Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher and Charlie Grob PROGRAM NOTES: In 1963, Dr. Gary Fisher wrote a paper titled Interim report on Research project: An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children (This link will take you to the full report.) Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option [From the Report] We have given treatment to 12 patients. They have ranged in age from 4 years, 10 months to 12 years, 11 months. The average age is 9 years, 10 months. All patients are severely emotionally disturbed and are considered variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism. Nine Children are considered to be childhood schizophrenics, one case of symbiotic, infantile psychosis and one case of manic-depressive psychosis. . . . We have found that the patients who have responded best to the treatment are those who: have speech; are more schizophrenic than autistic; older (10 to 12 yrs.); exhibit more blatant psychotic symptomatology . . . The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feeling and effectual states. The experiences that have produced such painful and frightening affect have been repressed and the feelings produced by such traumas have been denied. Consequently, the individual has built a massive control system wherein all experience is denied and he exists in an isolated, unfeeling condition which renders him helpless and incapacitated. The psychedelic drugs have the potential of breaking this psychotic control which then allows the individual to re-experience his trauma and to again experience his feelings. This phenomena has been amply proven with our work with these severely disturbed children, wherein they return to traumatic experiences and re-live and re-experience them. By working through these painful episodes the patient is then able to rid himself of the horror of them, to reevaluate their significance and be freed of the psychic effects of their repression. This process has been repeatedly observed in our psychotic children. The transcendental experience, often described in the literature, has occurred with 4 of our children. It might be added that we were very surprised to see this experience occur in such disturbed and young children.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "As you well-know, I never wanted any credibility. I’m more concerned with incredibility." "I believe in change. I’m a change agent. I want to keep changing myself. … Change is going to be the norm from now on, and we’re not changing from A to B, we’re changing in an explosive, multi-directional way." "Yeah, there are forces which slow down change. Certainly, you are aware of the fact that every educational institution, from first grade up to the high altitude of The College of Marin, every institution that’s supported by taxpayers and administered by politicians is carefully designed to keep young people serenely and productively stupid." "It’s necessary to have the conservatives, but it’s also necessary to have the mutants, the migrants, and the people with new ideas." "It’s always the intelligent that move. It’s always the intelligent that migrate, because it’s simply smarter to move out than to stay back in the village and quarrel over cobblestone streets and neighborhood territory. Quarreling over territory is lower mammalian and lower primate [behavior], and it’s the smart, the evolutionary people who always move out." "Now they say that there was a counter-culture [in the Sixties]. There was no counter culture. This was a left-wing, partisan statement. There were 100 counter-cultures. There were as many counter-cultures as there were groups of friends and lovers meeting together to look into each others’ eyes and smile. That’s the point of the Sixties, there was not one orthodoxy being replaced by another orthodoxy. … You make your own world. Don’t blame your parents and don’t blame society. Figure it out for yourself." "You would not have had the drug culture movement of the Sixties if you did not have the do-it-yourself psychology movement of the Fifties." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Coalessence Festival (October 3, 4, 5, 2008) For the best drug information available online, be sure to visit Erowid.org. Dr. Timothy Leary in WikiPedia.org The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana

Guest speakers: Nick Sand and Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: [The following quotations are by Nick Sand.] "This process of sharing through language our inherited ability to manipulate first stone tools, then concepts and symbols through language and printing, and then moving into the networking of electronic and virtually instantaneous world wide communication, are three quantum leaps of exponential increase in consciousness." "The continuity of these constructs through which we perceive the world is what we call tradition." "This leap across the gap into the unknown is unavoidable but it must be made. We have no choice. As we are moved to higher levels of evolution change will occur. The constructs and veils of our collective consciousness have to give way." "Purity of intention and purity of product go hand-in-hand to produce a transcendent trip." "For the chemist also, the mere intention toward purity is transformative. A path unto itself. This is Alchemy!" "It is time to become conscious, and existence has given us this valuable tool, LSD, to start this process. I pray that we have the time and courage to make this next leap in evolution. I believe that LSD is one of the gifts given to us by Spirit to do this." "I think that the psychedelics are the midwives of change. They help the change occur." [The following quotations are by Myron Stolaroff.] "Having been working with this for a number of years, and observing a lot of experiences, I’m convinced that what LSD does is simply to open the door to your unconscious." "As one who has abused LSD by trying to overcome difficulties with repeated experiences, I have found that a good meditation practice is an excellent way to keep the gains from experiences alive. … Deepening meditation practice deepens your LSD experience, and having more profound LSD experiences yields instant gains in deepening meditation practice." "When we use LSD appropriately, it can provide a direct, crystal-clear path to the height of spiritual ecstasy. It can provide the direct experience of the godhead, and our government makes this valuable tool illegal." