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Psychedelic Salon

English, Psychology, 1 season, 756 episodes, 2 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes
About
Your source for cutting edge information about the exploration and expansion of consciousness. Featured speakers include Terence McKenna, Alex Grey, Daniel Pinchbeck, Erik Davis, Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Nick Sand and more. Our most recent programs are listed in this RSS feed. To view the complete listing go to www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts/
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Podcast 692 – The Promise of Buddhism

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Jack Kornfield PROGRAM NOTES: Jack Kornfield Mickey Hart Today's podcast features Jack Kornfield speaking at the 1988 International Transpersonal Conference in Santa Rosa, California. Kornfield is an American writer, teacher, and psychologist who is known for his work in making Buddhism more accessible for Westerners. He trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, India, and Burma, and has been teaching meditation internationally since 1974. He has also spoken about psychedelics in the context of spiritual practice. His views on the intersection of Buddhism and psychedelics highlights the importance of intention, caution, and ethical boundaries when considering their use. Kornfield also recommends getting trained in mindfulness, compassion and equanimity before using psychedelics. As he says, they are not for beginners. Are Psychedelics Useful in the Practice of Buddhism? by Myron StolaroffJOURNAL OF HUMANISTICC PSYCHOLOGY
1/22/202448 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 691 – The New Berzerkers

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Ralph Metzner PROGRAM NOTES: RALPH METZNERImage source: Wikipedia Today we're going to dip back in time to 1988 and the recording of a talk by Ralph Metzner at the Transpersonal Vision Conference. Ralph has been mentioned by several or our past speakers, but this is my first podcast in which Ralph is the main speaker. Ralph was a German-born American psychologist, writer and researcher, who worked with Leary and Ram Das at Harvard. Sadly, Ralph died in 2019. In addition to being a psychotherapist, he was also Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
1/16/202446 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 690 – Terence McKenna at Esalen June 1984

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California Although he first appeared at Esalen in the early 1970s, this may be the earliest recording of a Terence McKenna workshop there. It is from June of 1984. I think this is Terence's best and most clearly detailed description of the psychedelic experience. And that is why I'm repodcasting it now, rather than refer you to a podcast that I first published in April of 2014.Among other little gem in this talk where Terence said that of all the people he'd given DMT to over many years, only FOUR of them reported an experience like the ones he described. And then, he admitted that, and I quote: "every single one of them had been primed by me." Podcast 396 – “A Freely Evolving Topology of Light & Sound” (This is the first podcast of this talk.(The title on the cassette is Mind, Molecules and Magic)
1/9/20241 hour, 26 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 689 – McKenna at Esalen 1985 Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna, Eduardo Luna, Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording of a workshop session at the Esalen Institute from August of 1985 featuring a conversation between three of the early pioneers of the psychedelic resurgence. The recording begins with Terence postulating the importance of pyschedelics in the early mental development of humans.
1/2/20241 hour, 36 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 688 – McKenna at Esalen 1985

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features a recording of a morning workshop that Terence McKenna let at the Esalen Institute in August of 1985. As you will hear, it takes place just before their noon lunch break, and there is no lecture per se. Instead it turns into a salon-like atmosphere with no particular topic, other than the then-current concerns about the millinium and the year 2012.
12/25/202348 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 687 – Psychedelic Summit – Santa Cruz 1992 Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Rick Doblin, Lester Grinspoon, Richard Yensen, Donna Dryer, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, Ralph Abraham, and Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the continuation of Podcast 684, the Psychedelic Summit that was held in Santa Cruz in 1992. As you can tell from the list of speakers, it was another celebrity-packed speakers' list. While all of the names will be famaliar to you, this is the first time that we've had talks by Lester Grinspoon, Willis Harman and Robert Anton Wilson here in the salon. PSYCHEDELIC AGENTS IN CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING: A PILOT STUDY (1966) The Issue of the Consciousness-Expanding Drugs - Willis Harman (1963)
12/19/20231 hour, 20 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 686 – Chaotic Attractors

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features a 1985 conversation between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham that took place at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. Their conversation centers on the science of chaotic attractors and models of their actions. While mathematicians will more fully understand some of these concepts, Ralph has a way of explaining them so we can all grok what he explains. The concept of using mathematical models for things like tracking hurricanes is common to most of us, ideas about modeling society may be new to many of us, and exciting as well. If ever there was a time to project the track of our culture's future, this is it. Ralph Abraham's recent book, Schims, is an excellent companion to this conversation. Schism: The Madness of Crowds, Toxicity of Social Media, Social Polarization, and Political Violence; A Cybernetic Approach
12/11/20231 hour, 4 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 685 – The Nature of Consciousness

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: John Beresford PROGRAM NOTES: Dr. John Bereford delivering this talk in 2006 at the conference celebrating Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday. Today's program features a lecture by psychedelic researcher Dr. John Beresford. Here is Erowid's introduction to him: "British-born John Beresford began his psychedelic research interests in 1961, and shortly thereafter he resigned his post as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College. In 1963 he founded the Agora Scientific Trust, the world's first research organization devoted to investigating the effects of LSD. In contrast to Leary's invitation to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", Beresford initially wanted to keep LSD as a tool of scientifically trained specialists. However, later in his life he adopted a viewpoint that was opposed to the medicalization of psychedelics." Of course, the story that he is best known for is the time that he wrote to Sandoz Laboratories and requested one gram of LSD! (If my math is correct, that's about 4,000 doses of 250 mics each.) Amazingly, Sandoz sent him a gram through the mail and attached a note that read, "Good luck." The talk we are about to listen to was given by Dr. Beresford at the conference celebrating Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday. He titled it: "Psychedelic Agents and the Structure of Consciousness: Stages in a Session Using LSD and DMT".
12/4/202355 minutes, 51 seconds
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Podcast 684 – Psychedelic Summit – Santa Cruz 1992

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Matthew Brederick, Bruce Eisner, Rick Doblin, Oscar Jannigar, Albert Hofmann, Humphry Osmand, John Beresford, Laura Huxley, Francis Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcasta features talks from the 1992 Psychedelic Summit that was held in Santa Cruz. As you can see from the names of the speakers, this was a star-studded event. While this 1992 conference features much talk about the War on Drugs, it is an interesting counterpoint to the conference that was held in Denver earlier this year in which the focus was the scientific importance of psychdelic substances.
11/27/20231 hour, 29 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 683 – Psychedelics & “Genius” &+ “Love”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Bruce Damer Today's podcast features two Palenque Norte talks that Bruce Damer gave at the 2022 Burning Man Festival. This talk was followed by an hour-long Q&A session that I'll podcast after I post a few of the other Paleqnue Norte talks from 2022. Although I haven't previewed them yet, there are recordings waiting for me from the talks by Corey Doctorow, John Gilmore, Android Jones, and Rick Doblin among others. My plan is to slowly roll them out to you during the next few months. Bruce Damer's Website Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate from George Wada Dog Paw Productions on Vimeo. Psychedelic Sunday Variety Series - February 5, 2023
1/21/20231 hour, 12 minutes, 51 seconds
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Podcast 682 – The Psychedelic Athenæum

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Kathleen Lakey PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature an interview that Charles Lighthouse recently conducted with Kat Lakey. Besides talking about her latest project, which will be the world's first Psychedelic Athenaum, they discussed the Psychedelic Assembly, which was a conference that Kat and her friends produced a few months ago. Some highlights of this interview include a dicusssion of her work for the salon, including the production of an audio version of Leonard Pickard's book The Rose of Paracelsis. Also, Kat tells talks about the harrowing experience of being deep in a Peruvian jungle when the pandemic hit and marshall law was declared in Peru. The World's First Psychedelic AthenæumThe Kat Lakey Archive on the Psychedelic SalonPsychedelic Salon Archives: The Rose of ParacelsusAthenaums: Where Greek Ideals Meet New England Charm2022 Psychedelic Assembly Speakers
12/23/202250 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 681 – Street Drugs Update

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Annie Oak and Rachel Clark Ann Shulgin (1933 - 2022) ... photo by Jon Hanna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the first of a series of Palenque Norte Lectures that I'll be podcasting over the next few months. And our guest speakers are Annie Oak and Rachel Clark. Annie, among many other activities, is the managing edidor of Lucid.news. Her co-presenter is Rachel Clark whose column "Your Psychedelic Auntie" is featured in Lucid.news. Rachel also works with the DanceSafe Project and is one of the most up-to-date people I know of when it comes to psychedelic substances currently being widely used at festivals and other large events. If you plan on attending an event at which you may be tempted to try something new, be sure to listen to what Rachel and Aannie are reporting. Annie Oak is the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress and co-founder of the nonprofit Women's Visionary Council. Lucid News Your Psychedelic Auntie DanceSafe
12/19/20221 hour, 36 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 680 – The Importance of Psychedelics

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Elizabeth Gips PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast is dedicated to long-time saloner MARJEAN McKENNA This is a recording, from 1985, of an interview that Elizabeth Gips conducted with Terence McKenna at his home. The interview begins, like most of the 1980s era McKenna interviews, with a detailed question about DMT, but Elizabeth quickly gets them on a more interesting track. And the reason that I say "more interesting" is because here in the salon we've already covered most of the nuts and bolts of various psychedelic experiences. It's the reasons that draw us to these substances that I find to be the most interesting. When choosing a new psychedelic experience, Terence suggests asking three questions about the substance you are considering: 1) does it have a shamanic history; 2) does it occure in the tissue of a plant or animal; and 3) does it bear a simularity with compounds in our brains. In Memoriam: Elizabeth Gips, 1922–2001 Elizabeth Gips' Obituary
10/6/202253 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 679 – The Psilocybin Connection

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Jahan Khamsehzadeh PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation with author Jahan Khamsehzadeh, whose recent book, The Psilocybin Connection, is a significant addition to our understanding of how psychedelic substances have aided humans throughout history and how they continue to do so. The book's publisher says that it is, “A comprehensive guide to psilocybin mushrooms and their impact on our psychology, biology, and social development. … Blending the selected experiences of nine people’s transformative experiences, his own psychedelic awakening, and the most comprehensive synthesis of psilocybin research to date, Khamsehzadeh’s Psilocybin Connection moves our understanding of the psychedelic mushroom forward toward a fresh, hopeful, and exciting future.”
7/23/20221 hour, 30 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 678 – “Tripping with Albert”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Patreon Saloners PROGRAM NOTES: The painting, Saint Albert by Alex Grey, was completed as part of Dr. Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday celebration held in Basel, Switzerland on January 11th, 2006. Can you imagine knowing someone for over 20 years, even tripping with them from time-to-time, and not knowing that this person had done LSD with Albert Hofmann on multiple occasions? Now that's humility. Had it been me, that would have most likely been one of the first things that I ever told you. That story has now been told by one of my friends (hint, it wasn't Alex Grey) in this recording of the live salon that we held on the 17th of March to celebrate the beginning of our 18th year of podcasting.
3/24/20221 hour, 18 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 677 – “Stalking Enlightenment”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Patreon Saloners PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a recording of a live salon that began with us sharing trip stories and eventually led into a discussion of Vedic astrology as well as right speech, right action, and right thinking. Along the way, we heard a wonderful story about the unintended consequences of missionaries thinking that they were doing good but inadvertently almost destroyed the social order of a small community. Links from this Live Salon Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants Biphasic Sleep: What It Is And How It Works Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake Using Cortisol & Adrenaline to Boost Our Energy & Immune System Function Everybody Knows - Leonard Cohen
1/15/20221 hour, 6 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 676 – “Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 5”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Kat Lakey, Alexa Lakey, Leonard Pickard, Gaia Harvey Jackson, and Greg Sams PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the next installment of the reading of Leonard Pickard's book, The Rose of Paracelsus. This program was produced by Kat and Alexa Lakey and includes a personal message from Leonard. The reading is by Gaia Harvey Jackson, and Greg Sams provides additional commentary. Gaia Harvey Jackson Women's Leadership & Facilitation Training IGNITE: Wild Women's Spring Retreat Greg Sams
12/24/20211 hour, 44 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 675 – “Psychedelic Law for the People”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Gary Smith, Sonia Martinez, Saumel Saks PROGRAM NOTES: Psychedelics are becoming more mainstream, but the law hasn't caught up with the culture when it comes to accepting psychedelic lifestyles. In this podcast, we discuss ways the law is changing around psychedelics and how this affects the community, with topics including:  Decriminalization: What's protected, what's questionable, and what's still risky?Social Media & Psychedelics: What's safe to say and do online, and where does being cautious still matter?Law Enforcement: Is it true that psychedelic users are low-priority targets for law enforcement, and does this differ according to race, culture, and locality? What are best practices for individuals to ensure safety for themselves and their people?Cognitive & Religious Liberty: What does the law really say about these commonly invoked topics, and how are psychedelic users protected or vulnerable in these areas?When Things Go Bad: What do you need to know if you run into legal trouble?  About Our Panel:  Gary Smith is a veteran cannabis attorney and general counsel to the nation's oldest non-Native American peyote church and the author of Psychedelica Lex, a pioneering text on the laws governing psychedelics and entheogens. A seasoned litigator, advisor, mediator and arbitrator, Gary focuses his practice on commercial matters, construction, real estate, cannabis and administrative law. Gary is one of the leading cannabis attorneys in the state and was recently appointed to US News & World Reports list of Top 100 lawyers in Arizona. Notably, he served as amici counsel to the former Director of the Arizona Department of Health Services in the Arizona Supreme Court petition State v. Jones, which restored cannabis extracts and concentrates to legal status under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act. He has authored numerous articles about cannabis law, and he is commonly invited to share his expertise with professional association and industry groups. Further, Gary is a founder and current president of the Arizona Cannabis Bar Association, an organization committed to educating lawyers and the public about cannabis law and responsible legislation. Guidant Law Firm Gary Smith’s Psychedelica Lex Podcast Sonia Martinez was recently appointed as a Judge Pro Tem for Maricopa County Justice Courts. For the past thirteen years, she has been the principal and owner of her own law firm in Mesa, Arizona. She also works in Indian Country and is licensed to practice in over 8 local tribal courts. She focuses her practice on representing tribal and non tribal members in their private family, dependency and criminal law matters. She has also been working with small businesses and tribal governments respecting issues with the Arizona’s Medical Marijuana Act since 2010, and is the Vice President of the Arizona Cannabis Lawyer’s Association. Sonia Martinez Law, PLLC Licensed to practice law first in California in 2004, Ms. Martinez is the past Co-Chair of the Arizona State Bar Committee on Minorities and Women in the Law, Co-Chair of the 2015 State Bar Convention, Chair of the 2013 Minority Bar Convention, Past President of the Native American Bar Association of Arizona, and teaches a special seminar class at the ASU Indian Legal Program on representing criminal defendants in tribal court. Ms. Martinez also serves on the Board of Directors and is the Compliance Officer for the United Food Bank, past board member for Whisper & Thunder, and Board Member for MomForce USA. In addition, she is a panel member on the selection committee for the Arizona State Bar Leadership Institute, and presented as a panelist at dozens of educational seminars. She is also a team member for the Maricopa County Superior Court Judicial Performance Review Commission Conference Teams. Most importantly, she is a mother of two daughters ages 24 and 15, and grandmother of two.
11/22/20211 hour, 31 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 674 – Cannabis Science & Business

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Robb Flannery    PROGRAM NOTES: While going through cancer treatment, Dr. Flannery’s mom sought recommendations for safely medicating with Cannabis. Dr. Flannery’s unmatched expertise in the field and his absolute vigilance for his mom’s health created the most stringent standards – no applied chemicals, no pesticides, and no additional risks of being harmful to his mother. No products matched his high standards for his mom, so Dr. Flannery decided to make his own clean product. And in doing so, Dr. Robb Farms was born with a mission to make products with care, for the people we care about. (https://www.drrobbfarms.com/) Topics include cutting edge cannabis science; legalization and its impact on the cannabis business; corporate influence on cannabis; and the future role of cannabis in society.
11/13/20211 hour, 5 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 673 – “Ayahuasca & Tobacco Secrets – Jeremy Narby”

In this episode, we talk with Jeremy Narby, PhD about his new book Plant Teachers, which compiles traditional indigenous and contemporary scientific knowledge about ayahuasca and tobacco. In this far-reaching conversation Narby talks about the different types and uses of Ayahuasca, creating partnership between scientific and indigenous knowledge, respecting the positive and negative powers within plant medicines, advocating for indigenous Amazonian people, and much more. This conversation was recorded in our live Psychedelic Salon, which happens every Monday and Thursday, and that you can access from our Patreon and Discord pages. Jeremy Narby, PhD, is co-author of Plant Teachers with indigenous elder Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. This brief, information-packed book presents a cross-cultural dialogue that explores the similarities between ayahuasca and tobacco, the role of these plants in indigenous cultures, and the hidden truths they reveal about nature. Juxtaposing and synthesizing two worldviews, Plant Teachers invites readers on a wide-ranging journey through anthropology, botany, and biochemistry, while raising tantalizing questions about the relationship between science and other ways of knowing. Narby became an early pioneer of ayahuasca research while living with the Ashaninca people of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1980s. He studied anthropology at Stanford University and now lives in Switzerland and works as Amazonian projects director for Nouvelle Planète, a nonprofit organization that promotes the economic and cultural empowerment of indigenous peoples. Jeremy is also the author of the award-winning book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, which was originally published in 1998. Plant Teachers - Publisher Listing
10/29/20211 hour, 20 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 672 – Psychedelic Filmmaking

PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 30, 2021 Guest speakers:Clement Hil Goldberg and Charles Costas Today's podcast is a conversation from the live Psychedelic Salon featuring Clement Hil Goldberg, the writer, director and animator behind the upcoming sci-fi comedy Let Me Let You Go. We talked about how mushrooms can save the world, stop-motion animation, Bett Williams' The Wild Kindness and contemporary psychedelic literature, non-human agency, queer culture, psychedelic capitalism, and how psychedelics can inspire a new future for art, poetry, and music. Clement Hil Goldberg is a queer and nonbinary trans, award-winning Multidisciplinary Artist, Writer, Director and Animator. Their satirical yet hopeful projects center collective grief rooted in climate crisis, cultural erasure, displacement and end-stage capitalism. Their work has been exhibited at REDCAT Theatre, VORTEX Rep, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art at U Penn, Anthology Film Archives; CounterPulse, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, SOMArts, Luggage Store Gallery, Artists Television Access, all in San Francisco; and over 50 international film and arts festivals including Frameline, Outfest, MIX NYC, Hamburg International Queer Film Festival and Cleveland International Film Festival. Clement received an MFA in Art Practice and a Graduate Certificate in New Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. clement hil goldberg Let Me Let You Go Kickstarter The Deer Inbetween Full Webseries Our Future Ends Excerpt Valencia Excerpt Clement Hil Goldberg, psychedelics, filmmaking
10/2/20211 hour, 1 minute, 2 seconds
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Podcast 671 – “Vaping DMT and 4-AcO-DMT

Support Lorenzo on Patreon - Guest speakers: Patreon Saloners PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording of one of our recent Live Salons. While we sometimes have guests who bring specific levels of expertise to our salons, most of the time we seem to be able to have in-depth conversations without the “experts”. This was one of those nights. I began our discussion thinking that vaping DMT over your lunch hour wasn’t a great idea, but after learning more about vaping DMT I changed my mind, not about doing it over your lunch hour, but about vaping DMT in general. As it turns out, there is a lot more to this new trend that I realized. Also, I learned enough about 4-AcO-DMT to thinking that this is something I’m going to try. If you aren’t already familiar with it, this discussion should be of interest to you as well. Here are the links from chat to books and other things that we talked about: Owlsley & Me: My LSD Family The Rose of Paracelsus LSD & The Mind of the Universe Hush Pipe Battery Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/21/20211 hour, 7 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 670 – War on Drugs Recent Legal Updates

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Gary Smith PROGRAM NOTES:   Today’s podcast is a recording from the Live Salon on July 12, 2021 where attorney Gary Smith joined us for another update of some of the current legal aspects of the War on Drugs. We also talked about his new book, which is an encyclopedia of drug laws. It includes both international and local laws. This new book, Psychedelia Lex, is not just a valuable resource for lawyers, it is also worthwhile for local psychedelic societies to use as background for some of their discussions. Psychedelica Lex Gary Smith’s email address: smith@guidant.law "Uniform Model Law on Plants and Fungi Medicines: A Better Path to Reregulation" by Gary Smith The Psychedelic Bar Association Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/15/20211 hour, 25 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 669 – “An Ethical Drug Dealer”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 12, 2021 Guest speaker: Jimi Fritz Today's program features an audio recording of a recent Live Salon. Our guest was Jimi Fritz who told us about his 50-years of buying, selling, and experimenting with psychedelic drugs while also traveling the world. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, home of the legendary BC Bud, Jimi also was a rave promoter. He has written two books about his adventures and shares some of his stories with us in this podcast. Confessions of an Ethical Drug Dealer by Jimi Fritz Rave Culture; an Insider's Overview Kindle Edition by Jimi Fritz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1GW7q1xEDI Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
4/25/20211 hour, 14 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 668 – “Nature Loves Courage”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 5, 2021 Guest speaker: Jacques Oliver and Matt Pallamary Today's podcast features a recording from last Monday evening's Live Salon. Our guests were Jacques Oliver and Matt Pallamary who joined us to talk about Jacques' recent autobiography, Nature Loves Courage. Since the three of us are long-time friends who have shared quite a few experiences together, the conversation sometimes turned to us telling a few of our old "war stories." Two of Jacques' stories really stand out. As it turned out, Jacques was the last person for whom Terence McKenna ever held a DMT pipe. And then there is the story of how Jacques wound up spending a rainy night all alone in Terence's house in Hawaii just after he helped pack the library for shipment to the states. The only things that were left in the room where he spent the night was a backpack that had some DMT in it and an urn on the mantle the contained Terence McKenna's ashes. The story gets quite interesting from there. Nature Loves Courageby Jacques Oliver Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
4/12/202153 minutes
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Podcast 667 – “A Conversation with Leonard Pickard”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 2021 Guest speaker: Leonard Pickard Today's Bicycle Day Podcast features a conversation that Leonard Pickard recently had with members of the London Psychedelic Society. After more than 20 years in prison, Leonard now is free to tell us about his prison ordeal and what his life is like today.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
4/11/20211 hour, 57 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 666 – “Winning the War on Drugs”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 15, 2021Guest speakers: Jennifer Stell and Alex Karasik Today's podcast features a conversation that we recently had in the live salon. Our guests were Jennifer Stell and Alex Karasik who are working with the Baystaters for Natural Medicine in Massachusetts. This group came together, online, in October of 2020. Already they have convinced the city councils in three Massachusetts towns to decriminalize drugs. I am hoping that hearing how they did it will inspire you to follow their lead. Baystaters for Natural Medicine Magic mushroom advocates following cannabis playbook Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books Due to being forced to use the Gutenberg interface for WordPress, I cannot figure out how to remove the above text, which automatically appeared. The WP team screwed up with this.
3/17/20211 hour, 16 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 665 – “Psychedelic NFTs”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 8, 2021 Guest speakers: Various This is a recording of a conversation that we had on a live salon the other day. It's about Non-Fungible Tokens, the NFTs that have been making news lately Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
3/11/202144 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 664 – “Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 4”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Guest speakers: Kat Lakey, Alexa Lakey, Julie Holland, Julian Vayne, and Ralf Jeutter Today we continue our reading of Leonard Pickard's novel, The Rose of Paracelsus. Chapter 4 is read by author and occultist Julian Vayne who was also featured in our introduction to this series. The reading of Chapter 4 is followed by commentary by Ralf Jeutter. Before the reading and commentary, Dr. Julie Holland tells about her recent conversation with Leonard Pickard. Archive of Previous Podcasts FeaturingThe Rose of Paracelsus Indigo’s Delivery: An Excerpt from The Rose of Paracelsus from The Oak Tree Review Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1/27/20211 hour, 35 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 663 – “The Day After the Insurrection”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this live salon was held: January 7, 2021 Guest speakers: Various Today's podcast features a recording of the live salon that was held on the day after Trump's Insurrection. Only a few hours had passed since the middle of the night Congressional approval of Joe Biden becoming the 46th President of the United States. At the time of this recording, however, there was a great deal of uncertainty about were we would be heading in the days ahead. So that you don't forget your own feelings at this precipitous moment in time, I'm playing this recording of what some of our fellow saloners were thinking then. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1/23/20211 hour, 40 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 662 – “Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 3”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Guest speakers: Ben Sessa, Tom Roberts, and Kat Lakey Today's podcast features a reading of Chapter 3 from Leonard Pickard's novel, The Rose of Paracelsus. The chapter is read by Dr. Ben Sessa who is currently leading a psychedelic research project with Professor David Nutt in the UK. The reading is followed by commentary by Dr. Thomas Roberts. Long time listeners to the salon will remember Dr. Roberts from my Podcast 633 – “The Man Who Invented Bicycle Day”. Leonard Pickard's email addressaphrodine (dot) 1 (at) gmail (dot) com Links to previous Rose Garden Podcasts Podcast 609 – “The Rose Garden – Introduction” Podcast 629 – “The Rose Garden” 002 Podcast 644 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 1 Podcast 652 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 2 Ben Sessa's Current Project Books by Thomas Roberts Psychedelics and Spirituality: The Sacred Use of LSD, Psilocybin, and MDMA for Human Transformation The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design Foreword by James Fadiman Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
12/11/20202 hours, 30 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 661 – “Psychedelia: History, Science, and Mysticism”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: November 16, 2020 Guest speakers: Pat Murphy and Charlie Grob Today's podcast features an interview in the Live Salon with filmmaker Pat Murphy and psychedelic researcher Dr. Charles Grob. During the course of the conversation the conversation drifted into several interesting tributaries. However, the main focus of our conversation was to discuss Pat's new film, Psychedelia. PSYCHEDELIA​ ​is an hour-long documentary film about psychedelic drugs and their ability to induce mystical and religious experiences. The film chronicles their use in controlled research studies prior to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, when LSD was regarded as a promising medical breakthrough, as well as their recent re-emergence in psychiatry. Featuring leading experts in the field of psychedelic research, the film tells the story of medical professionals who have re-introduced these compounds into a legal and growing field of study. First-person accounts from a study on end-of-life anxiety explore the profound, life-altering insights psychedelics induce in participants and what these insights might mean for society at large. Psychedelia(the movie) Virtual Screening with Fluence25% off discount code: PSYCHEDELIADOC Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
11/18/20201 hour, 3 minutes
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Podcast 660 – “Celebrating Timothy Leary’s 100th Birthday”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this live salon was held: October 22, 2020 Guest speakers: Rio Hahn, Michael Shields, and Ron Turner Today's podcast features a recording of a live salon in which former friends and associates of Dr. Timothy Leary shared their remembrances of him on the occasion of 100th anniversary of Dr. Leary's birth. Among other first-hand accounts, we learned the truth about why Timothy decided at the last minute to not have his head frozen after he died. Archive of Timothy Leary talkson the Psychedelic Salon Lorenzo's Days as a Drug DealerConfessions of an Ecstasy Advocate
10/22/20201 hour, 20 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 659 – “Krishnamurti Revisited”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti Today I am going to replay a recording of J. Krishnamurti that I first played here in the salon in January of 2009. A lot has happened since then, but I haven't noticed any overall change for the better in the way we humans interact with one another. My thought is that it may be worth our time to have another listen to these words of wisdom. [The following quotations are by J. Krishnamurti in today's podcast.] “Give your heart and your mind with every thing that you have to find out a way of living differently.” “We are talking about a revolution, not physical, but a psychological revolution in which there is no, at the depth, conformity. … Conformity exists when there is comparison. For a mind to be totally free from comparison, that is to observe your whole history which is embedded in you.” “What’s your answer to this question that human beings have lived this way for millennia upon millennia, why haven’t they changed? . . . Why don’t you, if you’re at all serious in this matter, why don’t you ask yourself that question? Why am I, a human being who has been through all of this, why haven’t I changed?” “And when observed through history, through our life, all that hope and faith have no meaning at all, because what is important is what we are, actually what we are, not what we think we are, or what we think we should be, but actually what is.” J. Krishnamurti Website Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
10/14/202046 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 658 – “Legal Questions and Answers”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 28, 2020 Guest speaker: Gary Smith Today's podcast features attorney Gary Smith who has just published a major compendium of drug laws in the United States as well as in several other nations. In this wide-ranging interview, which took place during a live session of the Psychedelic Salon, you may be surprised at what could happen to you if the federal government finds both cannabis and a firearm in your home. Even if you have a doctor's medical marijuana recommendation and a licensed firearm you have committed a felony. Psychedelica Lexa comprehensive survey ofthe laws governing psychedelics Gary Smith's YouTube Channel Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
10/6/20201 hour, 5 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 657 – “Psychedelic Law and Terence McKenna

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Gary Smith and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features a collection of short Terence McKenna sound bites that may have some relevance to life during today's pandemic. Additionally, I have included four brief answers to legal questions by Gary Smith, author of Psychedelia Lex and next week's guest in our live salon. Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/27/202041 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 656 – “Damer and McKenna Discuss Covid-19”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Dennis McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 4, 2020 Bruce Damer and Dennis McKenna engage in a spirited conversation for a tribute to Dennis' brother, Terence. This conversation was recorded on April 4th, 2020 at an online event held during the early phases of the COVID-19 epidemic. This tribute to Terence marked the 20th anniversary of his death, on April 3, 2000, a day which we have come to call "Terence Day" or perhaps more fun for everyone: "International Boundary Dissolution Day". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/1/20201 hour, 4 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 655 – “Datura Tips from a Psychedelic Sailor”

Guest speaker: Rio Hahn Rio Hahn PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 13, 2020 Today's program features a recent conversation in the live salon with Rio Hahn. He is an explorer, photographer/filmmaker, and author. Popularly known by the sobriquet “Rio,” given to him during his Amazon River explorations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; a founding and life member of the Rainforest Club; a Fellow, two-term Director, and past Ombudsman of The Explorers Club, as well as serving three terms as Chairman of the San Diego Chapter. He is the recipient of five Explorers Club Flags, a licensed sea captain, an open water diver, and a founding member of the International Society for Ethnopharmacology. And I should add that he is a friend of mine. I invited Rio to the salon to tell his stories about the time in the Amazon when Terence and Dennis McKenna joined Wade Davis on the RV Heraclitus for their now-legendary meeting in the jungle. However, the high (no pun intended) point of our conversation was his in-depth discussion of datura. This is the first time that datura has been discussed in the salon. Sawmi's Sacred PlantA Report of Unprecedented Datura Use in Nepalby Robert "Rio" Hahn, FRGS, FN'86 RV HeraclitusOwned and Operated by the Institute of Ecotechnics Spaceship Earth Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
8/17/202057 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 654 – “Bitcoin Is Psychedelic”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Brandon Quittem PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 13, 2020. Today's podcast features Brandon Quittem whose essay, "Bitcoin is the Mycelium of Money" provided us with a launching pad for a lively discussion about ways in which the world's financial system may experience turbulence brought about by cryptocurrency. In addition to talking about the basics of digital money, we also discussed blockchain technology, psychedelics, and Bitcoin. Brandon Quittem Website Bitcoin is the Mycelium of Money by Brandon Quittem Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/16/20201 hour, 4 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 653 – “We Cannot Have a Pacified Movement”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Nikkita Oliver Nikkita Oliver PROGRAM NOTES: If you only listen to one podcast from the Psychedelic Salon, I hope that it is this one. While these podcasts have been focused primarily about preserving talks by our elders and promoting the ideas of our "new elders", today's podcast is different. Between the covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations we have a lot to consider, and we have some serious decisions to make. Of all the people that I know, the young woman whose ideas you will hear in this podcast, Nikkita Oliver, is the one person who I would follow unhesitatingly into our shared future. She is highly intelligent, a great poet, and a leader that I believe we can trust. After you listen to this podcast and hear her Convergence speech from 2019, her TEDx talk in 2016, and her poems, I hope that you will feel the same way. Nikkita Oliver's Twitter feed “Building People Power”: Nikkita Oliver on Seattle’s Extraordinary Protests and What Comes Next Seattle People's Party Podcast 599 “The Psychedelic Hospice Movement” by Lorenzo 8:46 - Dave Chappelle Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
6/12/202046 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 652 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Brother David Steindl-Rast, Leonard Pickard, and Mark Juhan Brother David Steindl-RastCirca 2004Photo source: Wikipedia PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a reading by Brother David Steindl-Rast of Chapter 2 from The Rose of Paracelsus, written by Leonard Pickard. Earlier podcasts in this series include: Podcast 644 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 1 Podcast 609 – “The Rose Garden – Introduction” Podcast 629 – “The Rose Garden” 002 TED Talk by Brother David Steindl-Rast Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
6/1/20202 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 651 – “Brief Pandemic Update from the Salon”

Lorenzo self-isolating in the Psychedelic Salon This is a brief podcast bringing you up to date with some of the recent online activities of the salon. Join our live conversations on Discord's Psychedelic Salon server - It's FREE! Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com MAPS Career Page Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
5/27/20206 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 650 – “Remembering Queerninja on 4202020”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: QueerNinja The DopeTribePodcasting Pioneers PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast, which is being released on 4, 20, 2020, is dedicated to and in tribute to our dear friend Queerninja, who departed this little planet earlier in the year. The Ninja was one of the early pioneers of podcasting, and he hosted one of the first music podcasts on the Internet. It was called "The Sounds of World Wide Weed", and today's podcast features a replay of the final program in that podcast series. To lighten the mood a bit, today's podcast ends with Ron Shock's "Best Damn Dope Story Ever." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Tribute to Queerninja: Dopefiend Quarantined 005 Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
4/21/20201 hour, 40 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 649 – “Shamans of the Global Village” Episode 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Niles Heckman and Rak Razam PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 6, 2020 Today's podcast features an audio recording of last Monday evening's live salon. Our guests were film makers Niles Heckman and Rak Razam who were with us to talk about the second film in their series "Shamans of the Global Village". Rak Razam is one of the world’s leading ‘experiential’ journalists, and author of the critically acclaimed book Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey and the companion volume of interviews, The Ayahuasca Sessions. Niles Heckmanis a filmmaker with a background working in high-end commercials, games cinematics, and multiple Academy Award-winning teams in Hollywood with New Line Cinema, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Marvel Studios. In this episode, they take us on an in-depth journey into the ancient world of peyote cactus rituals. Niles Heckman - Documentarian Shamans of The Global Village Episode 2 (trailer) Screenings: Shamans of the Global Villiage Episode 2 Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
4/12/20201 hour, 7 minutes, 58 seconds
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648 – “Terence McKenna and Social Distancing”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "A person who does DMT once a year is a fanatically heavy user, I would say." "One way of judging how toxic a drug, or a plant, is is to ask yourself the question 'How long after I take it do I feel completely normal?' " "You want a surgical strike on the synapses, is what you're going for, not splattering all kinds of junk all over the place." "Growing the mushroom teaches you cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, steadiness, all of these virtues, which are the very virtues you need to travel smoothly in that dimension [on a magic mushroom trip]." "Here's a career for somebody. No hallucinogenic insect has ever been found, and yet there are persistent rumors in different parts of the world of either a butterfly or a beetle that is hallucinogenic." "As to why [psychoactive plants] have this peculiar effect that they do in us, I think that's because there was, anciently, and over the evolutionary life of human beings, actually a connection between us and nature. And that these drugs are the antenna, the switches that switch us back toward the Logos of the natural world." "This is something people don't realize, flowering plants are as recent as mammals. If the period of life on Earth is visualized as a yardstick, the period of the flowering plants is the last inch and a half." "[Psychedelics] are the [corrosive] acids of anarchy." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
3/25/202039 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 643 – “Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Rob Harper PROGRAM NOTES: Date this live salon was recorded: February 3, 2020. Today's podcast features a recording from last Monday's live salon where our guest was Rob Harper, the creator of a new documentary titled "Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness." The film features three men whose psychedelic journeys have had a profound impact on our world. These men are Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Aldous Huxley. After the interview with Rob, I play a short recording from earlier podcasts that featured these three men. Hopefully, this will give you a better idea of what pioneers they were and how relevant their ideas are yet today. Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
2/6/20201 hour, 30 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 642 – “Shamans and Their Plants”

RIP QueerNinja (details to follow) Guest speaker: Terence McKenna   Sounds of World Wide Weed was heard on The Dopecast PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "And what was this profession [of shamanism] precisely about? Well, it was about exploring the envelop of cognition, pushing against the linguistic membrane of what it was possible to say, symbolize, conceive, and communicate." "I prefer the organic hallucinogens and recommend them to other people because I think their long history of shamanic usage is the first seal of approval that you must look for. I mean, if these things have been used for thousands of years, then you can be fairly confident that they do not cause [medical problems]." "The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer but facing the answer. The answer has been found. It just happens to lie on the wrong side of the fence of social toleration and legality." "If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1/30/202056 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 641 – “McKenna’s Psychedelic Rhapsody”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "This is what the psychedelic experience means. It's a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board into eternity." "What we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe." "Psychedelics return us to the inner work of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience." "I think of going to the grave without a psychedelic experience is like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured it out what it was all about." "The three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony." Alien Dreamtime Produced by Ken Adams IMAGINATRIX - the Terence McKenna Experience The Shamen - Re:Evolution (1992) Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1/22/202049 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 640 – #ThankYouPlantMedicine

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Glenn Irving Photo by Sharon McCutcheon PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 13, 2020. Today's podcast features an interview with Glenn Irving who is a volunteer with the project known as #ThankYouPlantMedicine. As the project's title tells you, this is a world-wide effort to spread the word about ways in which the plants have come to our aid. The first mission of this project is to encourage 100,000 people to tell their psychedelic plant stories in public. You may be amused at the social media platform where Lorenzo plans to post his psychedelic story on February 20th. Thank You Plant Medicine Envision Festival Feb 17-24, 2020 | Costa Rica Drug Control: National Policies Dr. A.C. Germann, Professor Emeritus Department of Criminal Justice California State University, Long Beach If the ears of all the people in the nation who had ingested illicit substances in the past six months were to turn bright green for one whole week, the nation would be amazed, confused, astounded, and quickly taught something very important as they identified friends, relatives, neighbors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, soldiers, policemen, firemen, military personnel, businessmen, teachers, students, politicians, respected policy makers, administrators, supervisors, and workers from a variety of private and government institutions everywhere. Psychedelic Storytelling Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy Salon2 011 – “Psychedelic Therapy for Veterans” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1/15/20201 hour, 4 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 639 – “Our Culture Was Our Politics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Paul Krassner PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features one of the true heroes of the counterculture, Paul Krassner. In addition to leading the creation of our underground press, Paul was friends with important free-speech advocates such as Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. If you were alive during the so-called Sixties, you most likely remember his magazine, The Realist, that featured items for sale like the "Fuck Communism" bumper sticker and the "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" poster.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Paul Krassner's Website The Realist Archive Project The day anti-Vietnam War protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon October 21, 1967: Antiwar activists' satirical attempt to levitate the Pentagon   Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1/8/202059 minutes, 39 seconds
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Podcast 638 – “Replanting Ayahuasca”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Sophia Rokhlin PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: December 16, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation that took place in the Live Salon a few weeks ago with Sohpia Rokhlin. Sophia is an author, speaker and nonprofit organizer from New York City. Through engaged botany and ecology, she bridges the worlds of indigenous ecological knowledge and Western science. She holds a BA in anthropology and religious studies from The New School and a M.Sc. in Ecological Economics from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). She is a Program Coordinator at the Chaikuni Institute and currently directs the sustainable ayahuasca cultivation program at the Temple of the Way of Light, a traditional plant medicine retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon. Sophia is also a co-author of When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance (Watkins, 2019) on the global spread of ayahuasca. She has worked with several psychedelic harm-reduction programs such as KosmiCare, and serves as an advisor on the Ayahuasca Community Committee for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is currently based in Peru. Sophia Rokhlin Website Temple of the Way of Light Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines Dates for upcoming Head Talks with Shane Mauss A Comedian + Psychedelics + A Scientist = Head Talks Shane Mauss Website Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
12/31/20191 hour, 1 minute, 23 seconds
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Podcast 637 – “Become the Bliss”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Ram Dass Ram Dass & Lorenzocirca: 2001 PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Ram Dass.] "I was addicted to the experience of being high. I was not addicted to the chemicals, but just to the state. I had touched something so pure, and so fulfilling, that I had to keep going back. And I tried every method I knew to stay high." "What is required on this trip is renunciation of attachment." "Psychedelics show a possibility, but beyond that you still have a lot of stuff to do." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
12/24/20192 hours, 10 seconds
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Podcast 636 – “RAW’s Politics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1987. [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "I used to be a Libertarian, but they had too many rules." "And by 1968 a Gallup Poll showed that 70% of the population were against war. There's never been a time in the history of this country where 70% of the people opposed the government on a thing like war. So I regard LBJ as a pacifist president because he made pacifism so popular." "Alan Watts said to me 20 years ago the chief error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire fell. It never did. It still controls the Western World through the Vatican and the Mafia. Well, Alan was exaggerating. It doesn't control the Western World. It's just trying to." "The American people are the most policed and governed and watched and observed and snooped upon people in the whole world." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
12/17/20191 hour, 7 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 635 – “The Birth of a New Humanity” – Part 4

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]> "The horrible thing about UFO-people who claim contact is that the aliens they present to us are so incredible mundane. [They are] so much more mundane than what you would encounter on a DMT flash. They're just like the neighbors next door." "With alien intelligence the trick is not to find it but to to recognize it when it's in front of you." "Intelligence is a very slippery concept. Sometimes we can't even identify it in the person sitting next to us on the bus." "I think the world is a lot stranger than we can suppose without invoking benevolent aliens who prefer vegetarian diets and who come from the stars. Why do they so fit our preconception of what they would be?" "I think the best protection against unpleasant experiences on psychedelics is to do it with care and attention in environments that are safe and low on sensory input. In other words, you don't take it and go to a crowded singles bar, or even a rock 'n roll concert. If you have to combine psychedelics with rock 'n roll, do it with low doses." "I am terrified of psychedelics. I never take them without a sense of sickening dread." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
12/10/201940 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 634 – “The Birth of a New Humanity” – Part 3

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Psychedelic researcher Sasha Shulgin in his lab PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Matter is becoming a fairly uncomfortable dimension for us to be in, and I daresay matter would probably be highly relieved to have us just move on so that the rainforest, chipmunks, glaciers, and schooling salmon can go back to doing what they do best." "There is no reason to expect rationality to be apprehensible." "A little courage on the part of these almighty scientists would go a long way toward overwhelming the fearful strictures placed on them by politicians who are trying to maintain a social equilibrium that is fairly odious anyway." "Mantras, with psychedelics, work like magic. Yoga, breath control, drumming, visualization, simple prayer, it all works amazingly well in the presence of psychedelics." "Unfortunately, these non-psychedelic spiritual techniques are very quickly co-opted by the beady-eyed priests among us who then peddle it back to us with a menu of moral do's and don't s." "I think the real spiritual frontier lies in the community. . . . We must, somehow, carry everyone with us." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
12/2/20191 hour, 6 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 633 – “The Man Who Invented Bicycle Day”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Tom Roberts PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation from last Monday's Live Salon with Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D., who is a professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University. Tom not only began teaching the world's first university catalog-listed psychedelics course in 1981, he is also a founding member of MAPS, former visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins, editor of Spiritual Growth with Entheogens, and author of Psychedelic Horizons and The Psychedelic Future of the Mind. In this interview, Tom talks about his latest book, MindApps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design. However, you most likely know him as the man who created the first Bicycle Day celebration. Date this lecture was recorded: November 18, 2019 [NOTE: The following quotations are by Tom Roberts.] "I'm attempting to broaden the field [of psychedelics], and trying to get people who are interested in history and literature and philosophy interested in psychedelics." "We can install ideas in our brain/mind complex, just as we install apps on our devices." Thomas Roperts, Ph.D. Publications Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Boohbah: Skipping Rope (Episode 1) A visual trip - no drugs needed :-) A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
11/25/20191 hour, 6 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 632 – “Rainforest Medicine”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Jonathon Miller Weisberger PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 28, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation that a few of my friends and I had with Jonathon Miller Weisberger, who is the founder of the Ocean Forest Ecolodge Retreat in Costa Rica. Jonathan is also the author of Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon. For almost 19 years he has also been facilitating plant medicine council gatherings in Costa Rica and Ecuador. Jonathon was born in Berkeley, raised in Ecuador, and began his training in the Amazon with Maestro Don Cesareo in the early 90s. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon Ocean Forest Ecolodge Retreat, Costa Rica Rainforest Medicine Gatherings The Difference between Ayahuasca and Yagé Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
11/18/201959 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 631 – “Tim Scully and Orange Sunshine”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Tim Scully Tim Scully & Nick Sandcirca 2015Photo: @headsnews PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 12, 2019. [NOTE: All quotations are by Tim Scully.] "The LSD experience doesn't really carry a message with it. It's an amplifier. And it's much more dependent on set and setting than I believed at first. I should have paid more attention to what people like Tim Leary and Ralph Metzner had been saying." "It also slowly became clear, from observing my friends who'd taken a lot of acid, and some of whom were still behaving like assholes, that taking LSD was not a cure for being an asshole." "I think that maybe Huxley might have been right. Huxley wanted to turn the world on from the top down." "I still think it's much better, if you're going to take a substantial dose of a psychedelic, to do it in a quiet, calm, controlled environment, preferably with a very limited number of people present." Stuff Stoners Like Tim Scully Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
11/12/20191 hour, 28 minutes, 39 seconds
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Podcast 630 – “Sasha Shulgin’s Sidekicks” – 001

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Tania and Greg Manning PROGRAM NOTES: This lecture was recorded live in the salon on October 21, 2019. Today's podcast features what I hope will be the first of many more visits with Tania and Greg Manning. In addition to assisting Sasha Shulgin during the final years of his life, they continue working with Ann Shulgin to preserve the laboratory and other effects of her's and Sasha's life and work. In this initial conversation with "Sasha's Sidekicks", we reminisce about the Shulgins' first Burning Man experience and the Mind States conferences. Additionally, Tania reads some of Sasha's unpublished writing in which he talks about his relationship with Albert Hofmann, including an interesting anecdote about their favorite drugs, and Greg gives an emotional description of the peaceful final day of Sasha's life. Shulgin Research Institute Sasha Shulgin's Joke Book Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
11/4/20191 hour, 4 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 629 – “The Rose Garden” 002

A Video Podcast Today we feature our first video podcast from the Psychedelic Salon. Our normal audio podcast features the audio portion of this short documentary. However, the best way to experience this program is to watch the video version, which you may also download in various formats. Free Leonard Pickard PROGRAM NOTES: Guest speakers: David Luke, Ben Sessa, Mark McCloud, Julian Vayne, Michael Dupler, Gregory Sams, Carlo Rovelli, Nese Devenot, Shane Mauss, and Dr. David Nutt These interviews were recorded in 2019. In preparation of the audio edition of Leonard Pickard's The Rose of Paracelsus, Kat Lakey has traveled far and wide while gathering recordings from friends of Leonard's, all of whom have volunteered to read and record a chapter for this project. After meeting with some of these volunteers, Kat also recorded brief interviews with them. These interviews are presented in this video podcast. Some of these people, such as Nese Devenot, and Dr. David Nutt, have appeared before in the Psychedelic Salon. Also included in the interviews in today's podcast are Dr. Carlo Rovelli, David Luke, Ben Sessa, Mark McCloud, Julian Vayne, Gregory Sams, Shane Mauss, and attorney Michael Dupler. During the months ahead you will also hear each of them read one of the chapters from The Rose of Paracelsus. In case you missed it, here is an overview of this project. The Rose Garden (001) - Introduction Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
10/28/201931 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 628 – “Investigations of Life from Origin to End”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Charlie Grob Terence McKenna's logo, Bruce Damer's flight suit, Lorenzo and Charlie Grob PROGRAM NOTES: These lectures were recorded on Orcas Island during March of 2019.] This podcast features two interviews that I conducted last March at the Orcas Island Convergence. The first is a conversation that I had with Dr. Bruce Damer, and that is followed by my interview with Dr. Charlie Grob. Between them, their scientific inquiries span a wide range of inquiries. Bruce, with his work for NASA and his research into the origins of life, works with mega issues. And Charlie, whose human research work includes studies using MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, works with human-sized issues. "I think a lot of people don't realize it, but in the fifties and into the early sixties psychedelic research was the cutting edge of psychiatry." -Dr. Charles Grob Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer's Website Bruce Damer's Patreon Page Charlie Grob - Publications Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
10/21/20191 hour, 8 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 627 – “The Birth of a New Humanity” – Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses rarely. I used to say to my groups, if you haven't taken enough that you think you may have done too much, then you did too little." "Death by astonishment is a real danger in [psychedelic] places. I mean, these places are not simply strange, or amazing, or highly peculiar. They are absolutely confounding." "True spirituality is a very here and now matter. One should visit the sick and imprisoned, clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for orphans, feed the hungry. That's what the spiritual life is about. It's very down to Earth, straightforward." "In terms of suggesting you are a more spiritually advanced person if you take psychedelics. I don't really see any evidence for that." "It's too hard for the ego-maniac to take psychedelics. The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down." "I think history is a state of chemical deprivation that allows ancient animal patterns of behavior that degrade and confuse us to re-emerge and stabilize themselves." "Ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead people." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
10/15/20191 hour, 19 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 626 – “The Birth of a New Humanity” – Part 1

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Photo by Kyle Nieber on Unsplash PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Often in what I say there is, if not the fact of contradiction, then the appearance of contradiction. This is because, to my mind, life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction." "The great thing about the rational program of science is, pushed far enough, it reveals the irrational foundations of nature. And that's really what the crisis in science now is." "The human imagination, married to technology, has become a force too powerful to be unleashed within the fragile ecosystem of this planet. So we must either carry ourselves elsewhere, or the planet's homeostatic drive to preserve ordinary biology will eliminate us." "The notion of intoxication is an incredibly culture-bound idea." "What 'psychedelic' means to me is, in structural terms, a very small number of compounds all based on indoles. The indole hallucinogens are the true psychedelics." "I prefer to believe that [mind is] coming from the outside. That mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation, but it's not being generated in the neurons of the brain." "We're living in a fool's paradise, trapped inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism." "I think that the greatest disservice that science has done to humankind is the marginalizing of our own importance." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
10/7/20191 hour, 9 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 625 – “Nature Loves Complexity”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Photo by Brandon Green on Unsplash PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 17, 1998. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "You really can't understand the future without the psychedelic experience. History seems to be becoming more and more psychedelic." "We have all made too many sacrifices in the name of fitting ourselves into the culture we find around us through the circumstances of our destiny." "[Culture is a] toxic environment that one needs to negotiate with great care." "Domestication and civilization are curiously intertwined concepts." "A society has to be incredibly confident of its first premises to allow its citizens to habitually and regularly explore altered states of consciousness." "The entire Internet- computer-revolution rides on the backs of people who were taking LSD in the Sixties. People have expressed horror at this idea and then taken opinion polls at various professional gatherings, such as Sigraph and Comdex, and gatherings like that, and have this insight confirmed overwhelmingly. The entire post-1950s edifice of information transfer and replication technology was created by psychedelic people, and it's serving them very well, as well as the corporate elite." "Only the expansive, the generous, the psychedelic are going to be left standing when all of this stuff is sorted out, if it is ever sorted out." "The shaman is the one who is allowed to know how the culture is wired under the board. Everyone else stands out bathed in the glow of the big screen of cultural values, but the shaman are the people who actually understand the reasons for these performances, myths, and rituals." "We are trying to build, not a class of shamans but a shamanic culture. In other words a culture, and I think there has never been a culture of this type on the planet, a culture that actually lived in the light of the fourth dimension." "No human being has greater insight into your circumstance than you do." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/30/20191 hour, 18 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 624 – “The Way of the Psychonaut”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Susan Hess Logeais Lorenzo and Susan Hess Logeais in the Live Salon PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 16, 2019. Today podcast is a recording from last Monday evening's Live Salon with Susan Hess Logeais, the producer/director of a feature length film about Dr. Stan Grof. The film is titled "The Way of the Psychonaut" and presents Dr. Grof's work with some stunning graphics and effects. Even if you are already quite familiar with the life and work of Stan Grof, I am sure that you will learn even more when you see this documentary. TRAILER: The Way of the Psychonaut WEBSITE: Documentary project featuring psychedelic psychotherapy pioneer Stanislav Grof Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View  by Richard Tarnas The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View  by Richard Tarnas Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/23/20191 hour, 2 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 623 – “Timothy Leary Meets Jiminy Glick”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Dates when these interviews were recorded: 1973 and 1992. [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The best philosophers often end up in prison. ... Most of the men that I model myself after have been lucky if they just got away with being in prison for their ideas." "I have no more to do with drugs that Einstein has to do with the atomic bomb." "I based my entire life on Socrates. He's the guy that caused all the troubles in history. His motto was, 'The aim of human life is to know thyself.' And this is very subversive." "As soon as I studied books about Socrates, I realized that [philosophy] is a dangerous profession because you're teaching people to question authority. I realized that this job which I was going to undertake, the corrupting of the minds of youth, pays poorly, it gets you in serious difficulty with authorities." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Skip E. Lowe Obituary Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/16/20191 hour, 19 seconds
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Podcast 622 – “Nirvana Is Where You Are”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Alan Watts Alan Watts PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "The Bodhisattva returns into the world, that means he has discovered that you don't have to go anywhere to find Nirvana. Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it." "But the main thing [about death] is the attitude that death is as positive as birth and should be a matter for rejoicing because death is the symbol of the liberation." "The ordinary world and the Nirvana world they are the same worlds. But what makes the difference is the point of view." "Everything you know is remembered." "Always surround death with joyous rites because this is an opportunity for the greatest of all experiences when you can finally let go because you know there's nothing else to do." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Imperfectionists Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/9/20191 hour, 7 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 621 – “Insanity and Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "If you insist on, I don't want to use the word 'abusing' it, but if you insist on using psychedelics frequently, at high doses back-to-back, you will unlock your way into a set of assumptions, and perceptions, and feelings that not very many people can follow you into. And then the question is have you gone into a spiritual domain or have you just fallen off the track? And it's hard to tell, and maybe it can happen both ways." "What does it mean if it becomes harder and harder to take these things? Does it mean you're getting out of balance? Does it mean you're just getting older? Where should the blame be put, and what can you do about it." "Maybe [the psychedelic community is] a special slice. First of all, it is a monkey brain that we're operating with here. Nowhere is it writ large that it can actually encompass 'the truth'. Why should it? . . . So then, if you're into these consciousness-expanding techniques, whether it's just paying attention, or using psychedelic drugs, or something else, then you actually get to a place where there is an abyss of knowing." "Nowhere is it writ that the universe should be rationally apprehendable." "Abstract expressionism, all of these things, Freudianism, Jung, National Socialist, it's all anti-reasonable. From the point of view of the 19th Century we don't have to worry about madness, we are mad, every last one of us. We've so thoroughly imbibed the values of modernity that we are incomprehensible to our own past." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
9/2/20191 hour, 16 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 620 – “Psilocybin and the Mycology of Consciousness”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Paul Stamets Lorenzo and Paul StametsOrcas IslandMarch 2019 PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 21, 2019. [NOTE: All quotations are by Paul Stamets.] "As we reach down and we find a mushroom, we have a Eureka moment that as we touch the mushroom we are touching a portal into an underground network of wisdom." "In a single cubic inch of soil there can be more than eight miles of mycelium." "Mushrooms had their form well before we had ours. These are ancestral organisms. These are not just miscellaneous little fungi growing on the ground. These are elders. These are ancient individuals. These are bastions of knowledge. Encyclopedic in their history of evolution." "[Consuming psilocybin mushrooms] would be a shared community experience. And it wouldn't happen one time. It wouldn't happen ten times. It would happen millions upon millions upon millions of times over millions of years. Circumstantially, you cannot deny the possibility that the constant ingestion of magic mushrooms would have an impact on the evolution of human consciousness." Books by Paul Stamets Fungi Perfecti Makers of Host Defense Mushrooms Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Mushroom Stones Paul Stamets' Mushroom Stones A young Paul Stamets Breitenbush Mushroom FestivalHalloween 1999 Lorenzo is on the bus! Microdosing Foumula  
8/26/20191 hour, 46 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 619 – “RAW and the Information Age” – Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: December 1988. [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Anything that becomes a cliche eventually makes people stupid." "You've gotta deal with the future because that is where you are going to be spending the rest of your life." "Most of human history shows that we only do things the intelligent way only after we have tried every possible stupid way and found out that none of them worked." "I see interest disappearing, along with rent, in the next several years." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
8/19/20191 hour, 7 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 618 – “Rick Strassman’s Groundbreaking Research”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Rick Strassman Joseph Levy Escapes Death PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 5, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation with Dr. Rick Strassman, author of DMT The Spirit Molecule that took place last Monday evening in the Live Salon. During this wide-ranging interview Dr. Strassman discussed DMT, psilocybin, Gary Fisher, science, medicine, psychedelic research, mysticism, and the Bible. Joseph Levy Escapes Death by Rick Strassman Rick Strassman MD, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule Interviewed by Graham Hancock Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
8/12/201959 minutes, 35 seconds
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Podcast 617 – “Science Fiction Meets Science”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Bruce Damer Lorenzo and Bruce, who is wearing his "spiritual flight suit". PROGRAM NOTES: Date this conversation was recorded: July 29, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation with Dr. Bruce Damer that was held last week in our live salon. Although Bruce has made over 30 appearances on these podcasts, it has been a year and a half since he has been back to bring us up to speed on his latest activities, which include a recent presentation at the IONS conference, participation in the selection of the next Mars landing site, his origin of live research in the Outback, and the Shulgin Chip. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer's Patreon Page Bruce Damer's Home Page Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
8/5/20191 hour, 1 minute, 8 seconds
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Podcast 616 – “High Weirdness”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: Date this conversation was recorded: July 22, 2019. In today's podcast we listen in on a live salon conversation with author Erik Davis, who is an author, podcaster, award-winning journalist, and popular speaker. Erik was also instrumental in establishing the Palenque Norte Lectures at Burning Man, which eventually led to these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon. In 1999, Terence McKenna first brought Erik to my attention, and it has been a fascinating intellectual ride for me to follow his work since then. In this conversation, among several other topics, Erik talks about his new book, High Weirdness, which explores the work of Robert Anton Wilson, Phillip K. Dick, and Terence McKenna as they strode through the 60s, 70s, and into our future. Erik Davis' Techgnosis High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Paul Krassner Paul Krassner Obituary  
7/29/20191 hour, 6 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 615 – “Exploring DMT Space”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Daniel McQueen Daniel McQueen PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 15, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation from our live salon last week with Daniel McQueen. Several weeks ago we heard from Dr. Andrew Gallimore, who co-authored a paper with Dr. Rick Strassman regarding ways in which to extend an NN-DMT experience through an IV drip. Today we hear from Daniel McQueen, who is the founder of Medicinal Mindfulness and is a leader of the extended DMT research project that is based on the paper by Gallimore and Strassman. During our conversation, Daniel described the preparation and training that is now underway as a small group of psychonaughts prepare for a systematic exploration of the state of mind we experience while under the influence of DMT. DMTx Medical Mindfulness Psychotherapy & Psychedelic Consultation Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/22/20191 hour, 2 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 614 – “Meditation and Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Mike Sapiro Dr. Mike Sapiro PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 8, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation that I had with Dr. Mike Sapiro who is a clinical psychologist, meditation teacher and former Buddhist monk. He is the founder of Maitri House Yoga and a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His work integrates psychology, noetic sciences, nondual and Buddhist meditation, and social justice in the service of awakening. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dr. Mike Sapiro's website Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/15/20191 hour, 6 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 613 – “Iboga and Ibogaine”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Levi Barker and Gary Cook PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 1, 2019 Today's podcast features a recording from last week's live Monday night salon. Our guests were Levi Barker and Gary Cook who called in from the Iboga Wellness Center in Costa Rica. Levi Barker is a trained Iboga Provider in the Missoka Bwiti tradition and was trained to serve the medicine by Tenth Generation Bwiti Shaman Moughenda Mikala. The Iboga Wellness Center was founded by Gary Cook, and it is the longest-running shamanic Iboga retreat center in the Western Hemisphere. One of the topics we discuss concerns the different ways in which the plant iboga is used in healing compared with ways in which ibogaine, one of eleven active alkaloids in iboga, is used to heal opoid and other addictions. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Levi Barker website Iboga Retreat In Costa Rica Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/8/20191 hour, 7 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 612 – “RAW and the Information Age” – Part 1

