Psychedelic Salon

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Podcast 190 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 4 Jul 08, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna]. "Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda. Ayahuasca will work with you." "The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious." [Also see The Art of Steven Rooke.] "Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?" "Obviously, it’s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious." "The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That’s why it’s not important that yogas’ claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there." "Once you come face-to-face with these psychedelics, the trail ends. You have found the answer. … Now the question is, ‘What the hell do you do with it?’ " "Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made." "It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are IN the presence of the Mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide." "What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it’s accessible." "The race isn’t to the swift. It’s to the thoughtful." "There will be difficult moments in a five-gram [mushroom] trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is." "This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience." "On ketemine you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough to realize that you’re on a drug." "At the interface of the sayable and the unsayable [in a psychedelic experience] is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that’s what I think it’s important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas." "Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated." "One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?" "If you eat before you sleep after a trip, it won’t be nearly so hard a come-down." "DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eddy Lepp’s personal Web site Free Eddy Lepp (the song)

Podcast 189 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 3 Jul 01, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.> "Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god. ... [This] is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort." "I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business." "Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism." "The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another." "I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. … I think that these plants ‘take people’ as much as people take the plants. … When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenic fields of all the people who ever took it." "All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion." "People are concrescences of ambiguity." "I think the sitter should be there only if there’s a three dimensional emergency." "I have never felt that the primary use of these things [psychedelic medicines] was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn’t for that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links mentioned in this podcast Burning Man Poster Contest Oracle Gathering in 2009 Symbiosis Gathering in 2009 Burning Man Guidelines for First Timers What to and not-to bring to Burning Man

Podcast 188 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 2 Jun 24, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness." "Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage." "This is what I talked about last night about the archaic revival as the notion of making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow." "We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual. There will not, apparently, be business as usual." "You either have a plan, or you are a part of somebody else’s plan." "The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it." "We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us." "I’m fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you’re getting somewhere." "If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind." "For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined." "Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option California Institute of Integral Studies GocStock

Podcast 187 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 1 Jun 17, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Most software, I think, is written by freaks." "What it [investigating psychedelics] really requires is a love of the peculiar, of the weird, the bizarre, the étrange, the freaky and unimaginable." "Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience." "DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic." "By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other." "What I’m talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that’s the primary thing to bear in mind. It’s an experience." "Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we’re working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of." "What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, … and THIS is big news!" "If you play the cultural game, it’s like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded." "Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality." "The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system." "I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine." "The ‘person’ is not an interchangeable part. The ‘citizen’ is. … The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It’s what the hippies were." "What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what’s right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is." "It’s as important to be well informed in this area, if you’re going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Oracle Gatherings, July 31-August 2, 2009 SCIENCE AND NONDUALITY CONFERENCE October 21-25, 2009 Embassy Suites/Marin Civic Center San Rafael, California

Podcast 186 – “The Genesis Generation” Jun 10, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: In today’s program there is no featured guest. Instead, Lorenzo presents the first chapter in his new novel, The Genesis Generation. In it, Lorenzo weaves the tale of a young man caught between two worlds, the world of corporate America and the world of the psychedelic community. As the story unfolds, we learn of the transformation of a 29 year old "yuppie-geek" into an underground hero of the psychedelic community. The story begins in Palenque, Mexico and moves through Texas, Amsterdam, Viet Nam, and even to Burning Man. Chapter Titles: An Awakening in Palenque Depression in Dallas Amazement in Amsterdam Confrontation in Viet Nam Stranded in San Francisco Ecstasy in Dallas Midwest Memories San Francisco Seminar Caitlín’s Salon Rindy’s Place Burning Man Weekend with Old Joe Wizard’s Council A West Coast Drive Mountain Farewell Freedom’s Promise DOWNLOAD your own copy of "THE GENESIS GENERATION" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Podcast 185 – “Shamanism and the Archaic Revival” Jun 03, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting." "The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis." "And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature." "… of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern. The pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity, no one you would invite to your garden party." "Technique [in taking entheogens] to me is a kind of a … I’m reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable." "The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer, but facing the answer." "I mean, we’re playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the Cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot. It’s essentially a preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue because what we’re talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility In fact, not a religious sensibility, THE religious sensibility." "Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego." "Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?" "The ‘public’ has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit, which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet." "How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Tibet2Timbuk2 The song, "Beautiful Girl", played at the end of this podcast, is from their album titled Music is Life. About the pash "First Rays of Sunlight" by Clint Avery

Podcast 184 – “The Boundaries of the Human Mind” May 20, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.] "What Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral." "So if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis." "If you want a future, you have to take charge of your own thoughts." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You! by Bruce Damer DigitalSpace’s Educational Spacewalk Simulation for NASA’s upcoming Hubble Servicing Mission The DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer’s Personal Web Site Mind States Conferences

