Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Terence McKenna.] "One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively." "The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension." "So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It’s not my friend. It’s a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions." "Culturally defined reality is some kind of intelligence test, and those who are joining are failing the test." "The imagination is a dimension of non-local information." "And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings." "And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That’s how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience." "What they [psychedelics] cause is what I’m advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we’re practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction." "What is happening, I think, it’s really bigger than psychedelics, it’s bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That’s what’s happening." "This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time." "The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. . . . Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That’s how he can do his magic." "There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness." "There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this." "The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It’s just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we hear a talk given at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland in March of 2008. The speaker is the one and only Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, who has been a legendary figure in the psychedelic world since the early 1960s. Here is part of what Wikipedia has to say about Mountain Girl: Carolyn Adams, (born May 6, 1946),[1] later known as Mountain Girl and Carolyn Garcia, was a Merry Prankster and the wife of Jerry Garcia. After growing up near Poughkeepsie, New York, Adams met Neal Cassady in 1964; who introduced her to Kesey and his friends, one of whom gave her the name "Mountain Girl". Cassady took her to La Honda, Ken Kesey’s base of operations, where she quickly joined the inner circle of Pranksters and was romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter by him named Sunshine.[2] The Grateful Dead song "Here Comes Sunshine" may or may not be an allusion to Adams’ and Kesey’s daughter (the Dead were fond of lyrics having double, often personal meanings). Before actually marrying in 1981, Jerry Garcia and Adams had two daughters.[1] Garcia and Mountain Girl ultimately divorced in 1994,[1] however, they remained personal friends right up until Garcia’s death a few months later. In her talk, Mountain Girl told many stories linking her time with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to the evolution of the Grateful Dead and her life with Gerry Garcia and the rest of the band. This is perhaps one of the best encapsulations of The Sixties you will hear. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Daniel Pinchbeck at the Playalogue he led on August 29, 2007 at the Burning Man Festival. This Playalogue was held in the big yurt at the PodCluster in Black Rock City.] "I think there is a lot of evidence that suggests we’re in this kind of very critical sort of evolutionary window for the human species." "I really do feel that one of the critical things that is happening at Burning Man is a kind of conscious and subconscious interrogation of gender and sexuality." "What we have to consider is that if sexuality is this infinite spectrum, and everybody is highly unique in their sexuality, then to just have a social construct of monogamy is going to lead to a lot of anger, and frustration, and hostility." "In a lot of non-Western tribal cultures there is a kind of like a basic happiness that people have. Our culture is all about the pursuit of happiness, but at the core there’s a basic, kind of, general sense of insatiability and unhappiness." "I don’t think that the nuclear family is the natural model, or good model, for raising a child. I think, actually, the tribal community is the proper model." "And I think one question is really like is there a fixed human nature. And if there isn’t a fixed human nature, which I think is quite possible, then we can kind of reconfigure relationship patterns, relationship models, in almost any way." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We know that typically the real changes in human nature, the changes in human politics and economics and society, are brought about by two things: By people who have a map or a vision or a model of where we’re going to go, these are the philosophers. And then the technicians, the people who get together the printing presses, or the compasses, or the high technology that can take us where we want to go." "Viewed in the 1930s, when Einstein came to America, he was considered as far out as a crack dealer." "Heisenberg taught us to take the universe very personally … in both senses of the word." "So who? Who’s gonna prepare a civilization of factory workers and farmers and people who haven’t even got the Model T Ford yet? Who’s gonna prepare them for an Einsteinian, relativistic, quantum physical, ever-changing, probabilistic universe? Who? Well you know who you can count on at every time in human history when we had to make a big philosophic lurch forward. Who always came to the front and saved the day and made us feel happy and comfortable with a new future? I’m talking about those friends of ours who have always been around when we needed them, the musicians, and the artists, and the poets, and the writers, and the bards, and the performers, and the storytellers, and, OK, the minstrels, the rock n’ rollers. Right! The actors, the script writers." "The whole 20th Century, to me, is the story of how artists and writers prepared us to be comfortable in a quantum-physical world." "We’re talking about a generation of people who, since the time they were born, have been inundate by data, electronic data. To the Baby Boomers and subsequent generations electronic data is the ocean they swim in." "Of course, everybody got down on the poor doctor [Benjamin Spock]. He was blamed for the excesses of the sixties, ha ha. I was glad to have him get blamed otherwise I would have gotten blamed." "The psychedelic pudding hit the fan in the sixties when the Spock kids hit high school and college, and they wanted a gourmet education, and they wanted connoisseur sex. … Gee, we said you’re the best, but we didn’t realize that you guys would take us seriously." "The Cyber Society is a society made up of individuals who think for themselves, linked up with other individuals who think for themselves." "The Sixties were the adolescence of the Baby Boom." Following the talk by Dr. Leary I play a short personal message from Eldrige Cleaver to Timothy Leary that was recorded on January 7, 1995. The message Cleaver was so intensely trying to convey to his friend, Tim Leary, was that he believed it was imperative that the U.S. elect a woman president in the year 2000. Unfortunately, neither of these two important historical figures are alive today, and thus we can only speculate as to what they would think about the state of affairs in 2008. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option KMO’S C-Realm Podcasts KMO’S Personal Blog The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference "Flashbacks: An Autobiography"by Timothy Leary "The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time" by Hunter S. Thompson And by William Gibson: Neuromancer Mona Lisa Overdrive Count Zero

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Matt Pallamary NEW! ... Two of Matt Pallamary's books are now available on Kindle: Spirit Matters ... Kindle Edition Land Without Evil ...