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: This talk was recorded in December of 1988. Robert Anton Wilson's talks have always been a favorite of mine. How could I not like listening to someone who says things like, "Not even Kafka dreamed up the idea of a government inspecting the urine of its citizens." In today's podcast we hear his take, back in December of 1988, on the changes that have begun to enter our lives as a result of the proliferation of personal computers and the Internet. Since this talk was given four years before the introduction of the World Wide Web, it is surprising at how relevant it remains yet today. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Two new interviews with Lorenzo on other podcasts Charmers Podcast Episode 4: Lorenzo Hagerty From Notre Dame to Burning Man and Beyond Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
7/1/20191 hour, 3 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 611 – “At Home With DMT”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Andrew Gallimore Andrew Gallimore PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 17, 2019. Today's podcast features an interview with Dr. Andrew Gallimore regarding his protocol for extending DMT experiences with a drip technology. This conversation was recorded during one of our weekly live salons. Dr. Gallimore joined us from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology where he based. Andrew is a neurobiologist, chemist, and pharmacologist who is interested in the relationship between psychedelic drugs, the brain, consciousness and the structure of reality. His current focus is on developing a methodology whereby a detailed study of the DMT experience can be made. Andrew Gallimore Website Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game A Model for the Application ofTarget-Controlled IntravenousInfusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience Dr. Andrew Gallimore - Talking with Aliens Pt 1 DMT Nexus STARMAKER Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
6/24/20191 hour, 13 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 610 – “Beyond the Medical Model for Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Annie Oak and Ismail Ali Guest speakers: Annie Oak and Ismail Ali PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: February 26, 2019. Thanks to the new wave of research, psychedelics are poised to soon have legal medical use. MDMA- and psilocybin-assisted therapy are entering their final trials with “breakthrough therapy” designation by the FDA. But what’s beyond the medical model? Psychedelics have also long been used in personal, cultural, and sacramental contexts. Independently of any diagnosed disease, psychedelics can aid in the betterment of well people and support creative and spiritual growth. Regardless of whether psychedelics are legally sanctioned, there will always be “recreational” use in uncontrolled contexts. In a future society that recognizes these uses, what exactly do the systems look like that support risk reduction - and benefit maximization? In today's podcast, Annie Oak from the Women's Visionary Congress and Ismail Ali from MAPS discuss this issue. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
6/17/20191 hour, 29 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 608 – “Danny Nemu and the Neuro-Apocalypse”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Danny Nemu PROGRAM NOTES: Danny Nemu Today's podcast features a conversation that fellow saloner, Lex Pelger had with the Reverend Danny Nemu, author of 'Science Revealed' and 'Neuro-Apocalypse.' Their conversation covers how Danny found religion in Japan, looked for psychedelics in the Gospels, explored the world of legal highs, and how a tropical infection changed his life. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Danny Nemu's Website Danny Nemu's Vimeo Site Neuro-Apocalypse by Reverend Nemu Danny Nemu's Twitter Feed Getting high with the most high: Entheogens in the Old Testament Psychedelic Press Journal XXII with Danny's essay on racism and discrimination in ayahuasca-related anthropology Danny's Psychedelic Salon talk in Berlin on May 26 2019 A YouTube playlist of Danny Nemu's lectures and podcasts Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
6/3/201958 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 607 – “Music, Psychedelics, and Magic”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Matthew Schultz PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 15, 2019. Today's podcast features a conversation between Michael Kokal and avant-garde musician and artist Matthew Schultz. He was a founding member of the dark ambient band Lab Report, which included such diverse musicians as Genesis P-Orridge, Lydia Lunch and Chris Connelly. Schultz also invented the A.T.G. or Anti Tank Guitar and utilized this instrument with the Lab Report and Pigface. In total, Schultz has appeared on over 29 cds with 9 solo productions and 2 feature film soundtracks. Matt has also spent time in Peru working at an Ayahuasca healing center as a facilitator. He has worked extensively with Lakota and Mayan Elders for over 15 years and is a water pourer for sweat lodges. He continues to be involved in indigenous medicine ceremonies of many varieties. More information about Matt's art More information about Matt's SweatLodge More information about Matt's music and Lab Report End of the Road Podcast with Michael Kokal Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/27/20191 hour, 16 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 606 – “Michael Pollan Discusses Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Michael Pollan Now available in PAPERBACK! PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 6, 2018 Today's program features an interview with Michael Pollan by Michael Margolies from the Psychedelic Seminars project in San Francisco. Pollan is the author of seven previous books which were all New York Times bestsellers. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In today's podcast, Michael turns his attention to the psychedelic renaissance and discusses his most recent book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The book not only documents the characters behind the recent boom in psychedelic science, but Michael also provides some very personal first-person accounts of his own psychedelic experiences. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Paperback by Michael Pollan Joe Rogan Experience #1121 with Michael Pollan Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Mike Margolies Website Psychedelic Seminars Psychedelic Seminars PATREON Page Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/20/20191 hour, 38 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 605 – “Microdosing: Benefits, Risks, Unknowns”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: James Fadiman and Ayelet Waldman Mike Margolies, Ayelet Waldman, and James Fadiman PROGRAM NOTES: Date this interview was recorded: October 22, 2018. Today's podcast centers around microdosing psychedelics, LSD in particular. Much of today's interest in microdosing psychedelics blossomed after the publication of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, which was written by Dr. James Fadiman, who has been featured here in the Salon in the past. And we are fortunate today to listen to a conversation between Jim Fadiman and Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Their conversation was moderated by Mike Margolies, who you already know from his work a year or so ago on the Blue Dot Tour, from which we heard many podcasts. This conversation is one of a series of live streamed events presented by Psychedelic Seminars, the San Francisco Psychedelic Society, and Simulation. "I think psychedelics are great for people who don't like meditation, and I think that for people who like meditation they're also very good." -James Fadiman Psychedelic Seminars Hosted by Mike Margolies James Fadiman's Website Ayelet Waldman's Website DanceSafe Psychedelic Seminars Microdosing: The Benefits, Risks, & Unknowns w/ Jim Fadiman & Ayelet Waldman Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/13/20191 hour, 35 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 604 – “Healing With Sound”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Matt Pallamary and René Jenkins René Jenkins and Matt Pallamary  PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 2019. Today's program features a conversation between frequent guest, writer, and musician Matt Pallamary and René Jenkins who among other things is a ceremonial sound practitioner. During their discussion you will learn about the work that they have been doing with music during medicine ceremonies. They also discuss their gratitude for the guidance and teaching they have been given by world musician Tito la Rosa. René Jenkins Ceremonial Sound Practitioner Matthew J. Pallamary Author, Editor, Shamanic Explorer Mystic Ink Publishing The Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor Tito la Rosa "Ayni" with Tito la Rosa and René Jenkins   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/6/20191 hour, 3 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 603 – “Treating Opioid Addiction with Ibogaine”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Andrew Tatarsky and Lakshmi Narayan PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 22, 2019 Today's podcast features a recording of a recent session of the Psychedelic Salon LIVE in which our guests were Dr. Andrew Tatarsky and Lakshmi Narayan. In an interactive conversation with several of our fellow saloners, Andrew and Lakshmi told of their work in beginning the process of rescheduling ibogaine in a medical category that will better facilitate the work of treating opioid addictions. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option AWAKE . NET IBOGA/IBOGAINE Directory of Services The Center for Optimal Living Personalized solutions for drug & alcohol problems We Need to Change Our Thinking About Addiction by Andrew Tatarsky Ph.D. An Ancient African Remedy Helped Me Kick My Opioid Addiction Overnight Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/30/20191 hour, 4 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 602 – “RAW Theology”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: Sometime in 1987.] [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] There truly is no way to succinctly describe a talk by Robert Anton Wilson. This is one that you will want to listen to more than once. "The first time I tried [ketamine] I had an experience unique in my whole life. I was absolutely convinced I was god. I have had that suspicion on occasion, but this time I was absolutely convinced." "I'm really not about to set up as an exponent/proponent telling people to go around trying [ketamine]. It's a very interesting experience, but I think it's post-graduate work for those who have already been through the more elementary courses. I don't recommend it for beginners." "I think that the best way to achieve immortality is by not dying at all." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/21/20191 hour, 46 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 601 – “The Secret of Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Alan Watts. Alan WattsPhoto from Archive.org PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "If you have a radio, you don't only need an antenna, you also need a ground. So what happens in the world of mysticism, of psychedelic visions and so on, needs to be grounded." "Any law of this nature, any law that tries to enforce by the power of the state its morals, or your own business in looking after your own nervous system, is in fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization." "The rule for all terrors is to head straight into them." "LSD is one such chemical that produces the curious effect of making you aware of the polarity of things." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/16/20191 hour, 9 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 600 – “Elders from the Sixties Discuss LSD”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, and Humphry Osmond Left to Right: Myron Stolaroff, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, and Humphry OsmondPhoto credit: Erowid.org PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: February 16, 1979. Today's podcast features the audio track from the well-known last gathering of several of the men whose work was done in the very early days of what today is becoming known as the Psychedelic Renaissance. These men, who included Myron Stolaroff, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, and Humphry Osmond came together on a February day in 1979 and talked about some of their research, and some of their adventures, during the early days in which widespread use of psychedelics, particularly LSD, came into play. VIDEO of this conversation at Archive.org A Conversation on LSD on Erowid.org Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/8/20191 hour, 5 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 599 – “The Psychedelic Hospice Movement”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Lorenzo Hagerty A view of Roasario Resort in the distance ...  on Orcas Island, Washington PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 22, 2019 Today's podcast features the talk that Lorenzo delivered at the recent Imagine Convergence held on Orcas Island. The Imagine Convergence was a gathering of change-makers, intellectuals, innovators and cultural creatives who explored cross-disciplinary solutions to our current global complexities. Lorenzo's talk focused on end-of-life issues and what he calls The Psychedelic Hospice Movement. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option VIDEO of "The Psychedelic Hospice Movememt" by Lorenzo Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/1/201943 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 598 – “A Conversation with Nick Sand”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Nick Sand Lorenzo at home with Usha and Nick Sand PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features an interview given by legendary chemist Nick Sand, the creator of Orange Sunshine LSD. In this interview, given a few years before Nick's untimely death, we hear him explain what led him to become a psychedelic chemist as well as the many trials and tribulations he suffered over many years of incarceration as a prisoner in the War on Drugs. Nick Sand's Underground Cannadian LSD Lab Podcast 037 “Imprisonment & Liberation Aspects of Consciousness” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/19/20191 hour, 21 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 597 – “Terence McKenna on Art Bell” Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 19, 1998. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Repeated exposure to cannabis socializes it dramatically, and it becomes a much more manageable thing." "I can imagine the culture crisis getting so crazy that the people at the top will have to turn to their cohorts and say, "Call in McKenna and his friends." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/18/20191 hour, 21 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 596 – “Terence McKenna on Art Bell” Part 1

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Art Bell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features an interview that Terence McKenna did on the Art Bell radio program on March 19, 1998. This conversation begins with an interesting discussion of how Terence was living off the grid at the time, but it then proceeds to cover such topics as: Sandoz acid, technology, culture, artificial intelligence, aliens, UFOs, psychedelics, DMT, War on Drugs, television, coffee, politics. And this is only Part 1 of this interview. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "If you could build a DMT virtual reality, they would come!" "I once heard politics in America described as a civil war in a leper colony." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/18/20191 hour, 36 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 595 – “The Edge Runner” Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990. Today’s podcast features the second part of a talk that Terence McKenna gave in May of 1990. Rather than follow a script for this talk, Terence answers questions from the audience which feature such diverse topics as the family, education, ayahuasca, DMT, history, language, and psychedelics. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “For us, authentic meaning is beheld.” “History is the lower-dimensional language slice … among other things, of course.” “We have to educate people about drugs, and we have to tell them the truth. And the truth, unfortunately, is complex. So how do you tell a kid a complex truth?” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Entheo Medicine January 19, 2019 The Imperfectionists Don’t Get Owned Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo – Volume 1
3/17/20191 hour, 1 minute, 15 seconds
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Podcast 594 – “The Edge Runner” Part 1

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The world that we are living in is not at all as the linguistic structures we have inherited would have us have it. We are actually living inside some kind of artificial construction which is potentially permeable by human understanding but to date has not been.” “The unspeakable is the ground of language.” “History is the story of the cancerous and unchecked growth of the ego.” “If our god is omnipotent, omniscient, never wrong always right, utterly unforgiving, this is a jerk! Who needs this? We don’t need this. Our image of deity is pathological. Our image of deity is the image of the cancerously untamed ego.” “Psychedelics are not an ideology. Psychedelics are an experience.” “What the shamans say is truer than anything we can say about them.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo – Volume 1
3/17/20191 hour, 12 minutes, 40 seconds
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Salon2 056 – “The Harvard Psychedelic Club”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Gunther Weil Gunther Weil PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast from our Psychedelic Salon 2.0 track features some epic stories from a psychonaut who’s seen it all. His name is Gunther Weil. Gunther escaped the Holocaust, worked with Tim Leary on the LSD Concord Prison Experiment, worked on Aerosmith’s first album, recieved a Ph.D. from Harvard, and hung out with Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, and Ram Dass. These are his tales of adventure, curiosity, betrayal, and triumph. Gunther Weil shares with us a life of stories and adventures from political uprisings, government drug experiments, and his first-hand view from the start of a cultural revolution. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/11/20191 hour, 56 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 593 – “Understanding the Chaos at History’s End” – Part 5

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. Today we continue with the June 1989 Terence McKenna workshop session in which he sets out his ideas about history and time in his Timewave hypothesis. And while we now know that this idea of his will never actually become an actual theory, as it is sometimes said to be, nonetheless, he points out several instances in which history appears to be following a fractal pattern. As far as I know, this particular Timewave lecture hasn't been released on the Net before. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Videos of the Psycherence 2018 Conference in Estonia https://videolevels.com/psycherence Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/6/20191 hour, 27 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 592 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 4

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a mirror of the mind." "What are we when we begin to take off our cultural clothing? What kind of world will be build in the pure imagination?" "History is a kind of psychedelic trip. That's what it is. It's the big trip." "This transcendental object probably is more like a being than an object. I just call it a transcendental object to keep those issues out of it when we try to think of it as an at tractor. No, it's a mind. It's an organizing entelechy. It is THE mind. It's probably the mind that you call your mind." "When you go into these high dose places you are seeing a local map of this thing toward which all creation moves, at least this is my take on it." "It's just cognitive activity. It's all that the psychedelic experience is. It's accelerated cognitive activity. ... I think that the glory of human beings is cognition." "What psychedelics lead to is appropriate activity. Appropriate activity is the way to be straight with the psychedelic vision." "I regard all organized religion as a plot against free thought." "The thing which pervades the psychedelic experience is this sense of weird, sense of closeness to a bizarre secret of some sort. I don't even claim that the psychedelic experience should be put on the spectrum of spiritual experience, somewhere between moral rectitude and Buddha." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Imagine Convergence on Oracs Island Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/6/201957 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 591 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 3

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Minoan Crete PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Addiction to natural substances, with the exception of tobacco, is something you really have to work at." "There is something really insidious about synthetic drugs, about concentrating what is a vegetable essence, and very diffuse. Opium was no problem until morphine came along." "One of the things I think we have to disabuse ourselves of is that science knows anything about these things. The human studies were never done." "You may have the notion that we are a minority that feels this is important and there is a majority that feels that it's unimportant. That isn't the case. We are a minority who feels this is important, and there is a majority that knows nothing about it whatsoever, has no data, and no realization of what it is." "People such as ourselves, we are the cutting edge of neuro-psychopharmacology, because the content is the frontier, and these scientists know very little about it." "The official version of what can happen with these hallucinogens is very limited. There was never stress on content. The individual content of the psychedelic trip was treated like the ravings of a psychotic. In other words, it was never examined from the point of view that this person might be a reliable witness." "What does it mean that the most powerful of all hallucinogens occurs naturally in the human brain? What does it mean that the most powerful of all natural hallucinogens is the shortest acting?" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Lands of the Saracen by Bayard Taylor https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10924 Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
2/18/20191 hour, 13 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 590 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Mushroom ManLogo for the Palenque Norte LecturesPhoto by Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. Today we continue with a workshop that Terence McKenna led at the Esalen Institute in June of 1989. Although he begins with an exploration of ideas surrounding the use of sound during psychedelic experiences, he also tells some great stories, including one of my favorites. I'd only heard it once before, and for me it's the funniest story I've heard him tell, and this is a new version that you won't want to miss. Additionally, this may be one of the earliest talks in which Terence addressed the issue of global climate change. Also, for the first time I remember hearing it, Terence talks about his ideas concerning the concept of exo-pheromones. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Language is sound that stimulates ideas." "Interesting, the world wide reliance on sustained tone in spiritual exploration." "The ego is a neurotic response to separateness, and you cannot maintain your ego in the presence of strong hallucinogenic plant patterns of usage." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
2/10/20191 hour, 35 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 589 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 1

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Finn and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today marks the official beginning of the 3.0 track of the Psychedelic Salon. The main difference between Salon 3.0 and the earlier podcasts from the salon is that this 3.0 track on Patreon.com will be where you will hear the programs three months before they appear on the "classic salon" feeds. So to mark this new beginning I am playing a recording of a Terence McKenna weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute that, as far as I know, has never been published before. Date this lecture was recorded: June 23, 1989. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is history? What is it that is acting on us to propel us, in such a short time, out of the matrix of organic nature and into a matrix of our own creation, the world of culture, and epigenetic coding systems, and the human imagination as created by the modality of language. What is it that is pushing us in this direction?" "We fell into history. We became neurotic. We are, in a sense, the children of a dysfunctional relationship that we have forgotten all about." "I've had to come to term with the fact that bad drugs have been a major part of the human story." "The psychedelics are not ancillary. They're not peripheral. They're not secondary. They are the way to propel ourselves into these higher dimensional phase spaces. Eventually we will drag our computers with us." "What we see in our visions is not hallucinations. What we see in our visions is the higher truth." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
2/4/20191 hour, 3 minutes, 51 seconds
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Salon2 055 – “Matt Pallamary Live in the Psychedelic Salon”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Matt Pallamary Matt Pallamary delivering his 2007 Palenque Norte Lecture PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 21, 2019 Today's podcast features a recording from a recent live session of the Psychedelic Salon in which writer and ayahuasca researcher Matt Pallamary regaled us with his tales of jungle adventures. Matt Pallamary's Website n0thing Gets Swatted Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
1/27/20191 hour, 21 minutes, 41 seconds
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Salon2 054 – “Lorenzo at Entheo Medicine”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 19, 2019 Today's podcast is part of a presentation that I made at a recent Entheo Medicine event in Santa Barbara, California. The title of my little talk was "Psychedelic Renaissance – Creating Your Own Community", and the program notes said that I would talk about how I came out of the "psychedelic closet" and began podcasting episodes of the Psychedelic Salon. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option About Entheo Medicine   Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
1/21/201939 minutes, 29 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 597

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 19, 1998. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Repeated exposure to cannabis socializes it dramatically, and it becomes a much more manageable thing." "I can imagine the culture crisis getting so crazy that the people at the top will have to turn to their cohorts and say, "Call in McKenna and his friends." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
1/14/201913 minutes, 14 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 596

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Art Bell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features an interview that Terence McKenna did on the Art Bell radio program on March 19, 1998. This conversation begins with an interesting discussion of how Terence was living off the grid at the time, but it then proceeds to cover such topics as: Sandoz acid, technology, culture, artificial intelligence, aliens, UFOs, psychedelics, DMT, War on Drugs, television, coffee, politics. And this is only Part 1 of this interview. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "If you could build a DMT virtual reality, they would come!" "I once heard politics in America described as a civil war in a leper colony." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
1/7/20199 minutes, 48 seconds
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Salon2-053 – “Earth Medicine Women”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Shonagh Home Celtic goddess, Cerridwen holding the cauldron PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features a talk given by Shonagh Home at the inaugural Viridis Genii Symposium that was held in July of 2015. In this talk Shonagh discusses the role of women through the ages who have worked with visionary plant medicines. She explains the role of the Oracle of Delphi and her relationship with sacred plants, as well as other classic healers who were assisted by the plant spirits. Shonagh also shares some of her personal experiences with the sacred mushroom and the incredible synchronicities that have occurred as a result. "When I think of the technique of religious ecstasy, I think of high trance states that bring you into direct contact with the divine, with the ancestors, with the spirit of the plant medicines that you are working with." -Shonagh Home Visionary Mushroom Practicum: A Medicine Woman’s Perspective on the Practical and Mystical Layers of Visionary Mushroom Medicine Shonagh Home is a shamanic therapist, teacher, writer and poet. Her specialized private sessions and retreats are probing and revelatory, assisting clients to break chronic, self-defeating patterns, and move into empowered personal sovereignty. Shonagh is an international public speaker on the subject of visionary shamanic-spirit medicine, a voice for stewardship of the honeybees, and a teacher on the subject of Traditional Foods. She is author of the books, ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ ‘Poetic Whispers from the Green Realms,’ and ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissa Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Viridis Genii Symposium Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
12/31/20181 hour, 2 minutes
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Salon2 052 – “Ibogaine Therapy”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Richie Ogulnick PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: December 17, 2018. Today's program was recorded during last Monday's live session of the Psychedelic Salon. It features a conversation/interview with Richie Ogulnick, who is a leading expert on the healing properties of ibogaine, particularly in ways it is being used to treat addictions of various kinds. In addition to telling the story of how this African medicine made its way to New York City and beyond, Richie also provides rich details about the various protocols used in ibogaine therapy. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Richie Ogulnick Website https://www.ibogainealliance.org/iboga/bwiti/ Psychedelics Today Podcast with Lex Pelger Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
12/24/20181 hour, 24 minutes, 34 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 595

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990. Today's podcast features the second part of a talk that Terence McKenna gave in May of 1990. Rather than follow a script for this talk, Terence answers questions from the audience which feature such diverse topics as the family, education, ayahuasca, DMT, history, language, and psychedelics. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "For us, authentic meaning is beheld." "History is the lower-dimensional language slice ... among other things, of course." "We have to educate people about drugs, and we have to tell them the truth. And the truth, unfortunately, is complex. So how do you tell a kid a complex truth?" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Entheo Medicine January 19, 2019 The Imperfectionists Don't Get Owned Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
12/17/201810 minutes, 28 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 594

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The world that we are living in is not at all as the linguistic structures we have inherited would have us have it. We are actually living inside some kind of artificial construction which is potentially permeable by human understanding but to date has not been." "The unspeakable is the ground of language." "History is the story of the cancerous and unchecked growth of the ego." "If our god is omnipotent, omniscient, never wrong always right, utterly unforgiving, this is a jerk! Who needs this? We don't need this. Our image of deity is pathological. Our image of deity is the image of the cancerously untamed ego." "Psychedelics are not an ideology. Psychedelics are an experience." "What the shamans say is truer than anything we can say about them." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
12/10/201812 minutes, 14 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 593

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. Today we continue with the June 1989 Terence McKenna workshop session in which he sets out his ideas about history and time in his Timewave hypothesis. And while we now know that this idea of his will never actually become an actual theory, as it is sometimes said to be, nonetheless, he points out several instances in which history appears to be following a fractal pattern. As far as I know, this particular Timewave lecture hasn't been released on the Net before. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Imagine Convergence on Oracs Island Videos of the Psycherence 2018 Conference in Estonia Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
12/2/201814 minutes, 49 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 592

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a mirror of the mind." "What are we when we begin to take off our cultural clothing? What kind of world will be build in the pure imagination?" "History is a kind of psychedelic trip. That's what it is. It's the big trip." "This transcendental object probably is more like a being than an object. I just call it a transcendental object to keep those issues out of it when we try to think of it as an at tractor. No, it's a mind. It's an organizing entelechy. It is THE mind. It's probably the mind that you call your mind." "When you go into these high dose places you are seeing a local map of this thing toward which all creation moves, at least this is my take on it." "It's just cognitive activity. It's all that the psychedelic experience is. It's accelerated cognitive activity. ... I think that the glory of human beings is cognition." "What psychedelics lead to is appropriate activity. Appropriate activity is the way to be straight with the psychedelic vision." "I regard all organized religion as a plot against free thought." "The thing which pervades the psychedelic experience is this sense of weird, sense of closeness to a bizarre secret of some sort. I don't even claim that the psychedelic experience should be put on the spectrum of spiritual experience, somewhere between moral rectitude and Buddha." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Imagine Convergence on Oracs Island Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
11/26/201811 minutes, 36 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 591

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Minoan Crete PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Addiction to natural substances, with the exception of tobacco, is something you really have to work at." "There is something really insidious about synthetic drugs, about concentrating what is a vegetable essence, and very diffuse. Opium was no problem until morphine came along." "One of the things I think we have to disabuse ourselves of is that science knows anything about these things. The human studies were never done." "You may have the notion that we are a minority that feels this is important and there is a majority that feels that it's unimportant. That isn't the case. We are a minority who feels this is important, and there is a majority that knows nothing about it whatsoever, has no data, and no realization of what it is." "People such as ourselves, we are the cutting edge of neuro-psychopharmacology, because the content is the frontier, and these scientists know very little about it." "The official version of what can happen with these hallucinogens is very limited. There was never stress on content. The individual content of the psychedelic trip was treated like the ravings of a psychotic. In other words, it was never examined from the point of view that this person might be a reliable witness." "What does it mean that the most powerful of all hallucinogens occurs naturally in the human brain? What does it mean that the most powerful of all natural hallucinogens is the shortest acting?" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Lands of the Saracen by Bayard Taylor Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
11/18/201812 minutes, 19 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 590

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Mushroom ManLogo for the Palenque Norte LecturesPhoto by Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989. Today we continue with a workshop that Terence McKenna led at the Esalen Institute in June of 1989. Although he begins with an exploration of ideas surrounding the use of sound during psychedelic experiences, he also tells some great stories, including one of my favorites. I'd only heard it once before, and for me it's the funniest story I've heard him tell, and this is a new version that you won't want to miss. Additionally, this may be one of the earliest talks in which Terence addressed the issue of global climate change. Also, for the first time I remember hearing it, Terence talks about his ideas concerning the concept of exo-pheromones. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Language is sound that stimulates ideas." "Interesting, the world wide reliance on sustained tone in spiritual exploration." "The ego is a neurotic response to separateness, and you cannot maintain your ego in the presence of strong hallucinogenic plant patterns of usage." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
11/12/201816 minutes, 34 seconds
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PREVIEW of Podcast 589

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Finn and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today marks the official beginning of the 3.0 track of the Psychedelic Salon. The main difference between Salon 3.0 and the earlier podcasts from the salon is that this 3.0 track on Patreon.com will be where you will hear the programs three months before they appear on the "classic salon" feeds. So to mark this new beginning I am playing a recording of a Terence McKenna weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute that, as far as I know, has never been published before. Date this lecture was recorded: June 23, 1989. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is history? What is it that is acting on us to propel us, in such a short time, out of the matrix of organic nature and into a matrix of our own creation, the world of culture, and epigenetic coding systems, and the human imagination as created by the modality of language. What is it that is pushing us in this direction?" "We fell into history. We became neurotic. We are, in a sense, the children of a dysfunctional relationship that we have forgotten all about." "I've had to come to term with the fact that bad drugs have been a major part of the human story." "The psychedelics are not ancillary. They're not peripheral. They're not secondary. They are the way to propel ourselves into these higher dimensional phase spaces. Eventually we will drag our computers with us." "What we see in our visions is not hallucinations. What we see in our visions is the higher truth." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
11/4/201810 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 588 – “Good News on the Psychedelic Front” – Pt. 2

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2018.] Today we continue with the second part of the 2018 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Rick Doblin, the president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. In addition to learning some new information about the current state of MDMA research, Rick ends the Q&A session with some information about mescaline that I'd never heard before. As he says, "Mescaline is the most important psychedelic that isn't being researched." Also, there is an announcement about a screening of the film "From Shock To Awe" that was discussed here in the salon three years ago when the producers were first raising the funding for the project. It has now been completed and will be screened in select theaters on November 12, 2018. Full details are at the beginning of today's program. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Rick Doblin.] "We got an agreement letter on July 28th, and what it means is that the FDA is legally bound to approve MDMA if we get statistically significant evidence of efficacy from this design and no new safety problems come up." "Mescaline is the most important psychedelic that isn't being researched." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option From Shock To Awe Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
10/29/20181 hour, 31 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 587 – “Good News on the Psychedelic Front” – Pt. 1

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Rick Doblin The 2018 Palenque Norte Lecture Schedule PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2018. Today's podcast features the 2018 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Rick Doblin, the president of MAPS. In addition to a detailed description of the interaction between MAPS and the Veterans Administration, Rick also gives a detailed account of the now concluded Phase 2 study along with an explanation of how they believe MDMA works to relieve the symptoms of PTSD. As he says about the efficacy of the process he says, "What we found at twelve months is that people keep getting better. So at twelve months, two-thirds of the people no longer have PTSD. And of the one-third who still have PTSD, most of them have had a clinically significant reduction in symptoms, even though they still have PTSD." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Rick Doblin.] "I think we can look very carefully in our society and see that a lot of the people who are suffering but who might try to block what we're trying to do, if we really look deep into their suffering, a lot of them are really wanting us to succeed." "What we found at twelve months is that people keep getting better. So at twelve months, two-thirds of the people no longer have PTSD. And of the one-third who still have PTSD, most of them have had a clinically significant reduction in symptoms, even though they still have PTSD." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
10/21/20181 hour, 15 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 586 – “Psychedelics, Investors, and Politics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: David Nickles PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 8, 2018 Today's podcast features David Nickles, whose work may be found at the DMT-Nexus Website. The program is actually a recording of last week's regularly scheduled live version of the Psychedelic Salon, which takes place every Monday evening from 6:30-8:00 pm (Pacific) via a Zoom conference available to all of Lorenzo's supporters on Patreon. In this conversation, David provides some alarming details about the intersection of politics, psychedelic research, and big money. The DMT-Nexus Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
10/14/20181 hour, 17 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 585 – “Psychedelic Clinics In Our Future”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Will Siu PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 29, 2018.] Today's podcast features Dr. Will Siu, an MD and psychiatrist specializing, among other things, in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Dr. Siu is also one of the participating researchers in the MAPS MDMA study. In this 2018 Palenque Norte Lecture, he not only provides us with an inside look as some of the issues now arising as the possibility of psychedelic therapy morphs into a reality. For anyone considering a career in the vast field of psychedelic medicine, this thought-provoking talk is not to be missed. Will Siu MD, DPhil Capitalism on Psychedelics: The Mainstreaming of an Underground by Eric Davis Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
10/7/20181 hour, 16 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 584 – “Traversing the Imaginal Realms”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PIKAL and TIKAL Commemorative Editions PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 11, 2018 Today's podcast features a recent talk given by Shonagh Home at the New Moon Mycology Summit that was held in Wingdale, New York. As she speaks of humankind's loss of some of the powerful symbols that paganism once provided, Shonagh weaves in specific examples of ways in which her clients have leveraged the imagery experienced in mushroom trips to resolve issues in their everyday lives. Shonagh also tells the story of how she came to be a medicine woman. "Our state-run, Prussian education system, which is worldwide by the way, is designed to shut down imagination and creative genius to produce a predictable and compliant populace." --Shonagh Home Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Visionary Mushroom Practicum: A Medicine Woman's Perspective on the Practical and Mystical Layers of Visionary Mushroom Medicine Shonagh Home Shonagh Home is a shamanic therapist, teacher, writer and poet. Her specialized private sessions and retreats are probing and revelatory, assisting clients to break chronic, self-defeating patterns, and move into empowered personal sovereignty. Shonagh is an international public speaker on the subject of visionary shamanic-spirit medicine, a voice for stewardship of the honeybees, and a teacher on the subject of Traditional Foods. She is author of the books, ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ ‘Poetic Whispers from the Green Realms,’ and ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissa Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com The Mycelium Underground (TMU) are organizers devoted to bringing people together for the love of learning and embracing the world of fungi and all with which fungi intertwines.   PIKAL and TIKAL Commemorative Editions Psychedelic Chemistry Cookbooks Reissued In Stunning Boxed Set Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
9/25/201859 minutes, 9 seconds
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Salon2 051 – “Psychedelic Studies”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Kim Hewitt PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 2018 Dr. Kim Hewitt talks about her research into the history of psychedelics and their current manifestations. Her most recent academic paper is on psychedelic feminism. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Empower an Indigenous Ayahuasca Initiative  Kat Lakey's IndieGogo project   The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
9/18/20181 hour, 16 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 583 – “Psychedelics in the Age of AI”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 8, 2018 Today's podcast features a talk that Lorenzo gave at the recent Imagine Orcas Island Music and Arts festival. The title of this talk is "Psychedelics in the Age of AI", and it is followed by a question and answer session. At the end of the podcast Lorenzo plays a song from the newly emerging psychedelic/country/rock band The Burned. Lorenzo also talks about the festival as well as the Imagine Convergence that will take place on Orcas Island in March of 2019. Main Stage & LakefrontImagine Orcas Island Music & Arts Festival Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   The Burned Website The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival October 1 - 7, 2018 Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
9/16/20181 hour, 50 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 582 – “Graham Hancock – Glastonbury 2016”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Graham Hancock Graham Hancock speaking at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 2016 [NOTE: All quotations are by Graham Hancock.] "Our governments are so determined to impose these insane [War on Drugs] policies upon us that the whole credit worthiness of government in every way becomes suspect, if it was not suspect already." "I discovered that the most important aspect of ourselves is not our body. That's one of the lessons that ayahuasca teaches, that it's not our bodies that are important. It's our consciousness." "I have never regarded reality the same, since I began to work with ayahuasca." "Only a truly, psychopathically insane global human society would allow warfare to occur at all. The fact that war can snare us. The fact that we can be persuaded to go and kill other people in other lands should not be regarded as normal. This is deeply abnormal. It's the sign of a society that's gone terribly wrong." "Wherever I travel in the world I find that people are exactly the same. The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams, the same capacity to love, we are, none of us, any different." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
9/5/20181 hour, 8 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 581 – “Glastonbury 2016 – Dr. David Nutt”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: David Nutt Dr. David Nutt speaking at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 2016 [NOTE: All quotations are by David Nutt "The drinks industry is keen to keep its monopoly over drugs. And it fought battles over the last 150 years to make sure that no other drug got into the market. When acceptable versions of drugs like opium and cannabis and cocaine became available to the public, systematically, the drinks industry created opposition to them, created fear about them, and eventually got them banned." "Most of the justification for keeping drugs illegal is because, supposedly, they are harmful. But as you know, and hopefully some of you have read some of my work over the years, know that most of the illegal drugs are less harmful than alcohol." "We know that probably the majority of politicians know that they are lying about drugs." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
9/3/201857 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 580 – “Psychedelic Feminism”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Zoe Helene Zoe Helene PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 20, 2018 Today's podcast features a conversation between Zoe Helene and Lorenzo. After successful careers in the arts as well as in the corporate world, Zoe has transitioned herself into an advocate for the use of psychedelics, ayahuasca in particular, to help us all accept women as equals in our currently male-dominated societies. Zoe Helene's Website Cosmic Sister on Twitter Cosmic Sister on Pinterest Psychedelic Feminism   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
8/29/20181 hour, 10 minutes, 24 seconds
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Salon2 050 – “Lancaster Stories”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 8, 2017 In this last episode of stories from the Blue Dot tour, you get to hear stories from the barn at my parents' place in Lancaster, PA. Tales from Tipper and friends as well as a contest to see if you can find my story in the back catalog. . . . I hope you enjoy this last round of stories. --Lex Pelger Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
8/22/201848 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 579 – “Meditation and Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff Myron Stolaroff meditating in the morning PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: November 22, 1997 [NOTE: All quotations are by Myron Stolaroff "To me, one of the really great mysteries of our time is how we can have something as valuable as psychedelics and yet have our government, and the public-at-large, have such an absolutely twisted view of it." "As for myself, I'm on record as saying that LSD is the greatest discovery that man ever made." "I have a lot of friends who are always telling me about all kinds of nutrients. Gosh, there are things that are really, really helpful. But I want to tell you that the thing that helps more than anything is a good psychedelic experience." Are psychedelics useful in the practice of Buddhism? by Myron J, Stolaroff Journal of Humanistic Psychology Vol. 39 No. 1 Winter 1999 Pp. 60-80 Jon Hanna's Mind States YouTube Channel Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
8/14/20181 hour, 7 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 578 – “1) Enemies of Freedom & 2) Life After Death”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley A gathering of friends at Laura Huxley's home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features two recordings of Aldous Huxley. The first is an interview conducted by Mike Wallace, and the second part of today's program features a lecture of Huxley's that speculates about the possibilities of some sort of existence after the death of our bodies. Date the Mike Wallace interview was recorded: May 18, 1958 [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.]https://archive.org/download/578HuxleyFreedomAndMind/578-HuxleyFreedomAndMind.mp3 "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology." "People with a vested interest in a certain kind of philosophy find it almost impossible to accept facts which go against that particular philosophy." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
7/31/20181 hour, 40 minutes, 10 seconds
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Salon2 048 – “Mystical Systems and Psychedelics”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Daniel Greig PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2018 Daniel Greig studies cognitive science and philosophy. His lectures on psychedelics incorporate magic and mysticism. He uses the language of psychology and neuroscience. It makes for a fascinating mix. In this episode we will be hearing about his unique views on how these drugs are illuminated by the mystical systems of the past.   Daniel Greig 'The Psychedelic State' Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1 Crawl Space Hardcover by Jesse Jacobs
7/25/201838 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 577 – “Countdown Into Complexity” – Part 5

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "We asked for it, but we never knew we would get it in such spades. Last week was the 25th anniversary of the experiment at La Chorrera, and basically it's a trip that still goes on. We never came down. Now I've given up on coming down. I'm just hoping that if nothing happens in 2012 I'll have a few good years of penitent meditation ahead of me." "I think that the leisure and the indulgence that is permitted us, the super rich of this world, and we all are in that class, the upper five percent of the Earth's population, you can't live with yourself unless you give something back. And the thing to give back is share your art, share your soul. The reason we are so controlled, and abused, and misused by our institutions is because we are divided from each other. They have divided us by race, by class, by sex, by political style, all of these ways." "I'll tell you straight out, I'm an anarchist. I am an absolute anarchist. I believe in people more than in abstractions of institutions. I will always rely on people." "You cannot be a public figure and a practicing alchemist." "The basic notion here, I think, is an idea of radical freedom. This is not a cult of Terence McKenna. It is not a drug cult. It's a cult of curiosity if it's a cult of anything. And what you're supposed to understand when you come out of here is that an open mind is a very precious thing, and it should never be given away, perhaps ever, but certainly never lightly." "Belief is toxic. All belief. Don't believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt-fact of immediate experience. Everything beyond that is conjecture." "Explore the edges. Keep your logical razors sharp. Trust nothing that you haven't verified for yourself." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah by Ian Winn Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
7/17/20181 hour, 22 minutes, 11 seconds
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Salon2 047 – “Philadelphia and Baltimore Storytelling”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 2017 Thank you to the Philadelphia Psychedelic Society and to Psychedelic Seminars in Baltimore for two beautiful locations to hear these stories. As two of my favorite stops on the Blue-Dot tour, I'm glad to be sharing these stories about the power of psychedelics. -Lex Pelger The Philadelphia Psychedelic Society Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
7/10/20181 hour, 45 minutes, 35 seconds
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Podcast 576 – “Countdown Into Complexity” – Part 4

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Timewave 1995 - 2012Source: Fractal-Timewave.com PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996 This podcast features Terence McKenna in a March 1996 workshop where he goes into great detail about his Timewave idea. Although I haven't been including his Timewave talks in recent podcasts, since this series hasn't been posted elsewhere on the Net I've decided to keep the entire weekend's workshop intact. Baring any unexpected new recordings to pop up, this will be the last time that I include a Timewave lecture in the salon. However, this is one of his more comprehensive explanations of what turned out to be a not-so-great idea and is worth listening to as a way to sharpen your own critical thinking skills. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
7/4/20181 hour, 56 minutes, 35 seconds
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Salon2 046 – “The Psychedologist”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Leia Friedman PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 2018 Leia Friedman hosts "The Psychedologist" podcast, she cofounded the Boston Entheogenic Network, and is a writer and community organizer. She tells Lex about her work and her psychedelic journey. The Psychedologist Cosmic Sister Medicine Hunter Temple of the Way Of Light Psymposia Articles Eco-Feminism Psychedelics & Sexual Healing Social and Climate Justice Activism Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
6/26/201844 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 575 – “Countdown Into Complexity” – Part 3

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The way to get off on DMT is after you feel completely peculiar you have to do one more enormous hit. This is where courage comes in." "A meme has gotten loose on this planet that is the social equivalent of cancer in my opinion, and what it is is capitalism. Capitalism does not serve human beings. It serves itself in the same way that cancer does not serve a human being." "The reason people fetishize objects is because they have no accessible dimension of inner worth. They feel worthless." "I think the Internet probably will turn out to be very toxic for capitalism." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psycherence 2018 Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
6/19/20181 hour, 26 minutes, 37 seconds
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Salon2 045 – “Rick Doblin and the Psychedelic Storytellers”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 6, 2017 This week we go back to the very beginning of the Blue Dot Tour where Rick Doblin kicked off our event in Boston. Thanks to Northeastern's Student's for Sensible Drug Policy for making the event happen and to all the storytellers who came out to share.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Cora Venus Lunny Showreel Cora Venus Lunny Website Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
6/12/20181 hour, 11 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 574 – “Countdown Into Complexity” – Part 2

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "Nature is the original Internet. Nature is some kind of interconnected, communicating, data routing, self-regulating, non-equilibrium system." "I think what nature teaches, and what life teaches, is that worry is preposterous. Worry is a form of ego mania, because in order to worry you have to assume you understand the situation. What are the odds that you actually do understand the situation? Very low, I would think." Terence McKenna's Website Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1  
6/5/20181 hour, 24 minutes, 22 seconds
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Salon2 044 – “The Big Three”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Casey Paleos PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2018 Dr. Casey Paleos is one of the few psychiatrists to have worked with the Big Three: MDMA, ketamine and the psilocybin of magic mushrooms. In this interview, a day after his MDMA experience in Boulder, he shares what he's learned from his years of psychedelic research. Casey A. Paleos, MD "Ketamine: A Light in the Darkness" by Dr. Casey Paleos Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/29/20181 hour, 25 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 573 – “Countdown Into Complexity” – Part 1

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna The Baths at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "My techniques are all shamanic and involve perturbing the senses and dissolving ordinary states of mind through psychedelics. So my techniques are shamanic, but my method is rational and analytical. So I use shamanic techniques to go into shamanic places and then attempt to study them scientifically using reason." "To me, the New Age is typified by an incredible credulity and an utter immunity to cognitive dissonance." "What I have done is I probe weirdness, but rationally. Most people who are attracted to weirdness want to convert, and believe it, and take it in, and exalt it. I don't. I don't want to believe anything. I hate ideology, all ideology. That's why I'm so casual about the possible crushing of my own, because ideologies are a lesser resolution of our dilemma than we are capable of." "The truth does not require your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does." "Culture is a flight from reality. ALL culture is a flight from reality." "Radical human freedom is what you were born for, and culture is a kind of placenta, which if you develop normally by around age twenty you have no need of it, and in fact you've recognized the toxic nature of it and are trying to put it behind you and get away from it." "All this computer revolution is is a shift to more lightweight building materials." "Enormous doses of fuzzy thought and ideology are usually known as religion. . . . And the claim that you can achieve, somehow, the paradox of being outside without ever leaving culture by using the cultural instrument of religion to make your way to the heart of the mystery. I reject this. I just think think it's bunk." "Spiritual thirst can't be culturally confirming, because it's a rejection of culture. Culture generates spiritual thirst." "In the underground, then, an enormous database has been built up. No one knows as much about psychedelics as people in the underground, because they're the people who have actually taken them, correlated that date, and kept track of it." "Psychedelics demand of us courage. Every single person who says they've done psychedelics several dozen times is a courageous person. You're standing in the presence of fearlessness, because otherwise people turn away from it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/21/20181 hour, 21 minutes, 35 seconds
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Salon2 043 – “Psychedelic Charleston”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 23, 2017 From the May 23, 2017 stop on the Blue-Dot tour, a psychedelic storytelling session in Charleston, South Carolina that served as the launch event for our friends at the Society for the Exploration of Altered States. Society for the Exploration of Altered States https://www.meetup.com/connectwithSEAS/ Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Imperfectionists - San Francisco, California Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/16/201853 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 572 – “A Tribute to Larry Harvey”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Larry Harvey Photo source: BurningMan.com PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Larry Harvey.] "Milton Friedman once said, 'Only a crisis, real or imagined, produces real change.' When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic mission: To develop alternatives, and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable." "You can't base the core of a culture on sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Only an adolescent will tell you that." "The fact of the matter in the Sixties, at least the Hippie part, were avid consumers. They were happy consumers. The only people who came up with a critique of it later on were the Punks. As unattractive as they were, they figured out what the essential problem was. They would not sell out. They would not be commodified." "You are not going to create community unless you struggle together with other people. You will not create community unless you face survival with other people. Community isn't about sentiment. It's not about Kumbaya. It's not about loving other people., per se. It's about struggling with them, because only when you struggle together for survival with other people do you begin to see their soul. That's how it's done." "The Sixties were America's great recess." "If you want a stage at Burning Man, build it yourself." "We're not hiding from the world, we're trying to change it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Burning Man Official Site Burn on the Bayou Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/7/201859 minutes, 32 seconds
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Salon2 042 – “Psychedelic Law”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Noah Potter PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 2018 A lawyer specializing in psychedelic law and a New Yorker who witnessed the heyday of Yippie activism in Sin City, Noah Potter shares his thoughts on the past and the future of the movement.   New Amsterdam Psychedelic Law Noah Potter, Counsel Noah Potter on LinkedIn Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Salon Monday Night Zoom Conference May 7, 2018 at 6:30 pm Pacific Time Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/598427792 Meeting ID: 598 427 792 Or iPhone one-tap: US: +16468769923,,598427792# or +16699006833,,598427792# Or Telephone: Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): US: +1 646 876 9923 or +1 669 900 6833 International numbers available: https://zoom.us/zoomconference?m=rl6IjnPedyZ-dzB0GyTfHxP3-t34FYcb East Forest Podcast with Lorenzo Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
5/1/20181 hour, 8 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 571 – “Terence #2”

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "One thing about psychedelics, you don't have to be predisposed. It doesn't work for those who believe it work. It works for those who think it doesn't work." "The problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice. And sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about." "Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive, because at this very moment we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less. And what's the battle cry? Free trade everywhere!" "The way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away, at the same speed." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah http://octopusmessiah.com/ Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/23/20181 hour, 33 minutes, 15 seconds
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Salon2 041 – “Psychedelic Stories from Atlanta”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 17, 2017 Today's Salon2 podcast features a few psychedelic stories from a wonderful hot night in Atlanta. Thanks to Moshe Jacobson for making the night happen. Psychedelic Atlanta's Meetup Group Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/16/201842 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 570 – “A Psychedelic Truth”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Pedaling toward expanded awareness! PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Nothing is unannounced." "[A psychedelic truth:] Nothing lasts." "The lie of Western psychology is that something is stable. . . . And because of this lie we are in a state of perpetual anxiety because the truth of our experience is nothing lasts." "The central truth of being is the felt presence of immediate reality. That's all you will ever have." "I think this ability to accept the inevitable passing and coming to be of phenomenon is what psychedelic wisdom is really about." "Community is the enemy of authoritarian organization." "They don't hand out rights around here. The only people who have any rights are people who demand them." "Don't people understand that the essence of sophistication is tolerance?" "I think Americans are paranoid of nature." "This is very important work. Whether we succeed or fail, it would be tragic to not make the effort, because I think we really align ourselves with the Gaian intent when we bring these things to the community and share them." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/9/20181 hour, 11 minutes, 30 seconds
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Salon2 040 – MDMA for PTSD

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Ingmar Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: Today's Salon2 podcast features an interview with Dr. Ingmar Gorman about his work at the intersection of MDMA and PTSD.  Ingmar Gorman, Ph.D. The Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program Psychedelics 101 & 102 for Clinicians' courses Announcements Global Psychedelic Earth Day Cleanup on April 22, 2018 ICEERS survey of psychoactive use Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Lightning In A Bottle Learning and Culture Lineup Jon Hanna's video of Bruce Damer's 2007 Palenque Norte Lecture A short video clip the Lorenzo took at Bruce's lecture   Matt Pallamary, Bruce Damer, Jon Hanna, Lorenzo at the 2007 Palenque Norte Lectures   Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
4/4/201859 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 569 – “Searching for a Bias-less Media”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "Rational, and by that I mean statistically extractable expectations, seem to be superseded on these trips by a kind of magical connectedness. All kinds of strange things happen on trips that really happen! It's not hallucinations. These things really happen. The ordinary laws of causality are obviated, and you become a magnet for the strange, the peculiar." "In some sense, when you take a plant it takes you. . . . So essentially when you take psilocybin you are experiencing all the previous psilocybin trips that ever were." "I'm not of the school that says what we need is a drug we don't have. . . . I think that we have the substances we need. What we don't have are the techniques and the intelligence to know what to do with them." "Cannabis is the rudder on your ship." "In a sense, learning what drugs you should and shouldn't take is as big a task as deciding what kind of person you should or shouldn't go to bed with." "I think if you go through life taking vast amounts of drugs of all sorts then you didn't quite get it right. The idea is to find what works for you and then put the pedal to the medal. If it's LSD, or whatever it is, these things have personality. It's just like making a friendship, and some people are gonna want to be your friend, and some people are going to think you're a jerk. And you don't want to hang out with those people because they make you feel bad." "I don't believe everything the mushroom tells me. I just treat it like everybody else. You can't trust anybody one hundred percent." "I think one of the problems with education is that we are trying to use a print-created institution to educate electronically biased human beings. And it's created a kind of speed bump against illiteracy." "When media becomes bias-less media becomes reality." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Salon's Flipboard Magazine Psychedelic Salon Monday Night ZOOM.US CONVERSATION Please join us for an online conversation on the first Monday of each month. Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/598427792 Meeting ID: 598 427 792 Or iPhone one-tap: US: +16699006833,,598427792# or +19294362866,,598427792# Or Telephone: Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): US: +1 669 900 6833 or +1 929 436 2866 International numbers available: https://zoom.us/zoomconference?m=rl6IjnPedyZ-dzB0GyTfHxP3-t34FYcb Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/28/20181 hour, 14 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 568 – “We Become What We Behold”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna "Cosmic Christ" by Alex GreyPhoto credit: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "If a Buddhist could design their own genome they would become a fungus, because a fungus is a primary decomposer. It is the only karma-less place in the food chain. There is no karma for the fungi. They don't destroy any life whatsoever." "The trick is going to be to recognize the extraterrestrials." "I think probably the biota of the Earth is riddled with extraterrestrial genes, if not organisms, and possibly intelligences." "It's very clear to me that every abduction case around, except for a vanishingly small number that we can put in the classical category of stigmata, can be explained by one simple fact: People are losing the ability to distinguish dreams from memories." "Trust only yourself." "I think we're getting set, basically, to decamp into the imagination. That the imagination is as real a place as across the river is if you've just acquired eyes." "A shaman is a seer, is a prophet, is a higher dimensional mathematician. And they may not use tensor equations to express what they're doing, but mathematics before symbols is experience." "We have unleashed such novelty that I think we're in the terminal phase of decamping from three dimensional space. We are leaving the womb of Newtonian being for something else, the imagination. And the birth is tumultuous. The entire planet is at risk." "If this planet hadn't been wrecked sixty-five million years ago we wouldn't be here. Well then, what is our position on planetary catastrophe? We're in the process of making one. Is it so that sixty-five million years in the future an organism filled with love, and justice, and intelligence will look back at our skeletons in the shale and say, 'Well, they had a good thing going, but if it hadn't been for their extinction we wouldn't be here.' " Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "Thinking Outside the Quantum Box" by Bernardo Kastrup Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1  
3/23/20181 hour, 1 minute, 55 seconds
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Salon2 039 – “Psychedelic Columbus”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast presents a powerful round of story telling that took place in a Columbus, Ohio bike hangar. The event was hosted by the wonderful community of Mind Manifest West. "Mind Manifest Midwest is a psychedelic society based in Columbus, Ohio. Since 2016 we have hosted speakers to talk about some factual aspect of psychedelia. Our in-person community meets to share stories, promote harm reduction education, and create models for responsible transformational psychedelic use." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1  
3/19/201859 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 567 – “Psychedelicize Yourself”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Dale Pendell delivering his "Horizon Anarchism" lecture at the 2006 Palenque Norte Lectures during the Burning Man Festival PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I take psychedelics to be the catalysis of language." "This great period of creativity that we're living through now in the sciences, in the arts, in the implementation of exotic technology, I think this is the real legacy of the Sixties. The people who run these fancy computer companies, and the World Wide Web, and the Net, and CERN, and all that, they're all freaks. They're all people who came up through the Sixties and have somehow fitted themselves in to straight society. But the great bulk of creative work in society and those areas is being done by people who took psychedelics." "On psychedelics essentially you feel, or you see, the morphogenetic field that surrounds objects." "Clearly we have become a toxic drag on the rest of nature." "What the New World Order is is a Corporate Order." "The best substitute for psychedelics, which takes a lot more time, energy, and dedication, is penny-less travel in Asian countries." "If I had to say one thing that DMT is, it's alien beauty." "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at the peak of a psychedelic experience you see more art in a half an hour than the human race has produced in the last thousand years." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option He Spoke for the Plants Remembering Dale Pendell Obituary by Jon Hanna   https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-055-horizon-anarchism/ Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/12/20181 hour, 16 minutes, 44 seconds
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Salon2 038 – “Psychedelic Magick”

Guest speaker: Julian Vayne PROGRAM NOTES: Today's Salon2 podcast features the return of Lex Pelger who interviews Julian Vayne, an author and oculist. They about the history of drugs and magick - especially in the underground London scene. Vayne also highlights some of the important ideas from his new book on creating psychedelic ceremonies. This episode is cross-posted from the Greener Grass podcast. Getting Higher by Julian Vayne Trailer for Getting Higher Julian Vayne's blog The psychedelic prisoner project Lex Pelger's cannabis graphic novels are now FREE online. http://www.lexpelger.com/nononsense Lex Pelger's new program: The Greener Grass podcast. http://greenergrass.libsyn.com/ Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/5/201854 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 566 – “A Tribe of Selves”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "I think it's important to talk about and analyze your experience. There is no communication, even within the confines of your own mind, if you can't describe what's going on." "The crisis we're in, as a planetary society, is a culture of consciousness. There ain't enough of it. That's what happens when women are raped in Bosnia. That's a failure of consciousness. That's what happens when rivers are polluted with DDT. It's a failure of consciousness." "The idea that art should save humanity is very out of fashion in the cynical '90s." "When Fascism comes to America it will be called traditionalism. That seems to be how it's going to present itself." "Dancing your ass off in a noisy environment is a perfect strategy for clearing your system of a drug." "Your SELF is the instrument for the exploration of these dimensions." "Ideology is fairly absent in shamanism at a practical level. It's basically about experience, not about an ideological preconception." "What if there is actually something that survives bodily death, that actually continues to exist in a dimension which we would have to call mental, or trans-real. And what-if you could come and go from that dimension using shamanic techniques? That is what in fact shamanism has always claimed to anyone who would listen." "What is language? It's a strategy for escaping from the narrowness of the present moment." "I think that, well, frankly, I don't know what I think. It depends on how recently I smoked DMT." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Details of the Monday Night Conference Topic: Surviving in a Surveillance Society Time: Mar 5, 2018 6:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/326830671 Meeting ID: 326 830 671 Or iPhone one-tap : US: +19294362866,,326830671# or +16699006833,,326830671# Or Telephone: Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): US: +1 929 436 2866 or +1 669 900 6833 International numbers available: https://zoom.us/zoomconference?m=gd6Lbpidqa-Ks6hoGFbXcu2SJG8fB-he Salvador Roquet's bio on Erowid Eric Davis' Expanding Mind Podcast Goodbye Reality with Mark Pesce – 02.22.18 Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
3/1/20181 hour, 33 minutes, 44 seconds
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Salon2 037 – “The Family that Trips Together, Sticks Together”