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hofmann’s Potion – Video Documentary Part 1 of 6 RESEARCH REPORT NO. 1 INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDY QUESTIONNAIRE STUDY OF THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25 by Malden Grange Bishop (Dodd, Mead & Company: New York, 1963)

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Every evaluation is an evaluation of the organism as a whole, because the nervous system interlocks with the immunological system, and the endocrine system, and the neuro-muscular system and so on. So every evaluation you make is an evaluation of your whole body, and separating it into mind and body is a fictitious dichotomy. It’s a synergistic process." "What the front brain knows does not control you at all. It just thinks it does." "The idea of reality as a singular noun doesn’t make any sense to me at all any more." "Everybody has their own neurological reality-tunnel, which is why we misunderstand one another so often, and why we misjudge one another so profoundly." "I don’t think there’s a single drug, psychedelic, antibiotic, aspirin, or anything you can name that has the same effect on two people. People have to find out for themselves which drugs are safe for them." "Among the drugs that are currently controversial, that is to say illegal, I would say marijuana is the safest." "I think the dangers of LSD have been overstated to an incredible extent." "Most problems exist because the verbal form you put them in creates the problem." "So what you experience tomorrow, if it entirely fits your beliefs today, it’s because you’re not paying attention." "Every child is intensely curious until they get to school, and the function of school is to kill the curiosity by telling them there is one correct answer, and we know it already, and don’t do any thinking of your own." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcasts Mentioned In This Program The C-Realm with KMO The Cannabis Podcast Network The Dopecast with the Dopefiend Lefty’s Lounge Psychonautica with Max Freakout BB’s Bungalow Pothead’s Coffee Shop Blacklight in the Attic The Entheogenic Evolution with Martin Ball Ape Reality with Tom Barbarlet Biota.org’s Artificial Life Interviews with Tom Barbarlet Shrink Rap Radio with Dr. Dave

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When I say think for yourself, I don’t mean think selfishly for yourself. I mean think independently." "If you’re going to think for yourself, you gotta learn to think clearly." "The person who thinks for herself or himself has to have a sense of humility, and of modesty, and of relativity because you have to realize that I’m thinking for myself, but hopefully you are too, and you’re bound to come out with something a little different from me. So there has to be an ability to listen, compassion, plus the modesty. No matter how smart we are there’s a lot we aren’t going to be able to figure out tonight." "I’m glad we’re laughing together because that’s a key. A sense of humor is the key. … That ability to laugh together certainly goes along with the ability to think together." "Any time you introduce a new technology of thought processing, or of thought communication, you change everything else." [Speaking about the biblical Eve] "I’m really pleased that the first member of my species was a woman who had the courage to stand up on her feet and think for herself." "The idea that any human being should be forced by economics, forced to do work that can be done better by a machine or a computer is totally humiliating to any concept of our human dignity and worth." "Now in the Industrial Age, a good person was someone who was prompt, reliable, dependable, productive, efficient, and replaceable." "It’s always the artists, by the way, I think. The artists, and the entertainers, and the writers, and the musicians whose job it is to prepare society, to become a comfortable way for changes that otherwise would be too frightening." "The point of the 20th century, you can argue, is to get us to accept knowledge, processing, and reality on screens." "To me, a computer is a thought processor." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A case in defense of Salvia divinorum Mythic Imagination Fred Johnson and Michael Meade Johnson sings an introduction for Ari Berk "What Was Said to the Rose" Mythic Journeys (preview trailer)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think disease is (and I don’t want to be held to this entirely, but) largely more linguistic than people think." "The story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living." "Nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power. And it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism. Nothing is unannounced. If you’re paying attention, stuff comes down the pike, first the little waves, then the medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami. But you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected." "What it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always say. But THAT something is coming at you is usually pretty clear, pretty clear." [In response to the possible evolution of artificial intelligence] "It’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclineith toward bodhisattva-hood, then the bodhisattva are on their way. If on the other hand, intelligence doesn’t incline toward bodhisattva-hood, then probably the house-cleaning of all time is on its way. Because when these AIs come to consciousness and realize what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed, indeed." "Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiratualized the world, but we didn’t tame it." "It’s very interesting, how the re-animation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding it. That you could pass through the reductive phase of science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, and still not have a handle on what does it mean to be a being, what does it mean to be a human being, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow we got to this place without answering any of those questions." "Connectivity is the pre-condition for love." "My view of, let’s say, the last thousand years, is that it’s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it, more soul-searching afterwards, more questioning ‘Why? Why did we do that?’ " "People are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estate. But instead they’re invited to fetishize, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest. And all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own ends: The accumulation of capital investment, or the acquisition of land, or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that. Our human-ness is constantly being eroded." "The image I have of our community is, we’re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship." "Sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience." "If psychedelics don’t secure a moral community, then I don’t see what the point of it is. Otherwise we’re just another cult." "It’s good to dry out occasionally. Very occasionally." "It’s always puzzled me how this community has never really understood its roots in American Transcendentalism, or why we never used that hammer against the establishment. Because this sort of secular-mystical-Theosophical brand of thinking is just as American as mom and apple pie, and yet you rarely hear it invoked by our people. And yet it’s where our roots grow deepest, with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorn. I mean, my god, these are the people who put together 19th century America." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think reason can take us only a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination." "There have been many episodes in the history of science where great hope gave way to paranoia." "The [UFO] hysteria has become more explicit and has wandered in first one direction and then another, but if this is a contact it’s the most peculiarly un-contact-like contact it’s possible to imagine." "And this is something I’m going to try and convince the UFO community of, what we drug people have that you don’t is repeatability." "The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity." "Reason, but a willingness to explore the edges has been [my] method. … I have never seen a violation of physics that was not connected somehow with a psychedelic experience." "Not all psychedelics are alike. And this very small family of compounds, called the tryptomine hallucinogens, bear careful examination if we’re seriously interested in this question of exterrestial penetration of the human world." "Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff [psilocybin], Gordon Wasson, Richard Shulties, Albert Hofmann, the giants know that this stuff is animate. This is not a drug. It’s something that’s disguising itself as a drug in order not to spread alarm." "I think that the alien will be so alien that your jaw will hang in the air. And expecting to meet an anthropoid-like alien with an interest in your reproductive machinery and gross industrial capacity is as culture-bound a concept as searching NGC-321 for a good Italian restaurant. It’s absurd on the face of it." "All of human history is the signifier of the presence of the alien. Human history is what happens to an advance animal species when it is inner-penetrated on a scale of a million years by a mind in another dimension." "The flying saucer, the alien, the other is what is sculpting us out of animal organization as we move toward it in time. This is what shamanism is all about. This is what the psychedelic people are discovering as they descend into these trances." "A shaman, and a psychedelic person, and a UFO contactee, is someone who has seen the end. They simply didn’t know what they were looking at, because who knows what the end looks like." "The world is not what it appears to be." "Psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was to the re-defining of astronomy." "I think that the ‘real other’ need not be guarded by the frail efforts of a cults apologists." "Now you may have thought telepathy was you hearing somebody else think. Apparently, that’s not what telepathy is. Telepathy is you seeing what somebody else means. It’s the visual acquisition of meaning rather than the audio acquisition of meaning." "I think that we are on a collision course with a planet-transforming event, and that we have been for a very, very long time. I also believe that it lies below the horizon of rational apprehension at this point in time." "That’s where the frontier of this hyper-technical fantasy is headed, toward a revivification of knowledge systems that were ancient when the pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye." "I think we’re on the brink of a tremendous evolutionary adventure, and that it will involve physically re-designing ourselves." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Conference on Precession & Ancient Knowledge Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 117: Aliens are ‘Real’