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Alicia Danforth, who is Dr. Charles Grob’s research assistant, leads a Playalogue at the 2007 Burning Man Festival. In this wide-ranging group conversation, Alicia skillfully guided our eclectic audience through the intricacies of FDA-approved psychedelic research. "I’m hoping to spark ideas in other people’s minds about what can be done to get a foothold in advancing psychedelic research." –Alicia Danforth "I tend to think of music [in a therapeutic psychedelic session] as a little boat you can hop on when you’re journeying and ride to wherever you need to go." –Alicia Danforth. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: Ecstasy : The Complete Guide : A Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits of MDMA by Julie Holland, M.D.

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic drugs are to the human mind today what the discovery of the microscope was to medicine and biological science three or four hundred years ago. Psychedelic drugs expand and speed up consciousness. They are going to bring about a tremendous change in our society, in our view of man and our way of life in the future." "When you take LSD you do go on a trip. It’s a voyage. It’s the most ancient voyage that man has ever known, the one beyond your mind and your current tribal situation into the incredible possibilities which lie inside. So it’s a fair statement to say an LSD voyage is a trip." "A chemical age is going to have a chemical sacrament." "Every great breakthrough in religion and science has always involved a new method of bringing into consciousness what you couldn’t see before, the telescope, the microscope. And you remember, the fellow that developed the telescope back in Florence a few hundred years ago got into the same sort of trouble with society that we’re in today. Any new instrument which opens up consciousness threatens the establishment." "It takes a long time to learn to use LSD. It’s no shortcut. It’s no instant mysticism. It’s no instant psychoanalysis. It’s tough, hard work." "Stay away from it unless you’re willing to take LSD in a state of grace for serious and important purposes." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Erik Davis.] "The imagination is a key, and pivotal interface, between human beings and the natural world." "Any kind of restorative, sustainable renewal of our planet has to exist on the imaginal realm as well as the realm of technical solutions, political developments, and technological fixes. It’s a multi-dimensional problem." "So the imagination is really the core, the source, the matrix of our multi-dimensional experience." "The creative imagination functions in a different way than religious beliefs allow us to engage with." "If we’re into integration now, with science and technology, that means that we can’t avoid that skeptical voice [of scientific, existential materialism]. We have engage and learn to integrate that skeptical voice as well. [To think] it’s our job to just say ‘No. Those science people they don’t understand. They’re locked in rationality. It’s actually this mystical world, this magical world’, is a profound failure, in my opinion, of our role. And the more we go into loosy-goosy mystic New Age stuff as a concretized belief system, rather than as an open, playful world that adds richness to our lives the way that poetry does, or the way that religious imagery does, drawing us to those higher realms but holding them lightly so that we can still engage a skeptical materialist, for me, that’s what integration means." "The new paradigm is that there’s not a paradigm." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Erik Davis’ Web Site: Techgnosis

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "I’m very pleased … to see how much of the youth culture has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue. Because it really means that after 20, 30 years of unstinting distortion and misrepresentation by the media and some of the powers that be, that nevertheless the curiosity is intact, the opportunity is available, and people have not been fooled by the effort to denigrate, dumb-down, sideline, water down, sell out, whitewash and screw over the idea that psychedelic plants are an excellent and necessary part of any program of spiritual self-exploration." "Our evolutionary heritage lies in the use of psychedelics. It was in all probability that psychedelics called forth our humanness." "For all of its capacity to razzle dazzle, science has some serious drawbacks, some serious limitations that psychedelic experiences make more starkly evident, I think, simply because psychedelic people then compare the full spectrum of their experience to the paradigm they’re being offered." "Nature is self-similar across scale." "We can extrapolate towards cosmic processes by thinking about our own lives." "In other words, we represent the quintessential gathering together of novelty. We are more than mere matter. We are more than mere biology. We are more than mere aboriginal culture. We are all of those things plus we are our skin of technical connections." "The Big Bang is completely improbable, utterly improbable. It is the most improbable of all improbabilities. So just remember that when the fascism of science is telling you that astrologers don’t know what they’re talking about, and somebody else doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I mean, science has built a house of cards on worse than sand, quicksand!" "I’m willing to say I’m convinced that history is the annunciation of the nearby presence of a transformational event. . . . History is what happens when an animal species has its genome distorted by the nearby presence of a transcendental object." "Love, in the heart of a monkey, which is what we are, is an effort to image this transcendental thing at the end of time. To love is to open to the presence of the Other, and that’s a very, very profound boundary dissolution." "Ultimately at death, I think probably the only way you can meet death fully in command of your faculties is to love it, to surrender to it." "What it might take you forty years to do through a process of rational analysis, and psychotherapy, and deconstruction, and so on and so forth, it can happen literally overnight on a sufficiently alarming dose of a psychedelic substance." "One of the great things about psychedelics that is so corrosive to capitalistic values is that psychedelics show you that the best stuff is in your own head, better than walking down Madison Avenue looking in the windows is sitting in your shabby apartment on six dried grams [of psilocybin mushrooms] looking in the windows." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "You have to go out of your mind to use your head." "Now, in taking this eccentric position, of taking the brain seriously, you run the risk of getting out of touch with your professional colloquies." "Now from the standpoint of the strategy of the genetic material, every living species is simply a creative solution to a packaging problem." "This [early imprinting of young ducklings on orange basketballs instead of mother ducks] is both funny and tragic, because it raises the question, in the case of the human being, what accidental orange basketball have you and I been exposed to early in life?" "At times it seems to us that one of the functions of the mind is to rationalize and protect an accidental early imprint." "We suggest that psychedelic drugs may be seen as chemical agents which temporarily suspend your old imprints." "The thing which excites us these days is the corollary concept of psychedelic RE-imprinting." "I think that anyone who doesn’t experience, at some moment during their psychedelic sessions, and intense awe-full fear has been cheated by their psychiatrist or their bootlegger." "LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever known to man." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are from a conversation held in September 1991.] Terence McKenna: "But in fact it seems that the ouroboros has taken its tail in its mouth and these two concerns psychedelics and computers] are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge." Terence McKenna: "The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic." Terence McKenna: "Yes, I mean television certainly has an influence on the mass mind, but on the creative, cutting-edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture, but if you watch television it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television." Terence McKenna: "As a global society, possessing DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting wooly mastedons and that sort of thing, but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded." Terence McKenna: "Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward ‘outing’ the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this, as are psychedelic drugs." Terence McKenna: "High definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point on-the-ropes linear uniform unitarians, because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography. And it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within society." Ralph Abraham (in 1991): "Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation but because it’s not interactive. Interactive computer graphic games where you can watch the soap opera but also play with it to change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema." Terence McKenna: "So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: These comments were recorded on September 3, 1991, and the opinions expressed by the participants in this podcast may have changed in subsequent years.] Rupert Sheldrake: "If it were just one (crop circle), the hoax theory would be very plausible, but a phenomenon over such a long time period, now with ones turning up in other parts of the world as well, increasing levels – 400 of them last year [1990] in different parts of Britton, this requires quite a large effort." Rupert Sheldrake: "The alien theory [about the formation of crop circles] is a very rare one among the theories encountered. The one I think is most popular among people who take seriously the phenomenon and think that the hoax theory is not the only possible explanation is that the spirit of the land itself, or Earth mysteries long embedded in these ancient megalithic monuments are sort of coming back to life again and somehow are being reactivated in Brittan’s hour of need, or that Gaia or the Gaian intelligence or the Gaian mind itself is involved in some ongoing dialogue or communication which principally has the effect, year by year, of attracting more and more attention. And the message year by year seems to be ‘Watch This Space’." Ralph Abraham: "I think we should bet on the red and we should bet on the black. Probably you are right. Probably it’s a hoax. In case it’s a hoax, probably military, all right. But just as the fanatics of this phenomenon can’t dis the hoaxes theory to zero, neither can we reduce the non-hoax theory to zero, therefore, we have to keep our eyes open in case it actually begins to say some understandable intelligence to us. We can’t dismiss it completely." Rupert Sheldrake: "I think this is the only rational position to adopt, namely to treat it as a natural historical phenomena, or at least a phenomenon. Let’s just say a phenomenon, to investigate it emphatically, I think, is Bacon Ian science." Terence McKenna: "I’m claiming that orthodoxy is defending itself against magic. It’s a war between reason and magic. … It’s a desperate struggle between rational orthodoxy and magic." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Crop Circle Links 1. Why real crop circles cannot be hoaxed:http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html 2. http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/ Her photos can be found here: http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/photos/ 3. Andreas Mueller’s Interview with African Shaman on Crop Formations http://www.kornkreise-forschung.de/textCredoMutwa.htm 4. Interactive site: http://www.cropcircle-archive.com/archive/index.php?language=en 5. http://swirlednews.com/index.asp 6. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/index2.html Crop Circle Videos Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 1 (This link was broken the last time it was tested.) Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 2 http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7441333249846634309&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Unsigned Circles http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=2802311361701974260&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Alien Signs http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5043378172083766362&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Star Dreams – The Crop Circle Phenomena http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=966639197455233571&q=crop+circle&hl=en Julia Set http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6223143790883248313&q=crop+circle&hl=en Book mentioned in this podcast Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults by : Jacques Valle’e Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 118: 21st Century Koans