Guest speakers: Scott Olsen, The Lakey Family From: ‘The Mysteries of the Amazon’ exhibit at the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, FL PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 14, 2018 On this, the very first episode of ‘Find the Others’, The Lakey Sisters head to Florida. And so we are happy to welcome the Psychedelic Salon’s newest anchors, Alexa and Kat, as they prepare to part ways for the next chapter of their adventures. This episode was recorded just before Kat traveled back to the Peruvian Amazon, where she is currently studying to be an ayahuasquera. She will be recording her portion of ‘Find the Others’ from there. While Kat worked her way across the globe, Alexa journeyed back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she’ll be recording her part of the podcast. In this episode, they interview Dr. Scott Olsen - author of the international best seller, ‘The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret’ and owner of one of the largest collections of Amazonian visionary art in North America. The sisters visit with Scott on the last day of ‘The Mysteries of the Amazon’ exhibit at the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, FL, featuring the work of Pablo Amaringo and his students from the Usko-Ayar School of Visionary Painting. They talk with him about ayahuasca culture learn more about the paintings in his collection. Following that, they be talk with their parents about their psychedelic experiences and how psilocybin can work as a therapeutic agent. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Email the Lakey Sisters: FindTheOthers42 (at) gmail (dot) com  Links: Find the Others Website Intro music provided by Dashmesh ‘The Golden Section’ by Scott Olsen on Amazon ‘Wide Awake & Dreaming’ by The Lakey Sisters The Lakey Sisters on YouTube Mysteries of the Amazon Exhibit Photos (photos by Matt Pallamary)
2/19/201846 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 565 – “John Perry Barlow Tribute”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Cory Doctorow John Perry Barlow Photo source: EFF.org PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: November 17, 2006 Today we pay tribute to the late John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an important leader in the struggle to keep the Internet free. In addition to John Perry's remarks, we will also hear John Gilmore, another of the co-founders of EFF.org. One of the most important essays written by Barlow is his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and at the end of this podcast you will hear John Perry Barlow reading that declaration himself. "If information is power, then the public needs to have more of it than the government, or the public will not be able to control the government." -John Gilmore "I think the city-state is going to have the biggest Renaissance since the Renaissance." -John Perry Barlow Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   John Perry Barlow Library A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow  Electronic Frontier Foundation   Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1 https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/
2/12/20182 hours, 21 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 564 – “Plants and Mind (Part 2-Chimpanzee or Bonobo)”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "And that's what we are now, semi-human. We're capable of enormous acts of kindness and appalling acts of brutality." "All of our institutions have been built up on the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchies, and deconstructing that is really what the future is all about." "I think the modern family is, first of all a very modern invention, and basically a cauldron for the production of neurosis." "Ego is like a cyst which will begin to grow in you, whether you are male or female, unless you take a psychedelic. The psychedelic will dissolve this cyst. The cyst is in your personality. It's a tumor. It shouldn't be there. We do need to have egos, little egos." "What is impressionism but LSD thirty minutes in?" "I don't think there's much chance of survival without a major effort to reestablish archaic styles and institutions." "Hallucinogens are intra-species pheromones of some sort. They carry information across species lines." "History is the consequence of an animal species losing its connection to the Gaian mind." "I don't think we can fix ourselves through rhetoric. If we could fix ourselves through rhetoric then Buddha and Christ would have done the job." "The private issue, certainly for me and probably for most of you, [is that] it's easy to take psychedelics the first time because you don't know what you're getting into. Ever after that you have to really have a little chat with yourself, and there are barriers to overcome." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
2/7/20181 hour, 4 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 563 – “Plants and Mind” (Part 1)

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think the great overlooked factor in any model of human evolution, and indeed of evolutionary models of many other species, is we have not given enough emphases to diet." "What seems to me to be one of the most centrally interesting questions to be asked of this world, and that is: What is human consciousness? Where did it come from? And why does it exist at all?" "It still is a very challenging thing to dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness, and abandon yourself to the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in." "I think this is a frightening thing to contemplate, but the earliest cities, I will argue, were pens for human beings. That's what a city is. They're a pen for human beings." "What is the plant hallucinogen experience in all times and all places for all people? I don't know if you can be that general, but it's important to try. What it is, is it's an experience of boundary dissolution. It's an experience of having categories obliterated, of having previously defined boundaries and differences eliminated." "History is a progressive de-humanizing of the human experience." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1.  
1/29/20181 hour, 6 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 562 – “What It’s Like To Be Loaded”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "Psychedelics are like any other social phenomenon. There are a lot of wannabes. There are a lot of people who are along for the ride." "I want to talk about what to my mind is the quintessential hallucinogen, and consequentially the quintessential spiritual and magical tool of this dimension. And that is DMT, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine." "A long, long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret. I won't keep it. I'm against secrets. I'm against hierarchies, lineages. All assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I am a true anarchist, first and foremost." "The psychedelic mantra: I've done it this time!" "And yet, the DMT thing, it's like and avalanche of orgasmic beauty, but a certain kind of beauty. The only words that I can find for the kind of beauty that it is are bizarre, alien, outlandish, freaky, and at the very edge of what the human mind seems to be able to hold." "What we are about to discover is probably the least likely thing any of us expected out of our dilemma. What we're about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort." "I never imagined that a through exploration of life's mysteries would lead to the conclusion that, in fact, this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of some sort. Our lives are gestations, and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves into what it means to be human. This is some kind of a metamorphic stage, like the pupa of a butterfly, and so this is deep water." "I think that the human body, the human mind, these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny." "A drug that you take and forty-eight hours later you're laying around in warm baths and refusing telephone calls is a drug you shouldn't have taken." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Burner Podcast Episode 74 Interview with Lorenzo Hagerty   Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1.
1/22/20181 hour, 28 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 561 – “Psychedelics and Artificial Intelligence”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 1999 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "The electronic media and the psychedelics work together in a peculiar way to accentuate archaic values, values which are counter to the print constellated world." "The shaman is like a designated traveler into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people and go behind the stage machinery of cultural appearances. And has collective permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of healing." "All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future." "The Earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of morphogenetic order. And that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the Earth itself is growing conscious." "Human beings are the agents of a new order of being." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1. https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/
1/15/20181 hour, 2 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 560 – “McKenna’s Thoughts About Marshall McLuhan”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 1993 In today's podcast Terence McKenna waxes eloquent about the writing of Marshall McLuhan, whose work in the 1960 was considered a revolutionary break with traditional ways of thinking about media. As Wikipedia says about McLuhan, he "was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. ... McLuhan is known for coining the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety by Rachel Harris Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1 https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/
1/12/201859 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 559 – “Complexity and Meaning”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: March 10, 1996 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "This synesthesia thing seems to be the direction in which language has to go in order to be universal. It has to be beheld, acoustical signals don't do it." "No matter how abstract the meaning may be it ultimately is a feeling of recognition." "If you can somehow realize that the purpose of your existence is to figure it out, and then figure it out, you will be in some sense liberated from it." "The reason we are so controlled and abused and misused by our institutions is because we are divided from each other." "You cannot be a public figure and a practicing alchemist." "So if I disappear off the grid until 2005, I'll be back for the last act, I'm sure, unless, of course fate drops the cosmic safe on my head. There's always that." "Our real glory is our imagination, and we seem to be the creature with this relationship to the imagination. It is an attractor for us into the future." "Virtual reality is a place where the creativity, the staggering creativity, of psychedelics can actually find a home." "What is the designing of a drug but the building of a nano-machine?" "Belief is toxic, all belief. Don't believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt fact of immediate experience, everything beyond that is conjecture." "In contemporary society we're always in the past and in the future, but what is real are feelings. And feelings attain a nexus only in the moment, only in the moment. So explore the edges, keep your logical razors sharp, trust nothing that you haven't verified for yourself. My faith is that the universe will take you in and share with you its meaning, and its intent, and its conclusion." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
12/24/20171 hour, 18 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 558 – “Prophetic Painting”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Terence McKenna The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch Source: WikipediazClick to see larger image PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 1993 Today's podcast features the last talk that Terence McKenna gave during his August of 1993 Scholar-in-Residence program at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. His topic for the evening was the way in which artists like Bosch and poets like Yeats imagined a trans-historical future in their work. Along the way, Terence inserts his views about art history and appreciation, and tells us why he believes that their work remains important to us yet today. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/19/20171 hour, 1 minute, 38 seconds
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Podcast 557 – “Updates on Psychedelic Research”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: George Greer PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2017 Today's podcast features Dr. George Greer, one of the co-founders of the Hefter Research Institute. In this Palenque Norte Lecture that he delivered at the 2017 Burning Man Festival, Dr. Greer not only covers the current state of psychedelic research, he also provides several interesting anecdotes about ways in which research participants have had their lives significantly improved through the use of psychedelic medicines. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hefter Research Institute   Abstracts of papers by Greer and Tolbert “Subjective reports of the effects of MDMA in a clinical setting” “The Therapeutic Use of MDMA” “A method of conducting therapeutic sessions with MDMA”
12/11/201752 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 556 – “Coalitions for Liberty”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Grover Norquist Grover Norquist delivering his 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 29, 2017 [NOTE: All quotations are by Grover Norquist "The best coalitions come from the hard right and hard left. Center coalitions don't get you anything except more of the same. Each of them are part of the status quo. So you're not going to get dramatic changes there." "What makes it enduring and work is that there's a level of trust between people who disagree, on many issues, but can agree on a series of principles." "The secret sauce of democracy is the rule of law." "There's a threat of violence behind any law, and if there's no threat of violence then the law will be ignored." "[Throughout] history more people have been murdered by their governments than by foreign invaders. So I kind of think fear of one's state is a rational fear in history." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/4/20171 hour, 29 minutes
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Podcast 555 – “Drug Policy”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: John Gilmore Electronic Self Defence Tools from EFF PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1, 2017 [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore] "The U.S. still has the world's largest prison population in absolute numbers and per capita. We imprison more people than the next ten countries put together. It's insane. It's a warped part of our culture." "[Some of the opposition to the Drug War] comes from people who are making money from the Drug War. I'm not talking about cartels and gangs. We haven't seen any opposition from cartels, which is interesting. What we see is opposition from police officers, police unions, police chiefs' associations, district attorneys, drug court judges, prison guards' unions, probation officers. All of these people are putting their kids through college on the swelled prison population of the Drug War. And they're afraid, if it goes away, we're not going to need to pay them any more, or they might have to focus on some harder and more dangerous crimes and more dangerous criminals. Most of the people who are selling pot are not going to slit your throat. And so, 99% of the resistance to legalization comes from cops and prison guards, basically." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marijuana Policy Project MAPS.ORG Electronic Frontier Foundation Tools
11/27/20171 hour, 23 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 554 – “How to Make it in Psychedelic Futurism”

Guest speakers: Daniel Pinchbeck and Michael Garfield Daniel Pinchbeck speaking at the first Palenque Norte Lectures during the 2003 Burning Man Festival.Photo by Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 30, 2017 Today's podcast features the author Daniel Pinchbeck and some friends at the 2017 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held during the Burning Man Festival. Besides discussing his books, ibogaine, and ecology, they also give us their thoughts about evolution and culture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Entheogenesis Australis 2017 Outdoor Psychedelic Symposium http://www.entheogenesis.org/
11/20/20171 hour, 10 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 553 – “The Origin and Future of Life”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer Bruce Damer delivering his 2003 Palenque Norte Lecture PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2017 Today's podcast features the 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Bruce Damer. As he describes the life-long journey that has led him to search for the origin of life on Earth, you may be surprised at how forthcoming he is about the ways in which he thought about this problem. "Our common ancestor is a community, not an individual. . . . We did not come from competing individuals, we came from a collaborative network of simple things that were donating innovations and tools to a communal structure." -Bruce Damer Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/13/20171 hour, 26 minutes, 16 seconds
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Salon2 036 – “Nashville’s Psychedelic Stories”

PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 After a Veterans' Day story by Lorenzo, today's podcast features some stories from Nashville. Thanks to everyone at the Nashville Psychedelic Society for your help making a perfect last stop of the Blue Dot Tour. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/12/20171 hour, 1 minute, 19 seconds
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Podcast 552 – “The Power of Divine Inspiration”

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home Kai Wingo speaking at Breaking Convention:3rd International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, July, 2015 PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 2017 Today's podcast features a talk given by Shonagh Home in October for the Women and Entheogens Conference. Kilindi continued the conference in honor of the conference founder Kai Wingo. The Women and Entheogens Conference was the brainchild of psychonaught Kai Wingo. Continuing Kai's legacy the conference continued with her vision. The Conference pushed the envelope into new and novel ideas. This year's theme was "Psychedelics in Birth and Pregnancy from Conception through Life". Topics explored included the concept of utilizing entheogens for fertility, pregnancy and breastfeeding. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option https://vimeo.com/155222494
11/7/201745 minutes, 58 seconds
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Salon2 035 – “ICEERS & Plant Medicines”

Guest speaker: Benjamin De Loenen International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research and Service PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 In today's podcast Benjamin De Loenen, the founder of ICEERS (International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research and Service), talks about things that led him to start this organization, which comes to the defense of plants and is dedicated to sharing the science and best practices around their use. ICEERS.ORG The Ayahuasca Defense Fund http://ayahuascadefense.com/ Ayahuasca Technical Report http://news.iceers.org/2017/07/2017-ayahuasca-technical-report/ Ayahuasca Good Practice Guide http://iceers.org/Documents_ICEERS_site/Safety&Ethics/Ayahuasca-Good_Practice_Guide_ICEERS2014.pdf Videos from the second World Ayahuasca Conference https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFSYWkLS73y6hwEaBHmIJyyQ9XCbMauc1&mc_cid=a1a4803e3a&mc_eid=4d4a945542 Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Salon Magazine https://flipboard.com/@lorenzohagerty/psychedelic-salon-beqt65mhy
11/2/201745 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 551 – “Women in Cannabis”

Guest speakers: Annie Oak and friends Photo source: Fortune420.com PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a panel of distinguished women, all of whom are participating in various ways in the burgeoning new world of legal cannabis growing, distribution, and education. The panel assembled on the last evening in August at the 2017 Burning Man Festival, where they spoke in the Palenque Norte Lecture tent. You don't have to be a woman to get a lot out of the information and experience of these amazing women entrepreneurs. Just give it a listen and you will understand what I mean. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/30/20171 hour, 30 seconds
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Salon2 034 – “Psychedelic Chemistry”

Guest speaker: Dave Nichols Photo by Jon Hanna from the Erowid.org vault of Dr. David Nichols PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 As the founding president of the Heffter Research Institute, a chemist who crafted some of the most important research molecules of this generation and a leader in the psychedelic community, we're pleased to present an interview with Dr. David Nichols. He talks about the impetus for his interest in these molecules, the potential dangers of microdosing and the feelings of a chemist whose creations escaped the laboratory and - while doing much good - also caused harm. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Microdosing with LSD and its Research Potential Legal highs: the dark side of medicinal chemistry http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110105/full/469007a.html Review of psychedelics by Dr. Nichols: http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/68/2/264 LSD Neuroscience - David E. Nichols at Psychedelic Science 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbUGRcuA16E To support Lex Pelger's Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcasts, join the No Nonsense Club: https://www.patreon.com/NoNonsense
10/26/201731 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 550 – “FDA Approved Phase 3 MDMA/PTSD Research”

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin Lorenzo looks on as Jon Hanna delivers the very first Palenque Norte Lecture at the 2003 Burning Man Festival. PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1, 2017 Today we feature the 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture delivered by the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, Rick Doblin. In this wide ranging talk, besides an update about the recent FDA approval for MAPS' major Phase 3 study of MDMA, we are treated to the fascinating story of how Rick was able to convince his conservative family into supporting his decision to pursue the investigation of psychedelic medicines. "What I intimated in my early LSD and mescaline sessions, they weren't all beautiful and peaceful and, you know, unity with god. They more were like taking a very ridged intellectual person and helping me to start to feel, and helping me have emotions, and helping me to start to wrestle with some deeper emotions." -Rick Doblin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS.ORG http://www.maps.org/
10/23/20171 hour, 59 minutes, 40 seconds
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Salon2 033 – “The Psychedelic Archives of Keeper Trout”

Guest speaker: Keeper Trout PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 The wonderful Keeper Trout shares with us today includes his experiences archiving the files of Dr. Alexander Shulgin, working to collect the chemistry of psychedelic plants and medicines (particularly mescaline containing plants), and the cultural and legal history of the Native use of peyote and cactus as well as its suppression by the United States government. Keeper Trout is a multifaceted and delightful character who gives us today's engaging interview. See Trout's work on Shulgin's archive here: www.shulginarchive.org More about his work conserving the cactus here: www.cactusconservation.org And his own excellent and thorough work on the chemistry and history of use of psychedelics: http://Troutsnotes.com Also, here is the article in which Keeper mentioned: Hallucinations of Neutrality in the Oregon Peyote Case, by Harry F. Tepker, Jr. https://works.bepress.com/harry_f_tepker/23/ To support the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 broadcast, join the No Nonsense! Club on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/NoNonsense Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hemp for Victory
10/19/201756 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 549 – “Android Jones: Visionary Artist Q & A”

Guest speaker: Android Jones Android Jones delivering his 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2017 Today's podcast features the Palenque Norte Lecture given by visionary artist Android Jones at the 2017 Burning Man Festival. Rather than give a structured lecture, Jones answers questions from the audience about the process he uses, including the use of entheogens, to create the fantastical images that we have seen on album covers, festival posters, live performances, and online at YouTube and Vimeo. If you have ever wondered how a work of art, such as his intriguing video titled Samskara came about, this evening conversation on the playa with Android Jones will fascinate you. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Android Jones [When facing a blank canvas] "you've got all these possibilities, and every time you make a decision the infinite possibilities are collapsing. By making a piece of art we are actually collapsing infinity. Every yes is a no to every other thing that you do." "I don't take psychedelics to try to understand some sort of like forth dimensional entities' agenda on Earth. I take psychedelics so I can understand the majesty of nature. I take psychedelics and I study the ways that trees grow. I take psychedelics and I look at the way that bees will start moving around the hives and the shapes they make. Psychedelics are not inspiring, but they help me gain a whole new level of insight into what is the most inspiring thing, which is just raw, beautiful nature that's around us all the time." "I like making art more than sex. I like it more than any other thing that there is. . . . I'm a junkie for that deep creative flow space." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Android Jones' Website Android Jones on Vimeo Samskara - An experience by Android Jones Left to right:Phong, Chris Aimone, Bruce Damer, Andrew (Android) Jones, Samantha Sweetwater
10/16/201758 minutes, 42 seconds
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Salon2 032 – “Ben Stewart’s Wild Ride”

Guest speaker: Ben Stewart Ben Stewart PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 The filmmaker Ben Stewart sits down in Lex Pelger's living room to share his story about the journey that led him to making films and how the psychedelics helped shape his path. You can learn more about his work on his website: http://talismanicidols.net/ Watch Ben Stewart's videos at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVtkjwwba5AyYyIkq-DSZkw Follow Ben on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/KymaticaNamaste/ And see everything Gaia.com is up to at: https://www.gaia.com As always, this is a No Nonsense production. Any assistance is always appreciated. Join us on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/NoNonsense Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/13/201741 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 548 – “The Politics of Electronics”

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow delivering his Palenque Norte Lecture at the 2017 Burning Man Festival PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2017 Today's podcast features the 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture by Cory Doctorow. In this talk, which was given during the Burning Man Festival, Cory walks us through some of the current issues having an impact on our ability to have our thoughts and words exchanged between ourselves without the threat of Big Brother listening in. As he explains, this isn't a case of winning or losing, it is about the ongoing efforts we all must make so as to keep the Internet free and not simply be the tool of big corporations and governments to spread their stories at the expense of We the People. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/11/20171 hour, 10 minutes, 4 seconds
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Salon 2.0 – “Horizons Conference Announcement”

Guest speaker: Neal Goldsmith PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: October 4, 2017 Today we hear from Neal Goldsmith about the speakers at the Horizons psychedelics conference this weekend: http://www.horizonsnyc.org/ And then our old friend Brian talks about the Saturday night event with Duncan Trussel. https://www.psymposia.com/events/microdosing-duncan-trussell/ If you can't make it, you can watch the show on their livestream. And as always, if you'd like to have your events, gatherings and work promoted, shoot an email to Lex: pelger (at) gmail (dot) com Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/4/201727 minutes, 23 seconds
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Salon2 031 – “The Sacred Cactus”

Guest speaker: Sergey Baranov Sergey Baranov PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 The path to peyote for a Russian seeker named Sergey Baranov. Throughout communities spanning the Americas, Sergey explored plant medicines and even faced a near-death experience before finally settling in Peru and founding the 'Cactus House' where he now leads ceremonies. Sergey Baranov's Website: http://shamansworld.org/ His Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/huachumawasi/ Path: Seeking Truth in a World of Lies by Sergey Baranov https://www.amazon.com/Path-Sergey-Baranov/dp/1480040711/ "Mescaline: An Ancient Medicine for the Soul" by Sergey Baranov https://wakeup-world.com/2017/05/06/mescaline-an-ancient-medicine-for-the-soul/ "Huachuma – The Visionary Cactus from the Peruvian Andes" by Sergey Baranov http://www.wakingtimes.com/2017/06/19/huachuma-visionary-cactus-peruvian-andes/ Meetings with Sergey Baranov: Sacrifice Your Fears for Your Vision http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/154421460X Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Altered Conference 2017 - BERLIN 3 - 4 November 2017 https://www.alteredconference.com/ Use the code PSYCHEDELICSALON at the checkout for a discounted ticket TantraPunk Podcast 126 with Lorenzo https://tantrapunk.com/decrypting-the-cyberdelic-revolution-with-lorenzo-hagerty-tpp126/ This Is Not A Drill Podcast 39 with Lorenzo https://superorganism.space/
10/3/20171 hour, 1 minute, 38 seconds
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Salon2 030 – “Wars ON Drugs”

The War Nerd Guest speaker: John Dolan PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 Today's podcast features an interview with John Dolan, who is well known as the "War Nerd". Additionally, he has another alter ego as the writer Gary Brecher. The War Nerd podcast covers a wild amount about the history along with speculations about the future of human warfare. In this interview, John explains the long history of drugs and war. Follow John Dolan on Twitter, https://twitter.com/TheWarNerd And support John's work through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/radiowarnerd For extended reading about this deep subject, there's 'Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War' by Lukasz Kamienski Support the work of Lex Pelger on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcasts (as well as all of his psychoactive advocacy) at www.Patreon.com/NoNonsense Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/28/201758 minutes, 12 seconds
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Salon2 -029 – “Treating PTSD with MDMA”

Guest speakers: Michael and Annie Mithoefer Annie & Michael Mithoefer PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 Michael and Annie Mithoefer have been working for years to bring MDMA into the forefront as a treatment for PTSD. As a couple who works together holding space for these sessions, they share about what they learned of the promise and pitfalls of this medicine. Also see Psychedelic Salon Podcast 86, which was posted on April 4, 2007 for Michael Mithoefer's 2006 Palenque Norte Lecture.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/25/201748 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 547 – “A House Divided Against Itself”

Guest speaker: Gore Vidal PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a lecture by Gore Vidal about the true history of the U.S. presidency. Also included is a brief bit by George Carlin where he explains why America is always at war. And Lorenzo explains in detail why he believes that the USA is already a failed state. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/21/20171 hour, 37 minutes, 10 seconds
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Salon2 -028 – “Psychedelic Storytelling in Chicago”

PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 Today's podcast features a great storytelling night from the Blue-Dot tour. Hosted by the Chicago Psychedelic Club, you can hear why we loved our stop in the Windy City. You can join the Chicago Psychedelic Club Also: check out 'The Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry' For integration meetings in Chicago, there is the newly formed 'Psychedelic Safety, Support, and Integration' group.     To support our efforts, here in Salon2, at gathering stories, interviewing our elders and spreading the Good News, sign up to help at Patreon.com/NoNonsense Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/18/20171 hour, 19 minutes, 4 seconds
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Salon2 027 – “Conversation with a Polymath”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer Dr. Bruce Damer at Burning Man 2017 PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 Some big announcements this week followed by a conversation with Dr. Bruce Damer who shares from his wealth of stories, science and psychedelic history. You can learn much more about his many endeavors at his website: Damer.com Dr. Damer's podcast is The Levity Zone TEDx talk by Dr. Damer explaining his work Open-access paper about Damer's findings including the graphic he scribbled down after working on the 'origin of life' problem in one of his 'endo-trips'. Life on Earth Came from a Hot Volcanic Pool, Not the Sea, New Evidence Suggests Scientific American August 2017 Thanks to Daniel Loew for contributing to our new Salon 2.0 intro music. Listen his tracks here. Also on this episode, Lex added a shoutout to the Lakey sisters - Alexa & Kat -  and to Jaron West for helping with the Psychedelic History Project. The sisters produced this wonderful remix of Charlie Chaplin's speech in The Great Dictator. They also have an Instagram of moving psychedelic art. To support the Lex Pelger in the Salon 2.0, join him on Patreon. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/11/20171 hour, 13 minutes, 30 seconds
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Salon2 – 026 “CBD and Bluebird Botanicals”

Guest speakers: Kevin Leibrock and Michael Harinen PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 Kevin Liebrock and Michael Harinen from Bluebird Botanicals tell us about their work producing high quality CBD oil that can be shipped to all fifty U.S. states. They answer some of the most commonly asked questions that people have about CBD. They also explain the process of producing whole plant extracts from Colorado hemp and discuss the ongoing involvement of the FDA, DEA and the Department of Agriculture in the cannabis industry. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option https://www.bluebird-botanicals.com/
9/4/201752 minutes, 18 seconds
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Salon2 025 – “Cannabis Pair O’ Docs”

Guest speakers: Matthew Markert and Frank Sacco PROGRAM NOTES: Year this lecture was recorded: 2017 For Marijuana Month, this week is our Cannabis "Paradox" Pair o' Docs episode. Dr. Matthew Markert shares thoughts about cannabis, epilepsy and the brain. As an MD/PhD interested in altered states of consciousness, he chose epilepsy as a way to study unusual states of the brain. You can email him at stanfordneuromed (at) gmail (dot) com. Then we hear from Frank Sacco, a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at William James College, who works with his father to create an online healing community for people wishing to explore the altered state of consciousness induced by cannabis for healing. Learn about their work and share your own story on their site Virtual Healing Communities. Thanks to Robert Heinlein for the Pair O' Docs joke in 'Number of the Beast.' Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/22/20171 hour, 8 minutes, 46 seconds
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Salon2 024 – “Cannabis Ceremonies”

Guest speaker: Becca Williams PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2017 After much work with cannabis, Becca Williams learned how to use it as a Spirit Plant medicine. She teaches people about the power of cannabis to heal traumas and now leads Cannabis Ceremonies in Denver, Colorado. Her work also includes excellent educational videos. Her Website, Cannabis Ceremonies, is overflowing with content. Cannabis Ceremonies on YouTube Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/14/201743 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 546 – “Insanity”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 27, 1992 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "What I'm always afraid of is that I'll be ostracized, except that it will be entirely deserved. . . . Disgraced! . . . Did you hear how this guy ended up?" "Even as it is, I'm practically a 'Repent! The end is nigh!' person. . . . [The Timewave] is basically 'the end is nigh' rap of some sort." "From the point of view of the 19th Century, we don't have to worry about madness. We are mad, every last one of us." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Transcripts of Terence McKenna talks
8/12/20171 hour, 37 minutes, 23 seconds
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Salon2-023 – “Mona Zhang’s Cannabis News”

Guest speaker: Mona Zhang PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2017 Mona Zhang writes an important newsletter about cannabis, where she gives us an update on news around the weed world and what she saw in the smoking scenes of Beijing, London & New York. You may sign up for her excellent newsletter at http://wordonthetree.com/ Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Ascended Minds Podcast (interview with Lorenzo)
8/8/201737 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 545 – “Current Research and Future Trends of Psychedelics, Stanford 2/3/91”

Guest speakers: Bruce Eisner, David Nichols, Rick Doblin, Charles Grob, Richard Yensen, and Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: February 3, 1991 Today's podcast features a panel discussion that took place at a psychedelic conference that was held at Stanford University in February of 1991, which is before the World Wide Web came into existence. At the time, conferences such as this were the primary means of communicating information about psychedelics to the public-at-large. Participants were: Bruce Eisner, David Nichols, Rick Doblin, Charles Grob, Richard Yensen, and Dr. Timothy Leary who, in addition to his own comments, also provided some amusing running commentary during several of the other talks. And we get to hear a young Rick Doblin give one of his most detailed descriptions about how he first came to become involved in psychedelic research. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/2/20171 hour, 40 minutes, 53 seconds
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Salon2 022 – “Psycho-Tech with Dr. Roberts”

Guest speaker: Dr. Thomas B. Roberts PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2017 Dr. Thomas Roberts is one of the most forward thinking people in the field of psychedelics. This interview covers his experiences leading up to the idea of psycho-technologies. His book, "The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values" is a valuable addition to any explorer's bookshelf and his approach to psychedelic scholarship envisions the future of creative thinking fostered by these old tools. Also see: Home Page of Dr. Thomas B. Roberts Multidisciplinary Approaches to Psychedelic Scholarship by Thomas B. Roberts, PhD   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/31/201754 minutes, 50 seconds
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Salon2 021 – “Tipper Stage’s Harm Prevention”

Guest speakers: Mitchell Gomez, Lex Pelger, and Margie Weiss-Hoffman Listen PROGRAM NOTES: Date these talks were recorded: May 2017 For this entry in the Psychedelic History Project, here are three short lectures from the stage of the Tipper and Friends festival in Florida. Mitchell Gomez of DanceSafe starts with his work in festival harm reduction, Lex Pelger talks about psychoactive storytelling, and Margie Weiss-Hoffman. She became an activist about the use of confidential informants after her daughter was murdered in a police sting gone wrong. For more information on her work, see: The Rachel Morningstar Foundation. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/27/201737 minutes, 17 seconds
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Salon2 020 – “New Drugs and Safe Parties”

Guest speaker: Mitchell Gomez PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2017 Mitchell Gomez of DanceSafe walks us through what is happening with drugs in the wild and what his organization is doing to reduced harm at festivals, parties and other psychoactive gatherings of the tribe. On the street today, MDMA is strong, ketamine is cut, and fentanyl is everywhere. Mitchell also explains more about DanceSafe's drug education, harm reduction and reagent testing services.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/24/201745 minutes, 34 seconds
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Salon2 019 – “Wild Bill Radacinski”

Guest speaker: William Radacinski The last great mushroom conference of the millennium - Breitenbush, OR 1999 PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: June 2017 Wild Bill knows no bounds. A native of Queens and an explorer of psychedelic space, he is an old friend of Lorenzo who has some interesting experiences to share. This is the first episode in our Psychedelic History Project featuring the voices of the people. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Wild Bill, Lorenzo & granddaughter Haylee Wild Bill, Marycie, Lorenzo Nick Sand and Bill Radacinski
7/21/201750 minutes, 24 seconds
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Salon2 018 – “Drug Laws”

Guest speaker: Mark Haden PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 2017 It's rare to meet someone eager to tackle the law but in this interview with Mark Haden, the Executive Director of MAPS Canada, he wrestles with the thorniest problem of all: how to regulate these drugs. You can see more about him and the work of MAPS Canada at: http://www.mapscanada.org/whoweare/board/13-mark-haden Mark's research and writing is at: http://www.markhaden.com/ Also, if anybody wants a first look at the Psychedelic History Project treasures, the first 500 items are scanned in. Reach out to help look them over, clean them up or add the metadata to these unique articles gathered from Timothy Leary's archive: https://www.instagram.com/thepsychedelichistoryproject/ Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/17/201749 minutes, 18 seconds
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Salon2 -017 – “The Case for Cognitive Liberty”

Guest speaker: Casey Hardison   PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: July 4, 2017 This week we feature the underground chemist and cognitive liberty hero Casey Hardison. He served almost 10 years in the UK on drug charges, but now he's free and sharing his story from the Shulgin Farm on the Fourth of July.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS - Volume 10 Number 2 Summer 2000 - p. 11 An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays by Casey Hardison Casey Hardison, a graduate student at the University of Idaho, conducted an informal survey of 2C-T-7 users at the Entheobotany conference in Palenque, Mexico in February 2000. Noticing that quite a few people were conducting bioassays of the material, Hardison seized the opportunity to perform some informal impromptu research. He designed a survey which was handed out to conference attendees, and received 48 responses. The results of this survey were published in the Summer 2000 issue of the MAPS Bulletin under the title "An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays."
7/12/20171 hour, 9 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 544 – “Biodiversity Is Biosecurity”

Guest speaker: Paul Stamets The last great mushroom conference of the millennium - Breitenbush, OR 1999 PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016 Today's podcast features the 2016 Palenque Norte lecture by Paul Stamets, who is one of the leading mycologists in the world. In this talk Paul covers a wide range of knowledge about mushrooms and mycelium that will blow your mind. For anyone interested in biology, this talk is not to be missed. As Paul says, "There's a recurring lessen here folks, when we're facing extinction events pairing with fungi has an evolutionary advantage. And we should make use of that." [NOTE: The quotations below are by Paul Stamets] "If Terence [McKenna] was sitting here right now I'd tell him the same thing, 'Terence, 95% of the stuff you say is total bullshit. But you say it so well." "There's a recurring lessen here folks, when we're facing extinction events pairing with fungi has an evolutionary advantage. And we should make use of that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/9/20171 hour, 58 minutes, 5 seconds
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Salon2 016 – “Psychedelic Stories from Victoria”

PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 3, 2017 For convincing your relatives about the power of MDMA, have them listen to the first story in this episode and then read this article where Oprah's senior editor reports on the healing and then tries it herself: Inside the Investigation: Can MDMA Heal Psychological Trauma? Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/3/20171 hour, 9 minutes, 8 seconds
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Salon2-015 – “Mary Porter’s Peyote Church”

Guest speaker: Mary Porter PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 2017 Around the kitchen table, we hear from the powerhouse Mary Porter, a Native woman who, after her wild years staying away from the medicine, founded the Looking Glass Peyote Church. The episode ends with hearing from a discriminating young veteran about his experience, through Mary, finally finding a teacher and a path. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Recommended Books Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition by John G. Neihardt My People the Sioux, New Edition by Luther Standing Bear My Indian Boyhood, New Edition by Luther Standing Bear Stories of the Sioux, New Edition by Luther Standing Bear The Tragedy of the Sioux (Illustrated) y Chief Standing Bear Fools Crow by Thomas E. Mails
6/26/201750 minutes, 15 seconds
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Salon2 014 – “Psymposia Stories from Los Angeles”

Guest speaker: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 26, 2017 Psymposia hopes that you enjoy these stories from Los Angeles. Besides the police officer Michael Wood & UltraCulture's Jason Louv and an array of other storytellers who have fathomed hell or soared angelic. This episode ends with one of the most powerful stories we have ever heard on on our stage. Also there is an announcement about the Psychedelic History Project for which Lex Pelger will be archiving this summer in order to save a unique treasure trove acquired by Dr. Timothy Leary and saving it for the world. To support that work or learn more about Lex's other projects in psychoactive history and education, go to his Patreon for No Nonsense Productions where you can get his Queer chapter for free. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/19/201756 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 543 – “Working With Medicinal Plants”

Guest speaker: Erin Rivera Merriman & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 2017 Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Erin Rivera Merriman who is an Esoteric Women's Health Practitioner, Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner, Priestess, Oracle, Artist, and Mother. Erin has taught art to Brooklyn teens, volunteered as an Interfaith Chaplain in maximum security New York City prison, led women’s ceremonial circles and organized retreats with indigenous teachers since 2007. Erin’s study as an Herbalist in the Wise Woman Tradition, combined with her training as a Zen hospice and prison chaplain, and recent studies in Kaula and Shakta Tantra have given her a unique ability to accompany you through life’s turning points as an ally on your journey toward liberated embodiment. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Active Culture Family   Online Privacy Guide - 2017   Shonagh Home Shonagh Home is a shamanic therapist, teacher, writer and poet. Her specialized private sessions and retreats are probing and revelatory, assisting clients to break chronic, self-defeating patterns, and move into empowered personal sovereignty. Shonagh is an international public speaker on the subject of visionary shamanic-spirit medicine, a voice for stewardship of the honeybees, and a teacher on the subject of Traditional Foods. She is author of the books, ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ ‘Poetic Whispers from the Green Realms,’ and ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissa Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Free Press Guide
6/19/20171 hour, 20 minutes, 51 seconds
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Salon2 013 – “Pallamary’s Paths of Shamanism”

Guest speaker: Matt Pallamary Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Date this interview was recorded: April 28, 2017 After hearing from Matt Pallamary at the San Diego storytelling in last week's episode, here's an interview with him about the tools of shamanism applied to writing, the pitfalls of gurus and his many stories and lessons from his decades spent diving deep into the many paths of shamanism. Check out his website ( http://mattpallamary.com/ ) to see the wide range of books he's written. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Sequel to DreamLand by Matthew J. Pallamary Support Psymposia on Patreon
6/12/201754 minutes, 41 seconds
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Salon2 012 – “Psychedelic Stories from San Diego”

Guest speakers: Various Lorenzo speaking at Psymposia's Blue Dot Tour stop in San Diego PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 27, 2017 Here's the storytelling session from San Diego. It's an especially powerful gathering thanks to the Aware Project creating community there. Plus, lucky story #7 comes from Lorenzo himself and includes a great history on the importance of the talks in Palenque, Mexico. This episode also includes a request for your feedback about the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 now that we've got a few episodes under our belts. Feel free to shoot your comments, your critiques and your recommendations on who to interview or what topics to cover more to pelger (at) gmail (dot) com. I will always respond. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/5/20171 hour, 37 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 542 – “Shamans of the Global Village”

Become a Patron! Guest speakers: Rak Razam and Niles Heckman PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016 Today's podcast features the 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture by documentary film makers Rak Razam and Niles Heckman. In addition to discussing their work with indigenous people, they discuss the making of their documentary, "Shamans of the Global Village". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shaman's of the Global Village More about Phaze Theory I was just wondering if anyone else out there on these forums is making psychedelic music with live instruments in or around London. I run Phaze Theory (phazetheory.com) which does a sort of Art Rock that is directly inspired by some incredibly high dose LSD sessions; literally 100 hits in some cases while listening to our heroes – Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis Electric, Jimi Hendrix and Funkadelic. We sing over the poetry of the great psychedelic poets and artists – William Blake, Aldous Huxley and W.b Yeats. We take the light to the darkness. I was hoping that someone might wish to open for us on 22nd of July in Servant Jazz Quarters (London). We are looking for someone who is also putting there psychedelic visions to the test in the crucible of live music. The gig is paid and you can see the details here. http://www.phazetheory.com/phaze-theory-at-servant-jazz-quarters.html You can hear some of the music here Very Psychedelic ambient music – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE0XPduPQ5Y Art rock on an incredible Yeats Poem – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMzjshHxyCE A Huxley poem – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7qYH40wGcA
6/5/20171 hour, 6 minutes, 28 seconds
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Salon2 011 – “Psychedelic Therapy for Veterans”

Ian Benouis Guest speaker: Ian Benouis Date this lecture was recorded: May 2017 This week we talk with the veteran Ian Benouis who works to connect those who served with the plant medicines. He works with the Weed for Warriors project and the Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy. You can see their project of taking 6 soldiers with PTSD to the Amazon for Ayahuasca in 'Soldiers of the Vine': You can see him in the documentary 'From Shock to Awe' and on the Viceland episode 'Stoned Vets' and follow his blog, the Psychedelic Musalman. "Ask the green plants of the earth & they'll teach you." -Job 12:8 Here is the donations page link for Lorenzo. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/29/201735 minutes, 25 seconds
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Salon2 010 – “Stories from Boulder, Colorado”

Lex Pelger on Psymposia's Blue Dot Tour PROGRAM NOTES: Date these stories were recorded: April 15, 2017 Today's podcast features the Psymposia Stories from Boulder, CO. A wide-range of people gathered under Naropa University to share their personal tales. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/22/20171 hour, 28 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 541 – “The Divine Feminine”

Become a Patron! Guest speaker: Dr. Rachel Harris PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: May 2017 Today we feature the second of two interviews with Rachel Harris, author of Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety. In an earlier episode in the Salon2 series, we heard Rachel in her very professional mode, every bit the Ph.D. that she is. In this episode of the salon we get to experience another side of Rachel, the everyday human side. Not that we don't get the benefit of her extensive background, research, and practical experience, but in this enjoyable conversation between her and our own Shonagh Home that is more like an everyday conversation between two long time friends. Even if you think that you know all about Rachel's new book, you won't want to miss this podcast. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Shonagh Home Shonagh Home is a shamanic therapist, teacher, writer and poet. Her specialized private sessions and retreats are probing and revelatory, assisting clients to break chronic, self-defeating patterns, and move into empowered personal sovereignty. Shonagh is an international public speaker on the subject of visionary shamanic-spirit medicine, a voice for stewardship of the honeybees, and a teacher on the subject of Traditional Foods. She is author of the books, ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ ‘Poetic Whispers from the Green Realms,’ and ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissa Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com
5/20/20171 hour, 28 minutes, 23 seconds
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Salon2 009 – “Cannabis and Spirituality”

Guest speaker: Stephen Gray Stephen Gray PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 2017 This week we talk with Stephen Gray, the editor & writer who pulled together the excellent collection of essays titled: "Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer’s Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally" In other vital news, if you've spent the last many years listening to Lorenzo on the Psychedelic Salon, go sign up for his Patreon site to support his work creating a postmodern form of autobiography. And if you want a taste of what he can produce, I found his book of maxims titled 'Scattered Thoughts' to be one of the best of its kind I've ever enjoyed: Here are three examples: "Few activities give one such a complete sense of accomplishment and pride in a job well done than successfully completing a drug deal." "Humans are Gaia's opposable thumbs." "I'm a free-lance iconoclast who is just trying to make the world a little safer for anarchy." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/15/20171 hour, 31 seconds
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Podcast 540 – “What Does Being Human Mean?”

Become a Patron! Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Permutation City by Greg Egan PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 11 &13, 1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "There is no closure. All ideology is now exposed as an adolescent response to being. If the 20th Century taught us anything, it taught us the toxic nature of ideology." "There is a need to abandon ideology, which is really a postmodern position, and it's very uncomfortable. "The absence of closure is a post-juvenile stance toward being that few people in the past ever lived long enough to grow comfortable with." "Culture, as a con game, lasts long enough to keep you entranced up until sometime in midlife. If you live beyond midlife and you still are fascinated and entranced by culture chances are you're an idiot of some sort." "I was passionate about ideology in my youth. I had most of them." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Permutation City: A Novel by Greg Egan
5/12/20171 hour, 29 minutes, 55 seconds
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Salon2 008 – “Psymposia Stories – Austin, TX”

Guest speakers: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 13, 2017 Here's our next set of stories from the Blue-Dot tour's stop in a library of Austin, Texas. Support Psymposia on Patreon to keep the events coming together and the podcast episodes flowing... Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/8/201728 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 539 – “Novelty and Technology”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Esalen - Big Sur, California PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 11, 1998 "Novelty theory has always said as the universe ages it becomes more and more complicated. Period." -Terence McKenna In today's podcast Terence McKenna talks about one of his most abiding interests, the increase of novelty/complexity in the universe. Along the way he also touches on psychedelics, the Esalen Institute, dark matter, and modern physics. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/4/20171 hour, 36 minutes, 24 seconds
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Salon2 007 – “Listening to Ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Dr. Rachel Harris Lorenzo, Bryan, Lex, Mateo, & Mike on the Blue Dot Tour stop in San Diego PROGRAM NOTES: We sit down with Dr. Rachel Harris who collected countless anecdotes of people's work with ayahuasca and condensed them into the excellent book: Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety. If you enjoy the work of Psymposia, come join the Blue Dot Tour or consider supporting our Patreon. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/1/201749 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 538 – “Are Psychedelics Spiritual?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 10, 1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "This always comes up in the discussion about are psychedelics spiritual. Or is it legitimate and coherent to talk about psychedelics as a part of a spiritual path, or a moral path, or a path to enlightenment. I've always said I wasn't ready to make that claim." "The strange thing about the spiritual quest, or the quest for understanding whether it's spiritual or not, is how endangered it is by answers, as I said, by closure." "The truth doesn't require your cooperation to exist, but illusion does." "Bad trips make bad sex look like no problem, which is an amazing thing to achieve." "It's very hard not to be a creature of your own time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Nick Sand on the Salon Nick Sand Obituary Lorenzo's Patreon Site
4/27/20171 hour, 36 minutes, 12 seconds
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Salon 2 006 – “Stories from Athens”

Guest speaker: Various PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: April 11, 2017 Today's program features some stories that the Psymposia Team recorded in Athens, Georgia on their Blue Dot Tour. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/24/201724 minutes, 23 seconds
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Salon2 005 – “Psychoactive Drug Research”

Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna & Lex Pelger Dennis McKennaPsychedelic Researcher PROGRAM NOTES: Lex talks with Dennis McKenna about the upcoming ESPD50 conference: the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 50th Anniversary Symposium Lex also announces Psymposia's first sale on Patreon & asks for your help to keep bringing people together online & offline. Perks include hemp Psymposia shirts, blotter art & print editions from Lex's graphic novel series on the cannabinoids. Psymposia's contributions to the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 are hosted by Lex Pelger, engineered by Matt Payne, intro music made by Joey Whipp, outro music played by California Smile & this episode is produced by Brian Normand. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/17/201757 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 537 – “Integrating A Medicine Experience”

  This program has been deleted by request of the speakers.  
4/16/20171 hour, 28 minutes, 59 seconds
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Salon2 004 – “Psychedelic Science 2017”

Guest speaker: Brad Burge Psymposia at Psychedelic Science 2017 PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Brad Burge, the director of communications for MAPS, who tells us more about the upcoming 6-day conference in Oakland, CA: Psychedelic Science 2017. ** In the "Free Marketplace" at Psychedelic Science 2017 Psymposia will be hosting our stage ten hours a day. You can see the schedule and watch the livestream here. ** Today’s podcast is hosted by Lex Pelger, engineered by Matt Payne, intro music by Joey Whipp, outro music by California Smile, produced by Brian Normand. ** If you like this show, want to see more, or want to help Lex get a new mic, consider supporting the Psymposia Team monthly on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/psymposia Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/10/201727 minutes, 43 seconds
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Salon2 003 – “Psychedelic Stories from Canada”

Guest speakers: Adi Khavous, Jenifer Dumpert, Brett Greene, and Pol Cosineau PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 920 Psilocybin Mushroom Day 2015 This week you’ll hear stories recorded live at Psymposia Stories Montreal from 920 Psilocybin Mushroom Day 2015. Adi Khavous: A nomadic street artist’s first time taking mushrooms. Jenifer Dumpert: One dream researcher’s story about Santa, drugs, and elves. Brett Greene: A howling tale of a Jeremiah in the wilderness kind of head trip. Pol Cosineau: The life changing drug experience of a man who well prepared himself for the voyage. Today's program is hosted by Lex Pelger, engineered by Matt Payne, intro music by Joey Whipp, outro music by California Smile, produced by Brian Normand. ** If you like this show, want to see more, or want to help Lex get a new mic, consider supporting the Psymposia Team monthly on Patreon. ** The-Blue Dot Tour To find more about the tour and if we’re visiting your city: https://www.psymposia.com/bluedottour The Blue-Dot Tour is our two-month open-mic Psychedelic Stories road trip across the continent starting on the way to the Psymposia Stage Psychedelic Science 2017 in Oakland. Our goal is to hit blue cities in red states that serve as such pressure cookers of activism, education, and art. But also blue cities in blue states, red towns in red states, purple villages in green states, and anywhere we can find a host from Mexico to Canada. We’ll also be screening Robert Barnhart's film 'A New Understanding - the Science of Psilocybin.' Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/3/201754 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 536 – “The Future of Art”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Alex Grey painting in his Manhattan studio Photo credit: Bill Radacinski PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 7, 1998 Today's podcast continues with a series of lectures given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute in early August 1998. It begins with Terence discussing ways in which he sees art evolving. Eventually he transitions into a discussion about the growth of the Internet and the possibility of it becoming a super intelligent entity of some kind. Along the way he touches on science fiction, time, consciousness, Bell's Theorem, and complex systems. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/30/20171 hour, 32 minutes, 2 seconds
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Salon2 002 – “Microdosing”

Guest speaker: Ayelet Waldman PROGRAM NOTES: Today brings us the first of the Salon2 podcasts, and it is hosted by Lex Pelger, who I have asked to tell you a little about what his psychedelic clan is up to. After Lex's introduction of the Psymposia Team, he will be interviewing Ayelet Waldman about her new book titled "A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/27/201741 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 535 – “Salvia Divinorum and Other Plants”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna A Sequel to DreamLand PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 6, 1998 Today's podcast features an August 6, 1998 talk about Salvia Divinorum given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute. In addition to many interesting facts that Terence presents about Salvia, he tells how Daniel Siebert became the first person to identify the active ingredient of the plant, which eventually led to its widespread use today. In addition to discussing Salvia, Terence also touches on: Ibogaine, magic mushrooms, psychedelic plants, Australia's psychoactive plants, DMT, Greek mystery religions, Datura, LSD, War on Drugs, and language. "I've not done the pure [salvinorin A] compound. It's somewhat scary. One thing that's scary about it is it creates a profound break with reality. The person who is intoxicated totally loses touch with this world, and unlike people on DMT, or ketamine, or some other short-acting psychoactive or dissociative, they won't stay still. People tend to move around and be active, which is a real pain for the sitter. . . . The protocol for dealing with this is the 'tie 'em to a tree' protocol." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option U.S. State Laws regarding Salvia Divinorum Legal status of Salvia Divinorum worldwide
3/22/20171 hour, 29 minutes, 32 seconds
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Salon2 001 – “Frequently Asked Questions About Salon2”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This is the first of the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcasts. It is a very short program that answers the following questions: 1. How did the idea of Salon 2.0 come about? 2. Where did the ideas for how Salon2 will work come from? 3. How much input and control will Lorenzo have in selecting the new programs? 4. How do you provide feedback as to format (lectures, interviews, conversations), etc. 5. Psymposia's Blue-Dot tour Psymposia Blue-Dot Tour Information Currently Scheduled Cities 4/06/17 Boston, MA 4/07/17 Philadelphia, PA 4/08/17 Lancaster, PA 4/09/17 Baltimore, MD 4/11/17 Athens, GA 4/13/17 Austin, TX 4/15/17 Boulder, CO 4/21-23/17 Psychedelic Science in Oakland, CA 4/26/17 Los Angeles, CA 4/27/17 San Diego, CA Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/20/201716 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 534 – “Drugs, Cultures, and the World Corporate State”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4,1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "The nation state is now on the ropes. It's being replaced by something else, the world's one thousand companies, the world corporate state." "The interesting thing about the world corporate state is it has no real moral agenda. It only wants to pick your pocket, which when you think of what's been peddled in the ideological market place in the 20th Century, somebody who only wants to pick your pocket is a welcome and humane addition to the rogues gallery. So I think that fairly quickly, more and more drugs will be legalized and even drug taking encouraged because there's a great deal of money to be made." "So all of these things [adverse reactions to drugs] should just be treated as neurotic responses to the problem of being, and if people want therapy or anti-depressants, or whatever they want to get over this hump should be given to them. But to criminalize this is not to do any favor to the victims. It's simply to turn it into a racket for all kinds of underworld and marginal institutions." "What all these things [psychedelic substances] have in common is that without any great danger to body and mind they produce a profound transformation of consciousness, the processing of language, the way in which we model the world and relate to the past. And do they impact on cultural conditioning? You bet your booties they do, because what they do, essentially, is return you to some primal, per-cultural state of conditioning where the animal body and the unacculturated inputs of perception are directly experienced. This is a model of the psychedelic experience." "Is culture good or bad? Well, I'm coming slowly to the conclusion that, I'm not sure it's bad, but it's certainly a damn nuisance. It's a limitation, is what it is." "The problem is these [world] cultures create less than a full expression of human potential." "To the degree that we are integrated into our culture we are not ourselves." "Could we end up spending most of our disposable income on code rather than fabricated steel, aluminum, glass, and plastic?" "So it's going to be technology, or catastrophe, or fascism. These are the choices, because, of course, because fascism, you know, can just order the liquidation of everybody under five feet, or everybody with brown eyes, or whatever. But the consequences of fascism are the complete distortion and subjugation of the human spirit. When we talk about survival of the human species we're not talking about at-any-cost or under any circumstances. If humanness does not survive with the human species then we're no more than another cannibal ape with a bigger club in the hand." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/8/201749 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 533 – “The Social Virus of Political Correctness”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4, 1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "A certain portion of my audience is flakier than I am comfortable with." "The whole point with psychedelics was to cut through the programming and the cant, and the propaganda of culture to true truth, real reality, not to just initiate an era of intellectual permissiveness where everything in the spiritual marketplace was placed on the same pedestal as Euclidean geometry." "It offends me that psychedelic people are susceptible to this [New Age thinking], because it seems to me that we're the last people who should be susceptible to this. We have no need of spiritual illusions because we have access to spiritual realities through the substances and the plants. So why should we, least of all why should we, buy in to all these unanchored, wholly, fluffed-headed ideas that are being pushed in the spiritual marketplace?" "If you're intelligent and you live past forty you will outgrow your culture. Some people may do it sooner, but you have to be a complete idiot to just buy-in at fifty-five, at sixty, at seventy-five. At eighty what are you still going to be doing, expressing homophobic views, voting Republican, and worrying about the A, B, and C's of phony reality? Most people get to a place where they just see it's a bunch of crap." "It looks to me like ideology is one of these neonatal behaviors that culture downloads on us. In other words, belief is for kids. It's a fairy tale. Marxism is no different than belief in the Easter Bunny. Probability theory is no different than a belief in the Easter Bunny. Everybody needs to get a grip on the uncertainty of the intellectual enterprise." "So the way to live with a human mind in the world is not to believe things, that's childish. It's undignified. The thing to do is to build models." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option This Week in Psychedelics with David Wilder
2/27/20171 hour, 8 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 532 – “The Mind, Consciousness, and the Brain”

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake and Joseph Chilton Pearce PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 28, 1993 Today's podcast features a conversation that was held on August 28, 1993 between Rupert Sheldrake, the originator of the Morphic Resonance theory, and Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of many books including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and other works investigating the brain, the mind, and consciousness. As their discussion proceeds they explore the concept that, as observers, WE actually are creating reality. Their conclusion to this often explored area of quantum physics is that, no, WE don't create the physical world. Rather, we are largely the recipients of it and our job is to learn how to participate with it and go along with it.   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality by Joseph Chilton Pearce, Thom Hartmann Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (2nd Edition with Update on Results) by Rupert Sheldrake Very Ape Podcasts Episode Thirty-Nine: Acid Heads w/ Bill Radacinski Episode Twenty-One: Cops for Pot w/ Howard 'Cowboy' Wooldridge
2/21/20171 hour, 13 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 531 – “The Prisim Lecture”

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: February 1982 [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "The belief in certitude, I suspect, is a primate habit." "One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that almost all pessimism results from watching what the government is doing. . . . because the government is the last place that important change is registered. And so if you're looking at the government you're looking at the past." "Certitude only belongs to those people who own just one encyclopedia."   Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/13/20171 hour, 28 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 530 – “A Psychedelic Moment In History”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 30, 2017 In today's podcast Lorenzo explains how he came to his decision to not vote in last year's presidential election. He begins by quoting part of a poem by William Butler Yeats which read: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. And by changing a single word in the final two lines of that poem, it would conclude: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Washington to be born? Full Text (PDF) of Lorenzo's remarks Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole" by Jack Lukeman from his new CD, Magic Days
1/30/20171 hour, 3 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 529 – “Privacy & Free Speech in 2017”

Guest speaker: John Gilmore - - Francis Huxley 1923 - 2016 - - Photo: The Guardian PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016 [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “Don't buy Apple products when they lock you into only using software that Apple approves of. It's really straightforward. It's like, don't buy food that poisons you. Don't buy from companies that try to control you.” [In response to whether one can get their information back from Facebook.] “I don't think there will be a way if you voluntarily hand over your data to a huge corporation that does not have your interest at heart. For you to get the data back, no, I don't think there will be a way.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) HTTPS Everywhere NO SCRIPT Addon PRIVACY BADGER Francis Huxley obituary Anthropologist fascinated by shamanism, myths and religious rites who strove to protect indigenous peoples.
1/14/20171 hour, 25 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 528 – “History Ends In Green” – Part 5

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The payoff [of psychedelic experiences] is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.” “And I think that's how we have to act. We have to each choose a small area and then act in that limited area with all the existential commitments we can muster. But not with anxiety.” “Anybody who thinks that you can save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly disabused.” “Politics without responsibility IS fascism.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/27/201659 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 527 – “History Ends in Green” – Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart. Have you seen that happen?” “The whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing, and that they can't believe it either.” “The one thing they tell you it isn't, it is! It is! It is made of magic, anything can happen.” “There's nothing holding any of us back from becoming unrecognizable, not only to our friends and loved ones, but to ourselves.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Joy Less Pain: The Life of Peter Gorman A documentary film about Peter Gorman by James Michael McCoy.
12/13/20161 hour, 34 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 526 – “History Ends In Green” – Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 In today's talk from a September 1990 workshop, Terence McKenna explains that when speaking about the DMT state he says that what he calls self-dribbling basketballs “are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you're looking at them they're actually sentences. And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way.” That should give you something to think about the next time you come out of a DMT reverie. He also goes on a little riff about why drugs have specific “identities” in the way they present themselves, as well as giving some advice about how best to choose your drugs. [The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This crisis in the Soviet Union and in the East Bloc countries, which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere, and a lot of America's assumptions will be swept away.” “The thing about Czechoslovakia is that if you scratch a Czech you get a Celt.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Shamans of the Global Village”
12/5/20161 hour, 38 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 525 – “History Ends In Green” – Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no closure. There are models, and there are questions. But all models are provisional, and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What's being claimed here [in the psychedelic experience] is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers. And it's different for everybody.” “There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics. If you look at the people who've been involved with it they've said completely different and contradictory things.” “We look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of 'bare' furniture. We fear it and don't want to look at it. And to my mind, most of the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guarantied lack of success. That's what they offer, because the last thing anyone wants is real change, because real change is uncontrolled change.” “Somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state. The two, I feel very strongly, are linked. Of course we can't get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.” “The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience.” “Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/21/20161 hour, 4 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 524 – “History Ends In Green” – Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about [the psychedelic experience]. It's like not finding out about sex or something. It's just too weird. It's a part of our birthright. It's not a cultural artifact. . . . This is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.” “We have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.” “There was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.” “Human culture has become, charitably, a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous, exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.” “It's a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barriers to the solution to our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own minds.” “There is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.” “Then I discovered psychedelic plants, and it was like the descent of an angel into the desert of reason.” “I'm convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact.” “Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious and the substitution of something else.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Second Sunday Salon Information https://genesisgeneration.net/forums/topic/second-sunday-salons/
11/8/20161 hour, 13 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 523 – “Coalitions for Freedom”

