Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In just 50 minutes, Terence McKenna talks about how great cultures can lose their way, transforming machine-elves, the story of psychedelic psychotherapy, the Balkanization of epistemology, the UFO community as a social phenomenon, the role of psychedelics in the world corporate state, nanotechnology, time machines and the singularity. . . . See if you can keep up with this Niagara of ideas. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Terence McKenna talks about: The evolution of art representing the human form The impact of psilocybin on human sexuality How to build a gravity bong More thoughts on "the AI" being an obvious consequence of the Internet Further discussion about the Timewave Theory How his thoughts about the eschaton affect his daily life Psychedelics and the end of your spiritual childhood Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this installment, Terence McKenna continues his discussion about schizophrenia, and then he goes on to discuss his involvement in the rave scene, the possibility of psychedelic mushrooms being messengers from an alien intelligence, culture as a conn, and a suggestion for reversing the destruction of our Earthly environment. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 1:05 "I think that Maxwell’s Laws of Thermodynamics are only part of the story, and that you also have to look at the work that Ilya Prigogine did in the 60’s and 70’s where he showed that there is this principle-which they called different things, but, basically, it was random perturbation to higher states of order… Sometimes systems spontaneously organize themselves into more complex forms." 2:30 "Language is in conquest of dimensional expression-or, something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space of higher and higher dimension." 2:50-4:33 Terence uses Novelty Theory to describe the history of biological evolution in terms of an increasing ability to exist in and perceive higher and higher dimensions of being."…better eyes, better muscles, better coordination, better ability to move through this revealed topological manifold with a temporal axis." 4:40 "What spoken language is about is the recovery of memory at a later date-it’s a data recall system. And you talk about the past… and you strategize from it… When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit, the game is out in the open-the purpose of these endeavors is to keep the past from slipping away." 5:42 "The primate conquest of time (through time-binding technology) is the phenomenon that we call human history. This is apparently what we’re about, this is why we speak, why we write, why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical notation-because we are binding time. Well, you can then propagate that process forward to say, ‘What would satisfy this drive?’ Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself." 6:54 "To make this leap to the full-coordination of 4-D requires some kind of machine symbiosis… It requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet, and that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis, and become, instead of semi-cannibalistic primates, machine tenders of a global nervous system, some of which is gold and copper and glass, and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons, and this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment." 7:55 In the preceding podcast (In the Valley of Novelty – Part 5, 35:27), Terence says that two important facts about nature have been overlooked by science. The first one (discussed in Part 5) was the increase of Novelty/complexity through time. Now, Terence begins talking about the second one (the acceleration of this complexification). 8:05 "This process of producing Novelty… is not going on at a steady rate. It’s going on faster and faster as we approach the present. It’s like what mathematicians call a cascade… The early history of the universe is dull news… stars are condensing, galaxies are ordering themselves-this is the stuff of millennia, tens of millennia, greater spans of time… Once you get down to the last 500 million years on this planet, biology is the main show." 9:42 "When you reach the last million years, it’s as though this process of the emergence of Novelty both concentrates itself in nature into a single line-the hominids-but it also intensifies itself by orders of magnitude. So change is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years-languages are changing, pottery designs [are changing]-and as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious. What Novelty Theory is saying is: this is not an easily explained phenomenon." 10:56 "Human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature. Human history-25,000 years is all it is-is like a shimmer, an aura, something that flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before the thing goes cosmic, or whatever it is that it’s going to go." 15:08 "We even talk about downloading [sic] ourselves into machines. Well, as we sit here [in the summer of 1998], we’re functioning at about 100 hertz.