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth." –Rupert Sheldrake [Speaking of the past:] "So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways." –Rupert Sheldrake "The basic idea I’m proposing is that the so-called ‘Laws of Nature’ may be more like habits. They may depend on what’s happened before and on how often it’s happened. So there may be a cumulative memory in nature, largely unconscious, which gives rise to habits and things, which accounts for the stability of nature as we know it. But this is not all governed by eternal laws that were there at the Big Bang." –Rupert Sheldrake "The English couldn’t bear this void for long, caused by the suppression of pilgrimage [by the Protestant Reformation], and within a few generations had invented tourism, which is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage." –Rupert Sheldrake "I think a great move forward would happen when astronomy and astrology link up once again." –Rupert Sheldrake "If the Sun has a kind of consciousness, then what about the entire galaxy, with this mysterious center?" –Rupert Sheldrake "What we call the imagination is actually the universal library of what is real, that you couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real, somewhere, sometime. And that to me is very empowering because that’s the truth that you learn at the center of the psychedelic experience that’s so mind boggling that you can’t really return with it, that it’s real." –Terence McKenna "Now it’s time to realize that trying to reason upward from the laws of atomic physics to organism is not going to work. That there are … emergent properties at every level." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Galaxy Map Hints at Fractal Universe

Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Preet Chopra.] "The ’set’ is talking about what the individual who ingests a psychedelic brings to the table in terms of their life experience, their mood, expectations, family history, their personality structure, significant relationships, and their systems of belief. ‘Setting’ accounts for all the other factors that are not internal to the person, the physical environment, location, all sorts of sensory stimuli that might be present during intoxication, and the other participants, particularly a therapist or facilitator." "A term that’s out there among recreational psychedelic users is ‘psychonaut’, which really means, from Greek, ’sailor of the mind’, and I think this is kind of the experience those folks are going for." "In terms of reducing risk, I certainly feel that anybody with certain medical contra indications, and taking prescription drugs, should really avoid taking a psychedelic." [In response to a question about the fact that there was very little dialogue between the study participant and the attending psychatrists:] "Minimal dialogue during the actual experience. And that is based on the work that Grof did, and Panke saying, hey, let this medicine do its own work." "There are some people who believe that by putting on eyeshades and listening to music there is less incidence of sensual kinds of phenomena, and that allows for more of a psychological benefit." Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Scientists Who Revived Magic Mushroom Research Hallucinogen Gives Lasting Spiritual Boost "Spiritual" effects of mushrooms last a year Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms’ Transcendent Effect Lingers

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Most people are living in a world they can’t understand. And when people can’t understand something they tend to go for sinister explanations of it." "I prefer to think that, at minimum, there are about 24 conspiracies afoot. . . . I cannot find any proof of any conspiracy that really existed, that was brought into court and convicted, that lasted more than ten years before everybody double-crossed everybody else, and the conspiracy fell apart." "He [John von Newman] realized that most of our perceptions are in the ‘maybe’ mode. They’re not yes or no, they’re not true or false, they’re just ‘maybes’. I think ‘maybe logic’ is probably the greatest invention of the 20th century." "I regard religion and patriotism as the two major mental illnesses afflicting this planet." "The CIA/Tsarist/Nazi Alliance began to me to seem more and more the key to everything that’s been crazy and bizarre and incomprehensible about American foreign policy in the last fifty years. I think the central thinking of the ruling class of the United States is basically within the Tsarist paradigm." "Patriotism is loyalty to a gene pool." "I would say faith is the chief fomenter of war in the whole history of the world. Even in comparatively secular societies it becomes an article of faith that the government is justified. The other side is all wrong. We’re all right. And nobody’s supposed to think about the question at all. That becomes despicable. I believe we should think about the despicable." "It absolutely stops thinking entirely if you’ve got enough faith." " ‘Faith is believing what you know aint so’. That’s why they put lightening rods on their churches." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "What I’ve observed, and I think it’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine." "If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance." "Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. . . . Time is, in fact, speeding up." "No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night." "Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck." "What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use ‘higher dimensional’ in the mathematical sense." Definition of ‘eschaton’: "Eschaton comes from the Greek word ‘echatos’, which just means the end." "The ‘hard swallow’ built into science is this business about the Big Bang. … This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. … Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It’s the limit case for likelihood." "We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event." "Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us." "[The psychedelic experience] is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind." "The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "For as long as I can remember I have been influenced by a role model who has guided me through my navigation of this amazing life. I am a great follower of Socrates." "Corrupting the minds of the young is a difficult job, god knows it’s ill-paid, somebody has to do it." "I do feel this is a wonderful time for change-agents to be alive." "I ended up growing up thinking that everybody was like me, and that is, obviously, a mistake." "As soon as you belong to a system where you’re not known individually, and where you don’t know, individually, the other people, you are by definition depersonalizing yourself, a robot cog of the Big Machine." "This [1946] was the peak of the industrial age, and the aim of psychology was to help people be ‘adjusted’. Remember? If you were well-adjusted that was it. And the worst thing you could say was someone was maladjusted, which means they were thinking for themselves. "I see Ram Das two or three times a year. He comes by my house and we split a bottle of wine or a six-pack and have a joint or two." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: (This program marks our third anniversary of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon!) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Aldous Huxley.] "Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows." "We are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions." "Given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country." "If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government." "The really interesting thing about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered." "Man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature." "You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect." "And then again, in the case of these very strange substances like psilocybin and lysergic acid, I think there is a great deal to be said for doing what William James talked about, which was getting people to realize that their ordinary, sort of common sense view of the world is not the only view. The universe they inhabit is not the only possible universe." NOTE FROM LORENZO: A few minutes after I posted this podcast on the Net, I checked my email and discovered that fellow saloner John H. sent me a link to the following video. After you listen to the talk by Aldous Huxley you may find it rewarding to view the following video and then do a little thinking about what is really going on in the U.S. today while you re-read "Brave New World". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Link mentioned in this podcast: The Center for Cognitive Liberty

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [Quoting a friend] " ‘The apocalypse is already happening.’ The slow apocalypse is unraveling all over the world." –Terence McKenna "If it’s all on automatic, if the world is either undergoing some kind of mass extinction and soul migration into the Elysium realm, then very little has to be done. If, on the other hand, it isn’t on automatic then what is the nature of the political and social world that we should construct for ourselves and our children?" –Terence McKenna "What we have is a future-phobic society that places a great deal of stress on the preservation of a pseudo-tradition called "Family Values" by some people, but it has many names. It’s not an archaic social model, or anything rooted in long-term human organization. It’s basically the 19th century industrial model of the couple with some children fitted into an industrial economy." –Terence McKenna "It seems to me that a whole re-thinking of the notion of freedom has to come, and that it isn’t strictly a matter of more freedom." –Terence McKenna "I think we’re going to have to go back to Plato. Plato did not trust the poets, and the heirs of the poets in our hell bard are Madison Avenue." –Terence McKenna "The interesting ideas have to do with touching the taboos."