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Grover Norquist.] “You don't lose something because of partisan fights at the state level.” “States rights is a stupid concept, since states don't have rights. People have rights. States have power they use against people.” “People who have concealed carry permits go to jail or get in trouble with the law one-sixth as often as cops. So they're safer than cops.” “All the groups that want to be left alone have something to teach each other.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option My first Burning Man: Confessions of a conservative from Washington by Grover Norquist in The Guardian   Altered Conference 22 October, 2016, at Topics Berlin A conference exploring altered states of consciousness
11/1/20161 hour, 37 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 522 – “Surveillance Capitalism and the IoT”

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Cory Doctorow.] “This world of computers exists in a principle-free environment. The Internet of Things is the Internet of absolute, self-serving bullshit.” “The Internet of Things needs principles.” “The real struggle here, it's not making computers free, it's making people free. The reason we want to save computers is not because computers are more important than racial justice, or gender equity, or getting rid of homophobia and transphobia, or the climate. The reason we want to make computers free and open is because we cannot win those fights without a few and open information infrastructure.” “Considered atomically, one thing at a time all the things computers can do, we live in an age of unparalleled wonders. But all civilizations fall, and we have the shared responsibility to the civilizations that come after us to build the infrastructure that will lead to a future in which technology exists to server its users, not destroy their lives in service to surveillance capital, and the global war on terror, and self-serving bullshit so noxious that you can see it from orbit.” “No one puff [of a cigarette] is going to give you cancer, but statistically given enough puffs you're getting a tumor. If that tumor erupted with the drag there would be no second drag. The reason people smoke is because the tumors happen years later. And the reason people give up their private information is because the privacy stuff that bites them in the ass almost always happens years and years later too.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Cory Doctorow Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org)
10/26/20161 hour, 34 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 521 – “Risk Reduction – How You Can Help”

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Shannon Clare Petitt, and Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: In this 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture, Annie Oak, founder of the Women's Visionary Congress, teaches how to use Naloxone to help a person who has had an opioid overdose. She is followed by Shannon Clare Petitt who tells us about some of the work being done by MAPS' Zendo Project. Finally, we get to hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, talk about how he first learned about MDMA and what his first experience with that substance was like. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Naloxone John Oliver Blasts Pharma's Role in U.S. Opioid Epidemic:'This Is Happening Everywhere' "Some towns have been devastated," Oliver warned.
10/18/20161 hour, 16 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 520 – “Our Cyberspiritual Future” Part 6

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we're doing is we're building a nervous system. We're building a nervous system the size of this planet.” “The marketplace has an appetite for lies about the future.” “I cannot conceive of post eschatonic life. I think of it, just to make things simple for myself, as death, because that's the other thing in my life that I have no grip on whatsoever.” “An organism is chemistry abducted into hyperspace.” “If you're a guru these days, you're almost condemned to spending a life with foolish people.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrodinger "Shamans of the Global Village" Episode 1 Launch
10/6/20161 hour, 37 minutes, 39 seconds
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Podcast 519 – “Our Cyberspiritual Future” Part 5 – TimeWave

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear Terence McKenna's lecture about his TimeWave hypothesis (it never became a true theory). This 1997 talk was given less than three years before Terence's death and thus represents some of his latest thinking about this topic. He defines the TimeWave as a mathematical model of how the world works, as based upon the I Ching. Also, he clearly states that where the end point is set determines all of the other data points fall. However, in true Terence McKenna fashion he points out that even if he was 0.001% off, that gave him a range of 60,000 years in which his prediction would still be valid. He then goes on to discuss his correction to the Watkins objection that was discussed in podcast 472. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We are involved in the most accelerated, asymptotic ascent into change, so far as we can tell, that the cosmos has ever known.” “In the one sample we know of, biology has proven itself to be four times as enduring as the stars themselves.” “I won't defend it [the TimeWave] though. I've decided to get a life after 2012 no matter what happens.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/29/20162 hours, 5 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 518 – “Our Cyberspiritual Future” Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A nature trip is an eyes wide open trip.” “I think LSD is abrasively psychoanalytic.” “I don't see an intellect outside of space and time guiding things, and certainly not watching with baited breath the machinations of the human monkeys. I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.” “The universe is a self-creating mystery of some sort.” “Maybe reality is a far more perishable concept than we ever dared or feared to suppose.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option What Are the Benefits and Boiling Points of Cannabis Vaporization? Matt Lamkin's Bandcamp Site
9/20/20161 hour, 16 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 517 – “Our Cyberspiritual Future” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The only path in to the supernormal that I've found are the psychedelics. Everywhere else I found chicanery and fraud.” “It's fun to be a free person. It's fun to not depend upon an institution, an ideology, an other person, a place, a time. And it's very hard to sell this form of fun. People are afraid. People have been dis-empowered, I think, through the process of juvenilization.” “Millions and millions of people live larval, low-awareness lives warehoused in the burbs, plugged in to Costco and the tele. And as long as the magazine subscriptions stay subscribed and the credit cards continue to be serviced the illusion that there is life happening here is allowed to continue.” “I think that every single one of us should be learning how to expand our communications skills.” “It's not about rejecting the media or the marketplace. It's about changing your relationship to it. Do not consume. Produce! . . . Inject your own art.” “I don't believe alien spaceships are visiting Earth to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, or to do anything much else of interest, but I do think there is an alien presence. It's non-material. You contact it in the psychedelic experience. . . . Its nature is informational.” “What the alien needs to manifest among us is a suitable landing zone.” “In a sense, the Internet is a net to catch an alien.” “In other words, the imagination is like a field of data that is at the Bell level of connectivity in the quantum mechanical universe.” “Physically, we are alone, physically. But in the imagination we're surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our religions, our culture.” “We have exhausted the exterior world, and yet the interior world beats like an enormous ocean. And what is ordinary, historical consciousness but a tiny island protruding above that ocean.” “There was a period in my life where I formed my taste by saying I liked what I didn't like.” “I think the worst setting for taking drugs is complex social environments, especially public social environments.” “I believe in large doses . . . rarely.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Book Listing
9/13/20161 hour, 44 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 516 – “Our Cyberspiritual Future” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The real news is no one is in control, not the central bank, not the Jews, not the communist party, not the pope. Nobody's in control.” “I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models. You have to be incredibly naive about what people are to believe that a role model is in fact worthy.” “If you want to talk to the Dali Lama close the door of your bedroom and have a dialogue with the mirror. You're as good as the Dali Lama for crying out loud. Who could suppose otherwise?” “Buddhism without psychedelics is armchair Buddhism. How can you possibly know anything about these modalities if you sit there, shastras to the eyebrows, and never actually push off into the ocean of mind?” “Crop circles are the con that will not die.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia By Paul Devereux Entheogens and the Future of Religion Edited by Robert Forte
9/6/20161 hour, 37 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 515 – “Our Cyberspiritual Future” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it's a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we're basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our social systems, our religious ontologies, our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing, all of this is 19th Century at best. And so, really whether we live or perish as a species probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise from any source available.” “If consciousness is not part of our future then what kind of future can it be?” “Culture is an intelligence test.” “I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology.” “I think primates are most interesting when cornered.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Salon 2.0
8/23/20161 hour, 13 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 514 – “Anarchy Is The Ideal”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Democracy is this innate belief in people. It's a psychedelic way of doing it. It's the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy to my mind is, of course, the ideal. But anarchy has to be mediated with policy, and the way you do that is through democracy.” “The Earth is in far worse shape than we think.” “This notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics is, as far as I can see, the only way out.” “The most dangerous habits in the world today are not drug habits. They're idealogical habits, unexamined ways of thinking about reality.” “Besides the monotheistic thing, the really odd thing about Western religion is the persistent idea that god will come tangential to history.” “People think psychedelic consciousness is a permission to escapism. I don't think so. I think it's an invitation to a high degree of awareness.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/15/20161 hour, 3 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 513 – “An Ocean of Ideas”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken's right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn't done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?” “I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a week. And it's really changing how they look at the world.” “Isn't it interesting that the 'fix' turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we're just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There's an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego.” “Psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area. The area of thought and cognition.” “I've seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning.” “The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics, in a generalized sense, is that they are inspiration for ideas. And when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto an ocean of ideas.” “What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?” “If mind were not constrained by the rules of physics we don't know what we are. We don't know the castles we would build in the air.” “I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination. The imagination is a place. It's a world. It's a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we somehow have to marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it's the only safe haven there is.” “What we are cannot be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet.” “I think, based on the Timewave and based on reading the newspaper, that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane, global agenda is religious fundamentalism.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option It's All Happening With Zach Leary
7/27/20161 hour, 4 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 512 – “California’s Prop 64 is a TRAP”

Guest speakers: Ellen Brown, Letitia Pepper, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features insights from Ellen Brown and Latitia Pepper in regards to California's upcoming ballot measure Proposition 64. As you will hear, this measure will eliminate the current medical marijuana laws in the state. And while anyone over the age of 21 will be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, the days of medical patients going to a local dispensary will be over. Also, medical patients will need to obtain a new recommendation by January 1, 2018, and that can ONLY come from your personal physician . . . PLUS you will need to purchase a $100 permit to be a medical patient, but you will have no rights that anyone over 21 also has. This is a terrible proposition that basically puts Monsanto in charge of the marijuana business in California. Vote NO on Prop 64. NOTE: The original version of this podcast also included comments by a person whom I call "your typical uninformed voter." This apparently has caused him some discomfort, and so I have removed all of his comments from the podcast. Sorry about that.] Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Annotated Copy of AMUA, Prop 64 Ellen Brown's Website Latitia Pepper Interview (full) The Joe Hemp Network
7/20/20161 hour, 19 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 511 – “Psychedelic Book of the Dead”

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: “The whole history of Buddhism in the West, the whole thing in the post war period as Buddhism starts to become really popular, is inextricable from psychedelics.” -Erik Davis Today's podcast features a talk that was given by Erik Davis in which he unravels the history of both the Tibetan Book of the Dead and its psychedelic sister, the Psychedelic Experience, that was written by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner during their infamous Harvard years. Erik Davis, who holds a Ph.D. from Rice University's Gnosticism, Esotericism and Mysticism program, is a well known author and lecturer who has written books such as Techgnosis and Led Zeppelin IV. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Erik Davis' Website The Expanding Mind Podcast with Erik Davis Erik Davis on Twitter @erik_davis The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary
7/13/20161 hour, 20 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 510 – “Do Psychedelics Matter?”

Guest speaker: Professor David Nutt PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2016 talk that Professor David Nutt gave at the annual Glastonbury Festival. His topic was “Do psychedelics matter?”. Although demonised, and attracting severe criminal penalties for users during the half century of the “war on drugs”, psychedelics are now undergoing a renaissance – both in terms of scientific research and in people’s personal and spiritual worlds. It is once again a time of oriented explorations of the mystery of consciousness. As we all know, when it comes to the war on drugs, “the emperor has no clothes”, and there is no one in a better position to say this than a man who once was the UK's “Drugs Czar” but who lost his position when he began speaking the truth about drugs and refused to continue supporting the establishment's party line. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Professor David Nutt's Twitter handle: @ProfDavidNutt Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt Island by Aldous Huxley
7/6/20161 hour, 11 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 509 – “The Pharmacratic Inquisition”

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: In today's podcast Jonathan Ott unfolds a parade of history setting out the use and prohibition of psychedelic medicines throughout the course of human history. Although this talk was originally given at a 1996 entheobotany conference, it remains as current as if it were given yesterday. After Jonathan describes human uses of psychoactive plants stretching back into prehistory, he goes on to explain how what he calls “the overdeveloped world” has used religious morality to impose a pharmacratic inquisition that has essentially caused “the spiritual bankruptcy of our Western Civilization.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Shamans are Technologists of Myth” -Lorenzo The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley Reality by Peter Kingsley Peter Kingsley Interview – Western Civilization was intentionally created
6/29/20161 hour, 9 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 508 – “Techno-Shamanism”

Guest speaker: Michael Garfield PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features Michael Garfield who went to school for paleontology and then psychology before leaving academia to embark on a decade-long "trans-disciplinary" independent study of the intersections between art, science, and philosophy. As an experimental acoustic-electronic guitarist-singer-songwriter, as a scientific illustrator turned performance painter, and as a writer and speaker, Michael's work is an attempt to help articulate a vision for the best possible future for us – one that doesn't suffer the insane delusions of our separation from nature, technology, and each other. According to Cap Blackard, writing for “Consequence of Sound” this talk by Micheal rates in the top 25 of the 333 performances at this year's version of the Future Music/Future Thought Festival. He goes on to say: "Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer – a multidisciplinary monologue that rivaled Brian Eno’s Moogfest 2011 keynote for all the unexpected twists and turns it took. This one-man show saw artist-musician Michael Garfield take a captive audience on a vision-quest through the lands where metaphysics and emerging technology meet. Make no mistake – it was a ramble, but an insightful and fascinating one from start to finish that traveled from the ancient dragon god Tiamat to the Victorians laying the transatlantic telegraph cable to the Manhattan Project giving birth to a new age of fear and awareness. The “psychedelic century”? That’s the here and now that’s just beginning, and the more our technology graduates us to the alchemical act of creation, the closer humanity comes to confronting “the cosmic mystery that we are.” Heavy and heady stuff, and a pleasant counterpoint to the doom and gloom of the average transhumanist cybergrumps whose future-thinking seems improbably grounded in the limited perceptions of the present." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Michael Garfield's music on Bandcamp Michael Garfield's talks on Bandcamp Michael Garfield's Art The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness by Lawrence "Lorenzo" Hagerty
6/22/20161 hour, 6 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 507 – Certified Natural Cannabis

Guest speakers: Shonagh Home and Sally PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and a cannabis grower in the State of Washington, where both medical and recreational cannabis are now legal. Among other things, we learn how cannabis can be grown without the use of any chemicals to keep the pests away, thus providing their customers with truly healthy medicine. We also learn about an organization named Certified Natural Cannabis, which is uniting farms that use clean cultivation techniques and that meet or exceed national organic standards. Their mission is to keep cannabis nontoxic and to represent producers and products that use no synthetic chemicals. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Contact Sally at: synesthesia (dot) sally (at) gmail (dot) com Certified Natural Cannabis To get up to speed with Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and blockchain technology, here are some links that may be of interest to you: Understand the Blockchain in Two Minutes About “The” DAO Blockchain Explained, What is Blockchain?
6/14/20161 hour, 9 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 506 – “One Of Us”

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Sasha Shulgin in 1996. In many ways this is a perfect Shulgin talk for a podcast because he didn't use any photos or the chalkboard to assist in his presentation. This talk is also one of Sasha's best presentations as for not just the chemistry but also for some of the personal stories he tells. Also, he clarifies the Urban Legend about LSD occurring in nature. “I suddenly realized the fatuousness of people saying that 'mescaline taught me this', and I think the same, in a funny way, applies to plants, that 'the plants taught me this.' What it is, you use the plant, you use the compound as a facilitator, as a catalyst, to see within yourself what's there. And I think this is the heart of psychedelic drugs.” Sasha Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin Tihkal: The Continuation By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin
6/6/20161 hour, 24 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 505 – “Ayahuasca Stories From 1989”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the third section of a Terence McKenna workshop that was held in December of 1989. An interesting feature of this session is a report that Terence asked one of his friends to give about the state of ayahuasca use in Amazonian Peru. As one of the earliest accounts of what a Westerner will encounter when searching for an ayahuasca experience, we get to hear what it was like in the jungle before the plague of ayahuasca tourism took hold. One of the interesting ways in which he describes an ayahuasca vision is this it is a manifestation of one's own intuition. We also get to hear Terence describe what he calls “tingling-lip ayahuasca”. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “If you take tingling-lip ayahuasca then you are one macho hombre.” “I don't like the drugs that absolutely destroy the witness. I think the witness is important.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/30/20161 hour, 29 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 504 – “We Are Descendent’s of Stoned Apes”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I tend to think that there is a kind of unconscious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture but of humanism itself is in Africa.” “[The psychedelic experience] is about what is real, not what is culturally sanctioned.” “The ego lives by constraint. It draws lines, and this drawing of lines is a denial of the primary truth of the world, which is that it is seamless and one. Once you start drawing distinctions you're off into dualism, and it's no joke to say that dualism is the root of all evil.” “The Eleusian Mysteries are Cretan Mysteries that have been transplanted to Greece, and that's really where the psychedelic religion died.” “The major political task for people like ourselves is to be more stoned, is to find out more about the dimensions of the psychedelic experience.” “The drugs of the future are likely to be these non-invasive electronic drugs.” “Virtual reality is very important to creating a sane human future.” “The human visual apparatus is unbelievably forgiving of error. In fact, the human visual apparatus is set up to suppress error.” “Computers are becoming more like drugs. Drugs are becoming more like computers. The computers of the future will be taken orally, and the drugs of the future will probably be jacked into.” “What I think virtual reality is good for is showing each other the insides of our minds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/23/20161 hour, 17 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 503 – “Behind the Scenes at Burning Man”

Guest speaker: Marian Goodell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a Palenque Norte Lecture given at the 2015 Burning Man Festival by Marian Goodall who is Burning Man's Chief Engagement Officer (CEO). This was actually a focused Q&A session during which many of the community's most pressing issues were discussed. Even if you aren't interesting in attending Burning Man yourself, this discussion may hold some important answers if you are considering becoming involved in producing large events yourself. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/16/20161 hour, 15 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 502 – “Suspended Between Eternities”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is, in fact, the quenching and the withdrawal of this relationship of symbiosis to the rest of nature.” “Hedonists are people who don't take hallucinogens, to my mind, because it largely is very hard work. I mean it isn't always hard work, but as a life, as a path, it's extremely hard work.” “The issue of psychedelics, of plant transformation, of losing the ego, is the most closely held facet of reality in a dominator society.” “There is no rational way to save the world. Our only hope is a miracle. And the only place a miracle is going to come, so far as I can tell, is from psychedelics. That's the only miracle in town.” “I really think that the major political obligation upon all of us is to get more stoned. Take larger hits.” “Most things in the world are hyped. Most things are over-sold and under-delivered, but in my experience sex, music, and psychedelics deliver. They are actually better than advertised.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Third Eye Drops podcast with Bruce Damer Inner Vision with Greg Friedman The Novelty Generators Podcast
5/10/20161 hour, 18 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 501 – #PsychedelicsBecause

Guest speaker: Neşe Devenot Help Neşe complete her Psychedelic Humanities Research PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features three short talks by Neşe Devenot who is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches classes on psychedelics and literature. Nese received her PhD in 2015 in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the study of psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (what you and I call “trip reports”). She is a founder of the Psychedemia interdisciplinary psychedelics conference and is the former editor of “This Week in Psychedelics” (a Reality Sandwich column that reported on psychedelic news in the media between 2011 and 2013). And Nese is a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association  . . . and as you will hear in the second short talk that I play, Nese has also earned her wings as a psychonaut as well. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Neşe Devenot Website: www.chemicalpoetics.com Twitter: @NeseLSD eMail: ndevenot (at) pugetsound (dot) edu Online academic work:  https://ups.academia.edu/ndevenot Psychedemia Conference Documentary /* #PsychedelicsBecause (video) Psymposia Psymposia, LLC is a group of collaborative social activism projects on psychedelics, plants, and policy, that includes live events productions, Psymposia Magazine, and the Palo Santo Project. We’re an active network of entrepreneurs, students, activists, researchers, organizations, progressive businesses, artists, musicians, comedians, designers, and fresh voices. We create projects that build community, have a positive social impact, and change perceptions of plants, psychedelics, and psychoactives. Our live storytelling, Psychedelic Stories, could be described as “The Moth Radio Hour… On Acid,” and is hosted by drug writer Lex Pelger. People have the opportunity to share compelling experiences, peculiar underground exploring, or scientific research from The Academy. We have organized social networking events, conferences, parties, fundraisers, and live streaming at lofts, universities, and venues in Amherst, Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Montreal, Florida, Vermont, and Oakland. Simply, we work with people, organizations, and companies who do positive work, within and without the psychedelic community. (See Friends) We are based on the East Coast, USA. Psychedelic Mysticism: The Good Friday Experiment & Beyond Shamanic Graffiti: 100,000 Years of Drugs, 100 Years of Prohibition By Frank Ogden, Marcus Rummery
5/2/20161 hour, 4 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 500 – “500 Memories”

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, & Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a retrospective of some of the highlights of podcasts with several of the elders who are no longer with us. These clips include talks by Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, and Sasha Shulgin. Interspersed with these clips Lorenzo tells a few stories of his own. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/25/20161 hour, 51 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 499 – “PSYCHEology: Psychedelics and the Soul”

Guest speaker: Neal Goldsmith PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Neal Goldsmith.] “Personality is a strategy devised by a two year old.” “Parenting is like that. You don't want to be directing your child. You want to be more like a forest ranger than a farmer, making sure that if lightening strikes and there's fires you go put it out. But other than than you let the bramble grow, beautifully, and wholly, and healthfully.” “If you have a psychedelic experience, then your meditation practice is illuminated, and understood better, and aerated, if you will, conceptually aerated. You see it more clearly. It's not as musty, and the two go together, because mediation without psychedelics is kind of blind, but psychedelics without meditation is rootless.” “Ritual instantiates what works.” “Spirituality is not some big supernatural thing. It's just the advanced stage of normal human development.” “Psychedelics and meditation go together.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development By Neal M. Goldsmith Neal Goldsmith's WebSite Neal Goldsmith's Contact Information A recent, wide-ranging interview with Neal Goldsmith for the Comcastro podcast A recent write-up/interview with Neal Goldsmith in Brooklyn Magazine A recent interview with Neal Goldsmith in Bedford and Bowery magazine An interview on "Psychedelics as a Healing Modality" with Neal Goldsmith for the Questions for People podcast A six-minute video interview with Neal Goldsmith on psychedelic ecology called Fusion of Spirit and Science An hour talk by Neal Goldsmith on Psychedelics, Psychotherapy, and Change from the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference
4/18/201654 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 498 – “Where The Wild Things Grow”

Guest speakers: Nathan Ehrlich & Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today the first feature is a story by Nathan Ehrlich which first appeared on the Israel Story Podcast this past January. This is a story of healing, both physically and psychologically by two men from different countries who discovered the healing properties of psychedelic medicines. We then close with a short rap by Terence McKenna who explains what he believes to be the best method for smoking NN-DMT. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Nathan Ehrlich, Multimedia Journalist Shamanic Journeys in Peru with Sergey Baranov Israel Story Podcasts on iTunes TAKE THE THIRD HIT Terence Mckenna (HD) by Collective Awakening   This campaign aims to actively: -Increase awareness around the benefits of psychedelics -Share stories humanizing the diversity of psychedelic users -Reverse decades of negative stigma surround psychedelic and psychoactive drugs -Educate people about current scientific research -Promote psychedelic harm reduction by understanding the true risks and how to manage them -Help end arrests, incarceration, and criminalization associated with global drug prohibition -Unite psychedelic, drug policy reform, and harm reduction movements We'd love for your organization to join us. Ways to get involved: In April, spread the message through your network encouraging everyone to use #psychedelicsbecause on social media Join us in New York during the UN General Assembly Special Session on Bicycle Day, 4/19: facebook.com/events/540226032823475 Reply back with your organization's logo attached if you would like to be included and featured on our upcoming website, psychedelicsbecause.org Submit a 2-sentence video for our promo: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j4jhXO_qO3fWN1ygrf_uQE2n4b4DbAk8dmPF70DweXA/edit Or if you have other ideas to contribute, let us know :-)
4/11/201656 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 497 – “The Dream We Call Reality”

Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a lengthy reading by Bernardo Kastrup from his new book, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief. This reading comes from Part 3 of the book, which is a fictional account of a young scientist who participated in a research program that is investigating the nature of reality through the use of psychedelic medicines and brain scans during the experience. During the course of the experiments this fictional scientist uncovers the many layers of consciousness upon which our consensus reality is based. People who have had the good fortune to experience what Sasha Shulgin called a Plus 5 experience will most likely be amazed at how well Bernardo has captured the essence of such experiences. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief by Bernardo Kastrup Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/4/20161 hour, 20 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 496 – “Something a Little Different”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a series of raps by Bruce Damer who is backed up by the Faye Steen House Band led by: Joe Oppenheimer on loops, FX, and acoustic, with Darcy Davis on keys, and Aengus Donald on percussion. The recording was made in Melbourne, Australia in 2015. This is followed by Lorenzo giving a few of his thoughts about the state of the world today and a way in which alchemy may be applied to heal it. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alien Dreamtime Directed by Ken Adams Boss Drum Shamen An army of none: The U.S. military is more powerful, less accountable and more dangerous than ever before A World War Has Begun - Break The Silence
3/28/201659 minutes, 35 seconds
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Podcast 495 – “Our Bridges Have Burned Behind Us”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Trust your perceptions. Trust your intuition. And then accept the consequences, because this is what existential validity must be.” “Must it not be that humanity is the yeast of of the Gaian alchemical rarefaction, and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation.” “Speciation of a single plant can occupy fifty or sixty thousand years. It never happens more quickly than that, and the grinding down of glaciers from the poles, these are processes that take hundreds of thousands of years. With the advent of human beings an entirely new ontos of becoming, an entirely new category of becoming is introduced into the entire cosmos, as far as we know, because we cannot verify that there are other self-reflecting beings in the universe.” “Memory is a time-binding function. It's a way of somehow taking the past and calling up its essential properties so that they are co-present with the given moment of experience.” “Our bridges are burning behind us. We see no way back.” “If you believe in something you have precluded the possibility of believing in its opposite, and you have hence limited your freedom.” “Every belief has consequences.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Terence McKenna and Hermeticism Podcast 223 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 1 Podcast 224 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2 Podcast 225 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 3 Podcast 226 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4
3/22/20161 hour, 10 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 494 – “The Alchemical Angel Will Not Die”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we would call manic depression, despair, and that chaotic, near psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness is the precondition then for the alchemical work.” “An angel chartered modern science. It's the alchemical angel, which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and people toward an unimaginable conclusion.” “The alchemical spirit lives on. It never really died. It's just that it has taken peculiar forms in our own day.” Podcast 319 - "The Voynich Manuscript" by Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/17/20161 hour, 10 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 493 – “Peyote Wisdom”

Guest speakers: Rose Kiseato & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Rose Kiseato Shepherd Davis, who is a Navajo-Hopi water woman of the Native American Church of North America. She is from the tobacco clan and is a 5th generation grandmother in her maternal line. Rose is an accomplished artisan bead-worker who teaches classes on this ancient craft. She is recognized both by her tribe and by the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, and many people consider her to be their spiritual mother and grandmother. She has been participating in the peyote ceremony for over 25 years, and she lives on the Navajo Reservation in Sanders, AZ. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Cannabis Nurses Magazine Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
3/15/20161 hour, 20 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 492 – “The Dizziness of Things Unsaid”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Modern philosophy is a desert for my money, and who cares about it? Nobody cares about it. Who's living their life according to the conceptions of modern philosophy, nobody as far as I can see.” “We live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.” “We're like people who don't remember who we are or where we came from. And we just wander mumbling through the streets of our cities, foraging in garbage cans and frightening other people.” [Quoting another] “Coming into being is nothing else than presentation through sense.” “Too much light is trapped in the organic matrix.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/7/20161 hour, 4 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 491 – “McKenna, Alchemy, and the World Today”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it.” “Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root.” “Modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of Cartesian rationalism.” “The imagination is central to the alchemical opus, because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical dimension.” “We cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination.” “Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism.” “Authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That's what they're talking about, authentic being.” “Somehow it's possible for an informing voice to come into cognition that knows more than you do. It is a connection with the collective unconscious, I suppose, that is convivial, conversational, and just talks to you about the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates
2/29/20161 hour, 32 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 490 – “Bridging Western Medicine and Shamanism”

Guest speakers: Veronica Hernandez & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Veronica Hernandez and Shonagh Home. Veronica Hernandez, is a clinical psychologist and shamanic practitioner. Born in Peru, since 2006 she has been trained on shamanic facilitation. She received her clinical training at the Institute of Rational-Emotive Therapy, New York, under the supervision of Dr. Albert Ellis. She was assistant professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and research assistant at the Hospital Psiquiátrico Noguchi de Lima (Peru). In the United States, she worked as a Social Services Clinician at John Muir Health Hospital’s Inpatient Psychiatric Adolescent Unit, California. Currently she is completing her doctoral degree at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, where she is carrying out research on the healing and transformative benefits of entheogens, especially Ayahuasca. Among other topics, Veronica and Shonagh talk about children using pharmaceuticals, personal growth, spirituality, Jung's concept of a shadow, and processing psychedelic experiences. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/22/20161 hour, 18 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 489 – “The Art of Event Organizing”

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the Burning Man Festival. In her talk, Annie takes us on a tour of the various factors involved in organizing events such as festivals, dance parties, and theme camps. As a co-founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress, now in its 10th year, and as a co-founder of a major theme camp at Burning Man, not to mention numerous other events that Annie has helped organize. Also, in this podcast the tragic death of fellow saloner Kai Wingo is discussed. Women's Visionary Congress Camp Soft Landing  Kai Wingo Obituary Go Fund Me Contributions to help Kai's family Podcast 458 – “Practical Mushroom Activism” featuring Kai Wingo Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/15/20161 hour, 7 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 488 – “MDMA The Movie”

Guest speaker: Emanuel Sferios PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation that Lorenzo had with Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe and the producer of “MDMA The Movie”. In addition to discussing the movie that Emanuel is producing their conversation included a discussion of the way young people now perceive the differences between MDMA, Ecstasy, and Molly. Also their discussion touched on the current medical uses of MDMA and ways in which parents can talk with their children about drugs in an honest and sensible way. MDMA the Movie Ecstasy Data.org - Anonymous Drug Testing DanceSafe Students for Sensible Drug Policy The Secret Chief Revealed: Leo Zeff, MDMA Pioneer By Myron J. Stolaroff Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/3/201659 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 487 – “Mainstreaming Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.] “We need to move to a post-prohibition world.” “The spiritual/mystical experience has profound implications of the kind that we need now.” “Not in our studies only, but world wide there have now been over 1,100 people who have taken pure MDMA in research since the early '90s. And there's never been anybody who overheated and died. . . . We've never had anybody overheat. We've never had anybody have a heart attack. We've never had anybody have a mental breakdown. So we've shown in a clinical setting MDMA can be administered safely.” “We are currently estimating that MDMA will be a prescription medicine in 2021.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Lorenzo's Interview on the Natural Born Alchemist Podcast /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)
1/26/20161 hour, 36 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 486 – “The Main Vein of the Peculiar”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the final section of a Terence McKenna workshop that took place in February 1991. In addition to more stories about the machine-elves and DMT, Terence covers evolution, the imagination, virtual reality, shamanism, and falling in love. The title of today's podcast comes from my favorite quote by McKenna: “Apparently, if you pursue the weird, it won't take you very long before you get to [psychedelics]. This is the main vein of the peculiar.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/18/20161 hour, 29 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 485 – “The Ideas Remain”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast begins with Terence talking about the elephant in the ayahuasca room: purging, puking, barfing, vomiting or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately he moves on and speculates that the human break with nature came about due to a change in the climate. And he ends this part of the workshop talking about the dire state of affairs on the planet on that February day in 1991 as the First Gulf War was raging. Two of my favorite quotes from this talk are: “The modern nuclear family, and I've got one I know whereof I speak, is just a cauldron for neurosis. It makes impossible demands on everybody involved.” . . . and “The way you prove your worthiness is by not wrecking your home planet. You can't join the galactic club if you wreck your home planet. They withdraw your membership application.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/11/20161 hour, 22 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 484 – “This is the Mushroom’s Program”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I don't think you are going to spend very long involved with these things at a deep level without scaring your socks off eventually. One of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle with beginners. And then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans.” “You see, I just don't feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own? How about that you can't do it yourself unless humble yourself to cut a deal with a plant? That seems more logical to me.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/4/20161 hour, 27 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 483 – “Catalysts of Consciousness”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The great emphasis for the fall into history is this broken connection with this Mind in nature.” “We can move no faster than the envelope of language which we generate to describe our journey.” “We need to take the engineering of our language seriously.” “The poverty of our language, that it's such a low-grade signal, that we're using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and coordinate a global population of six million people. And having media to change that into an electronic signal has not apparently helped us all that much.” “I heard the electronic media described as the ability to spread darkness at the speed of light.” “And somewhere in between eloquence and poetry there is a side tree into demagoguery, which you have to watch out for.” “I think the whole thing about psychedelics is that they synergize cognition, and that cognition allows us to image each other and to understand each other.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/28/20151 hour, 29 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 482 – “Help Save Ross Ulbricht & Internet Freedom”

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast comes in two parts. We begin with the Palenque Norte Lecture that Grover Norquist gave at the 2015 Burning Man Festival. This talk was actually in the form of a question and answer session in which the somewhat liberal audience found several areas in which they held goals in common with the more conservative Mr. Norquist. Following that are two clips dealing with the government's persecution of Ross Ulbrich, who is now a political prisoner serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime of operating a Website based in Iceland. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/22/20151 hour, 17 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 481 – “The Deep, Dark Sixties”

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Danny Sugarman, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features talks by Dr. Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and Danny Sugarman, as well as audio from the trailer for DeepWebTheMovie.com. This is a podcast that you may want to listen to if you value your right to freely use the Internet, among other things. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/14/20151 hour, 17 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 480 – “Coming Down from a Psychedelic Power Trip”

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Alicia Danforth. In her talk, plus a question and answer session, Alicia describes some of the difficulties that a professional woman researcher may encounter in the area of sexism at work. She also discusses what has been called “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”, the psychedelic jerk. At the end of this podcast, Lorenzo explains why he raised the price of the paperback copy of his novel to $350. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option PTSD And Cannabis Study Seeks Veteran Participants
12/7/20151 hour, 1 minute, 9 seconds
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Podcast 479 – “Overcoming Culture”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Boundary-dissolving internal hierophany does in fact reliably occur in the presence of these [psychedelic] plants and compounds.” “We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer that even as a community we have a lot of trouble figuring out how you just fact the answer, how you come to terms with the options that are actually available.” “It is not only possible, but millions and millions of people do go from the cradle to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. To my mind this is just an instance of an appalling infantilism that is culturally sanctioned.” “[Psychedelics are] part of the birthright. This is what religion WAS for the first million years before it fell into the hands of men who insist on wearing dresses. It was the celebration of an ecstatic reality that could be coaxed out of a magical relationship with nature. And it's still there. The portals are still there.” “I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage. And to have a profane government interpose itself between you and that reality, why it's ludicrous.” “The government has never been a major factor in the decisions I made about my program of ingestion.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/30/20151 hour, 22 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 478 – “Breaking The Spell On You”

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “The mushroom has a wildness to it because it is wild, just as our minds once were wild.” “I see the mushroom as the ultimate test of the initiate because you're on your own. There's no shaman to guide you, and so it is up to you to determine how this [experience] is about to look.” “What is the point of doing these medicines if you are not going to break the spell of your perceptions, of who and what you think you are, and what you perceive this world to be.” Exploring Psychedelics Conference, 2015 Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
11/24/20151 hour, 4 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 477 – “What is this medium called consciousness?”

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “In the jungle, the ayahuasca is used traditionally to heal what are known as mystical, non-ordinary, problems.” “I came to look at it and realize that what we [North Americans] were looking for wasn't specifically an experience that would produce healing, but we were looking for a shift in consciousness that would produce healing.” “We are self-regulating, universal beings.” “There can be negative effects, and that's very real. The psychedelic plants are crap shoots in their own right, which makes having the presence of someone very trained very important. And that's a departed point out in the world, like, take it and go and see what happens. I'm not of that group of thought. I think it's very important to have people there who really, really know what they're doing, like REALLY know what they're doing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamilton Souther's Website  
11/16/20151 hour, 7 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 476 – “Origins of the Choice-Maker”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the February 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that we began with Podcast 472. When he gets to his overview of habit and novelty and then moves into a discussion of time, his poetic language provides several interesting mental footholds from which we can expand on some of his thinking about the topic of time. As he says, “We are very naieve about the nature of time,” pointing out that the concept of using an average of measurements taken in a science experiment requires that all moments of time must be the same. “Are they?” he asks. “Is every moment just like the others?” From there he takes us on an interesting journey into the I Ching. “We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.” -Terence McKenna “Time is a series of fluctuating variables.” -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Victory for Users: Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Uses
11/10/20151 hour, 15 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 475 – “The Path of a Medicine Woman”

Guest speakers: Borka Cafuk & Shonagh Home Today's program features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Borka Cafuk, who is a remarkable medicine woman. Not only does Borka provide interesting details about plant medicines such as ayahuasca, sapo, and nu-nu, she also tells the fascinating story of her transition from working as an environmental journalist from Europe into a South American medicine woman. And she minces no words in talking about the difficulties that she has encountered being accepted by the indigenous people, and in particular the male ayahuasceros, where she now lives. Much plant knowledge is being lost as traditional healers are being subsumed into the Western culture that is now seeping into the Amazon basin, and so it has fallen to people like Borka to help the local medicine men and women hold together the threads of this important work. Yana Puma Healing Center Yana Puma (Black Jaguar) is a plant medicine healing and educational center located on river Momon in Loreto, Peru. The center offers traditional healing treatments using a variety of Amazonian plants, ayahuasca, sapo, nu-nu and tobacco ceremonies, as well as plant diets. 
Our primary objectives are to preserve the jungle and its biodiversity, and to preserve the incredible knowledge and culture of the indigenous people. The mission of Yana Puma Healing and Educational Center is to help people on the path towards spiritual, physical and mental healing and growth, to ultimately reach their true purpose in life. This is done through unparalleled support on all levels, healing and education while simultaneously preserving and spreading the knowledge, culture and traditions of the indigenous people, who are in danger of being lost forever. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
11/2/20151 hour, 16 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 474 – Important Podcast – This Affects YOU!

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow cory (at) eff (dot) org PROGRAM NOTES: Update! October 27, 2015 Victory for Users: Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Uses   Today's podcast features a 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Cory Doctorow at this year's Burning Man Festival. Cory is a well-known science fiction writer and lecturer who warns us about how much of our freedom has already been assumed by rich corporations through their manipulation of the law through the use of technology. Whether you realize it or not, your personal freedom has already been significantly compromised in the digital domain, and unless you become aware of what is taking place, and then do something about it, Orwell's world of “1984” will continue to encroach on your life. “We have not reached peak surveillance . . . but we have reached peak awareness of surveillance.” -Cory Doctorow Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/27/20151 hour, 5 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 473 – “Outcasts and Future People”

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “We deliberately keep kids dumb by treating them like kids.” “We all know that if voting would change anything it would be illegal.” “The future belongs to those who can see the future.” “The smarter you are, the higher you want to be.” “The key to the Sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive's over-specialized models.” “Show me a taboo, and I'm interested in it.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/19/201558 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 472 – “The Timewave & The Watkins Objection”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.” “In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.” “I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?” “If the world is made of language, then you can hack it in the sense that you can hack code.” “My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.” “I think of the mainland as Blade Runner Land.” “Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.” “I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hyperborea - Terence McKenna's Website Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination? by Matthew Watkins Introduction by Terence McKenna 2012 and the "Watkins Objection" to Terence McKenna's "Timewave Theory" . . . by Matthew Watkins Terence McKenna's Reading List
10/13/20151 hour, 26 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 471 – “Healing For PTSD Is Available”

Guest speakers: Janine Sagert, Saj Razvi, Ryan LeCompte, & Shonagh Home FROM SHOCK TO AWE (Indiegogo Campaign) /* Click image to see video From Shock to Awe is a feature-length documentary that will chronicle the journeys of military veterans as they seek relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with the help of ayahuasca, MDMA (“Ecstasy”), and cannabis. It will be an intimate look at how these substances can be used to heal our wounded warriors—and, by extension, their loved ones. Our intention with this film is to raise awareness of the healing properties of, and help change the laws regulating, ayahuasca, MDMA, and cannabis so that these substances can be legally available for responsible use in therapeutic, and spiritual, settings—especially for veterans with PTSD. Because we believe that all vets have the right to choose their own path to healing. PROGRAM NOTES: “What we're finding is that after three full dose MDMA sessions, with each session lasting about a day and spread three to four months apart, we're finding that 83% of chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD sufferers no longer qualify for the diagnosis.” -Saj Razvi If you are (or know) a military veteran (or anyone else) who has PTSD, then you owe it to yourself to listen to the conversation featured in today's podcast. In this program Shonagh Home interviews Janine Sagert, the content producer of “From Shock to Awe”, Saj Razvi, who is an MDMA clinical therapist, and Ryan LeCompte, an ex marine who now runs an organization called Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy. Their discussion focuses on ways in which veterans and others suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders can get relief, and in some cases even be cured, through the use of MDMA, ayahuasca, and cannabis. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy   From Shock to Awe: Healing PTSD with Ayahuasca, MDMA, and Cannabis brand, web, and crowdfunding by awakemedia.com Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)
10/5/20151 hour, 44 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 470 – “Enter the Medicine Woman”

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature Shonagh Home from a talk that she gave at the recent Women & Entheogens Conference that was held in Cleveland, Ohio. The focus of Shonagh's presentation has to do with breaking the spell of our cultural constructs that are preventing us from living informed and satisfying lives. She begins with an excellent overview of how, over the centuries, the ruling elite have conditioned society in ways that keep most of us from being truly free to pursue our lives in ways that suit us. She then introduces the ancient concept of the medicine woman and suggests ways in which we can embrace their return. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BBC Documentary: The Century of the Self John Taylor Gatto: The Pathological Methodology of Forced Schooling Documentary: Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
9/28/201553 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 469 – “Philosophy With The Gloves Off”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We don’t produce enough seritonin for living above 20 degrees latitude.” “I’m not a big advocate of mixing drugs, anyway. If you really want to get out into unknown territory, where there is the potential for danger, then start pouring these things together.” “It’s a funny thing the way people relate to drugs. Many people take them in environments that couldn’t be better designed to suppress the effect of the drug. For instance, crowded singles bars, noisy social environments with everybody hitting on each other, and loud music, and lots of activity, and maybe lots of vigorous dancing. Well, this is an environment designed to suppress drug effects. . . . To really see what these things do, you need and atmosphere of quite, sensory deprived darkness.” “My attitude is always if it’s legal it ain’t gonna work.” “People have trouble saying a lot about many of these things. I think that’s a learned skill; narrative ability and to keep your wits about you in those places, and to try and bring back some kind of coherent metaphor.” “The strange thing about opium is that it’s so endlessly fascinating while it’s happening, and there’s just nothing to be taken out of it. It apparently does not transcript into short term memories.” “It’s as important to tell the trip as to have the trip.” In answer to the question, “How do you regain yourself when having a difficult trip?” Terence answered, “I always have cannabis ready. It’s the rudder of the boat.” “The key when you’re having a bad trip is to make your mind wander from the bummer.” Legal status of Salvia divinorum Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/21/20151 hour, 37 minutes
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Podcast 468 – “Investigating Life – Part 2”

Guest speaker: Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: “I have never gone to bed in Peru without having learned something new that day.” -Peter Gorman Today’s podcast features the second part of an interview with Peter Gorman, one of the larger-than-life figures to be found among our psychedelic elders. The program begins by picking up with a story about river pirates in the Amazon, migrates to tales of running a bar in the jungle town of Iquitos, Peru that was frequented by DEA agents, and continues with Peter talking about his interactions with luminaries such as Albert Hofmann, Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna. Also, Peter talks about his new book “Sapo In My Soul”, which is the first book to be published about this interesting medicine. Of interest to our younger saloners will be his telling of how, as a young man himself, he financed his trips to the Amazon and the methods he used to search for medicinal plants in the jungle. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman’s Web Site Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine By Peter Gorman Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming By Peter Gorman
9/14/20151 hour, 34 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 467 – “Investigating Life – Part 1”

Guest speaker: Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: Today’s podcast features an interview of Peter Groman by Tom Huckabee. The interview took place at Peter’s home in August 2015. In this, the first part of Peter’s story, we learn that Peter was one of the first American’s to take ayahuasca. At the time, Burroughs’ “Yage Letters” hadn’t yet made it around to him. He wrote a freelance story about the experience, which became a front page story in High Times Magazine. Many twists and turns later, Peter became the Editor in Chief of High Times and was instramental in entering the discussion of medical marijuana into the mainstream media. This is the first part of this interview, and it ends with Peter and his wife deep in the Amazon and being acosted by river pirates. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman’s Website Contact Peter Gorman Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine Other talks featuring Peter Gorman Podcast 280 – “Albert Hofmann is Interviewed by Peter Gorman” Podcast 279 – “Peter Gorman Interviews the Elders” Podcast 278 – “Oscar Janiger Interviewed by Peter Gorman” Podcast 277 – “Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna” Part 2 Podcast 276 – “Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna” Part 1 Dr. Timothy Leary’s Cooper Union Speech Podcast 127 – Leary: “The Cooper Union Speech”
9/8/20151 hour, 8 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 466 – “This Is An Incredible Moment”

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.] “When we take a psychedelic drug and material emerges from our unconscious . . . it’s not a psychedelic experience, it’s a human experience that psychedelics have catalyzed.” “One of the most successful exports of the United States is the drug war.” “Mescaline is the most important psychedelic drug that is not being researched.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Why I am not going to Burning Man this yearby Daniel Pinchbeck Podcast 432 featuring Rachel Hope Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (Video interview with Lorenzo)
9/4/20151 hour, 5 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 464 – “Temple of Light”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Dr. Bruce Damer in May 2015 at the Lightening in a Bottle Festival. Building on a theme introduced by Lorenzo in a talk at Esalen, Bruce takes an in-depth look at the importance and essence of the Mysteries at Eleusis. In his concluding remarks, Lorenzo discusses the drawbacks of organized religion and suggests that minor children NOT be given religious instruction. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Next:Space | Dr. Bruce Damer | TEDxSantaCruz In the Beginning: The Origin & Purpose of Life | Dr. Bruce Damer | TEDxSantaCruz Lightning in a Bottle Festival The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries By R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A. P. Ruck
8/18/20150
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Podcast 463 – “Novelty is to be Cherished”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I describe myself as a tall man with a cheap watch.” “If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.” “In a sense, the Italian Renaissance IS the medieval lead turned to the secular gold of reform and rebirth.” “You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.” “What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Do You Have Social Anxiety or Social Phobia? We are seeking men and women on the autism spectrum with social anxiety who are at least 21 years old. You must be in good physical health, with blood pressure that is normal. We are conducting a research study of an experimental drug used in combination with therapy. The study takes place in the Los Angeles area and requires about 15 visits to the study location over several months. For more information, please call (310) 222-1664.
8/10/20150
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Podcast 462 – “Psychedelic Advocacy”

Guest speakers: Ashley Booth and Amy Ralston Povah Today's podcast features Ashley Booth, scientist and psychedelic advocate, and Amy Ralston Povah, a victim and hero of the War on Drugs. The talk by Ashley was given at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man Festival, and the talk by Amy was given at a Venice, California salon hosted by Ashley in celebration of Bicycle Day 2014. Together these talks will give you a lot of things to talk about, both with friends who agree with you and the old Nancy Reagan just say no crowd. . . . As Ashley says, “By being a psychedelic advocate, I'm not saying that psychedelics are good for everyone, by any means. I would just like it to be an opportunity for people who would like to try it.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Ashley Booth's Website Aware Project Aware Project on Facebook
8/3/20150
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Podcast 461 – “Shake the mud off your shoes, monkey”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “In hyperspace nothing is hidden.” “Culture is a narrowing.” “We're about to have the chance to create a global culture, to essentially clean our basement and decide what we're going to save and what we're going to keep.” “It's the monotheistic religions that have to take a knock for the present situation.” “The thing that I go back to over and over again, and that makes psychedelics different, and that makes what I'm doing different, is you are not asked to believe anything.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Salon Magazine The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries: The Classic Study of Leprechauns, Pixies, and Other Fairy Spirits By W.Y. Evans Wentz
7/27/20150
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Podcast 460 – “Our planetary birth process”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Language is the software without which we wouldn't be people.” “Culture is a strategy for intensifying the dimensionality of an animal species.” “Somehow, the psychedelic experience is related to this bootstrapping process of climbing, organizationally, from one dimension to another, deeper and deeper into complexity. It's almost as though the psychedelic experience is a viewing of the process from the highest dimension in the plane.” “What you experience in the psychedelic experience is eternity, all of time.” “A shaman is someone who has seen the end.” “Ideas are the signposts of our destiny.” “It's an absurd question to ask the question, 'What will the world be like in 500 years?' What the world will be like in 500 years is unimaginable.” “Language is an informational creature of some sort.” “[Quantum physics] is our truth [about reality]. How crazy are you if your truth is something you can't even understand? And that's the situation that we are in.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Trip by Kelly Matten & Walker Farrell The Museum Dose: 12 Experiments in Pharmacologically Mediated Aesthetics by Daniel Tumbleweed
7/21/20150
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Podcast 459 – “Apes shouting at the monolith”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The most politically potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them, to give them the facts. The facts are now so horrifying, and the means of delivering the facts so effective that there is no excuse for everyone not beginning to act in an informed manner.” “How can we go to the place where ideas come from?” “We are to life what life is to the inorganic realm.” “I think psychedelics are catalysts to thought, to imagination, to understanding.” “Our style of society is the historical equivalent of a temper tantrum. It has no viability. It's completely self-limiting. It's destructive. And it hands nothing on to its receivers.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option From Larry to Lorenzo from Lorenzo Hagerty on Vimeo.
7/13/20150
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Podcast 458 – “Practical Mushroom Activism”

We were saddened to learn that Kai left this life on February 6th, 2016 due to complications from a fast. She was on the 37th day of a 40 day fast. Guest speakers: Kai Wingo & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: A mushroom expert, Kai Wingo's passion is highlighting the value of mushroom cultivation in the revitalizing of community. She is a mother, mycologist and lecturer on a quest to inspire reverence for earth's exploratory treasures and in the utilization of their technology and curative abilities. Kai feels that if we, women especially, learn to embrace fungi as our allies, they will heal, empower and transform. In today's program, Kai is interviewed by the salon's resident correspondent, Shonagh Home. [The following quotations are by Kai Wingo.] “When you use entheogens you truly change minds, and that is what will truly make a change.” “If you have the understanding that we are spiritual beings, the things that we do are spiritual. If we do it every morning, then it becomes ritual.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option You can find Kai and her grass roots effort, Kultured Mushrooms, on Facebook. Women and Entheogens2015 ConferenceSeptember 18-20, 2015 Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
7/6/20150
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Podcast 457 – “The Divine Invasion”

Guest speaker: Rak Razam PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Rak Razam this year at Byron Bay, Australia. Rak is an ‘experiential’ journalist, who writes about the emergence of a new cultural paradigm in the 21st century. Rak is the author of the critically acclaimed book Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey and the companion volume of interviews, The Ayahuasca Sessions. In this podcast he discusses the Gaian process underway spearheaded by ayahuasca and other plant entheogens healing and cleansing us humans, preparing us to return to the "Garden", and the sudden popularity of 5-MeO-DMT Sonoran Desert Toad medicine. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Rak Razam (home page) Aya Awakenings (trailer HD) Ayahuasca Retreats Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary - Official Trailer #1 Bay Area Release Info with Direct links to ticket sales Film opens Friday July 10th at the following theaters: San Francisco - Roxie theater: Berkeley - The Elmwood: Sebastopol - Rialto: San Rafael - The Smith Rafael Film Center: Eugene Center for Ethnobotanical Studies We are a crowd-sourced, social enterprise dedicated to supporting  plant-based, non-profit health and well-being as a viable, sustainable, and growing option to corporate based, for-profit, pharmaceutical options. Casualties of the State (trailer) Why watch "Casualties of the State," a feature-length drama-thriller:  
6/30/20150
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Podcast 456 – “Engineering Enlightenment”

Guest speaker: Mikey Siegel PROGRAM NOTES: “Technology is a manifestation of mind.” Mikey Siegel, Consciousness Hacker Have you ever given any thought to the proposition that perhaps human well-being, or enlightenment, may be approached through engineering? In today's podcast, which is the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Mikey Siegel, you are going to learn not only about the possibilities of such a thing as engineering enlightenment, you are also going to learn about the rapid advances that have been made in this field during the past five years. Mikey Siegel is one of the pioneers of what has come to be known as “consciousness hacking”, which is a hands-on-approach to making new tools for self-exploration. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Enlightenment engineering--tech as catalyst for inner & outer peace: Mikey Siegel at TEDxSantaCruz BioFluent Technologies: tools for integrating body, mind and spirit Consciousness Hacking is a hands-on approach to making new tools for self-exploration, in order to change the way we think, feel, and live. Psychedelic Thinking And The Dawn of Homo Cyber (PDF) Lorenzo's May 2001 Mind States Talk Podcast 001 – “Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber” Podcast 226-McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4
6/23/20150
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Podcast 455 – “Going Off the Psychedelic Rails”

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Irina Alexander, and Bruce Damer "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys"By James Fadiman PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a panel discussion about some of the difficulties that can be encountered during a psychedelic experience. This panel discussion took place at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man Festival and features Annie Oak, Irina Alexander and Bruce Damer. In addition to the featured speakers, several members of the audience also spoke about a few of their own difficult experiences with psychedelics and how they dealt with them. This would be a particularly good podcast to listen to before you attend a festival or other large event. And keep in mind, it isn't just the inexperienced people who sometimes go off their rails. It can, and does, happen to highly experienced trippers as well. So be prepared! Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys" By James Fadiman
6/15/20150
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Podcast 454 – Aldous Huxley: “Human Potentialities”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast celebrates the ten year anniversary of programming from the Psychedelic Salon. And so we return to one of the men who was responsible for igniting today's psychedelic renaissance, Aldous Huxley. The talk featured here was delivered at MIT in 1961, sometime after it was first given at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. The Medical Center version of this talk has been credited with giving Dick Price the inspiration to co-found the Esalen Institute. Today, more than 50 years after this talk was given, there remains much of current interest in the sentiments that Huxley so eloquently puts forth. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/10/20150
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Podcast 453 – “Palenque Norte Tribute to Sasha Shulgin”

Guest speakers: George Greer, John Gilmore, Rick Doblin, Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the tributes to Sasha Shulgin that were made at the Palenque Norte lectures during the 2014 Burning Man Festival. In addition to comments from the audience, we hear from Dr. George Greer (MDMA Researcher and Co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute), Rick Doblin PhD (President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), John Gilmore (Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Annie Oak (Co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress). Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Shulgin Research Institute  
6/9/20151 hour, 7 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 452 – “Kambo, Sananga and Rapé”

Guest speakers: Ginny Rutherford & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features an interview of Ginny Rutherford by Shonagh Home. Ginny is a Certified Transformational Life Coach in the Seattle area. She has studied Alchemical Tarot for the past 5 years and uses the Tarot in her coaching to get insight for her clients and information on their next step. She has spent time in the jungle of Peru participating in the Shamanic ceremonies using Ayahausca. She also uses Amazonian Kambo, Sananga and Rape' as healing and cleansing medicines. She will be completing her intensive Kambo practitioner training through the IAKP (International Association of Kambo Practitioners) in July. She does currently offer Kambo ceremonies in the Seattle area and can be reached at ginny (at) kambokiss (dot) com or go to her Facebook page Kambo Kiss. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Kambo Kiss Kambô is a traditional medicine used by native people in the Amazonian rainforest. It is made from a waxy secretion collected from the back and sides of the giant monkey tree frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor. Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine By Peter Gorman (Sapo is another name for kambo.) Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ 'Love and Spirit Medicine’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
6/1/20151 hour, 19 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 451 – “Toad Venom & Other Things”

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture delivered by Daniel Pinchbeck. Beginning with a discussion of his experimentation with toad venom (primary active ingredient 5MEO-DMT), his interaction with the audience leads down many of the different roads that Daniel has traveled as he was gathering information for his books Breaking Open the Head, and 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Daniel is also the co-founder of RealitySandwich.com, The Evolver Network, and the Center for Planetary Culture. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Daniel Pinchbeck's Website Reality Sandwich The Evolver Network The Center for Planetary Culture Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism By Daniel Pinchbeck 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl By Daniel Pinchbeck
5/26/20151 hour, 1 minute, 20 seconds
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Podcast 450 – “The Primacy of Direct Experience”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “These psychedelics, which in the Sixties and Fifties were simply called consciousness expanding drugs, a good old phenomenological description, if there is an iota of possibility that they expand consciousness then we must put out attention on this area. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is making our situation so very uncomfortable.” “Where spiritual advancement is discussed, I want psychedelics to be discussed. Where transformative social visions are put forth, I want psychedelics to be part of the agenda.” “The historical enterprise is an effort to turn the human body inside out so that the soul becomes visible, and the body becomes a process that you can command in the imagination.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/18/20151 hour, 23 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 449 – “McKenna’s Speculations About 2012”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this continuation of a Terence McKenna workshop from June 1994, he does brief riffs about Joyce's “Finnegan's Wake” and Orwell's “1984”. He then continues with some speculations about what he thought 2012 would bring. Step 1, he speculated, would be that everyone in the world would go outdoors and get naked. And from there he takes off on a wild flight of mind that you have to hear for yourself to truly appreciate his relationship (at that time) to a potential 2012 event. Ultimately he reaches a point where he speculates about why it was (and still is) necessary for a species like us humans to evolve. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/11/201550 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 448 – “The Cosmic Nervous System”

Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup PROGRAM NOTES: Today Bernardo Kastrup returns to the salon with more metaphysical speculations. Supplementing his recently released book, “Brief Peeks Beyond,” he touches on the so-called hard problem of consciousness faced by materialists. In his examination of the dominant materialistic world view, Bernardo reveals the forces behind our value systems, which in turn determine our behavior. He ends with some very concrete suggestions for five things each of us can do to make the world a little better. However, my favorite section of this talk comes when he suggests that cosmic consciousness at-large may actually be experiencing what we humans call multiple personality disorder. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bernardo Kastrup on Amazon Bernardo Kastrup's Metaphysical Speculations Bernardo Kastrup's Facebook Page Bernardo Kastrup on Twitter Bernardo Kastrup on Youtube Terence McKenna Transcripts Tink Tink podcast with Diana Reed Slattery Transmutation (a feature documentary film about uprooting the experience of normality)
5/4/20151 hour, 12 minutes, 51 seconds
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Podcast 447 – “Manifesting New Communities”