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: Terence McKenna: "In the absence of cannabis the dream life seems to become much richer. This causes me to sort of form a theory, just for my own edification, that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. … And if you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication." Terence McKenna: "And what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas." Terence McKenna: "Alcohol, on the other hand, is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits. What a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead." Terence McKenna: "For the 19th century, and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. … For the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology." Terence McKenna: "To my mind, the whole of Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish." Terence McKenna: "Hashish, cannabis, has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenic field you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world." Terence McKenna: "There’s a deeper issue which is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude." Ralph Abraham: "It [cannabis] is medicine for cultural evolution." Terence McKenna: "If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity." Terence McKenna: "It can turn you into a stupor, sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it, and I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it." Terence McKenna: "We [the U.S.A.] represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans." Terence McKenna: "Governments have always been, and continue to this day to be, the major purveyor of drugs, worldwide." Terence McKenna: "The day the Russians left [Afghanistan], the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured." "The precondition for creativity is, I think, is disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos." "The prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman." "This really is the bridge back to the archaic, shamanic function of the artist, permission to explore the irrational." "And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human beings, first in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone, within 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us and points us toward the kind of extra-planetary mega-civilization that we can feel operating on our own present like a kind of great attractor." "This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal, is the production and condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the human animal is language. … Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude with anything else going on on this planet." "Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language." "Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys. It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream." "The glory of the human animal is cognitive activity, song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent." "The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in fifteen or twenty thousand years." "The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act." "Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness." "Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. … If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found." "Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics." "The civilization that was created out of the collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: Today’s program features the second tape in a series of trialogue tapes that were recorded in September 1991 at a private recording session with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna. It begins with a wrap-up of their previous conversation, titled "Grass Roots Science". And then they begin with a new topic, introduced by Terence McKenna and his plan for "Saving the World". [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "If mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago." "As I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin, the one I come back to again and again as being central to any social program which would create a sane and caring future for our children and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment is the problem of over-population. All other social problems can be seen as being driven by the excess of human population on the Earth." "First of all, let’s just take it at face value: Each woman should bear only one natural child. Now what would be the demographic consequences of this? Startlingly, within fifty years the population of the Earth would be cut in half, without war, epidemic, forced migration, government programs of sterilization, and so forth and so on." "A child born to a woman in a high-tech, industrial society, in the upper class of that society, will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often told." "Notice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman, ‘How would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero? All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.’ " "I don’t think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future." . . . and from there, Ralph and Rupert point out a few of the problems with Terence’s plan and go on to propose yet another clever solution for saving the world. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Rupert Sheldrake: "Especially in Brittan, this declining confidence in science, and this declining funding of science has let to a reduction of scientific morale. Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students. . . . It looks as if the great golden days, the golden age of the sixties and seventies of endless expansion, is over, perhaps forever." Rupert Sheldrake: "So morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap, indeed, almost free in some cases. And much of the leading research has been done by students as projects. And this has made it clear to me that students, who do tens of thousands of projects around the world are quite capable of doing leading-edge research. They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance." Terence McKenna: "I think that science has not only moved from the easy problems to the hard problems, in its evolution over the past thousand years, it’s also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems." Terence McKenna: "Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature. Science is done to make money on a vast scale." Terence McKenna: "I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military/industrial complex." Terence McKenna: "And I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified scientific data. That’s an obscene concept." Rupert Sheldrake: "The vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999% at least, which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree, about the nature of consciousness, the range of imagination, and the powers of the human mind, etc. is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact, every effort is made to suppress it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Grass Roots Science Report mentioned in this podcast: An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Essentially, today’s podcast is a series of short notes to myself, little things that I don’t want to forget" [The following quotes are by Lorenzo] "As my Mexican friends sometimes say, ‘If you don’t change your direction, you are going to wind up where you’re heading.’ " " My problem, I discovered, was that there had been far too much DOING in my life and not nearly enough BE-ing." "I didn’t own my stuff. It owned me. … I now finally understand that nothing I possess is more precious to me than the opportunity to be able to appreciate a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day." "When I stopped trying to save the world I also stopped trying to save myself . .. and THAT was a big mistake." "Perhaps we all will have to first revolutionize our own lives, and then, on the foundations of our individual revolutions, will a new global consciousness arise." "It seems to me that our beliefs are what ultimately shape our personalities. So who OWNS those beliefs? If I do, then I am a freethinker, in charge of my own destiny. But if my beliefs own me, well, then the institutions that formulate and promulgate those beliefs, they own me." "I have finally come to grok the fact that the purpose of my life is not to reach a destination. Nor is my life a journey. No, for me at least, the purpose of life is to dance. A dance with no beginning and no end, just an endless dance." "Here and now. Here and now. All else is but memory and fantasy." TERENCE McKENNA QUOTES FROM THIS PODCAST: [The following quotes are by Terence McKenna] "People don’t take enough [psychedelics], that’s all." "When we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing." "The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting." "The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal." "These boundry-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past." "Get it straight. This is about an experience. Not my experience, your experience. This is about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard." "This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution, you are a free and indipendent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MUSIC USED IN THIS PODCAST: "Miss About You" (with vocals by Sharon), "Counting Days", "Long Distance" LiquidAlchemy with Queerninja … queerninja@doepfiend.co.uk "Velvet Apple" the sun blindness "Anything Can Happen" Catal Huyuk Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert "the Zahir" by Paulo Coelho

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [Note: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "These are the two things we don’t have: As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves." "We have not, in this culture, awakened to the depths of the crisis that surrounds us." "Our culture is in trouble. Not trouble! We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways, horror beyond your wildest imagination, or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination." "The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs but plants. It’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way." "When you talk about Gaia, it’s only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women. It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals." "We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I’m sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing, basically, to do enough hallucinogens in the diet." "It is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally. Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in." "Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behavior are acceptable." "There are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell. One of the other." "What we deny, as a culture, as a culture of materialist positivist reductionists, it the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature." "I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence. But that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Dr. V.S. Ramachandran PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes are by V.S. Ramachandran.] "Let’s think about what the standard explanations were [before the late 1990s] for synesthesia. The most common explanation, which we used to hear until about five or ten years ago was, ‘Oh they’re just crazy, they’re nuts,’ because it doesn’t make any sense. And this is a common reaction in science. If it doesn’t make any sense you brush it under the carpet." "It turns out that synesthesia is more common among acid users, but that to me makes it more interesting, not less interesting." "You cannot solve one mystery in science by using another mystery." "Synesthesia my even hold the key for understanding the emergence of language and abstract thought." "It turns out that it [synesthesia] is much more common among artists, poets, and novelists." "One of the things you know as a physician is that when you think something is crazy it usually means you’re not smart enough to figure it out." "Art is not about copying. It’s about distortion and exaggeration, but you cannot randomly distort an image and call it art." "There is only one pattern of neural activity that can exist at one time, and it will destroy any other competing patterns of neural activity. This means there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes are by Terence McKenna] "Culture denies experience." "We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to its surface." "We’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason, and science, and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm." "We’re in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it." "All the boundaries we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved [when using psychedelics]. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. Government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them." "The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the slave-driven agricultural projects, in the corporate office, whatever it is." "Madness, basically, up until the level of physical violence, means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore there is something wrong with you." "I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology." "History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing. We have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years." "What psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise. Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas." "The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego." "The key, on one level, to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding. That’s where it begins." "We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort. . . . You don’t get serial killers in the chipmunk population." "What the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable." "It seems to me that culture, at least this culture, is a shabby lie." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option