Psychedelic Salon

Latest Episodes:

Podcast 370 – “Modeling Human History” Sep 30, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.” “Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.” “The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.” “We are caught in a tremendous historical crisis. And what we lack, in this crisis, is consciousness, whatever that means, the ability to integrate data about the situation we are in.” “We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.” “Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.” “The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?” “What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast The Great Drug War: And Rational Proposals To Turn The Tide Arnold S. Trebach

Podcast 369 – “Timothy & Terence” Sep 17, 2013

Show notes

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary & Terence McKenna Invitation to the opening of the Timoty Leary Archive at the New York Library. (Held on the second anniversary of the Occupy Movement.) :-) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I know that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Tim Leary. He was the pathfinder. He cut the way through the woods. He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.” “Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.” “What 'psychedelic' means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.” “Mind conjures miracles out of time.” “You've been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you, fall of man, original sin, and so forth and so on. It's bullshit. It's absolute bullshit.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast One Foot in the Future Nina Graboi Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition By Frances A. Yates Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History) D.P. Walker

Podcast 368 – “Psychedelics and the Feminine” Sep 10, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.” “It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.” “What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.” “I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.” “We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].” “The world isn't this unbelievably strange thing which is 'out there'. The world is this stranger-than-we-can-suppose thing which begins from the core of us out. That means nothing can be taken for granted. It can be taken apart. It can be put together many, many ways.” “[DMT] is pure, one hundred per-cent magic. MAGIC. It's not a drug. It's an event. It's not something you do. It's something that happens to you.” McKenna also describes a DMT experience as, “A collision with another modality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books Mentioned in this podcast The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future Riane Eisler The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (Cornell paperbacks) The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series) Richard Evans Schultes Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch

Podcast 367 – “The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker” Sep 03, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite..” “In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.” “Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.” “One of the core elements of this psychedelic thing is freedom, on the broadest scale.” “Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.” “I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.” “Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.” “The archaic revival is an invitation to historical humanity to view itself as a kind of a prodigal son.” “What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Symbiosis Gathering 2013 The Transcendent Nature of Symbiosis Festival

Podcast 366 – “Terence McKenna’s Suggested Reading List” Aug 26, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.” “What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.” “I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.” “Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.” “The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Terence's List (1987) Psychedelics Encyclopedia Peter Stafford Hallucinogens : Cross-Cultural Perspectives Marlene Dobkin De Rios Hallucinogens and Shamanism (Galaxy Books) Michael J. Harner The Hallucinogens A. Hoffer; H. Osmond Science and Romance of Selected Herbs Used in Medicine and Religious Ceremony Anthony K. Andoh Narcotic Plants William A. Emboden The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series) Richard Evans Schultes A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance Rupert Sheldrake Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future Riane Eisler Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts O. T. Oss, O. N. Oeric Codex Seraphinianus Luigi Serafini True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise Terence McKenna The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution Terence McKenna A few more suggestions from Lorenzo The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Citadel Underground) Timothy Leary Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman Pablo Amaringo, Luis Luna Be Here Now Ram Dass Entheogens and the Future of Religion Edited by Robert Forte Hallucinogens: A Reader (New Consciousness Reader) Charles S. Grob Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics Charles S. Grob LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science Albert Hofmann One Foot in the Future Nina Graboi Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience From Park Street Press The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge Jeremy Narby The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications Christian Ratsch, Albert Hofmann The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia Paul Devereux

Podcast 365 – “Effects of Psychedelics on Society” Aug 19, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.” “We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.” “The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.” “I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.” “And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.” “The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.” “The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.” “I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.” “Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.” “Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.” “You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.” “We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.” “What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.” “The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.” “Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Palenque Norte Lecture Schedule at the 2013 Burning Man Festival Erowid Extracts (PDF) Erowid Prospectus (PDF)

Podcast 364 – “Communicating with the Mushroom” Aug 11, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.” “What you call man is time.” [Quoting the mushroom.] “It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.” “What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the Mandela, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.” “[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.” “History is the siren song of the soul.” “The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.” “I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.” “The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.” “And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future By Riane Eisler One Foot in the Future By Nina Graboi

Podcast 363 – “A Venice Beach Salon” Aug 10, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff and Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording from the spring of 2006, at Kathleen's Salon in Venice Beach, California, where Robert Forte and Myron Stolaroff came to tell their stories about the recent festivities in Basil, Switzerland celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. After telling a little about the Hofmann event, Myron read part of the talk that he gave in Basil. From there, the conversation ranged widely, eventually ending with an argument about the Kennedy assassination. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Podcast 362 – “Flashbacks” Aug 03, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Dr. Timothy Leary reading a few selected chapters from his autobiography, Flashbacks. Interestingly, he begins this recording with Chapter 19, which details with his departure from Harvard. [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “We agreed that as much as we loved and respected Harvard University, this finishing school for Fortune 500 executives was not the place for philosophic activists bent on changing practically everything.” “The State of California should be run like a successful business enterprise. . . . Anyone smart enough to live in California should be paid a dividend.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by and about Dr. Timothy Leary

Podcast 361 – “Catlin’s Salon” Jul 30, 2013

Show notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo RIP: Zoe7 & Dr. Andrew Sewell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcasts is from the audio book edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation. It consists of a reading of Chapter 9, Catlin's Salon. This is a fictional account of what was once the most fashionable psychedelic salon on the West Coast. Once each month, for more than eight years, an amazing group of people would gather to discuss a mind-numbing array of topics. And while the story line in my novel is obviously fictional, the backdrop of the salon itself is described as best I can . . . and as best that I now remember, looking back after so many years that have passed since those wondrous meetings of the L.A. Chapter of the Albert Hofmann Society. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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