Psychedelic Salon

Latest Episodes:

Podcast 320 – “Occupy Yourself” Jul 28, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and friends PROGRAM NOTES: In this follow-up session after Bruce Damer's “Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna”, Lorenzo leads the discussion of the participants in a workshop held at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. Topics of the conversation include: - Consciousness, not drugs were the focus of McKenna's work - Heroic doses are not as important as bringing back information - The healing and love value of teaching plants - We all contributed to making Terence McKenna a cultural icon - Building a new civilization in the shell of the old - The Eschaton as another step in human evolution Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Podcast 319 – “The Voynich Manuscript” Jul 21, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: “Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.” -Terence McKenna According to Wikipedia, the Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world's most mysterious manuscript”, and so far it's secret code has never been broken . . . including attempts by top U.S. Government cytologists. And this is the subject of today's talk by Terence McKenna from an April 1983 lecture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Podcast 318 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time” Jul 10, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Repression of psychedelic drugs Element of risk in taking psychedelics The imagination Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul Death The importance of psychedelics Bell's Theorem [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don't really; there is no degree in shamanism.” “This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.” “There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn't, but I think that the risk is worth it.” “Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.” “The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.” “A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.” “There is no knowledge without risk taking.” “It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind. “Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.” “The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.” “I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.” “We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.” So I believe that a technological re-creation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward. And that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and re-form from, but there is also the self, related to the body image but in the imagination. So that we each would become, in a sense, everyone.” “There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyperdimentional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.” “It is the people who are 'far out' who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.” “Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.” “On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.” “Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedemia: Integrating Psychedelics in Academia September 27 – 30, 2012 On the campus of the University of Pennsylvania

Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace” Jul 05, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic UFOs and aliens The end of history – the eschaton The psychedelic experience Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other Death and afterlife Dreams [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.” “Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.” “Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.” “The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'” “Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.” “Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.” [Regarding UFO's] “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.” “But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the overmind. You won't read about it in “Scientific American” or anywhere else. You will carry it out.” “Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.” “All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.” “We are, in fact, hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.” [From the point of view of the shamanic tradition.] “In shamanism and certain yogas, Daoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.” “There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space AND the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.” “The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the overself.” “I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.” “Now your question about the dialogue. I mean this very literally. It speaks to you. You speak to it. It says things.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More quotes from this talk may be found in Podcast 267. Women's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice July 27 - 29, 2012 IONS Retreat Center, Petaluma, California

Podcast 316 – “A Deep Dive Into the Mind of McKenna” Jul 01, 2012

Show notes

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This program is a recording of part of a live event at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. The workshop, titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”, was led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty. This specific recording took place on Saturday morning, June 16th and consists of Bruce's “deep dive” into the mind of McKenna. It begins with Bruce's “Ode to Terence” and is followed by Bruce's readings of parts of the soon-to-be published book by Terence's brother, Dennis . . . the book's title: “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Ode to Terence” by Bruce Damer “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss” by Dennis McKenna

Podcast 315 – “In a German Salon” Part 3 Jun 28, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.” “The ketemine experience is very much like the dying experience. It is a hands-on dying experience.” “If you know how to die, gracefully, and elegantly, and intelligently, why bother with all the foreplay?” [Speaking to the Baby Boomers] “Your generation is a sinking ship. So the intelligent thing to do is to jump ship.” “I'm into the absolute navigational fact that you can only go as far into the future as you understand and are really respectful of the past.” “The key to evolution is the individual, the intelligent individual, the self, finding a self within.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelics and Language The Institute for the Encouragement of Outrageous Ideas

Podcast 314 – “In a German Salon” Part 2 Jun 21, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: strong>[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Since World War II, in the Western societies, the generation you belong to is almost a different species.” “It's a wonderful time in history to be alive when young people are doing things better than grownups. Because that's a key sign that evolution's happening, because evolution only happens with young people.” “I feel that it is necessary, if you want to continue to evolve, that you have to learn and be comfortable with computers.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Juan Enriquez: "Will our kids be a different species?"