Guest speakers: La Laurien & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: In this wide-ranging conversation between two experienced medicine women, in addition to talking about shamanism and psychedelic medicines, such as magic mushrooms, MDMA, LSD, and others, they also venture into such diverse areas as aliens and language. Most importantly, they talk about Atlan, which was co-founded by La Laurien. Atlan is a living and learning ecovillage dedicated to the artful co-creation of healthy living systems celebrating the connectedness and diversity of all Life. The village is located in the Columbia River Gorge. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MIRRORACLE (La Laurien's Web site) /* The 2007 Palenque Norte Lectures (video) Psychedelic Traveler Your psychedelic travel guide around the globe The Daily Psychedelic Video
4/27/20151 hour, 9 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 446 – “Closing In On Concrescence”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: “If I didn't have cannabis I wouldn't take a psychedelic drug. It is indispensable.” Terence McKenna In this talk, Terence McKenna tells some stories about how Gordon Wasson was first led to investigating the mushrooms of Mexico, and of possible use of magic mushrooms by the Sufi's. We also get to hear one of the rare instances where the bard McKenna gives us his opinion about 5MEO-DMT, as contrasted with his primary psychedelic substance of interest, NN-DMT. Going on, he speaks about drugs grown out of cultured amphibian skin, and about ways to enhance certain psychedelics. At one point Terence takes off on what can only be called an anti-Myan rant, something I haven't heard him say before. This talk also contains the most detailed and specific accounting of what he thinks would happen on December 21, 2012 that I have ever heard Terence McKenna give. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/20/20151 hour, 24 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 445 – “Navigating the Ayahuasca Experience”

Guest speakers: Meriana Dinkova & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: In today's podcast we get to listen in on a conversation between Shonagh Home and Meriana Dinkova. Meriana received her initial training in psychology studies at Vienna University and at the Free University in Berlin. And in 2003 she completed her MA in Counseling Psychology at the California Association of Integral Studies in San Francisco. In 2010 Meriana started two different monthly Meetups, which have been successfully running since: “Get Out Of Your Own Way- Conquering Self Sabotage” and “Sex Magic”- . She has also been a featured speaker at the Visionary Voices Salon in SF where she talked about Sex Magic and different uses of sexual energy to enhance awareness. Meriana has developed a unique system of psychological and neo-shamanistic inner-space navigation tools for navigating non-ordinary states of consciousness and the Ayahuasca experience. Those tools are designed to maximize the experience and provide the opportunity for learning and healing, while safely navigating the inner landscapes, and avoiding common pitfalls. Learning how to use your consciousness in those ways can enrich your psychonaut toolkit and empower your inner shaman. Meriana also organizes retreats to Peru, in which she combines her work with experienced shamans. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Meriana Dinkova's Web Site “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate” with Lorenzo
4/13/20151 hour, 2 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 444 – “The Longest 100 Seconds You Will Ever Know”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's talk by Terence McKenna takes us on an in-depth description of what he experiences on a DMT trip. While it is a story that we have heard before in various guises, Terence once again manages to tell his DMT stories in a way that makes it seem like you are hearing it for the first time, and with new detail if that can be imagined. Who else, for example, would describe a DMT trip as feeling like you are a baby in a maternity ward's playpen. And this was new for me, at one point Terence says that when it comes to DMT, “I like to do it outside on a sunny hillside.” His description of a new delivery method that he was developing for smoked DMT sounds almost medieval. Followers of Terence will find his answer about his health quite revealing. And in regards to machine elves, et al, he says it's all a lie, but a lie which points toward a truth that cannot be told. If you only intend to listen to Terence McKenna talk about DMT one time, then this is the talk for you. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Live Streaming of the Psymposia Conference
4/6/20151 hour, 23 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 443 – “The Legendary Venice Salon”

Guest speaker: Kathleen Wirt PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature a talk given by Kathleen Wirt, the hostess of the legendary salon that took place in Venice, California. While the stories Kathleen tells are of interest from an historical point of view, they are also very informative for anyone who is also interested in starting a salon in their area. Kathleen's talk was given at the inaugural session of the Aware Project Salon, which has picked up the torch and is carrying this work to a new generation. You may know about Leary and McKenna, but if you don't know about Kathleen's Venice Salon you only have part of the historical story. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Awareness Salon with Kathleen (Video Jan 2015) Ashley Booth's Web Site Aware Project: Rethinking Psychedelics Aware Project on Facebook Aware Project on Twitter
3/30/20151 hour, 14 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 442 – “The Extraterrestrials Are Here!”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “One of the reasons I'm so fond of psychedelics is because they transcend rhetoric.” “Meditation and all these other things I take to be co-options organized by beastly hoards of priests.” “One of the most uncool things you can say to another human being is, 'Could you explain to me what it is I just said?'” “We are held together by our expressed assumptions.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/23/20151 hour, 25 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 441 – “The Technology of Spirituality”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The absolute victory of habit is death itself.” “Life is apparently a phenomenon in this universe considerably more tenacious than stars.” “When the democratic crunch hits, democratic values will go down the drain long before they turn off the lights and stop delivering the food.” “The Net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity.” “Freakery is the wave of the future.” “If you've never read Moby Dick you certainly should. It's a crash course in psychedelic metaphysics.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hopkins Psychedelic Survey Please Participate
3/16/201554 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 440 – “The Tao of the Ancestors”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The present is this hairline division between the past and the future, and the past exists in memory largely for the coordination of some agenda in the future. And that's history!” “We have thought of history as something that we do. History is something that is done to us, and therefore we are not responsible. This is the first thing to understand. History is a process. It's like waves in the ocean, and you are a cork.” “That's what the psychedelic experience is. It opens the inner eye, and what the inner eye sees is time.” “A human being is a kind of a plant/animal combination when they are at perfection. That's why shamanism is such a high ideal, because what shamanism really is is a symbiosis with the plant world.” “Western civilization is the bundled group of civilizations that have been most distant from plant hallucinogens for the longest time.” “Without doubt, in my mind, the most unique feature of psilocybin is that it speaks. It speaks in your native tongue.” “All other spiritual disciplines drive with the accelerator to the floor. That's how you do it. When you come to psychedelics suddenly there arises a great interest in locating the brakes.” “Technology is biology pursued by other means.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Recent Reddit AMAs with Lorenzo The Psychonaut sub Reddit The MDMA Therapy subReddit
3/9/20151 hour, 35 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 439 – “A Resolute Optimist of a Complicated Sort”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Now all that stands between us and some kind of angelic completion of some sort is the dark side of ourselves and the unpaid bills of the historical process.” “I am a resolute optimist of a very complicated sort.” “If you have the psychedelic experience in your inventory of experiences, you are able to make a different model of reality than if you lack it.” “I don't think that what the shaman is doing is something metaphorical, or analogical, or allegorical. What the shaman is doing is something real that is couched in a language that we find difficult to understand.” “Consciousness seeks the shape of its vessel. It's like water.” “At the center of the archaic impulse is the shaman. At the center of the shaman's understanding of the world is the boundary-dissolving experience of psychedelics.” “I don't believe me. I hated theology. And I think the way to keep it light is to not believe. I will attempt to convert you in the course of these meetings to all kinds of things that I don't believe.” “Ideology is poisonous. We're not trying to figure out the best thing to believe. What we're trying to do is not believe anything and somehow have a return to the direct empowering of common sense and common senses.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Genesis Generation: A psychedelic novel by Lorenzo
3/1/20151 hour, 29 seconds
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Podcast 438 – Annual Fund Drive & Book Announcement

Guest speaker: Lorenzo   THE FUND DRIVE HAS COME TO AN END AND THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR MAKING IT SUCCESSFUL   PROGRAM NOTES: It has been one year since our last fund raising effort, which means that the time has come once again to see if there is enough support for these podcasts to keep them going for another year. As I did last year, I will update the graphic that you see here to display the progress of our campaign. This year, in the way of saying thank you for your donation, everyone will receive the same gift, no matter the size of your donation. And that gift coincides with the announcement of a new edition of my psychedelic novel, The Genesis Generation. Not only is this edition being published in paperback, the final chapter has been rewritten to close up the loose ends that were originally planned on being revealed in the opening chapters of the next planned (but as yet unpublished) volume in the series. This new edition will be available on Amazon, and in bookstores, of course. However, everyone who makes a donation to this year's Psychedelic Salon pledge drive will receive, via email, a printable PDF file of the complete book.
3/1/201510 minutes
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Podcast 437 – “Integrating Sexuality & Spirituality”

Guest speakers: Yalila Espinoza & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature a conversation about psychedelics, sexuality, and the dark side of ayahuasca tourism. The conversation is between two highly experienced medicine women, Shonagh Home and Yalila Espinoza, Ph.D. Yalila's Ph.D. studies and diverse training in Integrating Sexuality & Spirituality have inspired her to create the Spiritual Erotic Awakening model ~ body centered practices that supports your connection with joy and sensual pleasure. She offers private coaching sessions, on-line IRIS training and a 7 wk ‘MIND YOUR HEART’ program that taps into your brilliant mind and activates heart centered creativity. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More info can be found at at yalila.com. Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net Health & Wellness Encinitas Podcast The History And Future of Cannabis And Psychedelics In Medicine with Lorenzo Hagerty Tink Tink Club Podcast Episode 29 - Lorenzo Hagerty - The Psychedelic Salon
2/24/20151 hour, 9 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 436 – “Behind the Scenes at Burning Man”

Guest speakers: Marian Goodell & John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Marian Goodell.] “I don't think Burning Man is the solution. I think that we are a really powerful gravitational force, and mixed with other cultures and other groups, that's what's powerful.” “The biggest problem I think Burning Man has is translating what people think is Burning Man into what really is Burning Man.” “I want people to see Burning Man as really a state of mind in their heart.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Burning Man Website
2/17/20151 hour, 2 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 435 – “The Neuroscience of Music”

Guest speaker: Marina Korsakova PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Dr. Marina Korsakova. Marina is a professional pianist and scholar in music cognition. Her research is focused on emotional responses to music and on the perception of melodic transformation. Currently, Marina teaches Music Cognition at Touro College. She performs regularly as a member of Union City Chamber Players, and she is an author of books and scientific papers. Her latest book, “Music as Magical Journey: A Story of Tonal Gravity, Melodic Objects, and Motion in Tonal Space,” makes a friendly introduction into the science of music. COMMENTS by Marina Korsakova When giving my talk, I was not always clear about important points. Below are some elucidations and corrections. 7:05 When saying a “low level of music perception” I meant the low level of consciousness, which is required for processing the melodic elements that make music. 10:35 Vibration of a string (and an air column) generates a very long tail of soft sounds - overtones. But the consonant quality of different sounds is defined by the relationships among their strongest overtones – those overtones that are in the beginning of the overtone series. 11:58 The pleasant quality of consonant melodic elements (as compared to the dissonant) can be explained by the lesser cost of neuronal energy for their auditory processing. The economy happens thanks to the redundancy of important spectral information for the consonant sounds. Here we are dealing with the law of laziness: the less efforts for processing, the more pleasant an element of perception. 12:50 Music can have different layers of perception. Enjoyment with some of the layers may require an expert understanding, though the essence of emotional communication in music is available for everybody. It is the perception of music’s building material—the melodic elements—that does not require any intellectual efforts. We perceive melodic matter intuitively. 19:40 Everything around us and we ourselves are made of interactions of different force fields. Today we know four fundamental forces of nature: the gravitational force, strong interaction, electromagnetic force, and weak force. 22:40 “Sharing on the top” meant that music and psychotropic drugs might share the same neural substrate. 25:24 Our study found that people we no musical training can have fine understanding of the exquisite details of tonal field and even of musical styles. That data was illustrated with graphs (pictures). 27:05 Music can be explained as artful arrangement of levels of tonal energy along the arrow of time Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marina Korsakova's Website The Universe of Music By Marina Korsakova-Kreyn The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness by Lorenzo Hagerty (HTML format) The Psychedelic Society of Ireland (first announcement) The Women's Visionary Congress
2/11/201548 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 434 – “The Metaphysics of the Psychedelic Experience”

Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bernardo Kastrup.] “It is not the mind that is in the body. It is the other way around. It's the body that is in the mind.” “In the same way that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water, I claim there is nothing to a brain-body system but consciousness.” “The psychedelic trance allows us to 'see the stars at noon' because it simply eclipses the sun of egoic-awareness. It reduces the obfuscation and allows us to see more.” “I believe that the key insight from the psychedelic experience, the key metaphysical insight about it, is not what the nature of the psychedelic realm is. In fact, I think the key insight is about the nature of our everyday reality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bernardo Kastrup's Web Site Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything by Bernardo Kastrup Bernardo Kastrup's Youtube Channel
2/4/201556 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 433 – “Consciousness Browsers”

Guest speaker: Rak Razam PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Rak Razam's 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture, which was originally titled “Cosmic Consciousness To Convergence: Activating the Species.” As you can see, I have shortened it to a phrase that Rak used in his talk, “Consciousness Browsers,” which is an excellent way to describe the psychedelic experience. During his talk, Rak ranges from a discussion of his research into the shamanic use of ayahuasca, to black holes, consciousness as a bit torrent, and the concept of a species swarm. One of my favorite quotes from this talk is: “The heroic thing really is doing what needs to be done, or discovering something of value, and bringing it back and sharing it with the tribe.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option RakRazam.com Ayahuasca Awakenings healing retreats If you've read the book or seen the film, you'll know that 'Aya: Awakenings' takes you on a journey of shamanic discovery into the heart of the Amazon and the powerful plant medicine ayahuasca. Now you can be part of the awakening with these special 10-day healing retreats with Writer-Producer Rak Razam and legendary curandero Percy Garcia Lozano..." Aya: Awakenings DVD by Rak Razam
1/28/20151 hour, 26 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 432 – “GAPS, MAPS, and PTSD”

Guest speakers: Katie Tomlinson & Rachel Hope PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features two of the Palenque Norte Lectures that were given at Burning Man in 2014. The first talk is by Katie Tomlinson, founder of GAPS, the psychedelic student organization at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. For anyone interested in establishing student groups on other campuses this talk has some great pointers for you . Following Katie's talk we hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, introduce Rachel Hope, a participant in one of the MDMA studies sponsored by his organization. Rachel tells her amazing story of a very long struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and how the treatment being perfected by Dr. Michael Mithoefer and his wife Annie has cured her of PTSD. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Evergreen State College The Secret Chief Revealed By Myron J. Stolaroff MIT scientist links autism to Monsanto’s Roundup and predicts HALF of U.S. children will be autistic by 2025 “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”
1/22/20151 hour, 21 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 431 – “That Voice In Your Head”

Guest speaker: Tom Barbalet PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between fellow podcaster Tom Barbalet and his guest. Their discussion centers on what we have all come to think of as that voice in our head. As you will hear, it may not be anything like what you think it is. As Tom's guest says, “The idea for me is really very simple, break the identification with the voice in your head. It's not who you are. It's just your language machine. And you'll be in a much better position to evaluate your experience and formulate new actions if you language machine isn't filling your head with a bunch of stupid, really bad ideas.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Stone Ape podcast Stone Ape Facebook group
1/15/20151 hour, 29 seconds
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Podcast 430 – “The Danger is Madness”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.] “The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.” “LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.” “Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.” “If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Union: The Business Behind Getting High Directed by Brett Harvey The Hasheesh Eater & The Poem of Hashish By Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire
1/7/20151 hour, 28 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 429 – “Leprechauns, Elves, or Dead Souls?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.” “The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.” “Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.” “A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.” “That's part of the nature of a fractal cosmos, nothing is utterly unannounced.” “History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.” “I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.” “So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.” “The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Best Psychedelic Videos of 2014
12/31/20141 hour, 20 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 428 – “Aliens from Hyperspace”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “After you fiddle with psilocybin for a while the question of whether or not there is an alien intelligence becomes moot.” “We are embedding ourselves in a matrix of silicone and glass.” “ We are beginning to embed ourselves into a cultural membrane of some sort.” “What is happening is a globalizing of intelligence.” “The reductionists who want to say these drugs just perturb the brain I don't think have taken enough of these things.” “Our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.” “I think psilocybin three or four times a year definitely means that you are a psychedelic person. For sure it means that your every waking moment is informed and transformed by your relationship to this stuff. It doesn't take very much because it's a way of thinking.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)
12/23/20141 hour, 21 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 427 – “Stand Up And Be Counted!”

Guest speakers: Lorenzo Hagerty & Chris Hedges PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Chris Hedges.] “I think when we speak today about American values what we're really speaking about are corporate-instilled values.” “When you spend over a decade brutalizing people, people become brutal.” “You can't use the word 'liberty' when your government watches you 24 hours a day. That's the relationship of a master and a slave.” “There is no difference between a night raid in Oakland and a night raid in Falluja . . . none!” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hedges v. Obama U.S. Drones kill more people than ISIS: Chris Hedges A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn Industrial Workers of the World A Union For All Workers COINTELPRO
12/15/20141 hour, 35 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 426 – “Alien Footprints”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Once you encounter [the psychedelic experience] you see that this is an aspect or an activity as informing of what it means to be human as something as inimical to our nature as sexuality.” “What we lack is the will to change our minds.” “WE are the anomalous factor in the natural world.” “I think part of what being psychedelic is about, the real shock of psychedelics comes from the realization of the relativity of cultural positions.” “Dissolution of boundary is somehow the precondition for understanding reality.” “The truth about reality is that nowhere is it writ large that monkeys should be able to elicit the final understanding of it.” “No theory of consciousness is going to be worth anything that doesn't come to terms with the perturbation of consciousness by drugs.” “This is how I think of mind, that put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience, and I use this kind of alchemical terminology deliberately, put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience the mind becomes fluid and then is recast in a higher dimensional manifold.” “Culture is about to go hyperdimensional. That's what's creating the crisis at the end of history.” “If consciousness doesn't loom large in the human future then it is not a human future.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/8/20141 hour, 28 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 425 – “Drug Policy, Technology and Everything Else”

Guest speaker: John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “I thank medical marijuana for breaking down social resistance to recreational marijuana.” “In medical marijuana states it was the gay community that developed political skills in working for their own liberation that then applied those skills to liberate marijuana in a medical context in the aids fight. Those people blazed a trail for us.” “I think encouraging courage among people who are in the know to actually say what they know is a way to have positive social change. It's a way that the powerful are vulnerable to the ordinary people.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option HTTPS Everywhere HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure. Encrypt the web: Install HTTPS Everywhere today. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry By John Markoff
12/1/201454 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 424 – “The Magic of Language”

Guest speakers: Shonagh Home & Diana Reed Slattery PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Diana Reed Slattery who is a practicing xenolinguist and psychonaut. She has been investigating linguistic phenomena in the psychedelic sphere for over 15 years. Her website, Psychedelics & Language, details this research. Her science fiction novel, The Maze Game, tells the story of one such language, Glide. Her latest book, Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness comes out in January, 2015, from North Atlantic Press. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
11/24/20141 hour, 30 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 423 – “Is There Hope In All Of This?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.” “[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.” “You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.” “Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants” “Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.” “The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.” “We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.” “Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/17/20141 hour, 27 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 422 – “Visualizing the Psychedelic Experience”

Guest speaker: Niles Heckman PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Niles Heckman.] “The visual component of the psychedelic experience is for the most part the final frontier for what computer graphics still have yet to replicate faithfully.” “Art isn't really important unless it helps you grow in creating it, or it helps others grow through its consumption.” “Computer graphics are, and will continue to be, the tool used to visualize what is essentially unlanguageable.” “It's really fascinating that indigenous people have essentially been uploading themselves to much more advanced organic realms for potentially thousands of years, if not more, seeing imagery that's much more complex than what you can see in a Hollywood summer blockbuster today.” “Psychedelic experiences, whether real or future replicated, if done responsibly, aren't negative escapism but could be a true awakening process for more people, because we are not human beings that can have spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings having human experiences.” “Ambitions are competitive, aspirations are not. Aspirations take nothing from anyone else and injure no one else and allow you as a sovereign individual to grow, because that's why we're all here.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Niles Heckman's contact information: Twitter Production Company Podcast Post-Burning Man companion interview with Rak Razam and Niles Heckmen for his podcast “In A Perfect World.” Blue Morpho.tv Foundation Upcoming Events What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff
11/10/20141 hour, 24 seconds
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Podcast 421 – “Personal Implications of a DMT Flash”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The world is magic, not a little bit, one hundred percent. Every atom from one end of this cosmos to the other is magic, magic, magic.” “Fate has chosen you to hear about [DMT]. . . . If you now go ahead and live in your mundane, stock portfolio, BMW existence, it's because you're making a choice.” “To go from birth to the grave without ever encountering DMT is to my mind like going from birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience. It means you skated through life. You never got it!” “We're accepting a kind of society where millions and millions of people have very simple thoughts and spend all their time in a larval state imbibing manufactured data streams that come to them over the boob tube. This is not a pretty picture, actually. I mean these people are not entirely human beings.” [A shaman] “is a creature of the Interzone. And this is the power of shaman, that they can come and go from the Interzone.” “I think that culture is the program within the monkey species that is an attempt to make language visible.” “At the operational level, what virtual reality is is it's a way of showing somebody the inside of your mind.” “People didn't know what an ego trip was until they took LSD [in the Sixties]. There was no word in the language for that.” “Psychedelics are like the quintessential essence of this aesthetic of the weird. Once you get to psychedelics it's like you've hit the main vein of weird.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten by MD James S. Ketchum
11/3/20141 hour, 41 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 420 – “Grover Norquist at Burning Man”

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: The final speaker at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures, which are held at Burning Man each year, was Grover Norquist. According to Wikipedia, “... he is an American political advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases and a co-founder of the Islamic Free Market Institute. A libertarian-leaning Republican, he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” While to those who haven't yet had an opportunity to attend Burning Man, his attendance at such an event may seem unlikely, in the extensive Q&A that followed his brief talk, it is quite evident that he has many admirers on the playa. I think that you will be fascinated as he very candidly discusses not just tax matters but also touches on what he thinks about Burning Man itself, as well as his position regarding psychedelics, legalizing cannabis, and mandatory minimum sentencing. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/27/20141 hour, 52 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 419 – “A Conversation from the Margins”

Guest speakers: Nese Devenot Photo credit: Randy Mayfield PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation with Nese Devenot who pose a number of challenging questions. One of the issues they raise regards the reluctance of some of us in the psychedelic community to discuss some of the serious problems that arise out of a false sense of protecting the reputation of us all. Hopefully this will be the beginning of an ongoing discussion of this important topic. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Neşe Devenot is a founder the Psychedemia psychedelics conference and a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies and teaches psychedelic philosophy and the literature of chemical self-experimentation. Website: https://upenn.academia.edu/ndevenot Contact: ndevenot (at) sas (dot) upenn (dot) edu
10/20/20141 hour, 14 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 418 – “Death By Astonishment”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Every drug problem can usually be traced to a previous drug problem.” “I think drugs are much safer than gurus.” “I've never been absolutely certain that psychedelics have anything whatsoever to do with the spiritual quest.” “Academic culture runs very heavily on alcohol.” “It's hard to live a life where you don't eventually get your mind altered.” “Anything which changes your mind can be abused as a drug.” “People who have taken 50 gamma of LSD, or 100 gamma of LSD, or two grams of mushrooms or something like that, they are not qualified to hold forth on the nature of the psychedelic experience, because those doses don't deliver it to you.” “DMT is the strongest hallucinogen there is. If it's possible to get more loaded than that, I don't want to know about it.” “A ten minute DMT trip is worth of academic pharmacology, art history, psychology, and all this other malarkey.” “Clearly we need to transform our language, because our culture is created by our language, and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer.” “A shaman is a person who knows the unspeakable secret. And once you know it, there's no going back.” “If flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow, it wouldn't change the fact that DMT is the weirdest thing in the universe.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/13/20141 hour, 31 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 417 – “Earth Mind and Monkey Mind”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Alcohol could hardly be more different than psilocybin in terms of the social values that it promotes.” “Warfare is the natural consequence of agriculture.” “I really see psilocybin as a kind of inoculation against the primate nature.” “Noting on Earth is as much like a man as a woman. We tend to forget this. And ego is not now a male problem. We are all completely infected by ego.” “We do not have group values. The reason the planet is dying is because we cannot place the good of the group above our own desires, consistently.” “The big news is that the rise of the ego has suppressed a portion of reality, which is that nature is an animate and minded thing of some sort.” “Culture is the condensation of language.” “Every society is based upon a lie of some sort. “Drug smuggling is like assassination, if the government isn't involved it never seems to really happen.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/6/20141 hour, 28 minutes, 42 seconds
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Podcast 416 – “McKenna: Psychedelics Are The Way Out”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Culture is the sanctioned virtual reality.” “They try to tell you that you're in a social contract, but when you ask to see your signature on the document they tell you that you were born into this contract. Well what the hell kind of contract is that? It means that you were born into a kind of enslavement to a linguistically powered paradigm, a virtual reality within which you will walk around your entire life.” “The clue that something weird is going on on this planet is ourselves. Obviously! I mean, we are like a fart at the opera.” “History is no longer rationally apprehendable by the systems which created it.” “We're taking bone marrow from the children of the future in order to keep a corpse alive.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/30/20141 hour, 7 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 415 – “A Conversation About Peyote”

Guest speakers: Shonagh Home and Alyssum Old Coyote PROGRAM NOTES: Today we join Shonagh Home in a conversation with Alyssum Old Coyote as they talk about peyote. In addition to describing the elements of a traditional peyote ceremony, we learn of the difficulties that Native American people have had in preserving these important ceremonies as well as stories about some of the astounding stories of healing that has been brought about through the proper use of the peyote plant. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net Allysum Old Coyote is a woman of prayer who leads peyote ceremony for her community. She is a master beader, wife and mother.
9/22/20141 hour, 3 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 414 – “The Entheogenic Singularity”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “Your brain has distinct pathways that outnumber the number of subatomic particles in the universe by a very large number. . . . Your brain is an information system that is bigger than the whole cosmos.” “Your brain is reverberating the whole cosmos.” “We are the great project of being.” “It's the informal experimenter (in their millions) that is the pioneering front edge of the science of psychedelics.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Tom Riedel's light show for this talk Johns Hopkins "Bad Trip" Survey After Psilocybin Mushrooms 2014 The main survey will take about 30 minutes to complete, and an optional open-ended section could take another 10-15 minutes. If you have previously completed a Johns Hopkins survey of "bad trips" on psilocybin mushrooms (aka. magic mushrooms or shrooms), please Do Not complete this survey. This is a questionnaire study of bad trips on psilocybin mushrooms -- psychologically difficult or challenging experiences while under the influence of mushrooms. This research study is being conducted by scientists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has been approved by the Johns Hopkins University Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB application number for this research study is NA_00080653. Dr. Roland Griffiths, Ph.D. is the Principal Investigator for this research study. Detailed information about the study is provided in the next few pages. If you need further information please contact ShroomSurvey (at) gmail (dot) com
9/15/201455 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 413 – “Plant Medicines As Healing Agents”

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home & Neşe Devenot PROGRAM NOTES: We again join Shonagh Home and Neşe Devenot in a conversation centered on how plant and psychedelic medicines may used in ways that aid in healing and in improving self-awareness. Along the way we hear stories of some of the difficulties that they encountered not only as women in the psychedelic community, but also as young people coping with a rapidly changing world. And their discussion about ways in which some people use the power of psychedelics to manipulate (and in some cases even abuse) others is worth listening to more than once. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’ Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net Neşe Devenot is a founder the Psychedemia psychedelics conference and a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies and teaches psychedelic philosophy and the literature of chemical self-experimentation. Website: https://upenn.academia.edu/ndevenot Contact: ndevenot (at) sas (dot) upenn (dot) edu Women's Visionary Congress Johns Hopkins "Bad Trip" Survey After Psilocybin Mushrooms 2014
9/8/20141 hour, 21 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 412 – “Permitting Smart People To Hope”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What's happening is that the computer is allowing us to go beyond the mathematical objects of Greek philosophy.” “The unconscious of the species is actually being hard wired as an artifact. We're pouring glass, and gold, and silicon down the microtubials of the racial imagination. And as it were, making a kind of casting of the state of the human imagination at the close of the millennium.” “Technology is facilitating the drive toward community, at this incredibly accelerated rate..” “The Earth is on the brink of the greatest change since the end of the mesozoic, but people don't like to think about that because all they can think about is the possibility of personal extinction.” “No one can run or program these vast networks except guys with ponytails.” “My intuition was always that the psychedelic experience was a fractal anticipation of human history.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/30/20141 hour, 35 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 411 – “Our Involvement With Matter”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: At the end of this talk Terence takes off on an interesting riff wherein he speculates that our life here on Earth may have something to do with us learning how to interact with matter as a preparation for some future existence in dimensions yet unknown. If, he postulates, we are the only intelligent species in the universe, then, he asks, don't we have an obligation to announce ourselves to destinations that exist beyond the limits of our solar system. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Being itself is some kind of opportunity.” “Outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope, which is that the world is whatever you say it is, if you know how to say it right.” “We have never taken the self-management of culture seriously.” “I'm amazed at what thin soup is dished out as spiritual food.” “It's hard to take psychedelics. It's not hard to sweep up around the ashram, but it's hard to take psychedelics.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/19/20141 hour, 3 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 410 – “Women and Psychedelics, a Discussion”

Guest speakers: Shonagh Home & Nese Devnot PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a perspective of the psychedelic community that sometimes gets ignored, a woman's point of view. Shonagh Home is joined by Nese Devenot in a wide-ranging conversation about not only womens' roles in the community, but also how they are often perceived as second-class members of our community in many ways. While I am convinced that it is only the rare male psychonaught who is always a jerk, some of us have inadvertently slipped into jerkiness from time to time. This conversation may be just what us men need to hear. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Shonagh Home is an author, teacher, shamanic practitioner and doting beekeeper. Her offerings focus on the cultivation of our intuition, creativity and the essential awareness of our personal shadow. Her shamanic work with the sacred mushroom informs both her teaching and her private practice. She is author of the books, ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.' Website: www.shonaghhome.com Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net Neşe Devenot is a founder the Psychedemia psychedelics conference and a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies and teaches psychedelic philosophy and the literature of chemical self-experimentation. Website: https://upenn.academia.edu/ndevenot Contact: ndevenot (at) sas (dot) upenn (dot) edu
8/14/20141 hour, 24 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 409 – The Shulgin Memorial

Guest speaker: Friends of Ann & Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: On August 2, 2014, a memorial was held for Sasha Shulgin. In addition to several of the talks that were presented that afternoon, Bruce Damer captured a few sound bites from those in attendance. At the end of the podcast you will also hear a short segment from one of the famous “Ask the Shulgins” conversations. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin Tihkal: The Continuation By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin The Shulgin Memorial (video) Shulgin on Alchemy, Basel, 2006
8/6/201456 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 408 – “What Do You Make Of This?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.” “The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.” “Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.” “What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.” “For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast The Movement of the Free Spirit By Raoul Vaneigem
7/26/20141 hour, 39 seconds
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Podcast 407 – “The Evolutionary Importance of Technology”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.” “It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.” “Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.” “In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.” “The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.” “The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.” “The human brain is the god of technological innovation.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/16/20141 hour, 50 seconds
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Podcast 406 – “Psychedelic Research Discussion Panel”

Guest speakers: Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. Alicia Danforth, and Gabrielle Agin-Liebes PROGRAM NOTES: This program features a recording of a panel discussion and Q&A session that took place at the 2013 Burning Man Festival with three people who are currently on the front lines of psychedelic research: Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. Alicia Danforth, and Gabrielle Agin-Liebes. This is an overview session covering a wide range of psychedelic research currently underway. Their detailed talks about their work is available in earlier podcasts. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dr. Roland Griffiths Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin & Spirituality Current Psilocybin Research Projects Q&A with Roland Griffiths Dr. Alicia Danforth MDMA-assisted Therapy for Social Anxiety in Autistic Adults Gabrielle Agin-Liebes NYU Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study
7/10/20141 hour, 5 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 405 – “Marijuana At Your Corner Store”

Guest speaker: Sarah Lovering PROGRAM NOTES: Today we travel back in time once again to the 2013 Burning Man Festival where Sarah Lovering gave a Palenque Norte Lecture detailing her work with the Marijuana Policy Project. It was MPP that led a coalition of cannabis activists over a several year period leading up to the legalization referendum in Colorado. Sarah not only explains how that campaign unfolded, but she goes on to describe the community's long term plans for the ultimate legalization of cannabis in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/2/201456 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 404 – “A Survey of Shamanic Options”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: During the 1980's, before the birth of the Web, Terence McKenna's workshops were just about the only source of information about psychedelics that reached the streets. While there was some information about psychoactive plants available in professional journals and university libraries, it took Terence to pull out this information and repackage it for the rest of us. In this June 1989 workshop, he does what he did best back then, give us a detailed inventory, continent by continent, of the psychoactive plants native to each area, along with a brief history of how humans interacted with them in the distant past. [The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.” “In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/23/20141 hour, 45 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 403 – “Sasha Shulgin: In His Own Words”

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: On June 2, 2014 Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin passed on to his next adventure. Although this podcast is a tribute to his life and work, I have decided to let it be told mainly in his own words. First you will hear the audio portion of a video tribute to Ann and Sasha Shulgin. Following that is a short interview of Sasha that was conducted by Terence McKenna. In closing I play the famous talk that Sasha gave at the 1983 Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Tribute to the Shulgins /*
6/11/201457 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 402 – “Global Psychedelic Research Update”

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.] “Once you've produced the scientific data that's necessary to make a drug into a medicine, you've gone a long way towards mainstreaming the acceptance of these drugs as having beneficial properties. And then the step to legalization is not that far behind that.” “The government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana that you can use in FDA-approved research. So even though there are 20 states and the District of Columbia [that have legalized medical marijuana], and there's marijuana everywhere, we've spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research. We're the only people in America that can't get 10 grams of marijuana.” “We are all dying and we all have some anxiety about it. And so people are more scared of dying than they are of drugs. If we can show that people who are facing death can be assisted with psychedelics that's a powerful message.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS Sponsored: MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Research “The New Drug They Call 'Ecstasy' ” (New York Magazine, May 20, 1985) "Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate" (video) "Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate" (podcast)
6/3/201459 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 401 – “Surveillance and Revolution”

Guest speakers: Glenn Greenwald and Stefan Molyneux PROGRAM NOTES: “What the NSA has done is essentially converted the Internet from this unprecedented zone of freedom into the most powerful means of surveillance ever known in human history.” -Glenn Greenwald [NOTE: The following quotations are by Stefan Molyneux.] “If we have a bitcoin universe, you don't get to print money for war. You don't get to have money for a prison/industrial complex. You don't get money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.” “So bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do.” “Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.” “To limit money is to limit political power.” “If we have a bitcoin universe, you don't get to print money for war. You don't get to print money for a prison/industrial complex. You don't get to print money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.” “When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.” “There is going to be enormous amounts of resistance to the adoption of bitcoin, but I really believe that it's about the most peaceful revolution that we can have in this world.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option /*
5/26/20141 hour, 13 minutes
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Podcast 400 – “Time Travel, Psychedelics, & Physics”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We can step out of the assumption of a universal history in which we're trapped, and realizing this is the beginning of a kind of liberation.” “Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.” “When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/17/20141 hour, 10 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 399 – “We Are At The Cutting Edge”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The moment is where we spend most of our time.” “Reality is a term that if it's used at all it's used in philosophy, in ontology, in epistemology. It is not a concept that you hear very often on the lips of scientists.” “The 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' is the belief that there is something, somewhere which is real, which can be depended upon, which everything else can be referenced back to. And as long as you are victim of this fallacy you are philosophically naive and probably not at ease psychologically.” “The ego is this strange transference of loyalty from the group to the self, the individual body.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/5/20141 hour, 10 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 398 – “Where Does Reality Begin & End”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Occam's Razor is fine in the formation of physical theory, but it doesn't take us far in understanding human motivation.” “What the psychedelics seem to me to argue for is that reality is not reality. There may be no reality, but certainly this is not it. This is some kind of highly provisional, culturally sanctioned, hallucination that we are all participating in.” “Reality, whatever it is, is temporary and yields to non-existence.” “Thought can't go where the roads of language have not been built.” “Culture is a kind of environment that we have learned how to interpose between ourselves and whatever is really out there.” “I just don't think that a monkey species had the wherewithal to evade the mechanisms of control and constraint that guide and direct everything on the planet. There is a purpose to history.” “What is to be done? You can't begin to answer that question until you have some notion of what reality is.” “But all it takes [when two people are sitting together in silence] is somebody breaking that silence and stating the contents of their mind for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us.” “I think great relationships are built in silence, because then nobody ever finds out what's really going on.” “Reality is a naive concept and should probably be abandoned as quickly as possible.” “What we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally-sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination of some sort.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/29/20141 hour, 7 minutes
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Podcast 397 – “Art and Other Disruptive Technologies”

Guest speakers: Joh Isaac Mitchell & Michael Goldstein PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature two interesting talks: Art as Technology and Crypto-anarchy. The first talk is from the 2013 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. And that story is followed by a concise explanation of how bitcoin technology evolved and that cryptocurrency is only the tip of its iceberg. And should you harbor fears that bitcoin is a government operation, there is this quote by Michael Goldsetin: “Satoshi could have been an NSA backed totalitarian, but his protocol is strictly anarchist. He could have easily been paid by the government to create it, but he created something that the government itself cannot shut down. And the protocol itself is strictly anti-government in the sense that it does not allow for government.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Follow Michael Goldstein on Twitter Satoshi Nakamoto Institute Cypherpunk in Wikipedia A Cypherpunk's Manifesto Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities John Gilmore on the Psychedelic Salon Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
4/17/20141 hour, 6 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 396 – “A Freely Evolving Topology of Light & Sound”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomena attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man that is evolving. Culture carries along.” "I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction simply because so much LSD was taken in the Sixties." “The world is not nearly as chaotic and random as we suppose. We are actually trapped inside a giant organism. And it is not Gaia. That's a much larger organism. We are trapped inside a large organism which is the human collectivity, and that's why we are such different monkeys.” “But really the psychedelic experience is like an intimation of immortality. And at varying distances in time from the point you occupy it shows you ever more vague intimations of the future, but they are there nevertheless.” “What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery.” “There is a potential for immortality, but it isn't assured. It is something which comes to the courageous.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/8/20141 hour, 15 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 395 – #WaveOfAction

Guest speakers: Various PROGRAM NOTES: The Worldwide #WaveOfAction begins April 4, 2014 and runs through July 4, 2014. During this three-month cycle, people throughout the world will be protesting corruption, rallying around solutions and taking part in alternative systems. The new paradigm will be on full display. As our part in this WAVE, the salon will feature periodic reports from this global ripple in our species-consciousness. This is the first of those podcasts. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Actify ~ Wave of Action ~ 4.4.14 Video sources of audio segments Dwayne Hoover's Podcast Song Download "Mushroom Man" (download)
4/4/201445 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 394 – “Shulgin Farm Research Update 2013”

Guest speaker: Paul Daley PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Paul Daley in which he talks about Sasha Shulgin, his life and his work. Paul is one of the key people who has stepped in to consolidate and continue the experimental research begun by Dr. Shulgin. In addition to telling about Sasha's chemical research, Dr. Daley also talks about some of the reasons Sasha has given for why he does what he does. And we also hear about some of the ongoing research taking place in Sasha's laboratory, including research into a possible remedy for cluster headaches. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/2/20141 hour, 9 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 393 – “A Serious Look At Our Planetary Future”

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: “If you step back from it and really think about what the mass media does on a global scale, the most significant thing it does is coordinate behaviour.” -Daniel Pinchbeck Today we feature Daniel Pinchbeck's 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture. This talk/conversation took place late one night during the Burning Man Festival in the big tent at Camp Soft Landing, which hosted the annual lecture series. Prompted by questions from the audience, Daniel touches on a wide range of topics that included Rudolph Stiener, reincarnation, ecology, shamanism, mysticism, planetary crisis, morphagenic fields, and he even touches on Bitcoin. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/2/20141 hour, 29 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 392 – “MDMA and Autistic Adults: A New Research Study”

Guest speakers: Alicia Danforth & Charlie Grob PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a 2013 Palenque Norte lecture given by Alicia Danforth in which she tells about her work with the autistic community and their use of MDMA. Following that is a recording of a conversation with Alicia and Dr. Charlie Grob, who have just begun a new study to investigate the potential of using MDMA to help ease the social anxiety that is sometimes experienced by our friends and fellow saloners in the autistic community. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option LINKS mentioned in this podcast: Study Information: MDMA-assisted Therapy for Social Anxiety in Autistic Adults “What Is Autism?” by Nick Walker Exploring therapeutic effects of MDMA on post-traumatic stress Podcast 380 – “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate” Podcast Archive for Gary Fisher MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy
3/18/20141 hour, 36 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 391 – “Nothing Lasts”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I have been underwhelmed by the accomplishments of Indian spirituality, personally; overwhelmed by the accomplishments of Amazonian spirituality.” “I'm also very suspicious of secrets. I mean, if you tell me one it's finished. I took a pledge long ago to tell all secrets as quickly as possible. . . . Secrets are a way of controlling other people.” “Post-historical existence would be non-linear. People would live in time the way now live in space.” “That's how I think of psychedelics. When I say boundary dissolution, the real boundaries I'm talking about are the boundaries of dimensionality. The way a shaman is able to do what shamans do is by transcending Newtonian space and time.” “Here's my model: The mind is like a crystal growing under pressure, and the pressure is the pressure of Newtonian space/time. And so the crystal grows and takes the shape of its confinement. But when you liquefy the crystal matrix with a psychedelic, it has another preferred geometry. And it unfolds into this second geometry. And the second and alternative geometry is more hyper-spacial. Culturally, our minds are confined by cultural pressure and cultural phase-space to reflect cultural concerns. . . . When you take a psychedelic and you dissolve the confinement . . . then it's like taking [the mind] out of its box, and it can configure itself in a more comfortable geometry, and it's free.” “In a sense, chess is like good practice for shamanism, because good chess players see deeply into the future. That's how you win chess games.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Interview with Shonagh Home on Shamanic Freedom Radio Podcast 360 with Shonagh Home – “Medicine Oracle & Spellbreaker”
3/10/20141 hour, 1 minute, 52 seconds
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Podcast 390 – “Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This nuclear family thing is, I think, part of the root of our problem, that it is an engine for the production of neurotic, dysfunctional people.” “If guys really got as much sex as they think they want they would probably hand over the machinery of civilization without a fight.” “I'm interested in the moral consequences of taking psychedelics.” “Everything that is, is an anticipation of what will be.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcast 380 – “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”
3/3/20141 hour, 13 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 389 – “Gathering Momentum for a Leap”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The 20th century is a great gathering for a leap, and the 19th century was the century of the gentleman.” “Whether we can actually make a new world is not clear because the momentum of the past is very great.” “The bigger you build the bonfire of understanding the more darkness you reveal.” “Belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn't to be believed. It's to be dealt with.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/1/20141 hour, 6 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 388 – “Wherever You Are, Be There!”

Guest speaker: Dr. George Greer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by George Greer.] “Meaning: the final addiction!” “Meaning is suffering.” “How do you feel your experience would be different if you 'understood' the universe? How would your experience be different from right now?” “My thought about MDMA is that it blocks the fear response to a perceived emotional threat.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option GEORGE R. GREER, MD Co-Founder, Medical Director, Secretary of the Heffter Research Institute Spheres & Constellations by Farthest South
2/10/20141 hour, 5 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 387 – “February 1994 Workshop Introduction”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Psychedelics, by metling assumptions, by destroying the expectations of rigid educations creates a fluidity of possibility that may allow answers to emerge. And it's the only thing that I've seen that operates on a time scale sufficiently short to have an impact.” “Language is a strategy for binding time.” “The other thing is that biology works. It's very successful. It's been around more than a billion years. Civilization doesn't work. It's been around 10,000 years, and it's on the brink of meltdown.” “We fabricate ideas out of matter. No other creature does that.” “One of the unique things that is happening on the planet is that the fate of all life is becoming hinged to the decisions made by a single species.” “If there's not free will, then thinking is meaningless.” “But all we have to do is hit one speed bump, and democratic values are down the drain.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/31/20141 hour, 19 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 386 – “Loose Ends Time”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “That's the key thing that the archaic world knew that we don't know: How do you live in equilibrium so that your children may live in equilibrium, because otherwise you get a cycle started that's going to shove somebody over the cliff. And that somebody in the present case is either ourselves, our children, or their children. It's no further away in time than that.” “We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it's a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.” “If you look at the fossil record, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on the Earth are extinct. From that point of view it looks as though biology is a process for producing extinction.” “You talk about a well-kept secret that's only two tokes away? How do they keep the lid on this? That's the miracle to me. How do they keep the lid on this?” [smoked NN-DMT] “These chemicals, these plant hallucinogens, are pheromones laden with messages for humanity, but you have to pick up the telephone.” “I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hallucinogens and Shamanism by Michael J. Harner The Terence McKenna Experience by Ken Adams Quasar shines a bright light on cosmic web
1/24/20141 hour, 27 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 385 – “Current Psychedelic Research”

Guest speaker: Roland Griffiths PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Roland Griffiths, who is a professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In addition to describing the current psychedelic studies being undertaken there, he also goes into detail about exactly what characteristics researchers consider when evaluating whether a person has actually had a spiritual experience. Among the research participant's comments that he read, one of the most common themes was the interconnectedness of all things and beings. Also, he spoke about their research into the character of one's personality in regards to how a psychedelic experience affected their openness to the experiences of life. Another interesting thing that his research group is investigating is the intersection of psilocybin and meditation, a discussion of which takes up a significant part of this talk. “Psilocybin is a pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. And that's exactly the same of meditation. It's about bringing yourself into the present moment.” -Roland Griffiths Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin & Spirituality Current Psilocybin Research Projects Q&A with Roland Griffiths
1/16/20141 hour, 38 seconds
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Podcast 384 – “Sex, Aging, and Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature a Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the 2013 Burning Man Festival. This ground breaking founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress continues to push the envelope of psychedelic discussion into two of the most important issues of all to humans, sexuality and aging. Additionally, Annie issues several challenges to us all as we continue to expand our own consciousnesses. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Woman's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice The Psychological Dark Side of Gmail Google is using its popular Gmail service to build profiles on the hundreds of millions of people who use it. Occupy Madison builds first house in planned eco-village for the homeless Daily Psychedelic Video
1/7/20141 hour, 5 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 383 – “A Psychedelic Point of View”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna & Edward Snowden PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Everything flows. Nothing lasts.” “Language is like an informational creature of some sort.” “This problem of language is central, I think, to understanding the psychedelic experience.” “Language is something unfinished in us. It is something that was catalyzed out of animal organization by hallucinogenic activation of brain states, and it is something that is in the act of perfecting itself.” “When you go into a culture, you're going to make a choice. And all cultures represent narrowing of choices.” “We're about to have a chance to create a global culture, to essentially clean our basement and decide what we're going to save and what we're going to keep.” “It's the monotheistic religions that have to take a real knock for the present situation.” “Monotheism, as a philosophical reflex, is understandable but simple minded. It's what an eight year old would get to.” “Taking a psychedelic is an experiment. It's not an act of religious devotion.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/28/20131 hour, 23 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 382 – “The Psychedelic Option”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “And now the task changes. It's a completely different kind of spiritual universe that you live in after you found the answer, because the task becomes facing the answer. Facing it!” “What we call history is the fall out of a dynamic hear-and-now, feeling-toned relationship with our environment.” “Gradual change was a luxury of the past.” “The politically most potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them. To give them the facts.” “The spiritual realm in practical terms means the imagination.” “The frontier of our species is the imagination.” “The spiritual realm, in practical terms, means the imagination. The frontier of our species is the imagination.” “And, in fact, the evidence is building that our style of society is the historical equivalent of a temper tantrum.” “A shaman is someone who has seen the end. A shaman is somebody who has seen it all.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/16/20131 hour, 36 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 381 – “A Stiff Dose of Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “[It is] a race between education and disaster. "We're going to either burst out into a millennium of freedom and caring and decency, or we're going to toxify the whole thing and turn it into an ash heap. And the responsibility falls largely on us.” “Outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope, which is that the world is whatever you say it is if you know how to say it right.” “Until I went into therapy I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world, and then once you're in therapy you discover that it was the most insane scene you'd ever heard of, and you just didn't notice.” “Science fiction I really consider a proto-psychedelic drug, because what science fiction does is it gives permission to imagine.” “We can't preach to the have-nots the virtue of voluntary simplicity when we're riding around in BMWs and collecting Monets. That doesn't make a lot of sense.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/10/20131 hour, 7 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 380 – “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo Hagerty PROGRAM NOTES: This relatively short podcast features the audio portion of a film by Tom Huckabee and George Wada in conjunction with “The Starck Project”, a documentary soon to be released. The short film consists primarily of an interview with Lorenzo Hagerty dealing with the introduction of MDMA (Ecstasy) to the street scene in Dallas, Texas during the 1980s. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Starck Project The Starck Project's Facebook Page VIDEO FEATURES /* Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video) Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate from George Wada on Vimeo. The Cosmic Dance Scene If you aren't already familiar with the world-wide dance scene, this trailer will give you a feeling of where it was in 2011. /*
11/28/201332 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 379 – “Divine Androgyny”

Guest speaker: Jae Starfox PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features Jae Starfox's 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture, which was delivered at the Burning Man Festival. In their talk, Jae provides a candid look into some of the issues that transgender people are faced with as they make their way through a sometimes less than friendly world. As more and more people are beginning to deal with their own gender related issues, this talk provides some little discussed but very important information. Following Jae's talk I play a short segment from my interview on the Joe Rogan podcast in which we also discuss gender issues. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: Intersex women speak out to protect the next generation Lorenzo on the Joe Rogan Experience Joe Rogan's Podcasts What is the Plan? The Plan Today
11/27/201352 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 378 – “A Psychedelic Point of View”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A psychedelic point of view means a point of view which honors consciousness.” “You do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate.” “Our role is not to understand but to appreciate.” “It's ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality, because we don't even know where we want to go.”J “We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane.” “Once nature is taken as the ground of being then permission to inflate the image of the ego is denied.” “Intuition must be given prominence in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world.” “Science is really the, it's the plumbing level of reality. It doesn't catch the integrated nature of language, the evolution of fairy tales, the dynamics of love affairs, the quintessence of genius, these are the things, that as human beings, structure and constellate and guide and inform our world. And science has nothing to say about these things.” “Intuition is the unifying of experience into a gestalt image of the world.” “We are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/19/20131 hour, 12 seconds
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Podcast 377 – “An Ecology of Souls”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “In the matter of deeper things, deductive reasoning rests only on the appeal that hope can lend to its case.” “In the felt domain of experience called 'living', intuition is how most of us, even the most self-defined as non-intuitional, are operating.” “[Nature] seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness, mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it's the species that can make itself indispensable to all others.” “Culture, as it is in a sense, the software of the infrastructure of the global civilization, which is the hardware.” “Culture can be redefined as software and radically re-written so that it runs much more smoothly.” “I did not say that we were software or hardware. We are neither. We are the user, and this is the important thing to remember. We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future. We are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have.” “To offer instead a potential calendar in celebration of flux, change, growth, and feminism, which are the values that are going to have to be maximized if we are going to open a dialogue with our souls and [the] soul of the planet and save ourselves from the lethal momentum that so many hundreds of years of dominator culture have imparted to the machinery of our civilization. We must awaken.” “The path out of the Dark Wood in which we find ourselves is cognition, thought, getting smart fast. We have to dance, sing, calculate, and drum our way out of the circumstances into which we have fallen.” “To the degree that we can celebrate the irrational, the feminine, the unconscious, the transpersonal, and even the psychedelic, to the degree that we can celebrate these things we are giving permission for the order that is in nature to manifest. The plan wants to come to be. We have to get out of the way.” “Life is some kind of opportunity. It's an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos, for twenty, forty, seventy years we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum. It is a puzzle. It is something to be figured out.” “The path with heart is the path which astonishes.” “All of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention.” “My own private opinion about this is, I think that what psychedelics in these high-dose, correct set/setting situations carry us into is an ecology of souls. . . . Those 'things' in that place are our ancestors.” “Do we know what we behold? We need to know what we behold because inevitably we become what we behold.” Download MP3MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Minecraft: The Story of Mojang
11/16/20131 hour, 38 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 376 – “Coming Out of the Psychedelic Closet”

We were saddened to learn of the untimely death of Daniel Jabbour on April 13, 2014. Celebrating The Life Of Daniel Jabbour: An Intersection Of Psychedelics, Activism And Technology A transcript of this podcast is being created at https://www.fanscribed.com/transcripts/7-376-jabbor-coming-out-of-the-psychedelic-closet/ — we’ll finish it with a handful of volunteers but the more who can help, the faster it will be completed. PROGRAM NOTES FOR THIS PODCAST: Guest speaker: Daniel Jabbour For anyone under the age of 30, this may be the most important podcast in the salon. Daniel Jabbor is a young entrepreneur and drug policy activist who, among many other accomplishments, and in a very short period of time, founded the now 4,000+ strong Psychedelic Society of San Francisco. Today's podcast features two of Daniel's talks, one from the recent Palenque Norte Lecture Series at the 2013 Burning Man Festival, and another from a psychedelic conference at which he detailed some of the successes of the SSDP, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. No matter what your age, this is an important message for you to think about. If you know history, you know that quite often it is the young people who are the ones to change its course. These talks by Daniel Jabbor will give you more positive hope for the future than you have had in a long time. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Daniel Jabbour.] “The War on Drugs was started as a way to control and segregate various groups of society.” “The drug war is increasingly a war on youth. Over 50% of marijuana arrests in this country [the U.S.] are people under 29 years old.” “We desire to alter our state of consciousness. It's an evolutionary thing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Society of San Francisco Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) is the only international network of students dedicated to ending the war on drugs. At its heart, SSDP is a grassroots organization, led by a student-run Board of Directors. We create change by bringing young people together and creating safe spaces for students of all political and ideological stripes to have honest conversations about drugs and drug policy. Founded in 1998, SSDP comprises thousands of members at hundreds of campuses in countries around the globe. Be sure to visit
11/6/20131 hour, 1 minute, 56 seconds
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Podcast 375 – “Story Time with Ken Adams”

Guest speaker: Ken Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear another of the Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the 2013 Burning Man Festival. This talk features the artist, experimental film maker, micro-publisher, and media developer, Ken Adams, who for many years was a close friend and neighbor of the late Terence McKenna. You will be delighted with some of the true stories Ken tells as we get to wander with him through the mind of a uniquely creative artist. Also, I tell a couple of my 'grandfather stories', and we finish with Ron Shock telling the greatest dope story ever. “We have shared experiences that the entire world knows about, like 9-11 and all the catastrophes in Japan and Haiti and all over the world, the Gulf. We're being introduced to a level of experience that's post tribal, post national, where we're all sharing the same emotional experiences and beginning to develop the persona of a new human being, a human being that's never been here before. It's something that's completely unique in human history.” -Ken Adams Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   The Terence McKenna Experience ceremonial cinema by Ken Adams (pay-what-you-can movie download)  
10/29/20131 hour, 15 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 374 – “Bootstrapping Ourselves”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Ego is the absolute impediment to Tao.” “We live in a domain of triviality that we have created.” “Do we embody the radiant correctness of what we say we are pursuing.” “I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.” “I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.” “If you're interested in drugs, the first stop is the library. And it's a long stop. And you educate yourself.” “In order to be free I must not believe anything. Then all things can be freely commanded in the mind.” “It takes months to assimilate a large psychedelic trip.” “I think the worst thing you can do is diddle with low doses. The nibblers of this world are no friends of mine. It should be overwhelming, and it should be an act of courage” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Book mentioned in this podcast Amazing Dope Tales by Stephen Gaskin Russell Brand Sounds Off!
10/25/20131 hour, 37 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 373 – “Thoughts About Gnosticism, Art, and Music”

Guest speaker: Terence McKennna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A single chemist can produce ten million hits [of LSD]. Well this is not some guy getting rich, this is about changing history, when you're talking about ten million consciousness-expanding experiences.” “One of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience is to see that it dissolves conventional wisdom. It dissolves adherence to group values, because it dissolves all structure, because it dissolves syntax. It shows the provisional nature of syntax.” “Try and look at consciousness as a resource for want of which we are going mad.” “And that what we really want, in the domain of planning, is an abandonment of ideology, that ideology is poisonous, all ideology is poisonous.” “You just can't go wrong as a heretic, because they're always vindicated.” “Permission for heresy is never a bad idea.” “Television is not reality. Television is the cultural myth about reality.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the RG Veda to Plato by Ernest G. McClain Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen
10/18/20131 hour, 34 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 372 – “The Intentionality of Meaning”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.” “Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.” “Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.” “Once they pledge allegiance to a given model of reality, then that absolves all necessity for further thought.” “Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.” “I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.” “I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/9/20131 hour, 21 minutes, 42 seconds
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Podcast 371 – “Civil Rights In Cyberspace”

Guest speaker: John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “Marijuana, it turns out, is three-quarters of the illegal drug problem, because it's three times as popular as all the other drugs put together. So if you can move marijuana out of the black market and into a legal and regulated market you've gotten rid of three-quarters of the crime, three-quarters of the violence, and three-quarters of the black market money. It changes the dynamics for the other drugs. It makes it much more of a small potatoes thing.” “If you move away from [Google's] free services you can move away from the part of the Net that's the most heavily surveilled.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)Defending Your Rights in the Digital World John Gilmore's Home Page Google has been secretly harvesting the passwords of all Wi-Fi devices everywhere
10/2/201356 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 370 – “Modeling Human History”

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
9/30/20131 hour, 31 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 369 – “Timothy & Terence”

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
9/17/20131 hour, 31 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 368 – “Psychedelics and the Feminine”

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
9/10/20131 hour, 11 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 367 – “The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker”

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
9/3/20131 hour, 36 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 366 – “Terence McKenna’s Suggested Reading List”

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
8/26/201354 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 365 – “Effects of Psychedelics on Society”

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)
8/19/20131 hour, 14 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 364 – “Communicating with the Mushroom”