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna (Minutes : Seconds into program) 2:10 "Civilization has made us uncomfortable with our human-ness because these various technologies and phonetic alphabets and things like that have rearranged our sensory ratios from what they were in Paleolithic times. In a sense, [psychedelics] hit your reset button, they address the animal body, they address a deeper level than cultural conditioning, and so you feel and experience these atavistic images and feelings that civilization has repressed or transmuted in you." 3:53 "Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris… Freud announces that… right beneath the surface… extremely violent, primitive impulses are [in us]… Jazz introduces syncopation… Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper-dancing… The whole of the 20th century is a turning back toward these values that had been repressed for millennia." 7:15 "Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer about, ‘Where is the gas pedal on the spiritual vehicle?’ The issue suddenly becomes, ‘Where is the brake?’… The doorway stands open, and all it requires is courage. Which is not to say it doesn’t require a lot…" 8:30 "I’ve [taken psychedelics] many times. There are many people here who have done it many times. And, the survivors are not confident. It doesn’t build hubris in you. It doesn’t promote bravado, because you know how quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size…" 9:02 "Sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up-I wouldn’t get near that… My goal is to see more, to understand more, and what I do on a trip is damn-near absolutely nothing." 9:38 "It’s an incredible statement about our human-ness… that within us, under the influence of these plants, we have, literally, Niagaras of alien beauty…" 10:04 "When I take mushrooms, I see more art in twenty minutes of behind the eyelids hallucination… than the human race seems to have produced in the last thousand years. On one level, that’s an incredible statement about the human capacity to generate and be in the presence of beauty. But the paradox is that so few people know this." 11:50 "[The 'gratuitous grace' of the psychedelic experience] is like a secret of some sort. And it’s a true secret, in that telling it does not give it away. I know this because I’ve been trying to tell this secret for twenty-five years, to anyone who would listen…" 14:20 "If you study the mystical literature… it all triangulates toward unitary states. ‘Bodhi mind’, ‘the white light’, ‘the ineffable’, ‘the unnamable’, ‘the radiance’. Vocabularies… which indicate some kind of homogeneity. …[but] when you push [psilocybin] there seems to be… a revelation of multiplicity, of detail, of complexification within complexification… an overwhelmingly bewildering profusion of phenomena." 17:08 "…the great confounding fact that I’ve brought back from my excursions in these places is that there is an organized intelligence in there… far more alien than the cheerful pro-bono proctologists that haunt the trailer-parks of the less-fortunate… What does it mean that our culture has sealed us off from this information?" 19:46 "What is the implication for the future [when] in this dark hour of complete over commitment to technology, economic solutions, rational reductionism, materialism, and so forth… this news [of psychedelics] arrives from these repressed aboriginal people that we have marginalized and humiliated in the process of building our own version of a global culture?" 21:28 "…where [psychedelics] hit us hardest is in the domain of art and invention and novelty, and we have built a culture that-however hostile it may be to the psychedelic experience-is incredibly friendly toward novelty, innovation,

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [All quotations are by Terence McKenna] 3:05 "Basically, for me, the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked—on someone who thought nothing would work." 4:06 "What I like to talk about [at these gatherings]—and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about—is the content of the psychedelic experience, which is very difficult to ‘English’, or to bring into any other language." 4:39 "…that was sort of my core specialty, if you will: the ethno-pharmacology of consciousness and the phenomenology of the states there derived. But, after 25 or 30 years of doing this, it bleeds into all kinds of larger categories, like, ‘What is art?’, ‘What is human history?’, ‘What is the religious impulse?’, ‘What is the erotic impulse?’, ‘What is mathematics?’… ‘What is the future?’…" 5:50 Terence gives a brief personal history (childhood-1998). 9:20 "…psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination …there’s nothing ‘woo-woo’ about it. It has to do with perturbing states of brain chemistry and standing back and observing the effects wrought thereby." 