Podcast 313 – “In a German Salon 1983″ Part 1” Jun 14, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “The way we define intelligence is the amount of information energy you can receive, that you can store and retrieve, and that you can transmit.” “It's very intelligent to be able to live as long as you want to. It's stupid to die.” “It's obvious that the blocks to evolution are anything that keeps you from changing, or discourages you from changing. And almost all the religions tell you, 'Don't change.'” “There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them.” “Drop out means to drop out of any line of conformity to any system.” “Now I'm telling people to Turn on, Tune in, and Take Over.” “Wherever you have the big religions, or the big totalitarian forces, they hide the body. They make you feel ashamed of the body.” “It's hard to have to figure out what do I really feel that I want. It's much harder to be yourself than to be a conforming person.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Sheldon's Kickstarter Campaign Confessions of a Dope Dealer - The Movie “Ready Player One” A Novel By Ernest Cline About Lorenzo

Podcast 312 – “Occupy the Internet” Jun 04, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Eben Moglen PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Eben Moglen.] “For the policy makers, in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand: How do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity? They do not know the answer to this question, and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.” “Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.” “Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the Net is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy. It proves itself all the time. Somebody's going to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for describing, in formal terms, the nature of disintermediation.” “The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web, an invention less than 8,000 days old. That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.” “The next Facebook should never happen. It's intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people. Which is not to say that social networking shouldn't happen. It shouldn't happen with a man in the middle with tax build into it.” “The way innovation really happens is that you provide young people with opportunities to create on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world and share the results.” “We care about protecting people's right to hack what they own. And the reason that we care about it is if you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.” “We said from the beginning that free software is the world's most advanced technical education system. It allows anybody, anywhere in Earth, to get to the state of the art in anything computers can be made to do by reading what is fully available, and by experimenting with it and by sharing the consequences freely.” “We should move to a world in which ALL knowledge previously available before this lifetime is universally available. If we don't, we will stunt innovation which permits further growth. That's a social requirement. The copyright bargain is not immutable. It is merely convenient.” “The universalization of access to knowledge is the single more important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet. Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout 'copyright'.” “Nobody should be fooled about the prospects for social growth in societies where fifty percent of the people under thirty are unemployed. This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car-building jobs. Everybody sees that.” “And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the world who insist that Internet freedom, and an end to snooping and control, is necessary to their welfare and ability to create and live.” “Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy with whom we are directly in touch. That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.” “And there is a third aspect of privacy, which in my classroom I call autonomy. It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions you make are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communication.” “The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumner is that young people move to them to make new ways of being taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village and the social control of the farm.” “The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living. We are closing it.” “We are on the verge of elimination of the human right to be alone. We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to do your own thinking in your place in your own way without anybody knowing.” “The Network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control. Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse, the two largest governments on Earth, that of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China, have adopted essentially the identical points of view. A robust social graph connecting government to everybody, and the exhaustive date mining of society, is both governments' fundamental policy with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as 'stability maintenance'. . . . We need, 'we' who understand what is happening, need to be very vocal about that.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eben Moglen's University Web Site Eben Moglen in Wikipedia The FreedomBox Foundation The TOR Project (Anonymity Online) F2C: Freedom to Connect F2C2012: Eben Moglen keynote - "Innovation under Austerity" (video link) F2C2012: Eben Moglen keynote - "Innovation under Austerity" (audio link)

Podcast 311 – “The Spirit of the Internet” May 29, 2012

Show notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a recording of a talk that I gave in March of 2001 at The Inside Edge, a Southern California association of cultural creatives. The topic was some of the themes in my book, “The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness”. One of the more controversial aspects of this talk is my comparison of a deep Internet experience with a psychedelic experience. . . . Also included in this podcast is some discussion of the growing student strike in Quebec and the mounting student loan debt bubble here in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Full Text of this talk (PDF) The Inside Edge OCCUPY TRACK 1 100,000+ Quebec Students Protest Debt OCCUPY TRACK 2 Student debt: the new slavery? by RTAmerica OCCUPY TRACK 3 Occupy Graduation: US student debt destroying the Future of our Youth - RTNews 10 Things You Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement Huge Montreal Student Protest, March 22 2012 (view from bridge) Howard Bloom's KickStarter project to promote “The God Problem”

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