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
8/11/20131 hour, 8 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 363 – “A Venice Beach Salon”

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
8/10/20131 hour, 6 minutes, 39 seconds
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Podcast 362 – “Flashbacks”

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
8/3/20131 hour, 36 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 361 – “Catlin’s Salon”

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
7/30/201330 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 360 – “Medicine Oracle & Spellbreaker”

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “Plant medicines have long been the domain of women.” “We are taught to escape in this culture, and so what these [psychedelic] medicines will do is they'll take you to the heart of the truth of who you are and what needs to be addressed.” “I think of myself as a spiritual warrior, and a spiritual warrior seeks to know, they are on a quest to know.” “We still have an Inquisition, it's a Pharmacratic Inquisition, it's still around.” “. . . they say we are wanting you to see and understand what's going on, because when you see, you SEE, then it's game over, right? [Which is] another reason why these medicines are illegal, because if you use them enough, in the right set and setting, then you start to get what's going on, you start to really see.” “We are here to remember the truth of what we are.” “You are not the 'story' of what you think you are.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Interview with Shonagh Home on Shamanic Freedom Radio Shonagh Home Web Site Love and Spirit Medicine By Shonagh Home The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values By Thomas B. Roberts
7/22/20131 hour, 31 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 359 – “The Real Message of Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History has been the pursuit of a false god, the god of stability, the god of permanence, the god of the unchanging, and we've become just neurotic on this subject.” “What's being said here is re-claim experience. Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future, and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates. Take back your mind and your body.” “You're involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder.” “The suppression of psychedelics has had the unfortunate effect of making it impossible for us to build a linguistically coherent community and have a shared body of experience, because you can't just say this stuff to everybody.” “Coming out of the closet on psychedelics should be part of the political agenda.” “The direct datum for metaphysical speculation should be ones own experience.” “I believe that the boundary dissolving quality of these psychedelics makes them social dynamite.” “The real message of psychedelics, I think, is to reclaim experience and to trust yourself. Your perceptions are primary. Your feelings are correct. Everything must constellate out and make sense and parse with what you know. If you don't start from that assumption then you are off center to begin with. And the psychedelics will dissolve the cultural programming that has potentially made you a mark and restore your authenticity.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth By Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen Process and Reality By Alfred North Whitehead Childhood's End By Arthur C. Clarke When Prophecy Fails By Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, Stanley Schachter Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts
7/15/201359 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 358 – “This Psychedelic Thing”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think if we ever tease apart this psychedelic thing, what we'll discover is it's an inter-species communication system.” “I'm at war with the keepers of the secrets.” “One of the motivations for my career is to get other people to check [DMT] out, because here is truly confounding data that you don't have to make an expedition to the heart of the Amazon, or battle your way through hours of waves of nausea and dark spaces, chanting your mantra obsessively. I mean, when you smoke DMT, 30 seconds later you're in the presence of the unspeakable, and the show is going full blast.” “It really frustrates me when people have psychedelic experiences and don't talk about them, because to me, that's what they're for. They're to fertilize the enterprise of communication. It's to be talked about. And if it's not talked about it's sort of like seeds which fall on sterile ground.” “I think that the world is held together by a misunderstanding.” “The real trick with an extraterrestrial is to know when you're in the presence of one.” “If you want the real thing, it's just five dried grams away. The REAL THING!” “The New Age, generally I find, is somewhat obnoxious, because it's a flight from the psychedelic experience.” “I love science. I just think it's incredibly pretentious and has claimed too much.” “It's astonishing the cul de sacs into which the human mind has wandered.” “The psychedelic thing speaks to freedom, and so you can shine that on a number of issues.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Contact in the Desert "The Planet's Premier UFO Convention"
7/4/20131 hour, 18 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 357 – “Fungi Questions”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.” “The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.” “Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean.” “The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.” “Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.” “The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Complete Listing of Salon Podcasts at Archive.org Dennis McKenna on the Dr. Future show
6/27/20132 hours, 10 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 356 – “The Psychedelic ‘Religious’ Agenda”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The 'banks' of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.” “All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don't run around announcing how they haven't got their act together.” “What the psychedelic thing is about, or at least for me, is it's a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.” “We are, literally, a schizophrenic species. We are at war with our own nature. Civilization, whatever that means, is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it's constantly refusing to come to terms with the context in which it finds itself, which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy, and so we go outside of those things and create a generalized abstraction and reason backward.” “The reason psychedelics, I think, are so frightening to the guardians of social order is because they represent a direct addressing of experience.” “What the psychedelics show, that is a secret that some people don't want told, is that we can redesign our behavior. We can change very, very quickly.” “The whole history of humanness is a history of unexpected adaptive response to unusual circumstances.” “Whatever the imagination is, psychedelics catalyze it, psychedelics enhance it.” “If we could feel the consequences of what we are doing we would stop doing it. . . . We're like someone half-awake inside a burning building.” “Everywhere where reason has shown its light the greater darkness has been revealed.” “The truth, for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn't you should seek a deeper truth.” “History is the necessary distortion of an animal species to lead it to the brink of an ontological transformation.” “The magic, if that's the word, or the grandiosity, the power of ecstatic exultation that resides in the psychedelic is because it is literally a change of dimensional perspective.” “The real test of your psychedelic authenticity is your ability to write a novel.” “The quintessence of understanding is the ability to occupy other people's points of view.” “Not reckless dose but committed dose. Not to see if it works. It works, other people have established that. You don't need to do research to confirm that it's psychoactive.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/19/20131 hour, 25 minutes
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Podcast 355 – “Building a Psychedelic Community”

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a panel discussion with Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer that took place at the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures held at that year's Burning Man Festival. “Women tend to vote against drug law reforms in greater numbers than men, because they're worried about their kids. And without the full participation of women [in the movement to reform drug laws] we will not succeed in gaining our civil rights.” -Annie Oak Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Women's Visionary Congress Palenque Norte 2013 Speakers The Tor Project East Forest What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution By Gar Alperovitz
6/13/20131 hour, 1 minute, 23 seconds
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Podcast 354 – “Pre-End of the World Special”

Guest speakers: Michael Garfield & Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt's novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and musician, Michael Garfield, one of my favorite topics was Michael's very positive take on the long-term impact of the work of Terence McKenna, regardless of the fact that the Timewave theory had obviously been disproven. Michael is also a regular performer on the festival circuit, and his schedule may be found online at Michael Garfield.net Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Salon Magazine Degenerate Art: The Art And Culture Of Glass Pipes “Is Ecstasy the Key to Alleviating Autism Anxiety?” Horizons 2012: CHARLES S. GROB, M.D - “Why Psychedelics Matter” Videos from the Festival Circuit Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
6/6/20131 hour, 7 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 353 – “Inflationary Evolution”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.” “Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.” “Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.” “National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.” “Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.” “In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.” “The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.” “Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics [Paperback] by Nick Herbert Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics [Paperback] by Nick Herbert A Vision by W. B. Yeats
5/27/20131 hour, 21 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 352 – “The Amazing Thing About Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it's discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there's somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.” “You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn't depend on a state of grace. It doesn't depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn't even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don't have to go to India for ten years. You don't have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.” “If you think that you've got it all figured out, and you haven't ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you're absolutely out to lunch. You don't know what's going on. It's like the opinions of eleven year old boys about sexuality.” “You can actually go from birth to the grave and never experience [a psychedelic trip] if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently idiotic culture.” “I think that there is some truth to the notion that the reason we are alive is to learn the path out of the labyrinth, and that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.” “We share this planet with some other kind of entity, and culture is a way of sealing us off from this fact.” “Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to entertain larger perspectives than the completely piss-ant perspective that they're being given by the popular media.” “We must not consume. We must produce, as a community. The psychedelic community must produce art, not consume it. If they get it flowing the other way and we begin to consume it then we are depotentiated.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto The Essential Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard
5/25/201359 minutes, 39 seconds
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Podcast 351 – “What Is Truth?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.” “The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.” “If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.” “So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.” “I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.” “I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.” “Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.” “The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.” “The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don't see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It's beautiful.” “Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.” “In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we're walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn't self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Three Halves of Ino Moxo : Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon by César Calvo (Translated by Ken Symington) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig
5/14/20131 hour, 10 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 350 – “Healing Through Sound and Ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you're never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don't know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.” “The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.” “[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it's letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don't want to become like that. Maybe that's not why you're there.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hamilton Souther, Medicine Hunter Blue Morpho Ayahuasca Center
5/8/201359 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 349 – “A Higher Dimensional Sectioning of Reality”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.” “Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.” “Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.” “I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.” “[Psychedelic experiences are] beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.” “It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.” “We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.” “There is an intelligence in the species that is deeper than the societies and the systems that we erect to rule us, and this wisdom of the species can make enormous changes in the evolution of the mass psyche, such as the Renaissance for example.” “Impressionism [in painting] is simply twenty minutes into LSD.” “Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.” “I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/30/20131 hour, 35 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 348 – “Entheogens and Plant Medicines”

Guest speaker: Dr. Naughtilee PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Naughtilee gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of modern medicine with the wisdom of the natural healing arts. In this engaging talk, and through interaction with her audience, Dr. Naughtilee discusses some of the foods, medicines, and poisons that we obtain from plants and helps us to better realize what a deep connection we humans have to the plant world. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/23/20131 hour, 4 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 347 – “This counts, somehow it matters”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence” “These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.” “Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.” “In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.” “To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.” “For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.” “And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.” “We need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being.” “Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.” “Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.” [Note: this comment was made a dozen years before the iPhone was released.] “As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.” “The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago. . . . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.” “History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.” “What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.” “To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.” “If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013 Conference Books Mentioned in this podcast Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet By Katie Hafner
4/9/20131 hour, 9 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 346 – “Critical Intelligence”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer /* A brief history of Palenque Norte (video) PROGRAM NOTES: Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of "global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism" where you "put yourself on the shelf" and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says "there is no dominator culture" and that if we aren't careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others' unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop "critical intelligence". If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn't feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Check out all of the projects Bruce talks about at his personal site at: www.damer.com Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone Podcast
4/5/20131 hour, 8 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 345 – “Transhuman Encounters”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.” “By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.” “The question is being asked, 'Are we alone?' ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we're not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?” “People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.” “Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state, it's that we haven't demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.” “In the last eight years we have undergone like a second Neolithic revolution. The first Neolithic revolution was the invention of agriculture. The second Neolithic revolution was the invention of home fungus cultivation.” (from a November 1983 lecture) “I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.” “The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.” “For all we know, we know nothing.” “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your understanding.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Against the Grain [Kindle Edition] Joris-Karl Huysmans (Author)
3/21/20131 hour, 29 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 344 – “A Global Cultural Crisis”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.” “Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.” “Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.” (quote from 1983) “Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.” “I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.” “If I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism.” “So it's [shamanism] a kind of a profession. It's almost like clergy. It's to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.” “The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present By Howard Zinn Burr: A Novel By Gore Vidal Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated By Gore Vidal
3/13/20131 hour, 23 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 343 – “Developing a Community Tea House Model”

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women's Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psychedelic community she has these powerful words, “We're not the counter-culture. We are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Women's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice Links mentioned in this podcast The Terence McKenna Legacy Library book list at LibraryThing Dr. Bruce's Levity Zone The Evolver Network BrynStoneBooks.com UKCSC Podcast 006: Please Hire Me, I'm a Cannabis Campaigner!
3/4/201355 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 342 – “Psychedelic Family Business”

Guest speaker: Allyson & Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: “If it's a psychedelic family business, then you've got to consider the 'top line' [as contrasted with 'the bottom line']. What's the top line? The top line is: You have one unique life, and what do you love to do? What do you want to spend your life doing? What is the highest impact you can have on the world in a positive way?” -Alex Grey “We know that in the wake of our psychedelic experiences we're awakened to a oneness with the environment and with a sense of the need to protect it. And at least the dream of Eco-sustainability and how could we possibly manage that at this point in our trip. And yet it's up to us to take responsibility for it. All of these things kind of naturally evolve in the wake of the psychedelic experience for many people.” -Alex Grey “If you really want something big to happen in your life you have to make promises that you don't know how you're going to keep, and you have to keep them. That's all. That's all it takes.” -Allyson Grey Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option COSM Allyson & Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors A sanctuary for seeing ourselves and the world as reflections of the Divine
2/20/20131 hour, 27 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 341 – “Ayahuasca Research Report – 1984”

Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's talk features Dennis McKenna in a June 1984 presentation of his research concerning ayahuasca. This is one of the first, if not the first, public presentation of Dennis' early work involving this sacred medicine. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of his professional life, and he is considered one of the world's leading scientific experts in this field. As Dennis says in a recent article in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs: “In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Index of Dennis McKenna Articles (from Erowid.org) The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012) Dennis J. McKenna (Erowid Character Vaults) “Ayahuasca and Human Destiny” by Dennis McKenna Dennis McKenna on the Joe Rogan Experience
2/13/20131 hour, 45 seconds
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Podcast 340 – “Visions and Biospheres”

Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a better understanding of not just our own local ecosystems, but of the Earth's entire biosphere as well. It is a fascinating talk and is followed by an interesting Q&A session. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2 By John Allen The publishing home of John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder Upcoming Events Books from the Synergetic Press
2/6/201359 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 339 – “A Necessary Chaos”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.” “Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.” “I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.” “The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.” “We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.” “Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.” “The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/29/20131 hour, 12 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 338 – “A Tribute to Myron Stolaroff”

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a few sound bites from several of the previous podcasts featuring Myron Stolaroff, who departed this life on January 6, 2013. Not only was Myron one of the world's leading psychedelic researchers, earlier in life he was instrumental in helping the Ampex Corporation develop the audio and video tape recorders. Below are a few links, videos, and books that more fully illustrate the life of this Renaissance Man. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Myron Stolaroff Archive on the Psychedelic Salon Donate to The Stolaroff Collection at Erowid Myron Stolaroff memorial video Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher in Dialogue The Gary Fisher Archive on the Psychedelic Salon A Visit with the Stolaroffs The Myron Stolaroff Vault at Erowid.org The Secret Chief: Conversations With a Pioneer of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Movement By Myron J. Stolaroff The Secret Chief Revealed By Myron J. Stolaroff Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness By Myron J. Stolaroff What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry By John Markoff Myron Stolaroff on Wikipedia
1/22/20131 hour, 16 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 337 – “The World Could Be Anything”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.” “It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.” “It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.” “And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.” “The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.” “In cyberspace things are built out of light.” “Apparently, in the Avesta classical period [early Iron Age and before] no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.” “To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Starmaker The Phenomenon of Man Childhood's End The City and the Stars The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
12/29/20121 hour, 40 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 336 – “2012 Re-visioned”

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features my friend Daniel Pinchbeck as our guest speaker. As you know, Daniel wrote a book titled “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, also, he is widely known as a speaker and writer about many things psychedelic and esoteric. However, I know him best as a fellow alumnus of the Entheobotany Seminars at Palenque, where Terence McKenna and his merry band of psychonauts would hold forth each January. In this talk, one that he gave at the Palenque Norte lectures during the 2012 Burning Man festival, Daniel follows the format of other psychedelic luminaries and lets the audience guide the direction of the lecture through their questions. Among other topics that Daniel covers are 2012, consciousness, the Occupy Movement, and possibilities for the future. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Direct link to video of this talk
12/22/20121 hour, 15 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 335 – “Is There Any Reason to Hope?”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “[The wide variety of psychedelic plants] are the way in which the Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.” “The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.” “Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there's no hope, there's no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!” “Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.” “This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.” “Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.” “The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.” “Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.” “The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Megatripolis Club, London Podcasts featuring Fraser Clark “Rave Culture And the End Of The World…as we know it” “Monkey’s Trip, A Short History of the Human Species” Unify 2012 Project
12/14/20121 hour, 2 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 334 – “The Alchemy of Cacao”

Guest speaker: Brian Wallace PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features Brian Wallace's 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Brian, who has been a community organizer for MAPS and other organizations, is also expert on the cacao plant. Originally, Brian titled this talk “The Entheobotany of Cacao”, however, I decided to change the title to better reflect the wide-ranging discussion of a little-understood, but extremely important, plant. Brian's talk is about significantly more than chocolate treats. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Brian Wallace's Web Site (click) Naked Chocolate: The Astonishing Truth About the World's Greatest Food By David Wolfe Following Brian's talk I play a short segment about the work of Occupy Sandy and close with a song sent in from some fellow saloners, The Chooks. It is simply titled “Occupy” and is freely available for download immediately below. "Occupy" (mp3 file) by The Chooks Podcast 256 - "A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate" featuring Jonathan Ott Erowid Search Results for: cacao The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna NY Daily News Channel on YouTube Direct link to video of this talk
12/4/20121 hour, 24 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 333 – Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”

Guest speaker: Ken Adams “I'm almost sixty years old, and I can guaranty you that I'm fucking tired of having to whisper about psychedelics.” - Ken Adams Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the fifth Palenque Norte Lecture of 2012, which was given at the Burning Man Festival. This talk features the filmmaker Ken Adams, who was a neighbor, friend, and collaborator of Terence McKenna in their search for new ways of explaining the psychedelic experience. Ken is the producer/director of a new, and experimental, film titled “The Terence McKenna Experience” which features never before seen and heard raps by Terence. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option TerraLucida-The Terence McKenna Experience-test sequence from Ken Adams on Vimeo. Ken Adams "Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”" - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. Rolling Jubilee A bailout of the people by the people
11/26/20121 hour, 5 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 332 – “Living in the Exile Nation”

Guest speaker: Charles Shaw Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Charles Shaw.] “Having a felony conviction, and having a drug conviction, essentially makes you a second class citizen.” “For the lower classes, the poorer classes, which generally in this country are people of color, drug laws have always been used as a way to control them.” “And if you take away the distinction between tobacco and alcohol and cannabis and cocaine or alkaloids or whatever, what you've got is a war against altering consciousness.” “But what they're trying to stop more than anything is ideas. Because what it is is a war of ideas. And it is a war of control, a breaking away from an external control factor, like a government, or a religion, or an ideology, or an economy that enslaves you, and thinking outside the box in revolutionary terms to try to solve it.” “It's no secret that psychedelics change consciousness. It's no secret that they're revolutionary. I mean, we've known this for a while. What is absolutely fascinating to me is how easily that culture was dismissed.” “The true revolutionary leaders, I think, are going to be the ones who figure out how to not go in the street and how to disseminate the revolution by other means.” “I also think that the real revolution is going to come from women, personally. I think enough guys have tried to lead the revolution, and it's always the same thing because men have the same intentions, we always enter into a war paradigm. And we've gotta stop that war paradigm, and at least the feminine will allow us to get out of that war paradigm and get into something that is a collaborative negotiation of disputes and grievances. But I don't know what's that going to look like.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Charles Shaw "Living in the Exile Nation" - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. Charles Shaw's Exile Nation Project "Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality" by Charles Shaw "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" by Alfred W. McCoy Rolling Jubilee Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%.
11/13/20121 hour, 9 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 331 – “Understanding theProcess of Consciousness”

Guest speaker: Dr. Brian Hewlett Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features the third in the series of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man festival. The speaker is Dr. Brian Hewlett and he titled his talk "An Algorithm of Human Consciousness and Implications for Artificial Intelligence". As you can see, I have re-titled the talk “Understanding the Default Process of Consciousness” to better fit with some of his closing remarks which included: “If you understand the default process of your consciousness, and you work with that default process and start to pay attention to that process, then you can actually start to manipulate the process, just like you can manipulate any process that you understand.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “What you experience as reality IS reality, and it's got consequences for you.” - Dr. Brian N. Hewlett Dr. Brian Hewlett "Understanding the Default Process of Consciousness" - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. The Psychedelic and Entheogenic Society of New York City
11/1/20121 hour, 21 seconds
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Podcast 330 – “The Politics of Knowledge in Psychedelic Sciences”

Guest speaker: Dr. Maddy Corbin Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Maddy Corbin.] “I've been a nerd for a long time. That's how you get a Ph.D.” “At least in my experience of psychedelics, and people who take psychedelics and why they value psychedelics, is because it helps to critique you. It helps to break you down. It helps to challenge your assumptions. Isn't that part of what we find, whether it's in our meditation or in our psychedelic practices is it pushes you to your edge, and it teaches you about your assumptions that you are making without even realizing it. And you learn to challenge yourself.” “How can we be as rigorous in our engagement with the outer world as we try to be with our engagement with our inner world?” “Psychedelics don't actually come from the counterculture. They come out of scientific laboratories.” “And because it came through a chemical that allowed them to study it, they began to engage with spirituality in a way that was historically unprecedented. The doorway, I argue that [psychedelics] are a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory in a way that it usually doesn't.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dr. Michelle (Maddy) Corbin Dr. Maddy Corbin “The Politics of Knowledge in the Psychedelic Sciences” - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. Women's Visionary Congress
10/22/20121 hour, 2 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 329 – “Vision Mapping for the Golden Age”

Guest speakers: Amanda Sage and Bruce Damer Watch a video of this talk Watch a video of Bruce Damer's brief history of the Palenque Norte lecture series PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Amanda Sage.] “Let's turn the museums into temples. I think the new museums are going to be temples.” “I'm interested in this collaboration, because I'm interested in what can we do to wake people up, to turn people on.” “And dream. I mean if this is about dreaming, what can each of us do to evoke the dream, a deeper dream, in another?” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Amanda Sage (official site) eARTh Voyage::: The mission is the art of transformation Amanda Sage “Vision Mapping for the Golden Age” - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. A brief history of Palenque Norte, from which the podcasts sprang . . . by Dr. Bruce Damer Dr. Bruce Damer "A Brief History of Palenque Norte" - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman Dark Ages America by Morris Berman
10/15/20121 hour, 26 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 328 – “In Praise of Ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Graham Hancock PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Graham Hancock.] “There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.” “I think that ayahuasca requires us to confront the truth about ourselves. That's one of the fundamental, universal experiences of anybody who has drunk the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon.” “All across the world we have a venal class of dishonest, self-serving bureaucrats who are using the power we give them to impose themselves upon us.” “You have to understand that we've had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the 'War on Drugs'.” “Do we as adults have the right to make decisions about what we put in our own bodies and what we experience with our own consciousness without reference to the powers of the state, or must we seek permission from the state in order to explore our own consciousness?” “I don't think it's an accident that I started smoking cannabis at round about the time I started researching “The Sign of the Seal”, which is the first book I wrote on a historical mystery. And I don't believe I would have actually written that book if I hadn't had this nudge from this curious plant ally called cannabis.” “What ayahuasca does is to allow us to make accessible to our senses areas of reality that are normally off limits to us. I believe that those are real, not fiction of the brain. What the shamans call 'the spirit world', what quantum physicists might call parallel universes or parallel dimensions, I think they exist.” “The model I use is that the brain is a receiver, or a transceiver, of consciousness rather than a generator of consciousness. And that as such, as a transceiver, the receiver wavelength of consciousness may be adjusted. And I think that's what happens with ayahuasca, and I think that we gain access to other levels of reality and the intelligences that inhabit those other levels of reality, which, for some reason, are interested in the human race.” “We ought to be able, in a responsible society, as responsible adults, to gain good information. If we want to experiment with our consciousness we should be able to gain good and reliable information easily. Instead it's very difficult. We have to go underground. We have to stay out of the mainstream if we want to learn about ayahuasca.” And, “What ayahuasca does is to allow us to make accessible to our senses areas of reality that are normally off limits to us. I believe that those are real, not fiction of the brain. What the shamans call 'the spirit world', what quantum physicists might call parallel universes or parallel dimensions, I think they exist.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option LondonReal.tv Graham Hancock's Official Web Site Graham Hancock's YouTube Channel The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind By Graham Hancock More Books by Graham Hancock
10/7/20121 hour, 34 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 327 – “Jesus, Aliens, and Ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Jonathan Talat Phillips PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a talk given by Jonathan Talat Phillips in Vancouver sometime earlier this year. In it, Jonathan tells the story of how, after a devastating loss as countercultural activist, he embarked on a mystical initiation involving underground ayahuasca ceremonies, kundalini awakenings, DMT cowboys, shapeshifting extraterrestrials at Burning Man, miraculous healings, and an international movement trailblazing visionary ways to help our planet in crisis. Along the way he uncovers the lost rites of the Christian mystery schools and secret “electric” messages for personal and global transformation. Jonathan is the author of “The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic.” He co-founded the cutting edge web-magazine Reality Sandwich and The Evolver Network, coordinating 40+ regional Evolver communities. He is a religion blogger for "The Huffington Post," the creator of “The Ayahuasca Monologues: Tales of the Spirit Vine,” a Reiki Master and Bioenergetic Healer. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Starck Project The Starck Project on Kickstarter
9/28/20121 hour, 7 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 326 – “Avoiding the Pitfall of Words”

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti J. Krishnamurti ONLINE PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by J. Krishnamurti.] “The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, and the way we live, and the way we feel. I think that is where a revolution must take place.” “No revolution, psychologically I'm talking about, is possible if there is merely the imitation of a particular ideology. To me, all ideologies are idiotic.” “What has meaning is what IS, not what should be.” “I think that is the worst thing one can do, to break up one's own existence into various fragments, and that's where contradiction lies.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Safe Access Now Martin Wittfooth Web Site Corey Helford Gallery
9/20/201258 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 325 – “Cauldron Chemistry”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.” “In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.” “I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.” “The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.” “I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links mentioned in Jon Hanna's comments: The bio synthesis of dimethyltryptamine in vivo. Comments by Sasha about DMT & Tryptophan
9/1/20121 hour, 2 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 324 – “Esalen 2012 Redux”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program consists of ten separate pieces from a June 2012 workshop at the Esalen Institute, eight of which are by Bruce Damer. Here are the titles that Bruce has given to these short talks: --Are we all becoming autistic astronauts? --On our dual bonobo and chimp nature --The things I loved about Terence --Esalen @ 50 --"Procreate only once" (and we will have a future) --The wellspring of human consciousness --Terence's greatest Rap: Its all about Love, and where to now, Butterfly Hunter? Following that we will be hearing the two closing segments of the workshop. The first is the “Rap for Terence” by Earth Girl and following that comes Galen Brandt singing her tribute to Terence titled “Aho Terence floating in the sky” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at Burning Man Podcasts featuring Fraser Clark "Rave Culture And the End Of The World…as we know it" "Monkey’s Trip, A Short History of the Human Species"
8/26/20121 hour, 13 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 323 – “Searching for a New Paradise Myth”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features the final community discussions at the June 2012 Esalen workshop led by Lorenzo and Bruce Damer. Among the topics discussed were: -Creating a new myth for our community -The genesis of the Occupy Movement -Are psychedelic “mutants” among us? -Cultural Creatives -Freeing our food supply from money -Timebanks -What the mushroom has to say about the future -The Importance of myth -Developing a “Medicine Circle” app -Building new cultures through shared global experiences -The 'superfood' revolution and our connection to the Earth -Indra's Net -The Temple at the Burning Man Festival Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option FindTheOthers.net
8/21/20121 hour, 28 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 322 – “The Evolution of Intelligence”

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “In my function as a [college] lecturer, it's my obligation, it's my task, it's my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority.” “And that's one of the things that is kind of amazing today, the junk information that we're being inundated with, the cloud, the atmosphere, the smog of disinformation.” “Reagan is a certifiable lunatic” “The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” “We're getting to one of those moments, one of those great moments in history, when evolution is going to happen.” “At all costs avoid terminal adulthood.” “You are as old as the last time you reprogrammed your brain or changed your mind.” “You're as old as the people you hang out with.” “There is no reason why any human being should work. Robots work, humans perform.” “The sensible thing to do about drugs is this, get yourself a really good dealer.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Myron Stolaroff's Lone Pine Stories The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25 by Malden Grange Bishop (Dodd, Mead & Company: New York, 1963) Reviewed by Lorenzo Hagerty Mavericks of the Mind - Elizabeth Gips (read online) Thought Provoking Interviews on Consciousness by David Jay Brown
8/11/20121 hour, 15 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 321 – “A Discussion About Psychedelics”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the next installment of the workshop that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. The majority of this program features comments by some of the workshop's participants who bring up topics that include: -Heroic doses -Body load with psychedelics -Techniques for using psychedelics -What exactly is the psychedelic state -The perfect answer when a cop asks, “Were are you at, buddy?” -The re-introduction of psychedelics to our species -How do we tell the psychedelic story -The Occupy Movement and the banking system -The need for a parallel system of money Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/7/201250 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 320 – “Occupy Yourself”

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
7/28/201258 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 319 – “The Voynich Manuscript”

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
7/21/20121 hour, 13 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 318 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time”

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?
7/10/20121 hour, 13 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace”

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 int...
7/5/20121 hour, 43 minutes, 39 seconds
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Podcast 316 – “A Deep Dive Into the Mind of McKenna”

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
7/1/20121 hour, 33 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 315 – “In a German Salon” Part 3

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
6/28/20121 hour, 22 seconds
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Podcast 314 – “In a German Salon” Part 2

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?"
6/21/201258 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 313 – “In a German Salon 1983″ Part 1”

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
6/14/20121 hour, 46 seconds
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Podcast 312 – “Occupy the Internet”

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 thi...
6/4/20121 hour, 20 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 311 – “The Spirit of the Internet”

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”
5/29/20121 hour, 8 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 310 – “Introduction to the Valley of Novelty Workshop”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.” “What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.” “I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.” “Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.” “Actually, these things [psychedelics] reveal scenarios, modalities hierophanies of emotional and poetic power that are very emotionally moving, and sometimes leave in their wake powerful ideas, ideas as powerful as any of the ideas that have moved and shaped civilization.” “The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.” “History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.” “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.” “The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.” “The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.” “Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles.” “So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.” “Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.” “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 then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham discuss “The World Wide Web and the Millennium” Podcasts of Into the Valley of Novelty Workshop Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 "Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012" Esalen Workshop with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo
5/19/20121 hour, 29 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 309 – “In Praise of Psychedelics” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think it's time to begin to talk very, very frankly about the forced engineering of consciousness, about the re-shamanising of society, about the re-birth of archaic values before it's too late.” “Anyone who loves adventure, and who loves life, and who loves the experience of being, has an obligation, I think, to explore this [the psychedelic realm]. It's as much a part of your identity as your sexuality, your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to choose to play with less than a full deck. Don't do that. Play with a full deck!” “People didn't care for the Holocaust, that was a moral outrage, but the policies of the Roman Catholic Church push more people into early death, disease, and poverty than the Holocaust ever did. And yet, they're perfectly free to run their bingo games and appear among us. Why? They should have to answer for this outrage.” “Millions of people right now are being warehoused by television. Television is the heroin of the electrified middle class.” “I think that technology has been obscenely in the service of profit. And science, too, has whored itself to profit. But what kind of world could we build if these things were in the service of art? It's our cultural values that are out of whack.” “It's ridiculous to criticize a drug you haven't taken. It's sheer, boneheaded, know-nothingism.” “DMT is a reliable method for crossing into a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50,000 years. Is there an invisible, nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet your boots there is. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so and you've smoked 70 milligrams of DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about.” “Everything has directions. Whether you are ironing your clothes, tuning up your car, or taking psychedelics. If you don't follow the directions, whose responsibility is it if you screw up? So we have to educate our children, educate ourselves, get these things out of the closet and make them part of the culture. That's the way to deal with sexuality. That's the way to deal with drugs. Maturely! “When I think that I will close my hand into a fist, that's a miracle. That's mind over matter. No philosopher in human history has ever been able to explain how that simple act takes place. That tells you that philosophy has been staying well-away from the world of direct experience, because every day we experience willing our body to act, and yet we say mind cannot affect matter. Why do we have this contradiction? It's because we don't want to admit the primacy of mind.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 "Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012" Esalen Workshop with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo
5/11/20121 hour, 2 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 308 – “In Praise of Psychedelics” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] This is the first part of an evening lecture given by Terence McKenna in early February, 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Maui. “Our [Western] civilization touches everyone on this planet. We are involved in a species-wide crisis, and it's a crisis of adaptation and intelligence. If we can meet the crisis, if we can re-design the cultural machinery so that it can glide in to the new value systems that a limited Earth, and an electronically activated population demands, then we can use the crisis as a stepping stone to further exploration of the universe, further evolution, further unfolding.” “Nature is an engine for the production of extinct species.” “The contradiction that history confronts us with is a deeper exploration of the psychedelic experience. And the psychedelic experience is something incredibly alien to the Western mind. It is, in fact, taboo.” “The psychedelic experience is not built in to your biology the way orgasm, or sleep, or hunger, or something like that is. It's a physiological option that involves forming a symbiotic relationship with a plant.” “We seem to be the creature that can download the ideas, the Platonic perfect forms of a higher dimension, into the world of matter. And so where we are there is an interfacing between the world of ordinary nature and some kind of transcendent force.” “Speaking about the unspeakable means stretching the envelop of what can be said. When new things can be said new plans can be laid, new directions can be found out of a crisis.” “Science has steered us deeply into the notion that nature is soulless and spiritless. And the practice of this idea has led us to the brink of catastrophe, global and species and ecological catastrophe.” “Psychedelics are catalysts for the human imagination. That very simply is what they are.” “[Biological] nature is a seamless community of intentionality. Nature is a gene-swarm covering the surface of the planet.” “I believe that shamanism without psychedelics is shamanism on its way to becoming religion.” “So we are like dysfunctional children. Something terrible happened to us in the childhood of our intelligence. We lost our connection to the Gaian matrix, to the goddess mother of the Earth who gives coherency to life, and when the connection was lost we fell into history.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/11/20121 hour, 7 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 307 – “Palenque Entheobotany Seminars Remembered”

Guest speakers: Matt Pallamary, Wild Bill, & Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features, first of all, a conversation between Matt Pallamary and Wild Bill, who begin by reminiscing about the legendary Palenque Entheobotany Seminars, but who then go on to other wild tales, some of which may actually be true. After that is the first of our long-awaited Global Trialogues in which Bruce Damer answers a question from a young man in Australia. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BRUCE'S BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS Books by Eckhart Tolle Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012 A workshop at Esalen Institute led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 Global Trialogue No. 1 . . . On Facebook The “October Gallery” talk by Bruce Damer (MP3 files) Part 1 Part 2 A Basic Theory of Neuropsychoanalysis by W. M. Bernstein Thought Nachos
4/26/20121 hour, 19 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 306 – “Terence McKenna & Ram Das in Prague”

Guest speakers: Ram Das, Terence McKenna, and Angeles Arrien PROGRAM NOTES: “The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.” --Terence McKenna “Psychedelics are a miracle, yes. They may not be the only miracle. I think they may have already done what they were to do. I think what is done is so much more powerful than anybody recognizes.” --Ram Das "I see all this destruction as just the process of transformation. The question is whether we'll keep it together in the process of transformation.” --Ram Das "So I really see the psychedelics as directly intervening in the core process, which is running us over the edge, which is our inability to connect with the consequences of what we're doing.” --Ram Das [Speaking of the Sixties: “The fact that they noticed us was because we were busy making statements, instead of just being it.” --Ram Das [McKenna] “So it isn't enough to just say, the system will take care of itself?” [Ram Das] “Well I am part of the system that is taking care of itself.” “I lead a continuous paradox that suffering stinks and suffering's great. And I live with both of those all the time.” --Ram Das “To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again” --Terence McKenna “I think that the crisis that came to Marxism is coming now to the RepubliCrat oligarchy in America.” --Terence McKenna “No more do we create cultural artifacts that are simply our furniture, but now it's our thoughts, our values, are embodied in this [digital] stuff.” --Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Signs of Life: The Five Universal Shapes and How to Use Them By Angeles Arrien World Council of Indigenous Peoples
4/25/20121 hour, 5 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 305 – “Conservatives Confront the Ideas of Occupy”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “I think it's clear to everyone on the left, the right, the center, every walk of life, that we have to undo a mess that's been created, a tangled mess. And we have to remake the System. There's no way to reform the System. We must re-do it.” “If you put out a powerful vision, the universe just lines up the stones and the pebbles and allows you to walk toward it. As long as you're pure in that vision and you really vision it, and you really share it, it's amazing how these things come to pass.” “Silicon Valley and its progeny have reinvented the world, and [the tools they have created] are now the tools by which we will reinvent politics and the economy.” “The Occupy Movement is like the tip of an iceberg, but underneath the water is 95% of the volume of the discontent and of the volume of the powerful organizing.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Radical Remake Wiki Bruce Damer's Web Site The DigiBarn Computer Museum Indian Man, Jadav "Molai" Payeng, Single-Handedly Plants A 1,360 Acre Forest In Assam The Joe Rogan Experience
4/5/20121 hour, 35 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 304 – “Timothy Leary and Jerry Brown in 1995”

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “I don't even use the word 'United States'. If there is such a thing I'm not a part of it. I'm not an American, I'm a Californian, and maybe I'm a Southern Californian.” “I think any sensible person would do this, but since my 70s I have been planning, thinking about, my dying, because that's going to be the climax, the final going away party. And you can't believe the taboo when you start talking about how you're going to die and the ways of dying. You'll easily clear the cocktail party. No one wants to talk to you.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Archive of Timothy Leary in the Psychedelic Salon The Timothy Leary Archives Timothy Leary in Wikipedia
3/30/201256 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 303 – “The Arrest and Imprisonment of Dr. Timothy Leary”

Guest speaker: Joanna Harcourt-Smith PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Joanna Harcourt-Smith.] “In my childhood, and in those [wealthy] circles, I never encountered compassion. If I ever encountered compassion it was from someone who was serving these people. And I wondered why that is. And this man said to me, 'Well, you see, the very, very rich have to kill compassion in their children. Every child is born innately compassionate, but they have to kill compassion in their children so that they don't give it [great wealth] away.' I mean, how could we own most of what is if we had compassion?” “Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.” “Once the System has you in their clutches there are no laws.” “A lot of times myth is stronger than reality. The mythological story endures. The personal story doesn't really make it, and some people are myths in their own lifetimes. Timothy Leary is one of these people.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/25/20121 hour, 33 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 302 – “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide”

Guest speaker: James Fadiman We are saddened to report that long time friend of the salon and psychedelic research pioneer extraordinaire, Gary Fisher has gone on to his next adventure. Archive of podcasts featuring Gary Fisher The Gary Fisher Page PROGRAM NOTES: “There is so much more psychedelic use in this country than any of us, even those of us who think we know a lot, are aware of. . . . According to [the government], 23 million Americans have used LSD since it became illegal. And that figure, because I've been tracking it, goes up 600,000 a year, pretty much rain or shine. So there's 600,000 people this year who are going to be taking, and that just deals with LSD, that doesn't deal with ecstasy or ayahuasca or anything else. But there's this growing, continual large number of people, and they tend to be better educated and brighter, and we do have research on that. So what I'm doing a lot with this book is say, 'Hey, it's OK to admit what is true, which is the person next to you at your work probably had some acid in their background just as you did.” -James Fadiman Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option JamesFadiman.com The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys By James Fadiman The Other Side of Haight: A Novel ENTHEOGUIDE.NET Meeting the Divine Within A Manual for Voyagers and Guides and Supplemental Information EROWID.ORG Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives BOOKS By Matt Pallamary Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher talk about the legendary Al Hubbard
3/12/20121 hour, 21 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 301 – “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” Part 4

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: In this, the concluding episode of recordings from the workshop titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” and led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo, we hear Bruce's final presentation in which he begins by taking us on a mental voyage around our solar system. From there he tells a fascinating story of his meeting with a somewhat dodgy character who convincingly explained that, although it may appear that way at times, there actually is no cabal secretly controlling human affairs. Following that begins an interesting Q & A session. . . . In the Occupy segment of the podcast I ponder over the pros and cons of the Black Bloc tactics that have become somewhat controversial lately. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “The financial system is a giant hair ball of GO-TO statements and lack of control and out of control pools of assets that flow.” “We do not have real technology compared to what nature does. We're not even close.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/3/20121 hour, 48 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 300 – “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” Part 3

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast picks up with the third section of the workshop that Bruce Damer and I led on January 28th. This section features my second presentation of the day in which I try to live up to the advanced billing for the workshop which read: “Lorenzo will take us from 2013 into the emerging era of cyber-enhanced humans, immersed in a meme-space stranger than we can suppose.” In the Occupy segment of the podcast I feature an interview with and a talk by Chris Hedges, including his criticism of the Black Bloc hooligans who are doing their best to destroy the Occupy Movement. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Art by Randal Roberts (who provided the art for this podcast) Description of the elements in “Fawkes” by Randal Roberts Video of today's podcast What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions by John Hoopes, Ph.D.
2/20/201251 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 299 – “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” Part 2

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: In today’s podcast we pick up with the next part of a workshop that was held on January 28, 2012 titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”. This section features Bruce Damer, who begins with his “Ode to Terence” [ In the Occupy segment I begin with a recap of what went down in Washington, D.C. the day of the eviction from McPherson Square. Also, I play a series of short audio clips. The first one is of a young man from San Diego who was speaking at the General Assembly that was held in the middle of K Street in Washington the evening after the McPhearson eviction. And while this segment also ends with a call to the barricades from Chris Hedges in different interview, between those two Hedges segments I play a three minute pep talk that Tony Benn gave to some of the occupiers in London the other day. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links Mentioned In This Podcast The Adult Autism and MDMA/Ecstasy Study
2/12/20121 hour, 51 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 298 – “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” Part 1

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the first of the recordings from last weekend's workshop (titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”) that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led in the Los Angeles area on January 28, 2012. In addition to Lorenzo's remarks and some comments by those in attendance, three videos created by Bruce Damer were shown. Those videos are embedded below. The second part of the podcast is the Occupy Movement update, which features a conversation between Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges. During the course of their conversation they debate the relative merits of pushing for a Constitutional Convention verses non-violent civil disobedience. Also included is a sound bite from one of OccupyFreedomLA's live video feeds in which a speaker addresses the actions now being taken by those who are suffering from the foreclosure epidemic that is facing so many people in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Video of the first session of the workshop Books mentioned in this podcast Land Without Evil: A Novel By Matthew J. Pallamary Death of the Liberal Class By Chris Hedges Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It By Lawrence Lessig OCCUPY SEGMENT: “The Occupy Movement seems deeply rational for not engaging in normal politics, because normal politics gets us Barack Obama.” -Lawrence Lessig “All of the correctives to American democracy came through movements that never achieved formal political power.” -Chris Hedges “Which in my mind means the system is not reformable but will have to be pushed aside. And I think in that sense the Occupy Movement is, in sort of classical terms, correctly defined as a revolutionary movement.” -Chris Hedges “The legislative branches, both at the state and the federal level, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state.” -Chris Hedges “But this is a moment, this is more the French Revolution moment. This is a moment when everything is falling apart at the same time, and it's another reason to be pushing on every front at the same time.” -Lawrence Lessig This is the YouTube video from which I extracted some of the audio for this podcast.
2/4/20121 hour, 39 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 297 – “A Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson”

Guest speakers: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny PROGRAM NOTES: The featured audio that I play in this podcast is part of a two-CD collection produced by Joe Matheny and given to the salon to podcast by the distributor, The Original Falcon Press, which you can find via originalfalcon.com. The voices you will here are those of: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option For the Occupy Segment, I first play a few minutes that I've taken from a three hour interview that Chris Hedges gave on CSPAN 2 on the first day of this year, and in it you will hear this Pulitzer Prize winning journalist explain how corporate personhood isn't just a threat to American Democracy, it is a threat to humanity itself. . . . Following that, I play a short speech for you that Senator Bernie Sanders gave on the Senate floor as he introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will strip personhood from corporations. After those two kind of heavy duty pieces. I lighten it up with a two minute clip of country music star Willie Nelson and his wife reading a poem that he wrote about the Occupy Movement. Finally, I close with a song that was written and is sung by a young man from Salt Lake City named Noel. And this is from a YouTube video I found where Noel was singing on Day 1 of the Occupy Salt Lake City street theater. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ow4lxtzBlqw Books and links mentioned in this podcast “The Terence McKenna Experience” a new film by Ken Adams Pyramid Eclipse, a Symbiosis Gathering RAW week at boingboing.net A few random quotes from Robert Anton Wilson "A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production." "An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave." "Belief is the death of intelligence." "Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil." "Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history." "Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals." "Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church." “On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.” “Only the madman is absolutely sure.” “The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.” “The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.” “The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.” “You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.” “Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.”
1/27/20121 hour, 29 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 296 – “The World and It’s Double” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “One of the most puzzling things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in 'Oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery. Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled!” “[DMT] is a secret of such magnitude that it's inconceivable how it has ever been kept.” “When you get to DMT you have hit the main vein.” “It has to do with your own intelligence. Truly stupid people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point of it is. It feeds off intelligence. It's a consciousness-expanding drug. If you don't have any consciousness you can't expand it.” “The less intelligent you are, the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes because the less capable of entertaining the implications you are.” “A hallucination is a species of reality.” “The world is like a novel. It's a novel in which you are a character.” “And then I got crossed up with this mushroom, and immediately life became art.” “If what we're embedded in is a novel, or some work of art like a novel, then what you want to do is figure out who in the novel you are.” “We are trying to find a doorway into a new world for the spirit.” “And I really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries this is what we will discover, is an unconditional caring, an unconditional affection that flows through all life and all matter and gives it meaning.” “You don't have to wait for the end of the world to get this news. You can just short circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality through the use of these hallucinogens They are the doorway that the Gaian mind has installed in the historical process to let anybody out, any time they want to, provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk through the door.” “Let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together.” “We are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves. Extend the design process to human destiny and produce something that will redeem 10,000 years of pogroms, and migrations, and attempted genocides, and pointless wars, and stupid religions that make people hate themselves, and all the rest of it. If we're going to redeem that legacy then we have to do something quite spectacular.” “A concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.” “Organized religion is as concerned with controlling social groups as organized politics is.” “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” “We all want our children to be well-adjusted, unfortunately there is nothing to be well-adjusted too. So that's a real problem.” “The reason shamans can do their magic is because they are outside the belief system.” “I think alienation, extra-environmentalism, shamanism, whatever you want to call it, is simply individualism, in the context of cultures that don't value individualism, and cultures don't.” “It's said nature acts to preserve the species. Cultures act to preserve the illusions of the population.” “There are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists, but there are no old, bold psychedelicists.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/11/20121 hour, 55 minutes, 42 seconds
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Podcast 295 – “The World and It’s Double” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Culture denies experience. We all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things. These are all experiences, which cultures deny.” “We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises.” “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.” “So we're in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.” “Boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People, meaning government institutions, become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.” “I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology.” “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.” “Notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.” “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.” “Our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions Future Theater Radio – Interview with Lorenzo TERENCE MCKENNA: BEYOND 2012 A one-day seminar celebrating the life and ideas of Terence McKenna and taking the next steps beyond 2012 with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo
1/6/20121 hour, 39 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 294 – “The Genesis of Occupy Wall Street”

Guest speakers: David Graeber & Tim Pool PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast takes a look back at some of the roots of the current Occupy Movement on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Today is also the eve of the third anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and so I have put together an audio collage that ranges from some early sounds of the movement to interviews with David Graeber and Tim Pool, as well as some comments by fellow saloner Jaret, and a couple of sound bites from Lawrence Lessig and Senator Bernie Sanders to round things out. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links to topics discussed in this podcast: Battle in Seattle The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - Lawrence Lessig Interview Brian Leher Program with David Graeber Majority Report interview with Tim Pool Jaret Johnston's FEEDBACK ART
12/17/20111 hour, 21 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 293 – “The Power of Art and the TAZ”

Guest speaker: Peter Lamborn Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Peter Lamborn Wilson.] “Why are artists still meddling, or mediating, between people and their desires?” “All livelihoods are arts, from midwifery to war, nothing is mere labor.” [In reference to gift economies.] “The artist sacrifices talent for money. The audience sacrifices money for talent.” “One can no longer distinguish between cops and cop-culture, the media-induced hallucination of a society designed by its lawyers and police.” “Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.” “The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desires.” “I will argue that illegality means more than mere law-breaking. Illegality as a positive attribute of the Temporary Autonomous Zone implies that the very structure, or deepest motivation of the TAZ-group necessitates the overcoming of consensus values, and that this is true when even no statute or regulation has been broken.” “The Temporary Autonomous Zone should serve as the Matrix for the emergence of a Sorelian myth of uprising.” “The Temporary Autonomous Zone cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise any more than the revolution can be realized without dancing, as Emma Goldman put it.” “Today quilts. Tomorrow, perhaps, The Uprising!” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option BrainMeats Podcast Episode 1 Occupy BrainMeats The inaugural episode of the BrainMeats podcast is devoted to the Occupy movement and what hackers and makers can do to support the protesters on the ground. Willow spoke over Skype to Ari Lacenski, Eleanor Saitta, Matthew Borgatti, Rubin Starset, and Smári McCarthy about the history of OWS, the meaning of illegibility within the movement, software tools for protesters, and more.
12/10/20111 hour, 26 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 292 – Makana the Mighty!

Guest speaker: Makana Please support MAKAKAMUSIC.COM PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Makana.] “This whole war that we're fighting is a war of consciousness versus ignorance, of controlling human behavior by controlling people's thoughts, by directing their awareness.” “There's always going to be disagreements as to what the solutions are, and even what the problem is, but if people in their own personal process start to face their own fear and let go of the prison that they are in, and that prison is the concern about what someone else thinks of them, if they get over that then they can be free. And then it's up to them to facilitate the change they want to see. But we have to at least help them to get to that point, and that's what I try to do with my music.” “The only way we can bring about a revolution of freedom is to bring about a revolution of perception.” “There are millions of people like me, who care about their future and will say something.” “Aloha isn't about representing yourself in a way that people will like you. Aloha is about valuing the well being of the other person, because you realize that you're interconnected to them by the nature of life.” “I know this sounds kind of silly, but for years I've been thinking to myself, it's the musicians' fault why things are so fucked up, because they have been programming people to not care for so many years now. And hopefully the musicians will start to not be afraid to say the things they really want to say, because music does something to you. It hits your emotions, and it goes right past that part of your brain that controls you.” “When we can transcend this illusion that we are so different from each other, then we become powerful.” “I feel that in the process of what we're attempting to facilitate, to consider how people orient themselves to these issues is of utmost importance. Not just to present these issues, but to really know how to get inside and behind the barriers that have been put in place there by systems, an education system and a media that work to create an unthinking workforce, and people that don't challenge authority and status quo. So I'm a big fan of understanding how nature works.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option ALSO SEE: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests by Matt Taibbi
12/1/20111 hour, 31 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 291 – RAW “The ‘I’ In The Triangle” Part 2

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] “I think we're in a period of fractal chaos, and the whole system is collapsing, and every week is a new surprise.” (1990) “Things are happening so fast that the only prediction I'll make is that everything is going to happen faster than we expect it.” “That's why I don't believe in monolithic conspiracy theories, there's one group that runs everything. If there was one group that runs everything the world would make a little sense.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option This program was made possible by the copyright owner, Joe Matheny, and the publisher, The Original Falcon Press. Tim Pool, Journalist Extraordinaire, (link to his live video feed from Occupy Wall Street) GENERAL STRIKE, by Moe Shinola /* Click image to see video "The Bat Signal" /* Click image to see video
11/22/20112 hours, 14 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 290 – RAW “The ‘I’ In The Triangle” Part 1

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] “There actually have been studies done at many schools in the big cities where IQ has measurably decreases from the entering of grammar school to graduation from high school. The longer they're there they dumber they get. And some people think that's an accident, or an oversight, or a mistake, but that is the function of the public schools. The function of the public schools is to stop thinking.” “I perforce had to invent this style of paradoxes to prevent people from thinking they're getting the truth out of my books. What you're getting out of my books is my guesses, my hunches, sometimes my prejudices. … I don't claim to know the truth.” “And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links and videos mentioned in this podcast Robert Anton Wilson (DVD) “The 'I' in the Triangle” from The Original Falcon Press Artist, saloner, and one of the Brooklyn Bridge 700: Ken Vallario (Web site) Ken Vallario's story of his arrest Information request about Children of the Revolution: Tune Back In (2005) OCCUPY STREAM (Video feeds from numerous Occupy sites) MAKANA the Mighty
11/16/20111 hour, 55 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 289 – Robert Anton Wilson “The Lost Studio Session”

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] “You know what family values means, that's hating the same people your grandfather hated.” “Information intrinsically tends to produce more information, and it breeds faster than rabbits.” “We never do reach limits. That's one of the big fallacies of our time, is the idea of limits. There are no limits.” “We are graduating from being terrestrial mortals to becoming cosmic immortals. We are becoming the gods that we imagined a long time ago. I think that's where evolution has been pointing.” “I think we've passed over the Abyss. Getting through the Hitler and Stalin eras and Auschwitz and Hiroshima and all those horrors we've gone over the Abyss, and now we are graduating into cosmic immortals, as startling as it sounds.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links mentioned in this podcast Occupy Movement eMail: lorenzo (at) occupysalon (dot) us TERENCE MCKENNA: BEYOND 2012 Constance Demby Joe Matheny's G-Spot Podcast The Original Falcon Press BB's Bungalow OccupyStream.com The Declaration of Desperation Michael Ruppert's Web Site
11/9/20112 hours, 3 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 288 – “What’s So Great About Mushrooms?” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's impossible to stop the forward march of information.” “This is the chaos at the end of history.” “Because our culture crisis is so much deeper [than during the Renaissance], we are casting back to 20,000 or 30,000 years back into the past.” “I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is a task of recognizing it when you find it.” “When talking about evolution it is important to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics is that there is no teleology. That means that evolution is not moving toward something. All notion of purpose has to be given up. It isn't that things evolve or move toward higher forms. It's just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher form.” “Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.” “One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is because they catalyze the evolution of language.” “I see the whole world we're living in as basically the legacy of LSD.” “The dreams of the alchemists of the 16th Century have been entirely realized in the technical accomplishments of the 20th Century.” “[Acid] heads are in charge of designing the cutting edge of culture.” “But there are no professionals in the field of self-exploration. That's everybody's job. I mean, you all are Ph.D.s in consciousness exploration, or if you're not you should be, because what else have you got going?” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Occupy Video Streams Livestream.com Ustream.com OccupyStream.com Links to David Graeber's Work Wikipedia entry about David Graeber Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination by David Graeber A conversation with anarchist David Graeber about anthropology on the Charlie Rose program Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
11/2/20111 hour, 37 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 287 – “What’s So Great About Mushrooms?” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no scientific truth, or new paradigm, can arrive in a vacuum vis-à-vis the opinions of the general informed public. If it doesn't fly with the general informed public it doesn't matter what degree of internal rigor it has, an idea is probably doomed to a kind of , or a kind of obscurity." “How are we to relate to the plants which intoxicate? Do they drive us mad, or do they return us to the “religio”, to our own origins? Are we to see the states of mind which they invoke as tremendously alien, or are we to see them as, in fact, a way of going back to the primary situation in which everything that we call human found genesis?” “If you want to change people's minds about something you have to get scientists to change their minds.” “It's actually cooperation is what nature seeks to consolidate and conserve. And it is the species which can make itself most user-friendly to its neighbor species which actually survives.” “The de-sacrilizing of natural space is the process of cutting it into grids and erecting flat, planer surfaces along those grids to cut out the influx of energy that is part of the natural world.” “Whatever Christianity was, it was a historical episode where the most patriarchal wrath extant on the planet was suddenly pumped full of so much energy that everything else was just shoved to the wall.” Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option “Homeless Land 9” by permission of singer/songwriter John A. Tackett OccupyStream.com
10/28/20111 hour, 9 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 286 – “The Revolution Continues” Part 3

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it's basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what's to come.” “There's perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn't. It's a neurological experience. It's a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it's basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.” “To summarize, I'm an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are 'leave the planet', 'get smarter', and 'learn how to live as long as you want'.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/18/20111 hour, 24 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 285 – “The Revolution Continues” Part 2

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “Looked at it pragmatically, the trick of taking intelligence tests is to get the highest score possible in terms of intelligence as defined by middle class intellectuals who designed the test.” “It's the nature of the game that a philosopher who's proposing radical new ideas will be opposed by 80% of society.” “My responsibility is to the genetic process and evolutionary process as I see it.” “We have to be gentle with each other because we are going through a period of mutations.” “I think, though, that there has never been a cultural change in history that was as profound, as pervasive, and as bloodless as the cultural revolution of the Sixties. . . . By and large it was a smiling revolution.” “By and large I'm very proud of what happened in the Sixties, every aspect of our culture was reformed and revised and reviewed and improved.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now By Naomi Klein, The Nation Posted on October 6, 2011 Occupy Wall Street Links Interview with Lorenzo on Joe Matheny's G-Spot Podcast
10/10/20111 hour, 18 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 284 – “The Revolution Continues” Part 1

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “From my earliest years I wanted to figure out what life was about. I wanted to find out why I was here so that my actions and my desires would have some meaning. I don't understand why everyone isn't mainly and centrally a philosopher, because if you aren't trying to figure that out for yourself you're borrowing, or begging, or passively taking on someone elses philosophy, and this may lead to situations that are unsatisfactory.” “A philosopher never gets in trouble if his ideas are not new.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  
10/6/20111 hour, 19 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 283 – “Elves in the Machine”

Guest speakers: Tom Barbalet and Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today we are taking a slightly different tack and heading into the cyber world of Artificial Life, which may sound like a contradiction or may sound like life in the hectic Western world these days. While this field may be controversial to old-line scientists, of late it has gained more traction and is proving to be the source of much new understanding about the way life has come to be. Our hosts for this conversation are Tom Barbalet and Bruce Damer, two leaders in the field of AL and who are the cornerstones of Biota.org, the Web's leading site for AL information. Surprisingly, their discussion quickly turns from things only true geeks can love to speculations about the work of Terence McKenna, psychedelics, and the possibility that all of us may be in the process of becoming machine elves. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Biota.org Noble Ape.com Damer.com Evogrid.org
9/28/20111 hour, 9 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 282 – “How Evolution Occurs”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no catalog of psychedelic effects, and so how does one know what the full spectrum is? It's a very tricky matter.” “At five dried grams (of magic mushrooms) it's very easy to invoke a voice, a kind of logos-like phenomenon, which operates as the typical hierophant. It's the teaching voice. It's Virgil to Dante. It's a very large and superior force which takes you by the hand and then narrates the various scenarios that you're conveyed through. … The trick is to get something out of it and get away clean.” “Human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts in your head by simply uttering small mouth noises.” “It is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man which is evolving. Culture carries along. At the present moment we are able to speak 21st centuries ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at about the 1950s level.” “We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language.” “I believe that people have deeper and subtler senses of humor. I think that people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity. I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction simply because so much LSD was taken in the Sixties. And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.” “We're very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding. But has anyone stopped to notice that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding, necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown becomes larger and larger. It's like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that there's an awful lot of darkness.” “You can discover [using psychedelics] actually that the adventure of being is not a cultural adventure. It's not a societal adventure. It's a personal adventure, and that this is what you really need to be involved in.” “There is always a low level of mutants in a population, but they are of no consequence as long as the selective parameters remain the same. But when the selective parameters change suddenly these individuals, who were previously masked in the general population, the selective advantage that they have now comes immediately to the fore. And they act very quickly, and critically, to send the evolution of a given species off in a different direction. . . . It's that the new types were always there but not with any advantage. It's that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them, and they are moving then into positions of dominance in the population, or the society if we're talking about human beings. I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level. There is a population of different people in the general population, and as conditions change these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages.” “What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery and put you right up against the human essence.” “I think there is a potential for immortality, but it isn't assured. It is something that comes to the courageous. And somehow in the historical experience we've gotten the idea, through orthodox religions, that salvation comes to the subservient, and this is totally wrong. It is more like the Greek ideal of the hero, that if you're heroic enough once you're dead you'll be a god. And I think this is what these things summon us all to.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 "Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012" Esalen Workshop with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo
9/19/20111 hour, 29 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 281 – Sacred Economics