12:49 "…I think a lot of people who have never taken psychedelics have the idea that it’s thermodynamic noise, that it’s just the brain isn’t working right, it’s firing randomly, and then some portion of it is trying desperately to lay gestalts of meaning onto this random firing, and so you get this kind of surreal careening from one supposed illusionary perception to another. Anybody that’s taken psychedelics knows this is not a very apt or cogent description…" 14:01 "I do not say that this is the only path out of the mundane coil of blind casuistry and entropic degradation. I don’t say it’s the only path out—it’s the only path I found. And I checked some of the other major players… Perhaps yoga can deliver this, perhaps Mahayanist metaphysics can deliver these things. Perhaps I was impatient, or lumpen, or simply not intelligent enough. But the good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic—even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient." 15:30 "…[the historical process] is inevitably ramping up into more and more hypersonic states of self-expression… and this is what’s causing this ‘end of history’ phenomenon, this eschatological intimation that now haunts the cultural dialogue. There is something deep and profound moving in the mass psyche… now exacerbated and focused by new communications technologies that are essentially prostheses, extensions of the human mind and body…" 18:10 "…at least since I read McLuhan and assimilated his notion of tools as things which have a feedback into how we see the world, it seemed to me that the psychedelic state was then like a predictive model for what human history wanted to do. Human history wants to break through all boundaries, to somehow have a realized collective relationship with deity, or with that which orders nature…" 18:56 "[The depth/meaning of the psychedlic experience] is all in the ‘implications’. It has to do with how much intelligence you bring to it in the beginning. If there’s no mind behind the retinal screen, then it’s just mental pyrotechnics. It’s how much we can make of the phenomenon that makes it so rich." 19:30 "[Aldous Huxley] was asked at one point: ‘What is the psychedelic experience?’ and he said, ‘It’s a gratuitous grace… It is neither necessary for salvation, nor sufficient for salvation.’ But it certainly makes it easier… One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available." 20:20 "It’s a kind of paradox that… the hubristic enterprise of white man anthropology carried back all these medicine kits and mojo-bags and sacred plants and so forth and grew them in university botanical garde...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 3:08 "…the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy… and that this process… is accelerating… It seems as if… the whole cosmos wants to change into information… All points want to become connected…. The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together… You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process–it’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe." 4:43 "On one level, I think there is a cultural singularity… a place in our cultural development where we can’t predict or understand what will happen to us… a kind of flip-point… or doorway… or revelation…" 5:20 "The human adventure has become the cutting-edge of cosmic destiny, but it won’t always be so…" 7:04 "…we wished for transformation. Western civilization built it into it’s cultural agenda… and now, under the aegis of market-capitalism… somebody is going to put something together that is just going to completely redefine and rewrite the nature of reality itself… I’ll bet you it’s some kind of technology/drug-type thing… It may already be here." 8:18 "What do you do when you can do anything? That’s really the question at the end of history. Once you have overcome all limitation, what is the human agenda?" 8:53 In response to a question about the role of individuals who are becoming aware of the approaching cultural singularity: "…I think we’re more than watching–I think that we spin it. We’re the spin doctors of the thing. In other words, if there’s a prophecy that must be fulfilled, it’s a kind of general prophecy… [It] is open to human definition through specific acts of creation." 9:34 "The levels of novelty or habit in any given moment will be fulfilled–but how they’re fulfilled is a matter of human decision." 11:00 "The strangeness of our condition signifies the nearness of the attractor. The reason that our world is accelerated… is because of the nearby presence of this cultural black hole, this singularity of technology and biological intent, that is feeding backwards into time these apocalyptic images…" 11:55 "In the collective unconscious–in which, each of us shares a part–the thing at the end of time is spinning… and it’s throwing off scintillations, which are distorted images of itself. The transcendental object at the end of time infects the history that precedes it with the images of its approaching unfoldment. This is what I mean when I say, ‘History is the shockwave of eschatology.’ The presence of history on this planet means this thing is moving beneath the surface–this protean form. When it manifests, it will shed the institutions of history the way a butterfly sheds a chrysalis." 13:32 Terrence suggests that Novelty Theory might explain the apparent existence of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ in the universe. 14:25 "…I don’t believe that 90% of the matter in the universe goes unobserved… It’s not that there’s mass missing–it’s that there’s a law missing." 