–Terence McKenna "I’m basically an optimist, but not because I have faith in human institutions. But because I think there is a transcendental attractor that will eventually pull our chestnuts out of the fire." –Terence McKenna "I do believe that history is the proof of the presence of a hyperdimensional something or other, which is acting on ordinary biology." –Terence McKenna "The government follows. It doesn’t lead. We need leadership now, and leadership comes from people, that’s us." –Ralph Abraham "We’re not being led by evil people. We’re being led by jackasses at this point." –Terence McKenna "Pretending that this catastrophe [a coming global ice age] is not probable will almost certainly guarantee that it takes place real soon." -Ralph Abraham "Let’s avoid the disease of denial, because if we don’t admit a problem then there is no solution." –Ralph Abraham "What free trade means is the right to sell crap everywhere. The right to deal Coca Cola in Afghanistan, that’s what free trade is, the right to sell Volvos in Turkmenistan. It’s a bad idea, free trade. We don’t want to make trade easier. We want to make the manufacture of objects and excruciatingly expensive process and the moving of them from one market to another damn near impossible, because what we want is the de-materialization of culture." –Terence McKenna "The Great Leveling, which the Left always called for has in fact taken place in part, and that’s why you have less money. When the leveling took place did you think it was going to kick back into your pocketbook? You haven’t visited Bangladesh recently." –Terence McKenna "The Nation State has become a Fascist tool, all Nation States. What these companies stand for is unbridled gangsterism." –Terence McKenna "What we need to do is dematerialize our interphasing with nature. If we’re going to keep the body then we have to jettison material culture. We cannot have both the body and material culture." –Terence McKenna "Yes, I think that we’re going to a grand destiny, and that the planet will survive this, but consciousness is the flashlight to throw on the path." –Terence McKenna "History is an agitation in biology that proceeds the Eschaton, and it only takes it 25,000 years to rise out of the sea of chaos." –Terence McKenna "Love is what lies at the end of the historical descent into novelty. It has to be." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "The key thing about the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized adult form." "The more power you give to the young of your species, the sooner you give that power to them, the faster your species is going to grow, the farther your gene pool is going to move into the future, and of course it goes without saying, the key to everything, the more growth in the individual will result." "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The smarter you are, the higher you want to be, that’s obvious." "The key to the sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult-hive over-specialized models." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD? (Discover Magazine)

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that any models [of the psychedelic experience] that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical are really, really feeble compared to the experience itself." –Ralph Abraham "It’s the Logos-world that we’ve lost the connection with." –Terence McKenna "I think the difference between a representation of the [psychedelic] state and being in the state itself is the sense of meaning, engagement, and intensity." –Rupert Sheldrake "When language became something acoustically processed it became so bloodless that it became then the willing servant of abstraction, which before had been an exotic and little explored branch of linguistic activity, that suddenly burgeoned into the major concern of a lot of people." –Ralph Abraham "I regard language as some kind of project that is uncompleted as we sit here. . . . Clearly, the whole world is held together by small mouth noises, and it’s only BARELY held together by small mouth noises." –Terence McKenna "If you buy in to the idea that psychedelics somehow are showing you the evolutionary path yet to be followed, then it seems obvious that what it entails is a further completion of the project of language." –Terence McKenna "The intellectuals, unfortunately, at the top of the pyramid are the last to get the news. They’re still pouring over Locke, and Hegel when what’s really happening is Guns n Roses and Nirvana, and I don’t mean the Buddhist state of transcendence. . . . So culture tends to be ruled by the people who are the last to get the news in terms of new technologies which are reshaping the culture." –TerenceMcKenna "Literacy is finished. It was a phase. It’s not to be preserved by anyone other than curators. The rest of us are going to live, obviously, in a culture shaped by new forms of media." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  Spirit Matters by Matthew Pallamary

Guest speakers: Allyson & Alex Grey plus Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "Our parents were completely unprepared for the sixties . . . and for our behavior." – Alex Grey "[In drug education as it is practiced today] there is this kind of overriding mis-characterization of drugs, and an exaggeration of the problems that, marijuana especially, gives us." –Alex Grey "And they contradict people’s own observations."–Allyson Grey "There are perils, and we have children and we want to protect them. So drugs can lead to terrible things as well." –Allyson Grey "Basically, you want to establish a bond with your children, and not to come in with total, preconceived notions about how they ought to behave. The idea is to listen and to establish a link of trust so that you can really be there for them, instead of alienating them. So you have to learn about these substances and the possible substances they’re using, so that you can be an informed assist for them." –Alex Grey "If you’ve already been lying to your kids about drugs, then why should they listen to you about anything, including the dangers of meth?" –Alex Grey "If any of you haven’t gone a year and a half without any substances, it’s really a great experience. The altered state of sobriety is something Alex and I recommend." –Allyson Grey "This is what my mother taught me when it came to sex, and I applied it to drugs. Whenever a child asks a question you answer it, and you don’t tell them things they