Guest speakers: Eileen Workman and Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Matt Pallamary interviews Eileen Workman, co-founder of the Universe Project who spent sixteen years working in the financial services industry, most recently as a First Vice President of Investments with a major Wall Street investment firm. Her new book, Sacred Economics: The Currency of Life has been praised by many, including Barbara Marx Hubbard, co-founder and chairperson of the board of The Foundation for Conscious Evolution who says of it: Occasionally in human history a clear voice of good sense and compassion rises from the multitudes caught in the memetic mud of obsolete ideas about current reality. Thomas Jefferson was such a voice when he stated: "All men are created equal" at a time when there was no equality, at all. So now Eileen Workman sends a clear and intelligent message: We can live beyond the current monetary economy better, longer, kinder and more joyfully, and here is how to begin. Even though it might seem impossible, as the system continues to breakdown and the inequalities grow, her voice increasingly serves us as a guide to the next stage of evolutionary economics. We should all read it and place our faith and actions in the good sense it offers us, guiding us toward the next era of economics in the coming age. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eileen's Blog
9/9/20111 hour, 19 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 280 – “Albert Hofmann is Interviewed by Peter Gorman”

Guest speakers: Dr. Albert Hofmann and Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Albert Hofmann.] “I reported about this bicycle ride because I had the feeling that time would stand still. It was a very strange feeling that I had never had before, this change in the experience of time.” “It [my first LSD experience] became such a strange experience that I feared to have become insane.” “At the climax I had the feeling to be already out of my body.” “It [LSD] works on the very center of our psychic existence.” “Nobody has died from toxic doses of LSD, not one case. All of the fatal cases were by accidents due to the disturbances of the consciousness of the senses.” “They did not see any special effect on animals, because LSD works only on very high spiritual centers, on consciousness, which animals don't have.” “[Research with morning glory seeds] shows us that LSD is not just a laboratory product. It is closely related chemically, and pharmalogically, psychologically with [morning glory seeds], with this old Indian magic drug. That means that LSD belongs, pharmalogically chemically, with a group of the sacred magic plants of Mexico. That's a very important finding.” “I never believed it [LSD] would become a pleasure drug on the streets.” “I think, of course, the story of LSD is not yet finished at all. If we learn to use it with respect and under the right conditions I am sure the beneficial effects are enormous.” “In antiquity they had institutions where people who liked to have a [psychedelic initiation] could go and have a very well elaborated condition to have a beneficial effect. But we have not this. We have not. Doesn't exist.” “I think the next thing that can be reasonably asked is that LSD and the psychedelics should be legally available in psychiatry. As doctors have access to morphine, they have access to cocaine, they have no access to LSD. This must be changed. This should be changed.” “That is also important, that LSD produces no addiction.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman, Writer, Explorer, Naturalist LSD Testing on British Troops
9/2/20111 hour, 28 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 279 – “Peter Gorman Interviews the Elders”

Guest speakers: Allen Ginsberg, Ram Das, Laura Huxley, Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: As us Monty Python fans love to hear, “Now for something completely different.” Well, not really. But today's program is a little different in that instead of featuring just one speaker we have an audio collage that includes Allen Ginsberg, Ram Das, and Laura Huxley. A finer collection of psychedelic elders you would be hard-pressed to find. First of all is a rare recording of a telephone interview of Allen Ginsberg by then “High Times” editor, Peter Gorman. When Gorman asked for a story about Timothy Leary, Ginsberg tells of the time that Leary came to his New York apartment to meet Jack Kerouac and they took psilocybin together Next is a brief conversation that Peter has with Ram Das during which we learn some more of the background of the early days at Millbrook and the interesting series of events that led up to going there. The last segment is another Peter Gorman interview, this time with Laura Huxley in which she tells of some of her own experiences with LSD. It's a short program but packed with interesting historical ancetdotes. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Personal Message from Eldridge Cleaver to Timothy Leary Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary A Kickstarter campaign for Joanna Harcourt-Smith
8/24/201154 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 278 – “Oscar Janiger Interviewed by Peter Gorman”

Guest speakers: Oscar Janiger and Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Oscar Janiger.] [In regards to the dangers of taking LSD] “Not everybody is committed to go to Everest. Not everybody is going to go to the Serengeti and shoot lions or whatever you want. These are risk-taking adventures. There are people courageous and adventuresome enough who are willing to do it, and when you do it you study your risks.” “You can die of over taking aspirin and drinking too much water, but [not] LSD, and by the way, there is no evidence of physical death from marijuana either.” “It's just the same as we go back to Everest, you can fall of the fuckin' mountain. That's all there is to it. I'm not going to make any apologies for that. You've got to be prepared. You know that old adage that LSD favors the prepared mind.” “[The Sixties was] a time when people began to see that what was laid down for them as obligatory reality was not obligatory.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Wikipedia article about Dr. Oscar Janiger Peter Gorman's 1993 interview with Dr. Albert Hofmann Albert Hofmann.org (online Hofmann Foundation papers)
8/19/20111 hour, 18 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 277 – “Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna” Part 2

Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and Peter Gorman ROBERT VENOSA January 21, 1936 - August 9, 2011 Dear Friends and Community, A great soul has completed his earthly journey and graduated to the next level. The great Venosa left his body on Tuesday August 9, 2011 at 6:56 PM. His transition was graceful and accomplished in the same composed and calm manner that he exuded throughout his life. I feel honored to have been able to accompany him to the gate, having walked 30 beautiful years together in this life. Robert had a long and brave healing journey with cancer and showed incredible strength on this path as well as tremendous courage in facing this great dragon. He believed in the natural healing ability of the human body and proved the doctors wrong time and again, who only gave him a few month’s to live upon his diagnosis over eight years ago. He was a powerful human being. Together he and I, held the piece of his physical struggle safely tucked away from the eyes of the world like a precious pearl. It is with great sadness that I’m sharing this news today but also with deep gratitude, for his magical and special life; fully lived. Even in death he gave those surrounding him a powerful initiation into the scared mysteries of the unknown. We will carry him in our hearts forever, remembering the light he shone on so many. He so appreciated the light that others shone upon him. In loving memory of my great love, compañero, best friend and artistic accomplice. Martina Hoffmann and family PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.] “I think that ayahuasca is actually much more controllable than mushrooms. . . . I think that it is quite an amazing tool for self-understanding and for exploration. I think that it's good for you, actually physically and psychologically good for you.” “It's no different than it ever was. When the Jesuits and the missionaries came to meso-America the first things to go, the first things to be stamped out was the knowledge of the sacred plants and the practice of using the sacred plants.” “I think that Christianity linked with Calvinism has a hard time dealing with what you might call facts of biology, which in another phrase is sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. In some ways, life is about sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Biology is about those things.” “All experience is a drug experience. Whether it's mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it's mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it's all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.” “He [Terence McKenna] will never let a fact get in the way of making a provocative statement. He's a good story teller, but I think it's important to remember that they are stories, and that he often makes mistakes in his lectures.” “In that position, a guy who can pack the houses every time, I feel has a larger responsibility to the psychedelic community to refrain from making these completely off-the-wall comments, and to actually tell it like it is, not how he imagines it to be.” “I'm sure that Terence views it as theater. I can't believe that he takes what he says seriously. I mean, I can tell you that he doesn't. Much of what he says he says it because it's going to get a rise out of somebody. He's always been that way.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman Writer, Explorer, Naturalist Web Site Blog Archive
8/12/20111 hour, 8 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 276 – “Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna” Part 1

Guest speakers: Peter Gorman and Dennis McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.] "The idea that you could use these to actually explore other dimensions, real worlds that were outside the cognizance of our ordinary world, is really what I think fascinated me about psychedelics." "More than anything else, it [DMT] seemed to be not an experience, not a drug, but a place, an actual other dimension that you were plunged into." "In order to understand its limitations, I almost had to become the 'enemy'. I had to become a scientist in order to understand the limitations of science." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Peter Gorman Writer, Explorer, Naturalist Web Site Blog Archive File Cleanup Test Thank you for all who worked on this project. ... A solution has been found and the files are being restored :-).
8/5/20111 hour, 6 minutes, 51 seconds
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Podcast 275 – “The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "It seemed probable to me that this phenomenon encountered in deep psychedelic experiences with psilocybin actually has a potential historical impact. It is a kind of human ability, which is at present submerged in the psyche, contactable only by the shamanic means of journeying into historical hyperspace. In other words, of going into that place where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough that you can have an intimation, at least, of what is to come.” “I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language. Because what you cannot think you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine you cannot steer your culture and go. So I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulates the evolution of human culture generally.” “Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.” “This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.” “The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.” “Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Women's Visionary Congress Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice The Women's Visionary Congress (WVC) is an annual gathering of visionary women healers, scholars, activists and artists who study consciousness and altered states. The WVC supports the transfer of knowledge among women who apply the insights of their research and spiritual path. We gather on beautiful land in Northern California to renew our community of adventurers and visionaries. The fifth annual WVC will take place from July 29 - 31, 2011 at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Earthrise Retreat Center, near Petaluma, California. The WVC welcomes interested women and men to join us as we talk, dance, eat delicious food and participate in a series of conversations with wise women. Presenters include Copperwoman, Valerie Corral, Earth and Fire Erowid, Dorothy Fadiman, Amber Field, Carolyn (Mountain Girl) Garcia, Dorka Keehn, Jessica Lucas, Mariavittoria Mangini, Jean Millay, Eleonora Molnar, Annie Oak, Linnae Ponté, Miss S, Nick Sand, Stephanie Schmitz, Jane Straight, Justine Willis Toms, Keeper Trout, Clare Wilkins and Nina Wise.
7/24/20111 hour, 29 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 274 – “Psychedelic Safety” plus “Borges and McKenna”

Guest speakers: Ann Shulgin and Dr. William Rowlandson PROGRAM NOTES: "If you are going to experiment with a psychedelic of any kind, make sure you are depranil-free for at least five days, probably seven would be safer.” -Ann Shulgin “You don't really need MDMA or a psychedelic to do [deep personal therapy]. … I think that until at least some of these materials become legal, don't dismiss the possibilities of hypnotherapy doing exactly what you need and want.” -Ann Shulgin “As far as I'm concerned, there is no substitute for MDMA, because it is the insight drug. And it does this magical combination of allowing you to see inside without fear and hostility toward yourself. It has a beautiful, beautiful effect, and no other drug that we know of so far manages to do that.” -Ann Shulgin “[Our] paradox is the ceaseless, constant drive to understand something that is inherently un-understandable. Now, of course, the paradox lies in the fact that we understand it is not to be understood, and yet we understand that we continue to try to understand. It's a beautiful paradox.” - Dr. William Rowlandson Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 2CT-7 Survey by Casey Hardison
7/15/201157 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 273 – “Indigenous Plant Wisdom”

Guest speaker: Kathleen "Kat" Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Kat Harrison.] "If a bird you're not used to seeing comes and sits on a tree outside your window and calls, and calls, and calls. It's not just a bird of a trip. It's a bird that has a message that it is sending you that may be positive, that may be a warning. It's something you pay attention to.” “You really need to, at least part of the time, speak [out loud] to the entity that you are invoking the presence of. That the whole idea with these medicines is to go into an active, right now, relationship between beings. It's inter-species communication.” “In order to do this kind of magical work, energy transforming work, you have to create a vulnerable oasis. You have to be willing to be open and be vulnerable, and in order to do that you have to set up protection around you, around the people you're working with, or even the place you're working. And one of the ways to set up protection is to plant plants that carry that kind of protective power around you.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option [From their Web site: "Thank you for considering Gaian Botanicals as your source for high quality ethnobotanicals, herbs and teas. We are a small privately owned and operated specialty shop who imports direct from growers & harvesters in small quantities to ensure everything is fresh. We use our own contracted laboratory to manufacture high quality, safe and effective botanical extracts. We maintain the highest level of respect and great relationships with the plants, those who cultivate and manufacture our extracts, our customers and Gaia. We take great care with every aspect of our business and keep overhead low to save you money!"]
6/29/20111 hour, 38 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 272 – “On the Genetic Runway”

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I like the Pope. I think he's the finest mind of the 12th century.” “It really is an awesome epidemic of deliberate stupidity that is laid upon us by the media, by the press, by the magazines and so forth. They simply do not raise any of the issues that will challenge our interest or intelligence.” “There's simply no question that anyone who knows anything about how to use brain-activating drugs and is operating with a clear mind, with no desire to screw other people's minds up, whose willing to put in time and patience, and sensitivity, can help anyone wash their brain. There's no longer any excuse for having a mind that you don't like, or having a brain program that you're dissatisfied with.” “I've always hated the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” “It always comes down to individual choices of what chemicals you're going to use to stimulate your evolution.” “You use a drug intelligently when you know what effect it's going to have on you, and you use it at the time and the place that it's going to add to your growth, or your fun, or your overall program of life management and directorship. And you're not going to use a drug that in any way will fuck up, or slow down, or throw obstacles in your overall path.” “Computers are to the Eighties what acid was to the Sixties.” “One thing that drugs give you: Personal options to change your own mind, a way of rewarding yourself, of teaching yourself, of activating yourself, of changing yourself. And one thing that the power-holders do not want you to do as an individual is to change your own mind and learn how to reward yourself.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/21/20111 hour, 9 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 271 – “Weaving Modern Ritual from Traditional Roots”

Guest speaker: Kathleen "Kat" Harrison Big Island, Little Planet March 17–28, 2012 A Travel Intensive in Polynesia on the Big Island of Hawaii Ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and Hawaiian cultural teacher Momi Subiono will lead this travel intensive, open to all who have a desire to immerse themselves in the story of plants, nature, and a deep cultural awareness of place. PODCAST PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Kat Harrison.] "The role of conscious, intentional behavior that is described by culture or subcultural rules of behavior with reflected meaning is sort of a way of describing ritual generally, and we draw these forms out of a number of traditions.” “I think when we go into thinking about how to do psychoactive medicines it's very valuable to look deeply, to look seriously, at the traditions that have attended these medicines through time.” “Repeated behavior in the same mode over a long time generates a kind of an etheric possibility of it recurring and being potentized by its ongoing, indefinite repetition.” “I feel that it's really valuable to look into the ritual history of the place where you live or the place where you're working.” “Pay homage to the history of ritual that is coming through the place.” “Why one [psychedelic medicine] may be your best friend's ally and not your ally is a mystery. And maybe you can solve that mystery and maybe not. But you should honor the fact that some things work for you and some things are not your medicine, even though everyone around you appears to be having a good time.” “You don't lead with your head. You let your heart and your body tell you what to do in these [introspective psychedelic] moments. Then if you think it's time to get up and bolt out into the street, you let your head come in and tell you, 'Don't! Sit down. You're not going anywhere.' ” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Thank you to The Turtles for "Eve of Destruction"
6/17/20111 hour, 29 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 270 – “Tryptamine Consciousness”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 003 of the Paul Herbert Collection. This talk was given in December 1982 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.” “It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth.” “The demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.” “There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things [psychedelics] on your feet. And that means that you have an I/thou relationship, and you say … 'you're long on talk, but what can you show me?” “These things [psychedelic medicines] invoke the Logos, which means they work directly on the language centers. So that the important aspect of the experience is the dialogue.” “I think if someone tells you they've every drug you know they're confessing they're a dilettante. It's much better to lean hard on a few.” “I think one of the interesting things about judging a drug is to see how eager people are to do it the second time. If they're eager to do it the second time it's probably not worth bothering about, because what is necessary to have validity in these experiences is the terror. The terror is a stamp of validity on the experience, because it means this is real.” “Friends, right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is trans human, hyper dimensional, and extremely alien.” “The most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul.” “As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded.” “As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of active intelligence that is on a galactic scale.” “In other words, shamanic experience, drug experience, this is ruled out of bounds. And it is because it is the source of novelty. The cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being is happening there. I mean, think about it for a moment. If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us?” “So I am saying we are at the beginning of human thought. This is the birth crisis of intelligence. And intelligence is something which is moving through the higher primates now at greater and greater speed.” “The fact is that the densest organizational material in the universe is the human cortex. And the richest experience in the universe is the experience you're having right now.” “The testimony that I want to give today is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you don't have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that except form a relationship with these plant drugs.” “There is some surety that you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant, but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully.” “DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once you know about it, it's very hard for anyone to understand you when you're talking about it.” “The future is bound to be psychedelic because the future belongs to the mind.” “The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily technique, not ritual.” “The only intellectual, or noetic, or spiritual path worth following seems to me to be the one that builds on your own experience.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option TRANSCRIPT OF THIS TALK FROM EROWID.ORG
6/10/20111 hour, 29 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 269 – “Inebriating Potions from Agave”

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: This is a talk that Jonathan Ott gave in September 2004 at the Mind States Conference in Oaxaca, Mexico. From the program for Mind States 2004: Jonathan Ott will give a talk titled “From Octli/Pulque and Xochioctli to Mezcal and Vino de Mezcal Tequila”. The ethnopharmacognosy of inebriating pre-Columbian potions based on octli or pulque, wine of various species of Agave, with special reference to numerous inebriating additives; traditional foods and beverages made from mezcal Agaves; and colonial development of distilled mezcal from fermented, cooked mezcal Agaves. Finally, more recent development of Vino de Mezcal Tequila or Tequila, a regional type of mezcal brandy, from cooked hearts of Agave tequillense or blue agave. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More about: Agave and Mescal Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise by Dr. Havelock Ellis
6/6/20111 hour, 6 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 268 – “Leary vs. Liddy – 1990 Debate”

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy This program is another selection from the Timothy Leary archive. It features an October 23, 1990 debate at Penn State University between Dr. Leary and his arch-enemy, the scandalous G. Gordon Liddy. One of my favorite segments in this debate, which wasn't all that polite at times, is when Leary pointed out the fact that he had spent more time in the U.S. Military service than Liddy had, but that Liddy had spent more time in prison than Leary had. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “My advice to you is: 1) don't rely on politicians to solve you problems; 2) work to the fullest of your power to decentralize and to take power away from the central government in Washington, bring it back to the villages, to the cities, to the neighborhoods.” "It politics, scum rises to the top. Let me say it again, in politics mediocrity rises to the top.” “As far as this election is concerned, I urge you, don't vote for either a Democrat or a Republican. It just encourages the bastards.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST The Maze Game by Diana Reed Slattery
6/3/20111 hour, 6 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 267 – “Exploring the Abyss”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! PROGRAM NOTES: This lecture was recorded in November 1982. A more complete version of this talk may be found in Podcast 317.] [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.” “Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they're metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.” “What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.” “Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright.” “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.” “[UFOs are], in other words, something which in order not to alarm us has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche signaling a profound historical crisis.” “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.” “Eternity does not have a temporal existence, even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed. It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity.” “We are not primarily biology with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. And the shadow in matter is the body.” “The whole purpose of shamanism, and of life correctly lived, is to strengthen the soul and strengthen the relationship to the soul, so that this passage [death] can be cleanly made.” “Technology is the real skin of our species.” "There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliacosoms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.” “An Aquarian science, or a science that places psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation, should move toward a practical realization of the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the overself.” “This [psilocybin] is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.” “We can release this thing once again. The logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenadies and Hericlitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people. And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.” “But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens, is information,
5/26/20111 hour, 40 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 266 – “Interview with Dennis McKenna”

Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and David Ellenbogen Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.]  "The brain is essentially a communications network … all this complex network of neurons that cross-talk to each other through these neurotransmitters.” “We think of ourselves as separate from the environment. We're kind of here, and our skin separates us from the environment, but we're not like that at all. We're semi-permeable membranes. Things are coming in all the time in the form of food, drugs, smoke, other things that we absorb, and we're putting out things all the time at the same time. So we're part of this chemical communication system.” “If it weren't for the linkage to symbols, or significance, which are abstractions, we wouldn't be conscious. That is the sine qua non of consciousness, is that we're immersed in this world of ideas and abstractions, and dreams. And this kind of experience is as real as the external world for us. And not really separated from us. That's what sets us apart from animals.” “Consciousness is something you detect, like tuning a television set to different channels, as much as it is something that the brain generates. I think the brain modulates signals that come from outside, but consciousness is probably more primal than matter.” “It's not only up to us. Life probably permeates the universe, and that means intelligence permeates the universe. And that's good. So if we blow it, and it looks like we're probably going to, others will carry on. And if we wake up in time maybe we can be part of that. Our challenge is to propagate these understandings through enough people that people do wake up and they realize that we've got to get cracking.” “Ayahuasca is now a global phenomenon, and this is part of the plants' reaching out, trying to reach out to larger groups of people and basically hit us upside the head with a two by four and say, “Hey you monkeys wake up! You're fucking it up! You have to wake up.” “I think humility is essential for doing this [working with psychedelic plants]. This is the other thing that to me personally, and I think to a lot of people I think this is the message of the plant teachers, not only 'You monkeys need to wake up,' but 'You monkeys need to get over yourselves. You monkeys only think you're running the show. You're not running the show.' If anything, the plants are running the show.” “Religions, established religions tend to want you to take a lot of things on faith for which there's not a shred of evidence. And so the doctrines and the dogmas become essentially political institutions, they become instruments for keeping people in line, don't ask too many questions, just accept it.” “One of the maybe adverse side effects of psychedelics is that they'll make you think you're the messiah, or you somehow have to play a role in this.” “I think ayahuasca is perfectly capable of finding the people it needs, and the people who need to find ayahuasca will find it. And there's no need for cults or movements or very much human intervention, although a lot of people will be convinced that we must do this.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/18/20111 hour, 18 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 265 – “Lawyers Lie”

We are saddened to report that Eric Hart suffered a heart attack and died quite suddenly on December 9, 2011. He will be deeply missed. Guest speakers: Eric Hart and Matthew Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: “[If you are in police custody] Never say a word. Don't ever talk to the cops under any circumstance. If you're a suspect, or you're being arrested, nothing can be gained from it. They will twist whatever you say. It can only be used against you, just like the famous Miranda advisement. You have a right to remain silent. So remain silent. Even if they're yelling and screaming at you to talk, refuse to talk. That's a basic right that you have. It's one of the only effective rights we have left from the Bill of Rights. So exercise that right, or else whatever you say will be twisted around, and it will end up leading to your conviction.” -Eric Hart, Attorney ... Email: LawyersLie (at) ymail (dot) com ... Web site: www.EricDHart.com Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Lawyers Lie (paperback) Lawyers Lie (Kindle edition)   Spirit Matters (paperback)      Land Without Evil (paperback) Spirit Matters ... Kindle Edition Land Without Evil ... Kindle Edition
5/11/20111 hour, 7 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 264 – “The Search for AI”

Program moderator: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a recording from the Timothy Leary archive. According to the label on the file, this is a recording of a television show that originated in Toronto, Canada. It was called Enterprise, or something like that, and this program took place sometime in 1983. The guest host that night was none other than Dr. Timothy Leary, and his topic for discussion that evening was Artificial Intelligence. … For me, one of the highlights was to hear a famous MIT professor predict that home computers would never catch on! Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST Fall & Winter (the movie)   The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era Vernor Vinge Department of Mathematical Sciences San Diego State University (c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge BB's Bungalow Number 44 Remembering the "Bear" (Note: There is no direct link to the above podcast. You will have to search for in after clicking the link above.]
5/4/20111 hour, 11 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 263 – “Terence McKenna’s Last Interview” Part 2

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Erik Davis Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The trick to making the shamanic virtual world compelling is to fairly and truly convey it. You can't cut corners. You can't fake it. . . . So that this stuff really does blow people's minds, so that people see, well, human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul. It doesn't leave you feeling like you're wearing too tight a pair of shoes.” “We have no idea how strange the world we can create in the near term will be.” “Given the circumstances as we find them, what rational momentum is there to think that life is unique and arose on this planet only?” “I think that's the question that remains unanswered, you know, that's the grail of the thing. What is the nature of the Other, is basically what you're asking. Is it a construct, a projection or a discovery? It's not clear to me what it is.” “ You can't believe everything you hear. They are of many kind, some are made of ions, some of mind, the ones of DMT, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.” “I think [ketamine] is an inter-uterine memory drug. I think there are things about it that cause you to recapture some kind of inter-uterine state.” “The psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing. It isn't just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed or something like that.” “Mathematics is really what it's all about when you finally get it sliced thin, I think.” “All doubt means is that 'I'm shopping, thank you.'” [Before I had cancer] I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind were naturally available to people, and non-lethal. In other words that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures and experience very bizarre states of body/mind dislocation and have it not kill you. So now I see that the spectrum of human experience is a lot broader than I previously imagined.” “The mind can adjust to a great deal more than that which simply kills it.” “Given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death. It's bound to be mighty strange, life was mighty strange, and I'm curious. … It's an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life left, because it composes your mind for you, wonderfully.” “What psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises. I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle. The fact that that can happen to your mind. So it means that all kinds of things are possible.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Animations Mentioned in this Podcast Asparagus [1979] Quasi at the Quackadero
4/27/20111 hour, 12 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 262 – “Terence McKenna’s Last Interview” Part 1

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: Please Support Dennis McKenna's Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss! [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "But I did [as a child] spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul, and the nature of sin, and all of these imponderables. And, of course, what you end up doing is you end up reading scholars of mysticism.” “To me it's the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience, it's when you get the logos coming out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.” “[Speaking about how to pursue a psychedelic culture.] Well, I'd say the wrongly-packaged version would be something like 'Castenadaism', a formulaic cult. Do these things, take these drugs, follow these instructions and moral obligation will flee from your kin. Nobody can be that foolish. If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff, grow the plants, try to understand it, try to revivify the rituals and figuring out what it's all about, well, that's an authentic push towards spirituality, a very authentic push towards spirituality, and probably fruitful.” “It seems to me that 'the shamanic drug of the month' is not a very appealing idea.” “The basic concept [of alchemy] is that somehow intuition and nature are reflective of each other. Until that hypothesis fails we should probably hang on to it, because look how far we've gotten. I mean it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.” “[I'm hoping] that some lack of resource or vision doesn't reveal that we can't give enough people a bearable life. So we [would then] have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil, and struggle for resources. It doesn't have to be this way.” “Now let's see if information can liberate. That's why I don't want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate. And it will be settled in the next ten or fifteen years. Either they'll get a handle on it, whoever 'they' are, whatever a 'handle means. Or it will slip from their control, and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge, and that nothing can stop it, that some kind of Renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Terence McKenna Vs. the Black Hole by Erik Davis This is Erik Davis' account of the interview heard in this podcast. Excerpt: The following are excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November of 1999, in preparation for a profile that appeared in the May 2000 issue of Wired. These interviews have also been edited and released on a CD, Terence McKenna: The Last Interview. Given McKenna's subsequent demise, I chose selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a craniotomy, and he therefore spoke a bit more frankly about his condition than during November, when I spent a week with him and his wonderful girlfriend Christie Silness during his sort-of recovery in Hawaii. Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise by Dr. Havelock Ellis
4/26/20111 hour, 12 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 261 – “The Definitive UFO Tape”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Please Support Dennis McKenna's Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!   Books by Terence McKenna The Missing Chapters of The Invisible Landscape Chapter 20: The Oversoul as Saucer Chapter 21: Open Ending PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 004 of the Paul Herbert Collection. [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "In psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens generally we actually have a state of mind that is very similar to the state of mind reported to accompany the UFO contact, and that these things could somehow be co-mapped, one onto the other” “Involvement with these tryptamines as they accumulated in your system, you seem to acquire the ability to inhabit more than one world at once, as though superimposed over reality there was a super-reality, a hyper dimensional world where information was accessible in magical ways.” “History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.” “The extraterrestrial is the human over soul in its general and particulate expression on the planet. . . . The over soul is some kind of field that is generated by human beings, but that is not under the control of any institution, any government, and religion. It is actually the most intelligent thing on the planet, and it regulates human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum of history.” “The myths that are building are like the Messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ.” “I think that science has betrayed human destiny to some degree. And that we are led to the brink of star-flight, but we're also led to the brink of thermonuclear holocaust.” “The political conclusion to be drawn is to preserve your freedom of thought by deconditioning yourself to the flying saucer religion before it happens.” “I think that the flying saucer experience is tremendously powerful. And that it really is somehow linked to the psychedelic experience in a way that perhaps will not be understood for some time.” “Well, see what I'm saying is if we would intelligently examine these dimensions that the psychedelic drugs make available, we could as it were get in touch with the over soul and leave the era when man is disciplined by flying saucers and messiahs and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch just because people can't evolve their ethics and their technology at the same rate of speed.” “The modern epistemological methods are just not up to dealing with an elf, with chattering, elf-infested spaces. I mean, we have a word for those spaces, we call it schizophrenia and slam the door. But, you know, these dimensions have been with us since ten thousand times longer than Freud. And people just have to come to terms with them.” “The discs which haunt the skys of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.” “The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.” “But I think what's being missed is that a whole dimension of communication is being ruled inadmissible as evidence simply because it doesn't conform to the epistemological biases of the people who are asking the question. And that is all these voices in the head that guide shamans, that obsess lunatics, that make poetry, and in other words the muse. The muse is real. . . . Well one could talk endlessly about this subject, I suppose, but until it's resolved all of man's epistemological dealings with reality will be haunted by this faint spookiness, which can't be gotten rid of.” “You see what is happening and why the psychedelic experience is so important is because information is loose on Planet Three. Some kind of very strange thing is going on.”
4/13/20111 hour, 12 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 260 – “The Great Crescendo” Part 2

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] “I would say it's no more than 500 people in the United States who cause a vast amount of the grief.” “A crescendo involves everyone. The singularity seems to be this nerd idea of reaching some kind of Omega Point. It's very much the Christian idea of the second coming. It's apocalyptic, etc., a bit of a downer because everything comes to an end, but it's incredibly unlikely.” “The crescendo will throw off all the old religions. It will throw off the conspiracy theories. It will throw off crusty old corporate jobs. And replace them with self-sufficiency, direct communication with nature, with other human beings, with media, and the creation of opinions directly. “So if you think of the computing, it's not really computing, but the computing nature is doing all the time, it outstrips all our largest supercomputing grids.” “So if we can't do even one neuron [computer simulation] how are we going to upload consciousness exactly?” “You're here not because something put you here and fabricated you and guided the evolution and created the whole planet. It's an emergent phenomenon and so are you. And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes, but it is also written in your mind. And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomenon.” “You don't need religion for miracles. The fact that you exist in all this existence is stacked upon miracles, turtles all the way down. So if we grok that, we don't need religious stories any more.” “The virtual worlds and avatar spaces and multi-player games of now are the Keystone Cops of what virtual worlds will be in twenty or thirty years through AR [Augmented Reality], and big home holodecks, and stuff like that.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/5/20111 hour, 7 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 259 – “The Great Crescendo” Part 1

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "What's interesting is the difference, or the counter-ballast, between the dialogue of doom and the voices of hope, and the innovators of hope for the future. And it's something that you could refer to almost as like a great crescendo.” “I think that in this year of 2011 and heading into the auspicious year of 2012 and 2013 and beyond we are in the great crescendo of humanity.”  “I think in a sense it's the dialogue, it is the control of the dialogue that is the problem here. It's the battle of the airwaves. It's the people we didn't nominate to talk back to us and tell us what our culture is and what our future is and what our politics are. That is the problem. That's the primary problem.” “There can't just be protests, it can't be like the Sixties. You can't be just against. You have to find out what you are for, not just what you are against. That's the key to getting through the Crescendo. “To some extent, the future is being made around us.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer's Web site Submit a question for the Global Trialogue ‘Fall & Winter’ is a documentary that explores the origins of our global crisis in order to better understand the catastrophic transition we have now entered. Breaking Convention: A Multidisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness Planet Radio London: The voice of the Dopetribe
3/30/20111 hour, 13 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 258 – “The Angel in the Monkey”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.” [COMMENT by Lorenzo: This statement was made before Terence discovered virtual reality in cyberspace.] “This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.” “This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.” “I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.” “It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.” “There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.” “It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.” “I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what's going on.” “The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.” “I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.” “I don't believe that the world is made out of quarks, or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe that the world is made out of language.” “The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.” “Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.” “ Certainly neoPlatonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.” “The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.” “Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.” “I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.” “We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/22/201149 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 257 – “Shulgin in Palenque 2001”

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin Ways to help the Shulgins For non-tax-deductible contributions, Paypal $ to [annandsashashulgin@comcast.net] or snailmail: Sasha Shulgin, c/o Transform Press, PO Box 13675, Berkeley CA 94712. For tax-deductible online donations to support the completion of Shulgin publishing projects that are underway: http://www.erowid.org/donations/project_shulgin.php Please spread this information. Read the story of a member of our community who needs your help PROGRAM NOTES: In his next to last talk at the legendary Entheobotany Conferences in Palenque, Mexico, Sasha Shulgin holds forth on a host of topics ranging from his experiences in the navy during World War II, to how he first developed an interest in psychedelic chemistry, and on to a description of the processes and protocols he uses to develop new psychoactive compounds. The talk was given in January 2001. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/17/20111 hour, 18 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 256 – “A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate”

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [From Wikipedia] Jonathan Ott has written eight books, co-wrote five, and contributed to four others, and published many articles in the field of entheogens. He has collaborated with other researchers like Christian Rätsch, Jochen Gartz, and the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson. He translated Albert Hofmann's 1979 book LSD: My Problem Child (LSD: Mein Sorgekind), and On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko, into English. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Entheogen Review, The Entheogen Law Reporter, the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (AKA the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs), the MAPS Bulletin, Head, High Times, Curare, Eleusis, Integration, Lloydia, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, and several Harvard Botanical Museum pamphlets. He is a co-editor of Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, along with Giorgio Samorini. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A sampling of books by Jonathan Ott Pharmacophilia, or, The Natural Paradises Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History< Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion   By R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott   Shamanic Snuffs or Enthogenic Errhines   By Jonathan Ott   Ayahuasca Analogues Pangean Entheogens   By Jonathan Ott  
3/10/20111 hour, 41 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 255 – “Why Is Christianity Afraid of Sex?”

Guest speaker: Alan Watts NOTE: This program is still available at the Internet Archive. Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. February 25, 2011 @ 10:15 am · Edit Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege.  ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Christianity is, of all religions in the world, the one uniquely preoccupied with sex." "Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world are, frankly, sexual regulation societies." "So we have, in a very special way, got sex on the brain, which isn't exactly the right place for it." "There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it." "That the physical world is transient, it seems to me, to be part of its splendor." "Neither the church nor the opponents of the church have clearly understood that the secret, or unconscious, motivation of sexual repression is to make it all the more interesting. And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that sexual biology and all that goes with it is a figuring force, on the level of biology, of what the whole universe is about, ecstatic play." "If you've got a prudish father and mother you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/7/20111 hour, 5 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 254 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I still don't believe that people who deal with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is." "The evolution of the human species is the evolution of the human mind. These consciousness-expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution of the human mind. And so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape. It is they which generate religions, and physics, and messianic careers, and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment and disgrace." "The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed." "It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind." "It is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug. It is not a thing which mixes well with the politics of any institution." "I think [taking psychedelic drugs] is very dangerous. I do not tell people that it's safe because I don't have the faith that it's safe. I know what the pharmacological literature says, and it says that it's safe. That at the doses where these effects occur there can't possibly be a problem, but this seems to me to be the naivete of materialists, and we shouldn't be in a hurry to believe them even though it might make us more comfortable to do so. In other words, it's saying the drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience." "I think it's fine to take drugs for pleasure, but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure. And the high doses of psilocybin that are necessary to elicit entry into these places it requires, as it says in Hamlet, 'You must screw your courage to the sticking place.'" "I think that the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred 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." "There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyper dimensional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunities for us to be happy hunters and gathers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured." "The entirety of human history has been the story of the monkey becoming the flying saucer. . . . And we, for some strange reason, happen to be living through the final moments of that process right now, and it is a turbulent, chaotic, multidimensional metamorphosis." "Evil is anything which trivializes a mystery." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/22/20101 hour, 12 minutes
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Podcast 253 – “Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary?”

Please help the Shulgin's! Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: This is an audio collage of three talks. The first is by Dr. Leary in 1966. That is followed by a 1973 interview with Ram Das on his current feelings about Leary. The final segment is a 1986 appearance by Dr. Timothy Leary on the Larry King show. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic art is the public face, a communication device, of our new religion." "Psychedelic drugs, which include marijuana, should be totally supervised by the state. That is, quality should be established, and you should have to be trained in how to use them, and they should be prescribed, and if you screwed up they'll take your license away. You'd have to show that you knew how to use them like [you do] an automobile." "I would say 90% of the kids who are under the age of 40 who are in computers now, ninety percent of them, have had some kind of experience in brain-change, or neurotransmission. That's why I may be misunderstood or not liked among certain segments of the country. But computer people really understand where I'm coming from and they welcome me." "The only defense against totalitarianism has always been, Jefferson said it too, constant vigilance on the part of the individual. There ain't no one going to protect us against Big Brother and Big Sister except ourselves linked up as free agents." "So go over there [India]. Try it all. Don't get hooked. Don't follow leaders. Watch your parkin' meters, and stay away from gurus. But try it all out!" "The basic trajectory of my life, no matter whether you agree with me (you don't have to agree with this) is to free yourself, to think for yourself, to question authority." "I love institutions. They're intelligence tests. Institutions are prisons that you have to escape from. . . . The only thing is don't get trapped in them. The most addictive, dangerous, mind-screwing thing in the world is conformity to an organization." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eldridge Cleaver denouncing Timothy Leary in 1971 Listen Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Eldridge Cleaver's friendly private message to Timothy Leary in 1995 Listen Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Khadoma & Kevin: Deer Harbor Live -- Autumn 2010 Axis Mundi's Online YouTube Channel
12/7/20101 hour, 19 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 252 – “How Do Psychedelics Heal?”

Guest speaker: Dr. Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Cameron Adams.] "It is not really reasonable from a public health perspective to make psychedelics illegal." "[Psychedelics] are biologically safe, far safer than alcohol. Alcohol, ten times the active dose will kill 50% of the people who take it. And something like mescaline, which is the most dangerous classic psychedelic is twenty four times. So that's two and a half times safer than alcohol. And it doesn't even compare to things like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD, which have only been predicted to be between one and five thousand times the active dose." "So there's this relationship to diet, neurotransmitters, and psychedelics which may be involved how the body regulates itself and builds itself." "There might be real biological changes even though it just seems on the surface that psychedelics are working in a psychological way." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelia Collection on the Internet Archive The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D.
12/2/20101 hour, 13 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 251 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "This connection between the cow, and the mother goddess, and the mushroom is some kind of a key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity in early man in that part of the Middle East." "This notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness." "But it isn't a missing link, I think, it's a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency toward symbol formation and self-reflection." "A history of the human race could be written analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol, and psychedelics." "That these foods and drugs and spices, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They are regulating human history and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation, all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants." "Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation, and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs, and the teachers are merely the pipeline for ideas, and the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction." "I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself." "The imagination may be, in fact, a three dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen." "The triumph of Socialism will be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context, that there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of information." "You see, what's going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/12/201053 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 250 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 3

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled. And that's why it's so important to find out what our real wishes are." "A delusion of grandeur is when you're a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be.” “The way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have.” “We feel the dizyness of the things not said.” “The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter. They can deliver their message all by themselves.” “Imagination is the real frontier. This is why the poets and the artists are so important." "The interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go 'through' space to other worlds, that will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space means going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves." "Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It's a vast, unfilled void into anything whatsoever can be projected." "The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species five hundred years from now." "The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know, and, of course, it has facets that they never imagined." "It is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself, and if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents (this is what they were originally called, consciousness-expanding drugs) if you that that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean, obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible, at all costs, in all times and places, because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available." "The thing that really interest me, or draws me back, to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there is something you can learn that would somehow have an impact on society at large." "Time is not simply the dimention of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words."  "The culmination of man's god-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it's not that we are 'doing' it, you see. It's that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding." "The richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful." "And this is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years, to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being, and have everything fused into a super numinous concrescence that is time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Psychedelic Information Theory Shamanism in the Age of Reason by James Kent MAPS’ 2010 Los Angeles Conference
11/8/20101 hour, 21 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 249 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 2

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What would you have if you could have anything?" "I think that life proceeds through time. It's an effort by organism to map one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a 'something', and the 'now' is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it. And so what being in time is is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And that's why, hopefully, a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get a whole picture." "Yes, well I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history. ... Because your history gives you the power of your convictions." "I think, better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetime." "This is the anguish of the ancestors. This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed. The pogroms, and the invasions, and the atrocities conducted across history can only be, somehow, redeemed if we, who are the living wavefront of this genetic experience do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do." "The 'other' is just a way of thinking about all of these things that we name spirit, god, demon, void. It's that there just necessarily is a place off our map. Whenever you have a map it implies the part that is not on the map, and the other, the truly other, lies outside the domain of language. It's like the unspeakable. All you can do it point at it." "That's the challenge. You see, that's the weird thing about the psychedelics. It is a path, but in a sense it's the end of the path. And then what do you do? Now it's up to you." "The way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/2/20101 hour, 9 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 248 – “The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring)” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The Dawning paradigm of post modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we don't know what is happening at all, that all of the models we have worked out over the past five hundred years or so have now become recursive, and they can no longer be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed." "There is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science." "Having seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small row boat in a dark ocean, and we are being swept we know not where." "Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation of unorganized matter into ideas which human beings carry on." "The Growing Transparency, that's a good idea for what the end of history is. It's that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate, and everything is seen to be of the same stuff." "Life is a hyper dimensional object. All hyper dimensional objects are organisms, whether they be societies or animals." "There seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps al la Bell's Theorem or something like that. And that's what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologramatic space of information, where by sitting still in your room and sending your mind you can cross the universe in an instant." "I've always thought that Christianity, without making any judgment about Christ himself, that Christianity is hands-down the single most reactionary force in human history." "I think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is what technology is." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/22/20101 hour, 18 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 247 – “On Being God and Death”

Guest speaker: Alan Watts NOTE: This program is still available at the Internet Archive. Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. February 25, 2011 @ 10:15 am · Edit Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege.  ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world." "And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much as the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning." "Indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho-hydraulics’s." "If therefore, the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution." "As Jung once suggested, life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death." "When somebody speaks as an authority it means they speak as the author. That's all it means." "All our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures. They contain no information for most of us on how we grow our brains, how we work our nerves, how we circulate our blood, how we secrete with our glands, and how we shape our bones. That isn't contained in the sensation, or the image, we call the ego. So, obviously then, the ego is not myself." "And they [fruit flies] in their world think they're as important and as civilized as we do in our world. So that if I was to wake up as a fruit fly I wouldn't feel any different as it were when I do when I wake up as a human being. I would be used to it." "In fact, it's a thoroughly good arrangement in this world that we don't remember what it was before [we incarnated as a human]. Why? Because variety is the spice of life, and if we remembered, remembered, remembered, having done this again and again and again and again, we should get bored." "There comes a point when really, if we consider what is to our true liking, we will want to forget everything that has gone before so that we can have the extraordinary experience of seeing the world once again through the eyes of a baby, whatever kind of baby. So that it's completely new, and we have all the startling wonder that a child has, all the vividness of perception, which we can't have if we remember everything forever." "So death, in a sense, is a tremendous release from monotony. It puts an interval of total forgetting in a rhythmic process of on and off on and off so that you can begin all over again and never be bored." "The universe is really a system which keeps on surprising itself." "You can't experience the feeling you call self unless it's in contrast with a feeling of other. ... Other is necessary for you to feel self." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Alan Watts
10/14/20101 hour, 5 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 246 – “Elves, Egos, and Avatars”

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "In life if you let yourself be ruled by fear life becomes a fearful experience." "If you shake the Earth, all of the loose objects end in the West Coast of North America." "There's nothing useful thinking about the same task fifty times. It's the ego filling the space according to Tolle." "Advertising is heavily ego-driven. ... So why do we have them creating our thoughts, creating our vision of ourselves? Why do we nominate them?"   "And also say, look kids, it feels good to be online and be doing fifty texts and having 10,000 Facebook members, but your brain is going to be mush. How do you explain to them let's tone it down and watch the dosage level of technology." "It's the strength of the survivors that's always going to get you through. So how do we create a critical mass of people ready for the next phase, ready to build that new Earth?" [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of you're hopes, memories, fears, and dreams. It's much more like a parallel continuum. It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data space." "One of the most puzzling things about DMT is does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world one hundred percent with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in 'Oh great. The world has just been replaced by elf machinery.' Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled." "The psychedelic experience, in the best sense of the word, is a religious activity." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More about Bruce Damer A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer Damer.com http://www.digibarn.com/ DigitalSpace.com The Buddhafield Festival Shamanic Freedom Radio Bruce Damer's October Gallery Talk
10/5/20101 hour, 26 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 245 – “UFOs: Angels Aliens & Archetypes”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna NOTE: This podcast is a "companion" to KMO's podcast #224 "Viral Disclosure", which you may also find quite interesting. [September 27, 2010 PRESS CONFERENCE UPDATE: Aliens 'hit our nukes': They even landed at a Suffolk base, claim airmen Read more: Google News Search UFOs PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The more serious contenders [for explanations of UFO phenomena] as explanations, I think, fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited? Or is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of?" "... and there always seem to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive. . . . If the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron. In other words, the invalidation of the experience is an inimical part of its structure." "So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what is it, and what is it for?" "I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem, like many subtle problems, is haunted by our own naivete concerning language." "There is a curious fuzziness about the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them in the clear light of consciousness." "To my mind, if the UFO phenomena is something arising out of the super-ego of the human psychic organization, then we should ask why. What is it doing?" "[UFOs] are an antidote to the scientific paradigm that has evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe." "The fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts." "I believe that that is the purpose of the UFO, to inject uncertainty into the male-dominated, paternalistic, rational, solar myth under which we are suffering." "[Science] is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down." "What assurance do we have that the several million life forms that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here? Do we have any assurance?" "I think we are discovering in our own psychic structure the potential, the possibility, of a relationship with an intelligent species outside ourselves, and this raises for us all the tensions, all the issues, that accompany an adolescent love affair." "What is happening on this planet is the self-reflecting genesis of communication for itself. It is language, somehow, that is loose in our species, on our planet, within and without the flying saucer." "So, communication, which we take astonishingly for granted considering the very basic kinds of needs that we communicate to each other, is actually the great frontier of our spiritual becoming." "Radical freedom doesn't mean giving someone the vote. Radical freedom means the right to take over and control our own destiny and the destiny of this planet. Radical freedom means recovering our birthright." "What would you think if somebody attempted to take your sexuality away from you. In the suppression of the psychedelic experience the masters who make the rules have taken away a major slice of what it is to be a human being." "We have been robbed of our birthright by the frightened, the constipated, the narrow minded, the stupid, and the afraid. Take back your mind. Take back your mind. That is the message." "The psychedelic experience is the replay of human history in the individual mind." "What virtual reality holds out is the possibility that we can create a language where we see what we mean. If we could see what we mean we would have a kind of telepathy." "Ego is something invented by frightened people 20,000 years ago as a way to suppress women, as a way to suppress sexuality,
9/27/201059 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 244 – “From Mind to Supermind”

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "More changes have taken place in the last twenty five years, unquestionably, than in any period of human history. Just as I said an hour on the Greenwich map is a century, a decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?" "If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques in the daily, moment to moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university, you've changed that culture." "The average post-1946 kid by the age of five had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography, more hype, more propaganda, you name it, than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings of the past." "To a 'factory philosopher' a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks." "Information, information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the future." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics Alcyon Massive ... "Dreaming The World Awake"
9/20/20101 hour, 12 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 243 – “Beyond the Doors of Perception”

Guest speakers: Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, and Tom Van Sant Ram Dass & Lorenzocirca: 2001 PROGRAM NOTES: "LSD produces religions experiences, but it's less evident that it can produce a religious life." -Houston Smith [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The origins of most great religions go back to groups of people who made this discovery that you don't look for god, you don't look for power in the Caesars or in the temples or in the churches and all that. You look within." "The fun has hardly begun." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Dass.] "But inside myself, as you all understand, that what you see [during a psychedelic experience] to turn it into what you be is a really subtle and sensitive trip." "And that's part of the integrity of this experience, of growing into seeing the relative nature of reality and the paper mache quality of social institutions and the way in which personalities turn into style rather than substance." "And it's interesting that it's taken many years to grow into the kinds of visions that [Leary] was having in those days and to appreciate how much what happened to me through psychedelics transformed my consciousness in such a way that death meant something different to me that allowed me to be in the presence of somebody that was dying in a way that honored the drama of the process without getting lost in it." "What I have experienced in the past twenty five years, if I were to look at what the essence of the matter is, is that having touched the unconditioned and having seen the relative nature of reality and the way the mind creates the dream, that has given me a faith in the possibility of who we are." "And it feels to me that as long as I live I will still be growing into what happened to me on the first psychedelic experience." "And allow my heart to be open, like keeping your heart open in hell, keeping your heart open in the presence of suffering, because even at the moment when the suffering is most intense, right behind it inside you is an incredible equanimity, because one of the things that I touched through acid was an extreme appreciation of the perfection of the laws of form, the perfection of the unfolding of the law." "But I can feel, when I look at what our spiritual journeys are on this plain, it feels so obvious to me, that the stuff we are handed is the grist for the mill of awakening out of the illusion until we can be in the form without being entrapped by it so that we can play lightly. We can dance sweetly. We can have joy in the presence of the hell-realms and do what we can do to relieve the suffering without getting burned out and lost and bitter and cynical and frustrated. And we have the tolerance to deal with chaos and uncertainty." "What has happened is that the Sixties unleashed something extraordinarily powerful that is still reverberating and echoing in this culture, and actually in the world. And what that released was a recognition in people that they were free to change, institutions and themselves." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/27/201055 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 242 – “Philosophical Gadfly” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered visa vie the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definition, and the drugs have done that to a great extent." "The notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion." "The fact that we rely on an intellectual method [science] two thousand years old almost precludes our understanding of anything interesting." "The present is the interference pattern caused by the forward and backward flowing causitries inherent in time. Where they meet they form an interference pattern, a standing wave if you will, which is what a hologram is. And it's that which is experienced as the now, and it is half of the past and half of the future." "And this is why the drugs are so controversial, because they free you from the myth of the tribe." "It's trying to make sense of our intuitions in the light of the enormous pressure to accept prepackaged ideologies that makes neurotics of us all." "And it isn't necessary for everybody to go out and get loaded. It's more about participating in a new language of self-reflection. This is what we need to do. Some of us should take drugs. It's a professional kind of obligation. That's what a shaman is. He's a guy whose professional obligation is to take drugs, but we all have an obligation to create a language that values us and the people around us." "We cannot afford the unconscious anymore. This is a concept that has to take its place with the high-button shoe. We must be entirely conscious because we have the power to shatter the Earth like a rotten apple with a stick of dynamite inside of it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/19/201050 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 241 – “Philosophical Gadfly” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The people who take that position that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis don't realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet." "Civilization is a ten thousand year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes ten to fifteen thousand years, a moment of biological and geological time." "We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time." "Humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own." "So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it, and the planet feels it." "Our imagination is really the sail of the soul, and the question is, where will that sail take us if we will but let it?" "That's why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology, because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tenancies does not give a true picture of the future. That the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty." "We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious but we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive, it's not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing. It is more like an entelechy, it guides, it opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices." "One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality. People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them they will work, and this is not true at all, especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you're attempting to conjure." "I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been." "So it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship between certain plants and certain monkeys, and that you don't have humanness unless you have the plants and the monkeys together. This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture." "And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing, it's providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor." "The word psychedelic has been attached to the drugs and confined, but many things are psychedelic. Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids, and supports consciousness is psychedelic if we take the word down to its Greek roots." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/6/201057 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 240 – “Philosophical Gadfly” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "There are several unexplained anomalies. Why is it that fully 80% of the world's known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin, even though the flora of the Old World jungles of Indonesia is equally rich?" "The curing scenario of the ayahuascero is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans world wide." "I think the word 'psychedelic' is maybe too broad, because it includes things which are very different from each other. It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline." "The icaros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination." "It seems very clear that this [ayahuasca] healthcare delivery system is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of psychological disorders." "You must be aware that I have other wrinkles, the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things, but all of these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us." "But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings. It is simply a modality, an interior landscape, and large portions of it are not human." "As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness, these trans-human, non-human dimensions slowly come into view. It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity, which our cultural and linguistic programming has blinded us to rather severely." "[The mushroom] is not a drug of acceptance, you know. It want's transformation of a very radical sort. The ayahuasca seems to integrate." "Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these other things sometimes can't be." "What does it mean that on a psychedelic drug one person can see more art in an hour than the species has produced in 10,000 years? What does that say about how effectively we are accessing our souls?" "If you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at." "I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life that life occupies to death." "I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/5/20101 hour, 24 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 239 – “Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna ... recorded in 1996, however, it is current enough to have been given just last night ... maybe it was :-).] "And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them, generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present. And in the present moment we, like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins." "In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept [of alchemy]." "I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate." "Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone." "Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena [as alchemy]." "All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact." "The psychedelics have brought us back to this alchemical mystery, shorn of any vocabulary for dealing with it, shorn of any real living notion of the spirit." "Shamanism and alchemy are a seamless enterprise." "If you look around you, the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort. The prima materia to be transformed are the nuclear stockpiles, the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands, the populations devoid of hope, the populations in threat of infectious and fatal epidemic disease. There is a great deal of prima materia to be worked on at the historical level of the alchemical process." "In the 60's, we thought that all that had to happen was that everybody would take LSD and the obvious right things to do would be done. And we expected no opposition to this because its rightness was so obvious. We didn't realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into the waiting jaws of its oppressors. But the spirit doesn't die." "In the 60's then, LSD was not sufficient, even coupled with rock and roll it only brought repression [oppression?]. It was like a failed alchemy. Instead of the dissolving and recrystallizing at a higher and more angelic level thousands of prisons were built, and the entire thing failed. But this spirit is THE spirit, the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself, and it will not be suppressed for long in any time or place. So now again it comes. ... It's a spirit of dissent that says we will not serve the values of materialism, the values of the ego, and the values that separate and break down the community. So here it is again." "We are not an army. So our strategy must be stealth. It's an alchemical strategy, and what do I mean by stealth? I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, by vision. And what is new is that there are massive technologies available to us, not available in the 60's. They were not designed for us. They were not intended for us. It was never ever thought that such power should flow into the hands of freaks such as ourselves. Never-the-less,
7/28/20101 hour, 1 minute, 33 seconds
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Podcast 238 – “A Tribute to Albert Hofmann” Part 2

Guest speakers: Albert Hofmann, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. John C. Lilly.] "There is no such thing as drugs. There's no such thing as illegal drugs. They're only chemicals. They can change the molecular configurations within the brain itself and hence change who you are and where you're going and where you come from. This is a profound experience." "The drug problem ought to be turned over to the Surgeon General and taken away from the Attorney General." "I learned long ago that one is a psychotherapist until one is cured of one's own diseases." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Psychology without psychedelics is pissing into the wind." "We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. Albert Hofmann.] "Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I obtained as a fundamental understanding from all my LSD experiences that what one commonly takes as the reality by no means it defines anything fixed but represents a thing that's ambiguous, that there is not only one but there are many realities, each compromising a different consciousness also of the ego." "Consciousness defies scientific definition. . . . All attempts to define consciousness are pathological. Consciousness can only be described as the [unintelligible] and creative spiritual dance of the ego at the very core of what we call 'I' ". "Consciousness remains a mystery, the very central mystery of our existence." "The perception of color is a purely psychological and subjective event taking place in the inner space of [unintelligible]. The brightly colored world as we see it does not exist on the outside." "The seemingly objective picture of the world surrounding us, that which we call reality, is actually a subjective picture. ... We all carry in life our own personal image of reality created by our own private receiver." "Just like sound and colors, touch, smell and taste don't exist objectively. They too represent purely subjective phenomena, occurring only in the inner space of individual humans." "Our understanding [born of intense direct experience of alternate realities] makes us aware of the fact that each individual is the creator of his or her own world, for it is in each individual mind and ONLY there, that the world and the abundance of life it contains . . . that the stars and the sky become real, become human reality. Our real true freedom and responsibility is founded in our ability to create our own individual world." "Once I have recognized what part of reality is objectively on the outside and what is subjectively taken place within myself, then I am more aware of what I can change in my life, where I have a choice, and thus what I am responsible for. Conversely, I become aware of what is beyond my will power and has to be accepted as an unalterable fact. This clarification of my potential and my responsibilities can be of invaluable help. I have the ability to choose what I want to receive from the endless, infinite program of 'the great transmitter', from creation." "That means I can let those aspects of creation, or the cosmos, that make me happy enter into my consciousness and thus imbue them with reality . . . or I can let in other aspects, those that depress me. It is I who creates the bright and the dark picture of the world. It is I who invests the objects that are only shaped matter in the outer world not only with their color, but with my affection and my love -- and also their meaning. This applies not only to my inanimate surroundings, but also to living beings, to the plants and animals and to my fellow humans. With this insight,
7/19/20101 hour, 15 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 237 – “A Tribute to Albert Hofmann” Part 1

