucination. I have a little aphorism which covers this. It’s: Rome falls nine times an hour. It falls more than that and less than that, but let’s say it falls nine times an hour. Well, then your job is to notice every time it falls. In other words, what we think of as our random musings and our personal mental furniture is in fact our subconscious awareness of these systems of temporal resonance operating around us." [Comment by Lorenzo: I have no idea what he means by this.] "I do entertain the idea that we may each have our own Timewave, sort of following the model of astrology." "What will happen, as novelty asymptotically increases, in the final months, hours, minutes, seconds is boundaries will dissolve, all boundaries They’re already dissolving. We see the nation-state dissolving, but wait’ll the atomic field dissolves." "It’s not a gravity collapse. It’s a novelty collapse. We are collapsing into a black hole of novelty." "The future is not like the past except that it hasn’t happened. If you were to suddenly find yourself in the future, it’s a vector-storm of unrealized possibilities. You’ve never seen an unrealized possibility." "I believe that the idea that is the most fun is probably the closest to the truth, and I find this idea to be absolutely delightful." "The whole thing [Timewave hypothesis] smacks of the impossible. It’s even pushed me toward the idea that maybe this is not actually a reality. We’re trapped, or I’m trapped. I don’t know if you’re trapped. But we’re in some kind of piece of fiction. It’s like a Phillip K. Dick deal, you know. We’re in some kind of simulacrum, and the clue to the fact that it’s a simulacrum is this impossible idea [the Timewave]. And so the point of the idea is not to believe it, but to use it as a wedge to fight our way out of this labyrinth and back to whatever reality we were in before we fell into this situation. Something like that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dustin Cantwell’s Fane of the Cosmos

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity." "Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process." "Feelings are primary. The primary datum of experience is feeling, and then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience. And then still lower on the rung, and I maintain lower on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience." "I think it’s really important to keep things as simple as possible because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly baroque. So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of Great Atlantis only further exacerbates the problem." "We know that behind all this constipated sociability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience. It’s important to keep it in mind in very psychedelically situations. But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality and commit crimes based on delusion about what is and isn’t reality." "The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of the culture. It is literally the response to toxic cultures. The more toxic the culture the more ego is revered as a natural value within that culture." "People are clueless, and they’re being used and abused. Seemingly intelligent people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconsciousable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous towards the Earth. … Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decomodify experience. … What is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?" "Novelty is that quality of nature that seeks complexity. It’s countervailing force is called habit." "The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it these past 500 years, because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true; the intuition that every moment is unique [time is not uniform]. It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysics of being." "The way you investigate time is by moving inward, by investigating metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "It is as though the Winter Solstice of 2012 was some kind of dwell point out of which the temporal continuum is being generated." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "The more of a mind you have, the more fun you can have when it’s fucked-up." -Nick Herbert (Wikipedia entry about Nick)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it." "If you aren’t ‘cool’ then you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means, by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed. But it can’t really be faked. But the whole engine of marketing is designed to make you think that it can be faked. I don’t know if I’m cool or not, but I am incredibly resistant to any effort to make me think I’m uncool." "You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears." "It’s very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked. … This nobody ever criticizing anybody else brings the intellectual enterprise and the refinement of human knowledge to a screeching halt. The way in which the intellectual enterprise moves forward is by being critiqued, analyzed, subjected to tests." "Scientists really respect each other for proving that they are wrong. If you have a theory that you’ve defended for fifteen years, and then you publish a paper saying, ‘I’ve been over it again. I’ve looked at the data again, and you know what fellow colleagues, I botched it. I was wrong.’ They promote you for this. They say, ‘This is the essence of intellectual honesty.’ … Religion doesn’t work like this. In the religious domain you never admit you’re wrong. You further elaborate the story to save whatever preposterous notion has been exposed. … And so what you get is error based on error based on delusion based on illusion based on lie based on half-truth based on supposition based on somebody thought it would be nice IF." "Somewhere after the Sixties, when the government decided that universal public education only created mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights, education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry. And instead we took an authoritarian model. The purpose of education [today in the United States] is to produce unquestioning consumers with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is." "If you turn cannabis into a Schedule I drug, a felony, suddenly all of these people who never felt inspired to dissent, never felt the heavy hand of the government, are automatically members of a criminal class. And what this does is thus radicalize the people so persecuted, and in a feedback loop of paranoia drive the government then into a frenzy of trying to understand and control this minority group. The idea that states of mind are matters for legal manipulation, it’s amazing that that discussion is even taking place in a democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson." "In the whole Marxist episode nobody was ever required to piss in a cup in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China to establish their loyalty to the government or the corporations, and yet that went down here with barely a murmur." "Once you find psychedelics there’s nothing between you and a complete check-out from your cultural heritage. The only cost to you is the complete abandonment of everything you’ve ever known and loved." "You can choose to be free, but it’s the last choice you’ll ever make." –Kafka [McKenna's Five Percent Rule] "As long as any school of dissent remains below five percent of the population no money is budgeted to destroy it." "I think that no one is in charge, and this is a very good thing because it allows the internal dynamic of the situation to express itself. Everybody who wants to control the situation is fighting a loosing battle." "I don’t feel this need for intellectual closure. I don’t see why things should make sense." [McKenna's Law] "As you advance in social hierarchy the percentage of smart people does not increase. … Every human situation is bedeviled by morons. No matter how high you rise you’re surrounded by fools,