don’t want to know, or they’re not ready to know. But if they ask you something, you tell them honestly." –Allyson Grey "We’re part of an underground society, and that’s a heavy burden to place on a young mind if they’re not ready." –Alex Grey "The Connection Between Mathematics and the Logos" Ralph Abraham tells the story of how he became involved with the psychedelic community and how psychedelic medicines informed his work and that of the generation who developed the personal computer among other achievements. In this trialogue, Ralph poses (and answers) the question,"Have psychedelics had an influence in the evolution of science, mathematics, the computer revolution, computer graphics, and so on?" "We have to admit that mathematics has been reborn, and this rebirth is some kind of outcome of, apparently, the computer revolution and the psychedelic revolution, which took place concurrently, concomitantly, cooperatively in the 1960s." –Ralph Abraham Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Bruce Damer.] "It seems as though the universe is a sort of self-contained thing, never looses any information." "A mechanism called ‘life’ was able to fight against all this crud, and entropy, and fires and brimstone and preserve this little piece of information [DNA] forward, and it’s called reproduction, it’s called life. And that process has outlived the life of most stars. It’s certainly older and tougher and more resilient than all the configuration of the continents." "What if the universe, like Chris Langston’s brain, is gradually booting up an awareness of itself?" "And are you part of that great project that the universe is trying to do, which is to know itself?" "It’s like exposing you to the most powerful drug ever given to primates, which wasn’t alcohol, it’s not nicotine, it’s not MDMA, it’s not LSD. It’s the computer/human interaction." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option (click to) Contact Bruce Damer "A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You" an essay by Bruce Damer

Guest speakers: Ann and Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do." . . .Sasha "Let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug." . . . Ann "I really cannot conceive of a color test that would show positive with 2C-B or 2C-I in urine because the amounts there are so small." . . . Sasha "There are many, many things that are potentially active as psychedelics and have not been assayed, not been tasted. The whole art of taking an unknown compound and beginning to find out what it’s action is going to be sounds naively simple. You just start taking more and more of it until you turn on. But the truth is your turn-on may be a convulsion. It may be sedation. It may be all kinds of other types of action. So you have to sneak up on a new compound. So if you are at all considering looking at these kinds of things, I stress: Be extremely cautious if they have not been taken in humans before. Preliminary animal screening, to me, is worthless." . . . Sasha "The hypnotic trance state is, I believe, fully as good as any drug in opening those doors inside a person’s psyche, and I do believe that instead of risking legal problems, you should go to a good hypnotherapist and find out how to discover yourself that way." . . . Ann "Sasha usually tries to remind people that it isn’t the drug that is giving you an experience, whether it’s one of love or anything else. It is your own psyche, the drugs act as keys to the inner doors. I mean, DMT will definitely open a different door than mescaline, but it’s all still what’s inside you." . . . Ann Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Ann and Sasha Shulgin:  Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story  Tihkal: The Continuation

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When the big quake comes, be on the California side!" "So the concept that developed at Harvard, then at Millbrook, and later it seemed to have moved out to other places, was the concept of serial imprinting. That for thousands of years the smartest women and men have known that through manipulating your nervous system by getting high in any way that you can you can suspend the old imprints and have a chance to start a new reality." "Your theory of evolution is the key to your own personal development, or your understanding of what’s happening around you. . . . Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re going to lead." "Evolution is not accidental." "Every time you put your tongue in the mouth of a loved one, or vice versa, you are exchanging more information in one second than all the Libraries of Congress in history." "You either believe in nothing whatsoever than chance, or you’re going to believe in a biological intelligence which knows that she’s doing." "The point here is, if you’re going to feel ’synced’ you’ve got to be in a place where there are people who share your reality." "The way evolution works is this, evolution never tries to change grown ups. . . . Look in the dictionary for the word ‘adult’. You’ll find the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘to grow’." "We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes." "What happened in the 1960s was this, the time had come to avoid terminal adulthood. . . . A generation of young people simply refused to buy the adult image, the adult model." "One of the messages that I have right now, the message is this: I don’t advocate anything, but I urge you to think it over. I urge you at all costs to avoid terminal adulthood." "When you look at a map that has got those hours, those meridians, those aren’t hours, those are centuries." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option