Podcast 183 – “What Are Humans For?” May 07, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Timothy Leary.] "The people who were teaching us about consciousness-expanding drugs were people like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, even Henry Luce, the respectable conservative founder of ‘Time’ magazine. There was a large group of thoughtful people who told us that the doors of perception were going to open and an avalanche of change would happen." "Harvard is there to train Ivy Leaguers to go to Washington and Wall Street and keep the wasp establishment going. They’re not supposed to be turning out new Buddhas and a new brand of science fiction neuronaughts." "The history of America is the history of those of us that belong to this wonderful brotherhood and sisterhood of avant-garde inner voyagers. We believe that we’re the American tradition. And so we really weren’t that surprised when the thing exploded in the Sixties. That’s what we’d signed up for." "I personally now feel that the concept of generation, the generation you belong to, is one of the most important things in your life, because you’re going to be swimming like a school of fish in this school of your own generation." "It’s so simple, too. If you want to change, it’s geography, just move to the place different people hang out, and listen." "I see very clearly that the age of the people you hang out with determines your age. … Generations are temporal units, and you can jump generations, you can migrate. And how do you migrate from one generation to another? It’s time travel, just hang out with people of different ages." "What are humans for? We’re not here to fight Communism. We’re not here to fight for a job. If we don’t do that any more, what are we for? Well the answer to that is, the function of the human being is to evolve, to grow, to become more intelligent, to become a more advanced form of our species." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Support the Stolaroff Collection The Timothy Leary Archives The Media Squat (radio program with Douglas Rushkoff) The Art of Steven Rooke "Lunch with the Shulgins" (video)

Podcast 182 – “The Spark of Divine Creativity” Apr 28, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Missy & Andre Nobels, Mateo Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: MATEO: "Here’s the thing about divine creativity, and that really pegs it because creation is divine, and we are creators. And when we tap into that cosmic oneness and unity, spirit comes through, and we give ourselves up to spirit and allow spirit to move us instead of trying to move spirit." MATEO: "So, when you tap into divinity the ego basically disappears, and you’re in the sweet spot, you’re in the zone, and then you’re listening to yourself, and you’re blowing yourself away with what’s coming through, because it’s beyond you. It’s beyond us. It’s spirit talking." MATEO: "Time is just a thing that the mind does to try to make sense out of reality." MISSY: "I know it’s heart, for me it’s heart, whatever that is. And because the heart’s in the body, if I get in my body I can feel my heart. And I let my heart move my body so that’s my way of finding, or taping into that creative divine, or that spark." ANDRE: "You get to that point where the ego can just rest because you know your body has it, you know your being can take care of the physicality, the mechanics of whatever you’re doing, and then, once I think you can rest in yourself, in that place, then there’s space for that divine to come through." ANDRE: "This pocket we’re talking about, this divine spark, it’s not something you can hold onto. The tendency when you fall in love is you want to hold onto that beloved, to grasp and try to posses. And in a sense, what you do is you kill that spark. Especially when you’re doing something delicate and creative, you have to be really in the moment, because the moment you try to hold onto it, it’s gone." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Andre Nobels Music Andre on MySpace Mateo Pallamary’s Web Site

Podcast 181 – “What Science Forgot” Q&A Session Apr 25, 2009

Show notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is the Question and Answer session following the talk heard in the previous podcast. In it, Terence answers questions from the audience, such as, "Can you talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness in layman’s terms?" [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "It doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope, or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean, processes always occur in the same way. And this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature. These things are as it were simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff." "Thinking means something. It’s not just something we do. It means something. It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong." QUESTION: What is the nature of magic, or what is magic or the wonder it invokes? "Magic is not a trivial issue at all." "If you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is are very close to the same thing." "The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality, through acts of language. And language is very, very mysterious. I mean, it is true magic." "All so-called primitive people know that the world is made up of language. That you sing it into existence. That what you say it is is what it is. That is it maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension." "Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. This is what quantum physics teaches." "Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy. Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty that it’s, at this point, to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors." QUESTION: Why don’t some people get high when they take psychedelics? "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." "But these boundary-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." "We are caged by our cultural programing, and this is the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives." "If we could train ourselves to simply remember our dreams, psychedelics would become obsolete." "Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it is worth." "Language is partially the key here. We cannot move into a reality we cannot describe. If we can’t describe a world, we can’t be there." "As long as we let the establishment set the language agenda we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian, world of consumerism and schloko values that the establishment has prepared for us." "The way I think of these psychedelics are a different way, is that they are catalysts for the imagination." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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