15:01 "…Why does the Milky Way tend to stay the Milky Way? The answer is: because, as a spiral galaxy, it’s a more complex organism, a more complex structure, than it is as a dissipated, homogeneous mass." 15:42 "…the Novelty Constant… is the constant that then causes large-scale structures to persist through time, for no other reason than that they represent higher orders of organization." 16:40 Finding support in contemporary astrophysics’ postulation of an anti-gravitational factor that causes the universe to grow outward forever (and not collapse on itself), Terrence notes that: "…one of the things Novelty Theory says is [that] the universe never goes back to its initial conditions." 20:36 "You can’t conceive of information in a way that the hallucinogens can’t then see your bid and raise the a...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 1:50 "Whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing I think depends on your meditation and your psychedelics. Different meditations strive for different things. Much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena. This would certainly not be a description of the psychedelic state." 4:14 "Ultimately, the meditation path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of data if the claims of both are to be respected, which is that they give deeper knowledge about reality." 6:03 "The chemistry of DMT suggests that, in deep REM sleep, it’s possible every single night you have a DMT flash, but it does not transcript into short term memory." 6:20 "…or imagine a drug that allowed you to enhance long-term memory, so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago, and play it back, moment by moment by moment. Again, this is not shooting for the moon, pharmacologically…" 6:58 "It’s a false dichotomy, the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things ‘on the natch’, and they’re not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics. This is just a con…" 7:55 Terrence tells the story of how his ‘gringa’ friend telepathically knocked a Peruvian shaman’s nephew off of his feet. 10:30 "Where the problem area lies–people think it lies in taking too much– [but] it lies in taking too little, because if you take too little, you can resist it, you can struggle with it…" 12:17 Terrence describes how he takes mushrooms. 14:00 "The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it, because language fails, because English–there are no words…" 14:30 Terrence talks about fear during a psychedelic experience, and how to deal with it. 15:39 "The thing to do is to sit up, and to sing." 18:53 "…the ego feels threatened by the boundary-dissolution… and it can actually say to you, ‘You are dying, and here’s the evidence.’ And you have to say: ‘No, it’s unlikely,’ and sing your way through it." 22:24 Terrence speculates that some psychedelic-seeming aspects of Tibetan/Mahayana Buddhism may have actually resulted from ancient experiences with psychedelics and/or cannabis. 26:39 "What always fascinated me was hallucination, because it was, to me, the proof that I was dealing with something outside myself. …a single image would have taken me hours to draw and figure out…" 28:49 "The impression you have when you smoke DMT is: This isn’t a drug… this is something else… this is a doorway into another modality that exists all the time, independent of my thoughts or feelings about it… It certainly doesn’t seem to be a place designed to fit human expectations." 32:18 Terrence speculates about the future of the ‘free individual’ in the electronic/information age: "…[whether] each of us will become a kind of god… [or will we become] …a socialist gas… a hive-mind…" 36:28 "Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans… is that, once you get past the language barrier… shamans… are simply curious people–intellectuals of a certain type." 37:05 "…the shamans, who are the keepers of the cultural values, are also… keepers of the secrets of the theatrics of the cultural values, and so they live their lives in the light of the knowledge that it all rests on showbiz." 37:41 Refering to Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and History, The Eternal Return, two books by Mircea Eliade: "…the shaman is socially marginal… and is feared by the people… [but] then the shaman comes forward in this critical role as… mediator between the cultural mind and the real world." 40:17 "…the logos–the alien A.I., the higher and hidden god that is trying to reach down to you and deliver the message–is a collagist. It can’t really compose the message except out of bits and pieces of what you already posses." 44:20 Terrence tells his story about the "good shit"...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program)