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves." "If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being. But given a more advanced nervous system and a more advanced cultural tool kit the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love." "The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a position like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion, the illusion created by the local language." "The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being." "Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste." "The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil." "Nature seems to be in the business of building systems that transcend themselves." "We are all just swarms of personalities. The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea." "Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over." "We’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner." "What shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals." "The keeper of the values [of his culture] is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit. … The shaman at the top realizes that, my god we stare out onto an abyss. We do not know." "Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness." "Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises." "Sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideology." "Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion, not a feeling to be drawn from that observation, the conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt present of the immediate moment must be what life is for." "I would say the bouquet of life is this moment." "I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever you miss the point." "We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children." "Life is what you get when a hyper dimensional object protrudes into ordinary space." "We clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter." "In my highest states I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this [human existence] is the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than this. This is the bottom line, and so the good news is it’s only up from here." "The last dance you dance alone, and nobody will be watching." "I don’t think you should live in anticipation of the drama of your death-bead scene, better to repair to the moment." "The real message of the psychedelic experience and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique we’ve been carrying out here is to take the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience, this is all you know. It’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibilities, fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope, who knows?

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present." "If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it’s paranoia." "Art is like the footprint of where the imagination has been." "Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception, not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be." "Who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore when there were saber toothed cats walking around that weighted 1100 pounds?" "Imitation is an act of the imagination." "What is a city but a complete denial of nature? … Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho." "What this [virtual reality] should tell us, in the domain of light the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will." "Shamanism didn’t use matter to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind, in the presence of unusual neurochemicals, to produce unusual phenomenon and unusual sensoria of experience." "A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination." "We now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this." "Clearly we [humans] view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion." "The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow … and our best people are working on that very problem." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #1 Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #2

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: SASHA SHULGIN: "So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive, they do not do what occurs, they allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get into and express yourself without the help of the material." "My main argument for continuing to use the term [psychedelic] is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about." ANN SHULGIN: "My interest in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche. They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be." "The psychedelics, the visionary plants, allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning, because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge." "The ’shadow work’ is, perhaps, the most important use of these materials, as far as I’m concerned, that there is. Because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it’s not a monster, that it’s not a terrible, horrible beast, that it is the uncultivated, the unsophisticated and slightly, sometimes, unlawful part of ourselves, which can be one of our greatest allies as long as we can find the courage to do the work necessary to discover it and become one with it and to negotiate with it." "I consider them [psychedelics] basically spiritual tools." BABA RAM DAS: "The place we share is that place that stands nowhere, not the place that’s caught in these spirals that involve intellectual advance, or ‘Now we know it!’, and so on. That’s all like little ripples on the ocean." "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised." TIMOTHY LEARY: "…neuro-geography that tells us that where you are determines who you are, habitat determines species." "We are literally at a position where collectively, working in harmony, we can do most of the things, and take the responsibilities, which in the past have been attributed to the great deities of the past. I think the Golden Age is ahead. It’s the age of humanist science, humanist technology, pagan science, pagan technology, high tech, high touch." "I think it’s our duty as explorers and as frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminology. … I really feel that words are tremendously important. . . . We’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years because more people have been killed in the name of god that any other word around." TERENCE MCKENNA: "Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment." “Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!” "On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It’s crawling all over you! And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy, because it’s all a play of energy that we’re involved in." "Now the message I have is an old one, the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It’s those six words: Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in. It’s a rhythm." "Now how do you turn on? Well, I’ll tell you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking. You can’t think your way out of this sticky black checker board of an American education. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on you’ve got to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament." "Now with all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Viet Nam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house." "The educational system, at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug." "The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully because you’re likely to get hooked." "You, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out, and by drop out I mean all the way. You can’t vote, I urge you not to do politics, don’t picket, don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference." 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.] "Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences." "For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status." (This was in response to a question about legal highs.) "Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them." (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.) "Science fiction is the gateway drug." "I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … 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." "Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist." "I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I’m interested in finding one doorway that works." "Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced, free house calls in our homes. This could almost be a litmus test for sanity." "Whether achieved through some yogic or some quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways." "It’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight [that we are creatures of language] is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. … Code is the primary reality." "I’ve always felt in a way that the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was ‘We’ll try anything as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work,’ and that automatically exempts psychedelics." "Once you find psychedelics you’re not looking for the accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine, or oneness, or something like that." "Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously, since the sixteenth century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language, and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on." "Computer code is magical language. It’s language which when executed causes something to actually happen." "So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis." "Drug-taking and drug-using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap we...