Guest speakers: Earth and Fire Erowid PROGRAM NOTES: Fire & Earth, founders of Erowid.org (Photo by Bill Radacinski, taken at the 100th birthday celebration for Dr. Albert Hofmann) In this highly original talk, Earth andFire, the founders of Erowid.org, provide a clear and convincing argument for the positive role "Drug Geeks" can play in civilized society. They also provide some interesting ways in which to think of this newly-evolving human culture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Shulgin Sasha Shulgin (photo by Bill Radacinski) This podcast of the Psychedelic Salon Sasha Shulgin’s in-depth talk about cacti, which was given at the 2002 Mind States Conference held in Jamaica. After podcast #022 of another talk Sasha gave in Jamaica, we received a lot of eMail saying, "More Dr. Shulgin!!!!" . . . And so, here he is once again. Although Sasha has given a lot of presentations at conferences all over the world, it isn’t often that he has devoted a single talk exclusively to a discussion of his extensive research into these intriguing plants. In addition to PIKAL and TIKAL, Transform Press has also published Sasha’s new book about cacti, all of which are listed in the BOOKS section on the Shulgin’s page at Palenque Norte. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: Alex &Allyson Grey (photo by Bill Radacinski) This is a talk Alex Grey gave at the 2002 Mind States conference in Jamaica. In it, he describes his journey as an artist as he takes us on a tour of some of his work. Pictures of the art Alex describes in this talk may be found on his personal Web site www.alexgrey.com. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Susan Blackmore, V.S. Ramachandran, Richard Glen Boire, John Gilmore, Ralph Metzner, and Jaron Lanier PROGRAM NOTES: Here are a few samples from the 2003 Mind States conference that was held in Berkeley, California in May of that year. Sound bites from the following talks are included here: Susan Blackmore:"The Grand Illusion of Consciousness" V.S. Ramachandran: "What Neurology Can Tell Us About Human Nature" Richard Glen Boire: "Neurocops: Welcome to the REAL Drug War" John Gilmore: "Our Constitutional Rights of Anonymous Travel" Ralph Metzner: "Seven Phases of Social-Cultural Transformation Catalyzed by LSD" Jaron Lanier: "Post-Symbolic Communication" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option LINKS: Mind States Conference Central

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: This is Sasha Shulgin at his best . . . talking about some of the most beautiful molecules on Earth. Recorded at the Mind States conference in Jamaica in 2002, this is classic Sasha. "The revolution is in the ditch until you get your chemistry together."   ---Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Ann Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: This is a talk given byAnn Shulgin at the Mind States Conference in 2002. It provides a rare look into the world of psychedelic therapy during the years immediately preceding the scheduling of MDMA as a Category I substance. This schedule level means that the U.S. Government considers MDMA to have no medical value. After you listen to what Ann Shulgin has to report, you will see how wrong the government is about the medical value of MDMA. SOUND BITES: A newborn baby has no shadow. . . . The shadow represents the parts of us that, for whatever reason, we have come to think of as parts of ourselves that are not acceptable, not lovable, and not OK. . . . Whenever you find yourself reacting negatively to a person or group of people, consider the possibility that you may be reacting to your own shadow." –Ann Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna & Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: This is part two of the conversation between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, which is featured in program #019 of the Psychedelic Salon. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna & Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast is part of a dialogue between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham that took place at the Omega Institute on August 1, 1998. It isn’t often that we have the opportunity to see how accurate predictions about the future are, but this fascinating conversation between two of the great thinkers of our times has already proven to be right on target. The reason this may be of interest to you is that if they correctly predicted some things that have now happened, then we are really in for some big time excitement if some of their more far-out predictions come true. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: In this talk, Erik Davis gives an overview of the role that visionary art, as lineage and practice, plays in today’s planetary culture. Then he contrasts this with what he is calling "Visionary Design": the translation of the visionary impulse into the design of artifacts, systems, and real-world solutions. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: Daniel Pinchbeck explores the thesis of a "dimensional shift," currently underway and culminating in 2012, the end-date of the Mayan Calendar. In this talk, he discusses crop circles, extraterrestrials, infraterrestrials, the likely collapse of the current socioeconomic order in the next few years, as well as the need for a new measure of time. Daniel also discussesEvolution, a new magazine and media company, currently in formation, designed to assist in the process of global healing and revisioning, offering new paradigms and tools for creating a harmonic planetary culture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Fraser Clark PROGRAM NOTES: A story about reversing the Big Lie . . . The true story of Monkey’s Marvelous Trip from theAfrican Jungle toInner and Outer Space by Fraser Clark. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option