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: The Albert Hofmann Papers at Erowid.org The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online) [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet." "So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream." "We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous." "In the future it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth. It is the mark of a barbarous culture." "One doesn't 'just say no' to truth." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Andrew Weil.] "I have to tell you that the majority of human beings that I encounter operate mostly out of fear, guilt, and that when people operate from those emotions they are dangerous to themselves and to others."  "We [the psychedelic community] are a very small minority, a very small minority, and have no illusions about that. And whether our minority will grow fast enough, and be able to influence humanity fast enough to avoid the catastrophe that is certain to come if we persist in the ways that we now persist, I don't know?" "If it may be as it appears that our ability to manipulate the environment, our technological ability, is so disparate with our ability to control our own emotions, that may be a fatal flaw of our species. It may be." "Deep down everything is all right, and that's the way it's supposed to be. And there may be a lot of drama in between [now and the extinction of our species], but it's all all right. ... It's OK with me if something else gets a chance, if the life-force experiments with another form, that's fine, that's OK too." "And here it seems to me is the fundamental absurdity of the way our science has developed: The most obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence. How can you construct a world view, how can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science tries to do." "Often I find, in my experience, that changes in the realm of consciousness must accompany physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/13/20101 hour, 4 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 236 – “The Politics of Ecology”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] "To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it." "When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?" "Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire to better things, which has been called 'wantlessness', the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot'." "From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels." "And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty." "Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even in those countries where they are free to vote, are prevented by the basic postulates in terms in which they do their thinking and their feeling, from summarily decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations." "Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prisons in which they are now confined." "In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always willing, but it's technical and organizational flesh was generally weak. Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit." "My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective intention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects to the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving. We have to get it into our collective heads that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological." "It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children, who in less than forty years will be six billion, to lead a tolerably human existence without in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment." -Aldous Huxley (November 30, 1962) "All that I meant was, the sort of basic frame of reference in which political activities will take place shall be less culture-bound and more ecology-bound, let's say." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/9/201050 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 235 – Osmond, Stolaroff, & Hubbard Discuss Psychedelics

Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard PROGRAM NOTES: On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org. "There's a central power system, and here's the source. And the guidance system simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source. The closer he gets the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is, the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation, and the more he sees his total responsibility. Now it's inconceivable to me that you could move toward that source without increasing responsibility. And to me, Leary has found a way of moving in that direction but not going toward it, because he's obviously missed his responsibility level." -Myron Stolaroff "From our crowd I think very, very few people get off the beam the way I would consider Leary and Alpert are off the beam, for example." -Myron Stolaroff "[We should use these substances] in a way which will not simply allow us to become aware of what any decent mystical saints have been aware of for a long, long time, but to become aware of how to produce a rise in the social level of communication, which will, indeed, transform the species from a biological animal to a communicating animal, which is what Teilhard had in view." -Humphry Osmond "[The map of the noosphere] is not to be created by mucking up bits of the Book of the Dead and saying how smart chaps were. This is a fraud." -Humphry Osmond "When you most need help is when you least want it." -Myron Stolaroff "This is the life that I've seen: Live or die. Be intelligent enough to get along. Don't walk in two places without knowing where you're going." -Al Hubbard "The ten year delay in our work brought about through our struggle with NIH in Washington and through being unable to cope with a large and powerful power-system there has produced, it's resulted in probably several million people being quite unnecessarily damaged." -Humphry Osmond (November 1, 1964) "You have to understand the specific risks that [using psychedelics] involves. Now the specific risk is that every person involved will be altered whether they like it or not. And that the result of this will, in a sense, alter every other relationship they have whether they like it or not." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Please Support the Archival Efforts for The Stolaroff Collection
6/30/20101 hour, 17 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 234 – “The World Soul”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it." -Rupert Sheldrake When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, "No," and then he went on to say, "Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it." "If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?" -Rupert Sheldrake "Not thinking about the World Soul but the individual soul, that the seizure of DMT is almost like a simulacrum of death itself, and that you seem to see into an ecology of souls." -Terence McKenna "The World Soul, I think, is in communication with us in the culminating moment of human history. This is all being scripted for a purpose and toward an end unglimpsed by us but tied up with the survival of everything." -Terence McKenna "Tourism is a kind of secularized form of pilgrimage." -Rupert Sheldrake "At the root of many problems is the denial of the problem and the fact that we maintain unconsciousness of the problem." -Ralph Abraham "I hold monotheism responsible for the mess that we're in from Abraham right on down to the present moment. I think it is the metaphor which is responsible for the dominator break-out, and that until we get a more polytheistic, nature-oriented conception of reality we will be pretty much under the gun." -Terence McKenna "For my money, monotheism is the single most reactionary force in all of human history. I don't even know what is running second." -Terence McKenna "Democracy is a step away from anarchy." -Terence McKenna "Perhaps to unify consciousness it isn't a Western hemisphere goddess we need but simply a recognition of Gaia." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/24/20101 hour, 25 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 233 – Ram Das and Timothy Leary – “1983 Harvard Reunion”

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.] "The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you're free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim." "Methods are methods are methods. Meditation's a method and psychedelics are a method. Methods are all traps. A method by its nature is a trap. It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end. You just hope it self-ejects." "Psychedelics was one of the major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture." "Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know." "I don't for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard . . . anymore." "All form in the universe, including your mind and your thought, is part of law, it's unfolding lawfully, it's the karma unfolding, just law. And within that there is no freedom. There really is no freedom in form. The freedom comes as the formless creates the form. There's where the freedom is. And that freedom, of the formless coming into form, is a place from which you stand, or you don't stand, in which you experience the creation of your own universe around you." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "[So Emerson] came to Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said, 'Don't look for god in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor in the pulpits, look within, find divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant (translated as do your own thing) and for, I believe thirty-three years, he was not allowed back on this sacred territory. We're back after twenty!" "We were smart enough to know how little we knew." "Once you put that pill in your mouth, YOU were the Principle Investigator ... like it or not." "The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that nobody wants to leave." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Raw Master Files of This Talk la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part2.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track1.mp3 la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track2.mp3 Harvard Crimson Announcement of this Talk The Varieties of Religious Experience By William James (free Project Gutenberg edition)  
6/17/20101 hour, 41 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 232 – “Fisher, Stolaroff, and Al Hubbard”

Click HERE to see the video of this conversation. This program marks Our 5th Anniversary! Support the Stolaroff Collection Make a contribution to support the archiving of Myron Stolaroff's resources Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: This is a conversation that took place between Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, and a group of friends at the legendary salon that Kathleen hosted on the third Friday of every month in Venice Beach, California. The talk begins with Myron telling stories about the legendary Al Hubbard, also known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.  He then goes on to explain the workings of his research center in Menlo Park, California where they treated over 300 people with LSD in the 1960s in order to help them improve their creativity. He also tells of the historic first trip of Duncan Blewett, which led the Saskatchewan researchers to change the direction of their work. For his part, Gary Fisher expands on some of the comments we heard in earlier podcasts when he talked about his work with autistic and schizophrenic children who were treated with LSD and other psychedelic medicines.  He also tells of a self-experiment he did to study the effectiveness of LSD in reducing severe pain. Here is a sampling of Gary's comments that evening: " 'We didn't have any bad trips because we didn't know you could have bad trips.' [quoting Laura Huxley] So all the input we ever had from anybody was how wonderful the [LSD] experience was. So we didn't have any sense that it was other than positive, and what a blessing that was." "How do you tell kids that the government is fucked?" "When you want people to be just one thing they bite you in the ass." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Research Report by Dr. Gary Fisher An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children HTML Version      PDF version Audio Discussion with Dr. Fisher and Dr. Grob “Treating Childhood Schizophrenia with Psychedelics”
6/10/20101 hour, 38 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 231 – Damer-McKenna: “Bruce, Terence, and Virtual Worlds”

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence's house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain. One of the reasons I think it might be interesting for you to hear this conversation is to get a feel for what it was like to hang around with the bard McKenna. While you might think that he did most of the talking, you will find that the opposite is true, and much like Aldous Huxley, Terence did a lot of questioning and listening. It wasn't only from books that they acquired their particular views of the world. A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer Terence McKenna's comments on NPR about his time with Bruce “I spent last week withBruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/7/20101 hour, 9 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 230 – Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 3

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future." -Ralph Abraham "In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for "the snap", that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. ... What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history." -Ralph Abraham "The edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It is a special time." -Ralph Abraham "Salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension." -Terence McKenna "This is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. ... What we must become is clear." -Terence McKenna "To the degree that we can change our minds we will escape extinction." -Terence McKenna "If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity you're going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity." -Terence McKenna "I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite." -Ralph Abraham "I think that grass root research, based on phenomena that are actually common sense, that are part of everyday life for many people, could help to wake us up, to give a greater clarity about what's really going on, and make us recognize that there's far more interconnection between us and other species, and us and other people, than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public." -Rupert Sheldrake "What we're saying is that we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions. Someone once said, 'If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth we would stop immediately.' . . . So we have compartmentalized our lives, and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal work that is destroying the planet, destroying communities, and so forth." -Terence McKenna "Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion." -Terence McKenna "As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we're inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and we're going to produce incomplete agendas and answers." -Terence McKenna "The great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? It's the idea that there is no distinction between shit and Shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing." -Terence McKenna "The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out the pernicious forms of idiocy that flourish in our own community." -Terence McKenna "Yes, well it is an ambitious enterprise, and fraught with contradiction, but forward, ever forward!" -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/27/20101 hour, 7 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 229 – Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 2

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery." "Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined." "What is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense." "As our understanding of the machinery, the genetic machinery that supports organic being deepens, and as our ability to manipulate at the atomic and molecular level also proceeds apace, we are on the brink of the possible emergence of some kind of alien intelligence of a sort we did not anticipate." "Vast amounts of the world that we call human is already under the control of artificial intelligences, including very vital parts of our political and social dynamo." "While we've been waiting for the Palaidians to descend, or for the Face on Mars to be confirmed, all the machines around us, the cybernetic devices around us in the past ten years have quietly crossed the threshold into telepathy." "[Artificial intelligence,] this most bizzare and most unexpected of all companions to our historical journey is now, if not already in existence, then certainly in gestation." "Time is defined by how much goes on in a given moment, and we're learning how to push tetraflops of operations into a given second." "Surely in a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years we, if we exist, will be utterly unrecognizeable to ourselves, and we will probably still be worried about preserving and enhancing the quality of human values." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ralph Abraham.] "The very fact that we are at a hinge of history means that what we say and think, even individually, matters enormously in the long run. That's the teaching, if there is any, of chaos theory." "In the creation of societies it was altruism, essentially, that was involved in going from where we were to where we are, and it could well be that without love, for example, further evolution is impossible." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/19/20101 hour, 29 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 228 – Trialogue: “The Evolutionary Mind” Part 1

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "The development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn't changed much for 100,000 years." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. ... It wasn't until about 50,000 years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies all around the world, whereby human beings could indeed become fairly effective hunters. But for most of the three and a half million years of hominid history it was man the huntED." -Rupert Sheldrake "The shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal, who can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back." -Terence McKenna "The domain in which the change [from animal to human] was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. And this is what we created that is uniquely human and that has defined us ever since." -Terence McKenna "You don't need to go straight beyond the universe to the divine mind, there's plenty of lower-level minds than the divine mind that could be out there." -Rupert Sheldrake "My notion of the mystical is simply that which remains to be understood, and there will always be a residuum of mystery in principle, but in principle it is not mysterious." -Terence McKenna [Rupert disagreed with this.] "The idea that this evolution's equipped us with minds, and language, and cognitive abilities that enable us to comprehend the entire universe, where it's come from, where it's going, what minds and mind may lie beyond what we see, the idea that this very small part of the evolutionary system, with all the limitations inherent in it, could comprehend the whole seems to me a rather improbable supposition." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's not decided what's going to happen next, there are imaginations of many levels, including human imaginations, at work here, looking at alternative possibilities. New things happen, and then what happens next depends on what's happened already and the new possibilities of imagination that open up, but without the goal being fixed in advance." -Rupert Sheldrake "[Evolution] is a game, one of the rules of which is: The rules can change." -Terence McKenna "Time is not a tyranny. It's a relativistic medium subject to all kinds of plasticity. There are many ways out of any assumed corner we paint ourselves into." -Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/15/20101 hour, 18 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 227 – Shulgin-Watts: “Sasha at MIT plus Alan Watts”

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Alan Watts PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Sasha Shulgin.] "So I look upon these materials [psychedelics] as being catalytic, not productive, they do not DO what occurs. The allow YOU to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material." "I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials." [In testing a new substance] "You go with great caution. Decide what is the amount is that would have no effect and take one thousandths of that amount." "How does the mind work? What kind of a probe can you make to look at the function of the mind? To me, it's going to be a psychedelic material, that has very little action in experimental animals, to look into actions in man that are not seen in experimental animals." [NOTE: The following quotations are by Alan Watts.] "Nature has mercifully arranged the principle of 'forgettery' as well as the principle of memory. ... And you begin again. You see, it doesn't matter in what form you begin. Whether you begin again as a human being, or as a fruit fly, butterfly, or a beetle, or a bird, it feels the same way that you feel now. So we're really all in the same place." "So the possibility, even the imagination that there could be such an experience [of the end of the world] in the back of our heads, is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good, feeling that it's all right." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/8/20101 hour, 12 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 226 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Newton himself was a man with a foot in two worlds. He was a thorough-going occultist. His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous. And yet he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society." "History itself is a kind of alchemical process. ... History is the catalyst of nature." "If we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage, and our heritage in the shamanism of the archaic, then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate, not to enslave, and somehow we've lost the thread." "You know, Tim Leary used to say, 'When in doubt, double the dose.' " "Capitalism, I can't say this enough, is NOT in our interest." "The Earth is perfectly capable of raising outrageous hell without us triggering a nuclear war." "My faith is that we're just slow to get rolling, and that once the battle is joined, once every person on Earth realizes that we're in a battle for planetary survival, then people will get with the program, it's just that things aren't bad enough yet." "We're lead by jackasses. We [the psychedelic community] don't bother with our political processes." "What we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us makes their way into those positions of power. I mean, you can see that now [1992], those guys are not fit to throw guts down to a bear ... ANY OF THEM!" "What we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state. I mean, what we are are the propagandized masses inside a Fascist dictatorship." "Know your enemy and they probably will not be your enemy." "I think that the Third Reich was a Sunday school picnic compared to the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church. ... In a civilized political environment those people would be placed under immediate arrest." "The way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history." "And so it's up to the creativity of ordinary people, and the strongest weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people is the psychedelic experience, because it allows you to put information together in new and exciting ways. And this is to be then the basis of a new political order. It has to be." "The model of human nature which this society has deified makes it a pathological act, a sin, and a crime to alter your own consciousness. This doesn't make any sense. We are at war with ourselves, and we're losing." "It's all about personal empowerment, and personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/30/20101 hour, 13 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 225 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I've never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself." "So what you have to do is just like every other thing, everything you've been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what's really going on, which doesn't mean that you're reckless." "We've been polluted by Disney." "We are living inside a 90% Nineteenth Century world view. And a culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves, because what cannot be said cannot be done. What cannot be said cannot be put in place." "So in a way, one way of thinking about psychedelics is that they empower language. It's a way to force the evolution of language. The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language." "It was very important, I think, to the Establishment to suppress that [hip phrases from the Hippie culture], because new words are the beginnings of new realities." "What holds us together is what holds all sub-cultures together, which is an experience. In this case, the experience of being loaded, and, you know, it's a very powerful and immediate kind of experience." "It's amazing that the world has evolved as far and as fast as it has, the human world, glued together by nothing more than small mouth noises." "The whole history of the evolution of the Western mind is in a sense the birth of the Logos. The Logos is making its way towards self-expression, and it's doing this by claiming dimension, after dimension of manifestation." "The mind is not a form of intelligence. The mind is the theater in which intelligence is manifested. You don't want to confuse the garage with the car. ... Everything goes on within the confines of mind. It's like the light that you switch on when you walk into a darkened room, and then everything else is the furniture within the room. Mind is simply the light which is shed over the landscape of appearances. ... Mind is the inclusive category, I think." "It's very important to try and make some accommodation to the local language, because in a way, only the local language is appropriate to the place. ... Somehow the local language is a part of the local reality." "The one thing you learn taking psychedelics is that nothing is straightforward." "Anybody who starts talking to you about the grandeur that was Rome, should be reminded: The grandeur of Rome was it was a bargain-basement on three floors masquerading as a military brothel. It was not a great civilization." "I'm completely convinced that no one is in control, and that this is very good news." "In a sense, the flying saucer is nothing more than a modern rebirth of the philosopher's stone. The flying saucer is the universal panacea at the end of time. It's the thing which cannot exist, but which does exist, and which if we could obtain it everything would be different." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/27/20101 hour, 33 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 224 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think, when it's all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C." "The African 'Cradle of Civilization', I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't believe that is going to have to do some fast talking." "They [16th century alchemists] were angelic magicians, is what they were." "DMT is this very short-acting hallucinogen that you smoke, but it's a neurotransmitter. It occurs in all human beings on the natch, and it occurs in various plants and animals. In terms of nature, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens. In terms of impact, it's the strongest of all hallucinogens. It's a completely reality-obliterating experience, and it comes on so quickly that you don't grok it like a drug." "The other thing about DMT that's weird is, it does not affect your mind. In other words, you don't feel gaga with ecstacy. You don't feel relaxed. You feel exactly the way you felt before you did it. It's that the world has just been swapped out, and that's strange. I sort of like that, that it doesn't lay a glove on the observing cognitive processes, instead it just does something in the visual cortex that causes the world to be replaced by a three-, four-, five-dimensional, highly colored moving environment filled with screaming elf-deamons." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/23/20101 hour, 28 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 223 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." "In a Christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command god to act. In other words that in some strange way the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires." "The Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of god. So it's a completely different attitude toward being human. It's an empowering attitude." "In the hermetical, magical view human beings are not tainted by Original Sin." "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." "Had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece, Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did." "Alchemy, and conjuration, and tailsmanic magic, and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished, really, not as a throwback but as a kind of prelude to modern science. Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise." "[John] Dee is the last person to be able to unify into one world view science, and mathematics, and magic, and astrology all together." "Paracelsus was an interesting guy. He's essentially the inventor of drugs because he was the first person extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence." Today's podcast begins a newly uncovered lecture by Terence McKenna. His topic is "Hermeticism and Alchemy" and he begins this 1991 workshop in fine form, making statements such as: "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." And, "Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings." Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/13/201059 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 222 – “Crimes Against Nature: The Civil War Against Drugs”

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Jonathan Ott.] "It is, of course, absurd for humankind to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet." "A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground." [In reference to releasing violent criminals to make room for small-time, non-violent, simple possession offenders.] "In short, drug prohibition is impractical, ineffective, uneconomic, anti-scientific, unhealthy, immoral, unecological, undiplomatic, and dictatorial." "Drug laws are the monstrous result of institutionalizing paranoia." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/6/20101 hour, 30 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 221 – McKenna: “Evolving Times”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing." "Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance. And not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed. Poetry may have been at its climax. Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy, there's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin." "All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later." "What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance." "We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it." "All of them, if you generalized, what these substances do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. ... Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries." "The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder." "We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma." "There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them." "I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself." "I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking." "The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak." "I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster." "We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis, which is the way we may well be headed." "It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another five hundred or a thousand years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created, will be the first to be swept away. So it's very, very important that people take back their minds, and that people analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire h...
4/3/20102 hours, 7 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 220 – Damer: “EvoGrid: The Ultimate Nerd Project”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup." "[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists' beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere." "Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life." "The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people's minds more than on the streets. It'll be in the minds first." "The giving response that we have [when natural disasters occur], and through technology the fact that we can sort of be there virtually, and be in the environment that those people are in, and the crisis they're in, the empathic response coming out of support is perhaps the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there's a disaster." "Not only is no one running the world, but it probably isn't possible for anyone to run the world. And once we come to that realization we become human again because we'll say, 'Look everyone's human. Everyone is trying their best. Everyone is going from crisis to crisis, and we'll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I also think will be a healthy thing." "So in a sense, it'll be the geeks that inherit the Earth, but it'll be enlightened geeks we hope." "We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization." "When you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye, and therein you will find your rescue." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Bruce Damer Online Bruce Damer's DigiBarn Computer Museum Bruce Damer on the BBC Forum The Planetary Mood Ring Project
3/28/20101 hour, 8 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 219 – “Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 2

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Now the key thing to the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized form." "It's obvious that if any quantum leaps are going to happen in evolution it's best designed to happen in a period of adolescence." "Evolution has always involved people like us getting together as we are tonight, figuring out where we came from, and who's slowing us down, and what's the factual evidence as to how fast and where we can move?" "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The key to neurological navigation is to be able to voyage into exactly the circuits of your brain that you want to be exactly when you want to be there and with whom you want to be there." "The key to the Sixties, as we see it now [1979], was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive over-specialized models." "Show me a taboo and I'm interested in it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/23/201058 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 218 – “The Truth About Cannabis”

Guest speaker: Claudia Little, BSN, MPH PROGRAM NOTES: Below you will find the list of links to Web sites that Claudia Little refers to in her presentation about the safety, benefits, and importance of the cannabis plant. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marijuana – Why it Works Supporting Studies and Articles Growing Acknowledgments from Health Organizations regarding the Medical Benefits of Cannabis Health Organization Endorsements AMA Calls for Scientific Review of Marijuana’s Prohibitive Status How Cannabis Works The Brain’s Own Marijuana (Get link to complete article from Scientific American at this link) Cannabis and the Brain Marijuana Compounds Possess Synergistic Anti-Cancer Effects, Study Says Marijuana Extracts Relieve Intractable Cancer Pain Better than THC, Study Says Books on Specific Conditions Aging, Arthritis, Cancer, Chronic Pain, Gastrointestinal Disorders, HIV/AIDS, Movement Disorders, Multiple Sclerosis (Americans for Safe Access) Comprehensive Reviews of Recent Research Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids Some of the Most Significant Research Results of 2009 ‘Gold Standard’ Studies show that Inhaled marijuana Is Medically Safe and Effective (CA Center for Medical Cannabis Research) Feds’ Top Pot Researcher Says Marijuana Should be Legal (UCLA’s Taskin/Lung Cancer Risk) If Pot Prevented Cancer You Would Have Heard About It, Right? (Boston University re: Head/Neck CA) Smoke Has Contrasting Effects On Lung Function Compared to Tobacco, Study Says Moderate Marijuana Use Not Associated with Altered Cognitive Shills, Study Says Opposite Relationships Between Cannabis Use and Neurocognitive functioning in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia Review: Supposed Marijuana and Schizophrenia Link "Overstated" Weeding Through the Hype: Interpreting the Latest Warnings About Pot and Schizophrenia THC Shown to Help Patients with Schizophrenia Safety of Cannabis Addictive Properties of Popular Drugs Conant vs Walters (Safety for your MD) Marijuana compounds may offset alcohol-induced toxicity, study says Marijuana Users Substitute Pot in Place of More Dangerous Substances, Study Says Marijuana Ingredient Blocks Opiate Dependence, Study Says Federal Agency in Charge of Marijuana Research Admits Stifling Studies on Medicinal Cannabis Organizations to Join: Drug Policy Alliance National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Americans for Safe Access Marijuana Policy Project Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Extras 2009: The Year in Review NORML’s top 10 Events that Shaped Marijuana Policy Annual Marijuana Arrests in the US Top 10 Cannabis Studies the Government Wished it had Never Funded Ashland Alternative Health, LLC The Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP) is a state registry program within the Public Health Division, Oregon Department of Human Services. Ashland Alternative Health’s team of physicians and professional staff will successfully guide you through the OMMP process of acquiring an Oregon Medical Marijuana Card. Our mission is to be the foremost medical marijuana advocate for patients in the state of Oregon by providing a clinic that sets the gold standard in professional, compassionate and private care while upholding the guidelines of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. Please call us at 541-488-2202 for more information. Vaporizer Information
3/9/20101 hour, 20 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 217 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean it’s like a magnet for screwballs." [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . go figure  .] "I’ve seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe." "My technique, which I recommend to you, is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing we’ve got." "Probe the edges." "Psychedelics work. If you think that I’m bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and then we’ll talk. That’s the sine qua non. It’ll work, on demand. I’m not saying, ‘And wait forty years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It’ll work. It’ll blow your mind to shreds. It’s real." "What I’ve decided is that the [DMT] experience is an archetype. It’s the archetype of the circus." "I think where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time. Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen." "The dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else." "Fairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language. And the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication, faries, and language suggests that here we might have a restrictive gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns." "As long as we pursue the destruction of the Earth, and the elaboration of materialist ideology, and the suppression of psychedelic states, and the suppression of the feminine we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology." "The apocalypse is no longer a rumor. It has arrived in many parts of the world." "Do what you think is right. Think about what you think is right, and once you’ve thought about it then do it!" Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/5/20101 hour, 26 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 216 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here." "A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate." "It’s more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we’re not using. They [the machine elves] want us to speak in colored lights." "I think that the subtext of the governments’ fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run. And I think this is true of any society. It isn’t an American phenomenon. It’s that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hassidic Rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises. And you get millions of people questioning the first premises, and then the powers that be become very nervous." "Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state." "This is a heresy for sure, I’m not that fond of LSD. I think it’s a very sloppy drug." "It’s the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala." "We have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present. The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future." "History is not a random walk. It’s not a series of undirected, random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved." "The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the New Age." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Terence McKenna Audio DMT Nexus Index of /audio/McKenna
3/1/20101 hour, 29 minutes, 42 seconds
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Podcast 215 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The surface of things is not where attention should rest." "I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world." "We’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu." "I came to feel, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it [DMT] is secret. It is not a secret. It is THE secret. There is a secret, and this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is. It’s that the way the world is, is a way that you can’t think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity." "You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told." "Without this [the smoked DMT experience] in the picture, half the world is missing." "What we have discovered in DMT is, literally, a chemical doorway to the bardo." "One thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure, is to convince you that what’s real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what’s real." "The biological object is made of time itself as much as it’s made of space and matter." "I’ve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul." "The Twentieth Century is analogous to the birth canal of human history." "What’s interesting about DMT is that it occurs naturally in the human brain. We all make it all the time. And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all. This is a human metabolite that you’re getting a tremendous of, but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, bio synthetic pathways, that can deal with it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/20/20101 hour, 41 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 214 – “Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 1

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "For the last four or five thousand years, freedom and intelligence and individualism have been moving in an unbroken chain from East to West. So that here on the banks of the Pacific Ocean we obviously have assembled the most advanced nervous systems on the planet." "We all live within the reality bubble that our nervous system projects." "Neurology was the real revolution of the Sixties." "Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re gonna lead." "The old theory, by old I mean the one they’re still teaching in your colleges, says that new speciation takes tens of millions of years to create a new species. Well if that’s so let’s go back to Quaaludes. Why bother?" "The Sixties was a genetically designed and programmed paedomorphic revolt against adult authority." "I’m sure that most of the people who have felt alienated, I think many of the people who are put in mental hospitals, are simply people who were born with nervous systems that we call futique, as opposed to antique." "It’s so simple, that to be in the right place you’re in the right time. Tune the place you are to the vibrations of the brain circuits that you want to activate at the time." "Evolution never tries to change grown-ups." "We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes." "I urge you, at all costs, to avoid terminal adulthood." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/12/20101 hour, 9 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 213 – “The Alchemy of LSD”

Guest speaker: Alan Watts Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive. PROGRAM NOTES: If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege.  ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this? ... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material. Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.] "So we have to think again and try and find out, think deeply, what is fundamentally taboo in this culture and perhaps in other cultures as well. What information, in other words, would really let the cat out of the bag and give away the show?" "But you see, the trouble about deep secrets is they can’t be repressed indefinitely." "And we don’t even think that we had anything personally to do with the fact that our fathers once had an evil gleam in their eyes, but that evil gleam was you … coming on." “And so underneath the opposition, or the polarity, between self and other or between any other pair of opposites you can think of there is something in common.” “This is the description of anxiety: Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other … forever." "So one of the problems of the various chemicals which can change the human mind in certain ways so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together is that they do rather give the show away. And people who take these chemicals and see through the human game cannot be trusted." "What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do." "When you are told, from childhood, that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily you remain permanently mixed-up." "You can’t have pleasure in life without skill, but it isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill." "It’s very bad form if an actor always acts the same way. That’s what’s called a Star, as distinct from an actor. A real actor can become anything." "LSD is simply an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope, except this one’s inside you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge, you can use a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So in the same way, according to your capacity and your knowledge you can use an interior instrument to your advantage … or just for kicks!" "The thing that we’ve learned from history is nobody ever learns from history." "Any law which in a way tries to enforce by the power of the state its private morals, or your own business in looking after your own nervous system, is in a fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization." "The rule for all terrors is head straight into them. … Whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it, and it will disappear." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   The Soft Pack on MySpace iTunes Band Website Spirit Plants Radio on the air 24/7
2/8/20101 hour, 21 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 212 – “The Genesis Generation”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo NOTE: This chapter was revised for the paperback edition that was released in February 2015. Please see the Kindle edition for the current version of this chapter. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Lorenzo.] "Forget getting a permanent job. Forget careers and the quest for financial stability. They are all false gods, sent to you by the Capitalist elite on Wall Street, whose primary goal is to trap you into a life of servitude." “You still haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” began Shadow. “It should behoove us all to take the words of the Empire’s leaders at face value. They have declared what they call a War on Drugs. Of course, that’s a lie on its face, because they aren’t putting drugs into prison cages, they’re putting people in them. This is no war on drugs, William, this is a war on consciousness, as Richard Glen Boire says. It’s a war on people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo. It is a war on the very people that we are going to need to get us humans out of this mess we’ve created for ourselves. And if this is really a war, as they want to call it, then you and I, young William, you and I are their sworn enemies." "We are at what many believe to be the most pivotal moment in human history that we know of. The arrow of unsustainable consumption, powered by the bow of credit, has reached the top of its flight. There is nowhere for that arrow to go now but down, and where it is going to land is anyone’s guess." “A thousand years from now, humans will most likely still be walking the Earth, as we have done for over a million years already. Some of those future humans will have genetic links to us. . . . And those people of the future will be alive because they had at least one ancestor, maybe you, who was a part of what their historians will call the Genesis Generation. "We are raising our children to become serfs!" "Our families are detaching from the monetary system and applying their energy in different directions, like raising some of their own food, and entertaining ourselves without spending exorbitant amounts of money." “Unlike that insidious John Galt, I am advocating that We the People go on strike and remove our minds from their System of servitude. For we are fully aware that it isn’t the handful of CEOs who are the producers. No, in fact, they are the looters now. It is time to keep our best ideas to ourselves, here in our own community." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/4/20101 hour, 6 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 211 – “Empowering Hope in Dark Times”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?" "Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances." "We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings" "[We] often feel like hapless atoms, running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever. We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else." "There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it." "Every society, in the moment of its existence, has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation (good alchemical word), a distillation of what has preceded before." "Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball." "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." "The mushroom said to me once, ‘Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage,’ and I said, ‘What’s the payoff on that?’ And it said, ‘It shows you it loves courage because it removes obstacles.’ You make a commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up." "It is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites." "It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas." "We are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery if we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer. Then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast that says, ‘May ye be alive at the end of the world.’ " Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Leo Plaw at the Temple of Visions Gallery (Los Angeles) Fantastic Visions Exhbition Berlin the sun blindness
1/29/20101 hour, 29 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 210 – “From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower”

Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled "From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking." "The suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic thinking, began roughly two thousand years ago. And you get more intense socio-economic and socio-spiritual hierarchies … until you get to where we are today where there is state control of consciousness as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life." -Anna Waldstein "They’re incredibly good at convincing us that we need a new car, and that new shirt, and the toys for our kids, or whatever, but very good at also convincing us that we don’t need this type of thing any more, this psychedelic thinking. But despite the Powers’ attempts to eradicate this, it bubbles up. … The power elite doesn’t want us to think like this because it disengages us from consumerism, it connects us with the environment, and makes us question what’s going on." -Ivan Casselman "Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact the box itself is figmentary and illusory . And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates one cannot be truly original in thought. So once we are stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on top of the groove or the bottom of the groove, its still going down that same path." -Cameron Adams Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/22/20101 hour, 23 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 209 – “An Audio Collage of Aldous Huxley”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control." "I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do." "That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy." "Democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time." "Ulysses is obviously a very extraordinary book. I mean, I don’t exactly know why he wrote it, because I mean, a great deal of Ulysses seems to me to be taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The complete recordings of the Aldous Huxley 1961 London interview may be found at: The Grey Lodge Occult Review
1/12/20101 hour, 12 minutes, 51 seconds
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Podcast 208 – “It’s Time To End The War on Drugs”

Guest speaker: Ethan Nadelmann PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Ethan Nadelmann.] "The War on Drugs, this policy of punitive prohibition, is a horror in our society, something that cannot be morally justified, cannot be justified in terms of health, can certainly not be justified in terms of public safety, that cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that I’ve ever heard of." "The War on Drugs is a cancer in our society, in our American society and in global society." "There’s never been a drug-free society, and there’s never going to be a drug-free society. We are moving increasingly into a world in which there will be ever-more psychoactive drugs available." "The stand-bys, you know, the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol and marijuana and coca cocaine and opium, they’ve been with us for thousands of years in one way or another, and they’re going to continue to be part of our society and our lives, whether we like it or not." "When drug treatment gets owned by the criminal justice system, drug treatment simply becomes a synonym for coerced abstinence." "We need to aim to cut America’s incarcerated population in half, to pick a rough number." "We need to get that term, over-incarceration, into the popular dialogue, into the popular language." "One of the definitions of power is when somebody tells you to do something, and you do it without asking why. That’s the definition of power. Somebody tells you to do it and you do it without even asking why, that’s the power of the prison-industrial complex today." "California used to be known as the state of higher education and is now known as the state of higher incarnation." "When you live in a society where one of the most powerful political forces is the organization which earns its livelihood from keeping its fellow citizens behind bars, I don’t know of any other free society in which that is the case. That’s a distortion." "I define recovery as getting to the point where your drug use, if you use drugs, is no longer impairing your life. … That’s the objective, to get on with your life." "It’s about accepting that each one of us, who have struggled with drugs, has to find their own path. And that the role of the state should certainly not be to get in the way and optimally to facilitate this." "That we are each sovereign over our own minds and bodies, that is the core principle that we have to keep putting out there." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Drug Policy ACTION Network Drug Policy Alliance Network A New PATH Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing
1/5/20101 hour, 4 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 207 – “A Tribute to Alan Watts”

Guest speakers: Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and others PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast begins with a short clip of Alan Watts speaking about human consciousness. Then we join Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and a few other friends who are discussing the life of Alan Watts a few months after his death in November 1973. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alan Watts in Wikipedia List of books by Alan Watts
12/21/20091 hour, 5 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 206 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 6

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you." "If I want a more intense drug experience I take more of one drug." "Low doses of psychedelics, or moderate doses of psychedelics, transform the quality of thought. You think faster, think deeper, think odder, think broader, but you need more for that to burst through into hallucination." Terence McKenna’s ‘Private’ List of Most Influential Books The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/039484484X The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0916870480 "The world is something to look at, and that attitude in the presence of psychedelics will throw open a cornucopia of riches." "I don’t know what life is like without cannabis. I hear there is such a thing." "The thing about DMT, and we didn’t talk about it much this weekend, is it is an inhabited space. A HUGE percentage of people who take it encounter entities of some sort in there. Not entities like wombats and foxes, but entities with intelligence of some sort, with language of some sort." "I think that in service to the principle of parsimony, preferring the simplest explanation, these things [beings encountered in DMT space] must be human souls. "Now I dare to hope that maybe there is some kind of existence beyond the grave." "I’ve looked at the literature of near-death experience. What those people are describing is far more mundane than a DMT trip." "I would suggest, with great heat, that if we want to study the near-death and after-death experience, that actually you come far closer to dying, whatever that means, on DMT than you do in drownings and things like that." "If you’re living right, your life should get just more and more baroque, beautiful, complicated, mysterious … and then you die." "I prefer to think that it [2012] is not a planetary catastrophe, or a mass dying." "Perhaps what enlightenment is is it happens to an entire universe when it drops its matter and anti-matter out of its structure, and it becomes entirely made of light. That would certainly fulfill the Novelty Theory [sic]." "It’s a bit baroque for my taste." [Speaking about the concept of parallel universes. Of course, Terence never lived to read: April 14, 2003, Scientific American, Parallel Universes Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations http://www.krabach.info/astro/parallel_universe/parallel_universe.html "The universe is a series of impediments to the expression of novelty." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option So You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher? (PDF) by R. Andrew Sewell, M.D. • McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School
12/10/20091 hour, 23 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 205 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 5 (Timewave)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "You don’t conquer time by building vast instrumentalities and seeking a primary particle and all that. The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "I live in a kind of waking hallucination. I have a little aphorism which covers this. It’s: Rome falls nine times an hour. It falls more than that and less than that, but let’s say it falls nine times an hour. Well, then your job is to notice every time it falls. In other words, what we think of as our random musings and our personal mental furniture is in fact our subconscious awareness of these systems of temporal resonance operating around us." [Comment by Lorenzo: I have no idea what he means by this.] "I do entertain the idea that we may each have our own Timewave, sort of following the model of astrology." "What will happen, as novelty asymptotically increases, in the final months, hours, minutes, seconds is boundaries will dissolve, all boundaries They’re already dissolving. We see the nation-state dissolving, but wait’ll the atomic field dissolves." "It’s not a gravity collapse. It’s a novelty collapse. We are collapsing into a black hole of novelty." "The future is not like the past except that it hasn’t happened. If you were to suddenly find yourself in the future, it’s a vector-storm of unrealized possibilities. You’ve never seen an unrealized possibility." "I believe that the idea that is the most fun is probably the closest to the truth, and I find this idea to be absolutely delightful." "The whole thing [Timewave hypothesis] smacks of the impossible. It’s even pushed me toward the idea that maybe this is not actually a reality. We’re trapped, or I’m trapped. I don’t know if you’re trapped. But we’re in some kind of piece of fiction. It’s like a Phillip K. Dick deal, you know. We’re in some kind of simulacrum, and the clue to the fact that it’s a simulacrum is this impossible idea [the Timewave]. And so the point of the idea is not to believe it, but to use it as a wedge to fight our way out of this labyrinth and back to whatever reality we were in before we fell into this situation. Something like that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dustin Cantwell’s Fane of the Cosmos
12/2/20091 hour, 4 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 204 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 4

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity." "Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process." "Feelings are primary. The primary datum of experience is feeling, and then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience. And then still lower on the rung, and I maintain lower on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience." "I think it’s really important to keep things as simple as possible because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly baroque. So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of Great Atlantis only further exacerbates the problem." "We know that behind all this constipated sociability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience. It’s important to keep it in mind in very psychedelically situations. But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality and commit crimes based on delusion about what is and isn’t reality." "The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of the culture. It is literally the response to toxic cultures. The more toxic the culture the more ego is revered as a natural value within that culture." "People are clueless, and they’re being used and abused. Seemingly intelligent people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconsciousable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous towards the Earth. … Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decomodify experience. … What is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?" "Novelty is that quality of nature that seeks complexity. It’s countervailing force is called habit." "The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it these past 500 years, because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true; the intuition that every moment is unique [time is not uniform]. It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysics of being." "The way you investigate time is by moving inward, by investigating metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "It is as though the Winter Solstice of 2012 was some kind of dwell point out of which the temporal continuum is being generated." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option "The more of a mind you have, the more fun you can have when it’s fucked-up." -Nick Herbert (Wikipedia entry about Nick)
11/18/20091 hour, 12 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 203 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 3

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it." "If you aren’t ‘cool’ then you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means, by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed. But it can’t really be faked. But the whole engine of marketing is designed to make you think that it can be faked. I don’t know if I’m cool or not, but I am incredibly resistant to any effort to make me think I’m uncool." "You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears." "It’s very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked. … This nobody ever criticizing anybody else brings the intellectual enterprise and the refinement of human knowledge to a screeching halt. The way in which the intellectual enterprise moves forward is by being critiqued, analyzed, subjected to tests." "Scientists really respect each other for proving that they are wrong. If you have a theory that you’ve defended for fifteen years, and then you publish a paper saying, ‘I’ve been over it again. I’ve looked at the data again, and you know what fellow colleagues, I botched it. I was wrong.’ They promote you for this. They say, ‘This is the essence of intellectual honesty.’ … Religion doesn’t work like this. In the religious domain you never admit you’re wrong. You further elaborate the story to save whatever preposterous notion has been exposed. … And so what you get is error based on error based on delusion based on illusion based on lie based on half-truth based on supposition based on somebody thought it would be nice IF." "Somewhere after the Sixties, when the government decided that universal public education only created mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights, education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry. And instead we took an authoritarian model. The purpose of education [today in the United States] is to produce unquestioning consumers with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is." "If you turn cannabis into a Schedule I drug, a felony, suddenly all of these people who never felt inspired to dissent, never felt the heavy hand of the government, are automatically members of a criminal class. And what this does is thus radicalize the people so persecuted, and in a feedback loop of paranoia drive the government then into a frenzy of trying to understand and control this minority group. The idea that states of mind are matters for legal manipulation, it’s amazing that that discussion is even taking place in a democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson." "In the whole Marxist episode nobody was ever required to piss in a cup in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China to establish their loyalty to the government or the corporations, and yet that went down here with barely a murmur." "Once you find psychedelics there’s nothing between you and a complete check-out from your cultural heritage. The only cost to you is the complete abandonment of everything you’ve ever known and loved." "You can choose to be free, but it’s the last choice you’ll ever make." –Kafka [McKenna's Five Percent Rule] "As long as any school of dissent remains below five percent of the population no money is budgeted to destroy it." "I think that no one is in charge, and this is a very good thing because it allows the internal dynamic of the situation to express itself. Everybody who wants to control the situation is fighting a loosing battle." "I don’t feel this need for intellectual closure. I don’t see why things should make sense." [McKenna's Law] "As you advance in social hierarchy the percentage of smart people does not increase. … Every human situation is bedeviled by morons. No matter how high you rise you’re surrounded by fools,
11/11/20091 hour, 30 minutes
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Podcast 202 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves." "If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being. But given a more advanced nervous system and a more advanced cultural tool kit the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love." "The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a position like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion, the illusion created by the local language." "The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being." "Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste." "The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil." "Nature seems to be in the business of building systems that transcend themselves." "We are all just swarms of personalities. The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea." "Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over." "We’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner." "What shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals." "The keeper of the values [of his culture] is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit. … The shaman at the top realizes that, my god we stare out onto an abyss. We do not know." "Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness." "Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises." "Sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideology." "Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion, not a feeling to be drawn from that observation, the conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt present of the immediate moment must be what life is for." "I would say the bouquet of life is this moment." "I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever you miss the point." "We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children." "Life is what you get when a hyper dimensional object protrudes into ordinary space." "We clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter." "In my highest states I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this [human existence] is the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than this. This is the bottom line, and so the good news is it’s only up from here." "The last dance you dance alone, and nobody will be watching." "I don’t think you should live in anticipation of the drama of your death-bead scene, better to repair to the moment." "The real message of the psychedelic experience and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique we’ve been carrying out here is to take the moment. The felt presence of immediate experience, this is all you know. It’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibilities, fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope, who knows?
10/27/20091 hour, 20 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 201 – “Appreciating Imagination” – Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present." "If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it’s paranoia." "Art is like the footprint of where the imagination has been." "Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception, not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be." "Who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore when there were saber toothed cats walking around that weighted 1100 pounds?" "Imitation is an act of the imagination." "What is a city but a complete denial of nature? … Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho." "What this [virtual reality] should tell us, in the domain of light the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will." "Shamanism didn’t use matter to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind, in the presence of unusual neurochemicals, to produce unusual phenomenon and unusual sensoria of experience." "A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination." "We now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this." "Clearly we [humans] view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion." "The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow … and our best people are working on that very problem." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #1 Marc Emery’s Prison Potcast – Episode #2
10/21/20091 hour, 26 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 200 – “A Few Words From Our Elders”

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: SASHA SHULGIN: "So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive, they do not do what occurs, they allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get into and express yourself without the help of the material." "My main argument for continuing to use the term [psychedelic] is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about." ANN SHULGIN: "My interest in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche. They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be." "The psychedelics, the visionary plants, allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning, because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge." "The ’shadow work’ is, perhaps, the most important use of these materials, as far as I’m concerned, that there is. Because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it’s not a monster, that it’s not a terrible, horrible beast, that it is the uncultivated, the unsophisticated and slightly, sometimes, unlawful part of ourselves, which can be one of our greatest allies as long as we can find the courage to do the work necessary to discover it and become one with it and to negotiate with it." "I consider them [psychedelics] basically spiritual tools." BABA RAM DAS: "The place we share is that place that stands nowhere, not the place that’s caught in these spirals that involve intellectual advance, or ‘Now we know it!’, and so on. That’s all like little ripples on the ocean." "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised." TIMOTHY LEARY: "…neuro-geography that tells us that where you are determines who you are, habitat determines species." "We are literally at a position where collectively, working in harmony, we can do most of the things, and take the responsibilities, which in the past have been attributed to the great deities of the past. I think the Golden Age is ahead. It’s the age of humanist science, humanist technology, pagan science, pagan technology, high tech, high touch." "I think it’s our duty as explorers and as frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminology. … I really feel that words are tremendously important. . . . We’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years because more people have been killed in the name of god that any other word around." TERENCE MCKENNA: "Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment." “Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!” "On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It’s crawling all over you! And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification.
10/16/20091 hour, 34 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 199 – “Timothy Leary at MIT – 1967″

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy, because it’s all a play of energy that we’re involved in." "Now the message I have is an old one, the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It’s those six words: Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in. It’s a rhythm." "Now how do you turn on? Well, I’ll tell you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking. You can’t think your way out of this sticky black checker board of an American education. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on you’ve got to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament." "Now with all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Viet Nam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house." "The educational system, at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug." "The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully because you’re likely to get hooked." "You, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out, and by drop out I mean all the way. You can’t vote, I urge you not to do politics, don’t picket, don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/6/20091 hour, 9 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 198 – “Terence McKenna on NPR – 1999″

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences." "For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status." (This was in response to a question about legal highs.) "Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them." (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.) "Science fiction is the gateway drug." "I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in." "Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist." "I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I’m interested in finding one doorway that works." "Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced, free house calls in our homes. This could almost be a litmus test for sanity." "Whether achieved through some yogic or some quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways." "It’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight [that we are creatures of language] is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. … Code is the primary reality." "I’ve always felt in a way that the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was ‘We’ll try anything as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work,’ and that automatically exempts psychedelics." "Once you find psychedelics you’re not looking for the accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine, or oneness, or something like that." "Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously, since the sixteenth century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language, and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on." "Computer code is magical language. It’s language which when executed causes something to actually happen." "So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis." "Drug-taking and drug-using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap we...
9/30/200959 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 197 – “McNature”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "It seems to me that it [Nature] is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language." "Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity." "Nature is actually the goal at the end of history." "Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination." "And what we’re looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization." "We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what’s going on or that the generation which follows us will know what’s going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what’s going on?" "It’s no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other." "Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong." "Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society." "Living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding. So that every day you know more, and see into things with greater depth, than you did before." "Culture is another dimention." "The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/16/20091 hour, 31 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 196 – “Timothy Leary vs. Notre Dame”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Of course, what the politicians debate about is really irrelevant because they’re in basic agreement. They believe in the system. They just want the power to run it. So they give us the illusion about fighting fiercely about words and tactics and promises, but we know, don’t we, that there’s no choice there." "What’s it all about? What’s life all about? Why are we here? To build bigger and bigger machines? To do things faster and faster and think more and more? In fifty years everyone will know what I’m telling you tonight. That the only reason for being here is to get on this glorious adventure of finding the Divine, unraveling the great conscious mystery story. That’s the only point, ecstatic being, that is, get high and stay high." "Dope is going to be the religion of the future." "You just can’t drop LSD the way you slug a beer. It’s much too intricate" "Once you start playing around with reality you are never the same." "Most of you aren’t ready to take psychedelic drugs now because you haven’t done much work on the yoga of the senses. To put it in a word, most of you are senseless." "It may not come as a surprise to an audience of Catholics that the sensory realm has, since the dawn of human history, been recognized as one of the great sacramental approaches to the divine. And any religion that has lasted for any time at all has utilized the sensual experience as a way of turning on the beholder, getting him high, getting him ameliorated to a god-intoxicated state." "If you don’t have a sacred place stick to beer." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/14/20091 hour, 11 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 195 – “The Future of Higher Intelligence” Part 2

Guest speakers: Robert Anton Wilson, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: "Creativity has a touch of the bizarre" –Robert Anton Wilson "Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate." –Robert Anton Wilson "We need something to replace death as an intelligence increaser. Generally, the only way that intelligence could grow was to get rid of the people who haven’t taken any new imprints since adolescence, as Tim would say." –Robert Anton Wilson "The bizarre, the unthinkable is where creativity comes from." –Robert Anton Wilson "In that process [Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures], we are dissipating, collapsing, out of all the structures we know, not into chaos, not into the collapse of civilization, but into a higher level of coherence." –Robert Anton Wilson "There seem to be more optimism about psychedelics. They seem to be treated now with more rationality, as I was hoping they would be back in the Sixties, but they couldn’t be then. We were too ignorant." –Dr. John Lilly "The dumb people in the Sunbelt have all gone to Washington and New York to seek their fortunes there, people like Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. He’s just plain dumb. He’s got a track record not where everything he touches is turning wrong simply because he’s betting on the past." –Timothy Leary "The doomsday sayers, the people who are warning of and hoping for some sort of apocalyptic crisis, an earthquake, an end to everything. Now anyone who lays that trip on you, just look at them and smile and say, ‘Listen, the world isn’t coming to an end. You have come to an end of your vision. It’s you who feel that your end is at hand. The evolutionary picture is moving along beautifully.’ " –Timothy Leary Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/14/200953 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 194 – “The Future of Higher Intelligence” Part 1

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: This recording was made at a conference held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981. Panelists include: Dr. Timothy Leary, Frank Baron, Dr. Andrew Weil,Walter Houston Clark, Robert Anton Wilson, and Paul Krasner [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I think it’s all about the brain, or certainly the brain as the key to consciousness and intelligence. The brain, as we well know, is the taboo organ of the 20th century." "The introduction of a new technology, a new paradigm, a new world model to a primitive society takes a lot of delicate doing. You can’t spook them too quickly. … You have to attach the new model to some of the old theories." "It is now possible to access your brain. It is now possible to activate circuits that were undreamed of before. … There’s no limits to the creativity, and imagination, and novelty, and intelligence that can be generated by this instrument, the brain, whose function we are now realizing is to fabricate reality." "The more you understand about the complexities of the brain, and the psychopharmeucedicals which activate it, the more cautious, the more careful, the more experimental, the more scientific you are before you rush around activating this instrument." "The function of human life from now on is to learn how to access, to activate, to direct, manage, and control your own brain." "It’s not the survival of the fittest. It’s the survival of the people with a sense of humor who can say, ‘Hey, look at those dinosaurs. We won’t go that way." "You can only evolve and mutate when you can laugh at your old form and go beyond it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/24/20091 hour, 11 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 193 – Alan Watts & friends “The Houseboat Summit – 1967″

Guest speakers: Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Allen Cohen PROGRAM NOTES: "The Houseboat Summit" was held in February 1967, and has been documented in several places on the Web. In addition to the quotes below, which are from this podcast, you can read a more complete transcript of this historic meeting here. "I think that, thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership." -Alan Watts "What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed." -Alan Watts "My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it’s always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form." -Timothy Leary "Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life." -Alan Watts "That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality." - "And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom." -Alan Watts "Increasingly, we’re developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it." - "Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with." -Timothy Leary "What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks." -Alan Watts "Half the things I’ve done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn’t have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat." -Timothy Leary "In other words, when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting. See, we’ve left this game and it bores us." -Alan Watts, February 1967 "I would agree to change the slogan to ‘Drop out. Turn on. Drop in.’ " -Timothy Leary Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Matt Muirhead’s e(n)tymology
8/17/20091 hour, 26 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 192 – Timothy Leary “Live at the Stone – 1987″

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "So to me, that Summer of Love [1967] was kind of a coming out party, a coming of age party, of the first wave, the first year of the baby boom [when the first boomers turned 21]." "It’s kind of interesting that the military, and the police, and these bureaucrats, they live in a germ-free society. They live in shells of bureaucratic boot kissing." "I’m very much against addicts and drug fuck-ups." "At those moments in human history where it’s time for our species to confront a new reality, whether it’s going from four foot to two foot, or it’s to make love face-to-face or whatever, there’s a certain breed of human beings in every gene pool who come along at that time and make us feel comfortable. They explain, they personalize, they popularize what’s really happening. Now you know who these people are. They are the artists, the musicians, the playwrights, the poets, the myth makers, the wizards, the jugglers, the story tellers, the crazed scientist, the mischievous physicist, you know who they are. In every epic of human history these people come along." "So finally we catch on, it’s the governments that cause all the fuck-ups." "It doesn’t do any good to think for yourself if you don’t know how to think." "They say, never mind about politics or economics or religion, it’s language that controls society and that controls the individual. And who controls the language controls everything. … If you control the language, and the technology of the language, you control the mind." "The personal computer allows you to do exactly what these French philosophers say we gotta do, control your own screen." "The real message I get from the 20th century is learn how to be cyber-hip." "Literacy my friends is the oppressive chains of the educated middle class." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Timothy Leary Recordings (MP3 Format) Download Instructions PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 1 Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 2 Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 3 The Sordid Story of a DEA Informant Halperngate (PDF) by Jon Hanna Halperngate II (PDF) by John Beresford, M.D. The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc (PDF) by Erik Davis
7/24/20091 hour, 34 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 191 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 5

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable." "This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human." "It’s a relationship [ingesting mushrooms] like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers." "I said [to the mushroom], ‘What are you doing on this planet?’, and it said, ‘You’re a mushroom, you live cheap.’ " "To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back." "One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life." "Memory training is great psychedelic training." "There’s something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology." " ‘Drugs’ and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position." "Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image." "I can’t think of a society on Earth where people don’t take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/17/20091 hour, 36 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 190 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 4

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)
7/8/20091 hour, 26 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 189 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 3

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
7/1/20091 hour, 40 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 188 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 2

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
6/24/20091 hour, 31 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 187 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 1

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
6/17/20091 hour, 26 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 186 – “The Genesis Generation”

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
6/10/200955 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 185 – “Shamanism and the Archaic Revival”

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
6/3/20091 hour, 17 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 184 – “The Boundaries of the Human Mind”

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
5/20/20091 hour, 1 minute, 39 seconds
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Podcast 183 – “What Are Humans For?”

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)
5/7/20091 hour, 3 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 182 – “The Spark of Divine Creativity”

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
4/28/20091 hour, 4 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 181 – “What Science Forgot” Q&A Session

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
4/25/200957 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 180 – “What Science Forgot”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? I mean it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? … I think so." "I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy, and I forget that not everyone is so fortunate." "What I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "An added wrinkle [to the story of ever-increasing complexity] is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound." "I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game. If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently players in the cosmic drama. And in this particular act of the cosmic drama we hold a very central role. We are at the pinnacle of the expression of the complexification in the animal world." "Since the rise of Western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that we’re getting from the impact of human culture on the Earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere …" "History is a state of incredible destabilization. It’s a chaostrophy in the process of happening." "It’s very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist. Because if it were to exist it would impart to reality a purpose. … Science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose." "Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable Omega point." "So why hope? Isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so. I think the out-of-control-ness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact that it’s out of control. I think that if it’s out of control then our side is winning." "We represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event." "In our species complexity has turned inward upon itself. And in our species time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution, and instead historical time is generated." "It is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history. History then is ending. History is a kind of gestation process. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. It’s an episode in the life of a species." "Culture is merely clothing on the human experience." "The body is the nexus of the mystery of life, and our culture takes us out of the body." "More and more, the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian Mind." "We now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of Apocalypse We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be awaiting us." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/15/20091 hour, 14 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 179 – “Timothy Leary at Cornell – 1989″

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "The first very dangerous side effect of psychedelic drugs is long term memory gain. And the second is short term memory loss. And I forget the third." "The time has come for us as a species, and for you all as individuals, to move into the post industrial society." "We all create our own reality." [Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre] "You can make up all the abstract gods or leaders that you want, and theories and so forth, but you’re just whistling in the dark. The existential facts of the matter are that you are in the nose cone of your own time ship, hurtling at the speed of light into a dark future, and you don’t have a clue or navigational map. And if you’re scared, well, grow up." "The sillier a religion is the more passionately fanatic people will defend it, if you know what I mean. So you’d better be careful when you buy a god, because it can get you in a lot of shit." "Quantum physics is all about loosening up your tight structure." "Now think about jazz. What’s jazz about? Jazz is about singularity, about creating your own rhythm, improvising, doing your own riffs, innovating. Hey, that’s exactly what quantum physics is all about." "The fact that you become an individual, and think singular thoughts, doesn’t mean you can’t be understood." "The function of the government is simply to protect us, not from ourselves, but protect us from bad [impure] products." "No matter how crazy, fucked-up an individual can be, he can’t be as fucked up as the Catholic Church." "You know that collectivity lowers intelligence. No matter how dumb the individual is, there’s no dumb individual that could have caused World War II." "Colleges, universities, are tax supported, state supported, or financed by wealthy individuals and trusts to prepare you to find your niche, your spot, your cog in the great industrial machine. This is a factory." "Don’t decide to major until after you graduate. When you get 50 years old, select your major." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Keepin’ The Vibe Alive Mick Mashbir Mick’s MySpace Page Lyrics to "American Weirdo"
4/9/20091 hour, 14 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 178 – “A random walk through two great minds”

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All of the following quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "I don’t want to legalize drugs. It’s not the government’s business to legalize anything we do privately in our own homes. Are they going to legalize masturbation." "By far, the number one problem facing our species for the last 25,000 years has been the relentless, ruthless, perennial, almost invisible oppression of women and children by armed men. And it starts in the home." "The concept of a generation implies that young people are doing something different." "Each of these generations, my generation and the so-called hippie generation, we’re heroic. We were thrown into the future where there was no map, where there were no guidebooks." "Hippies, to be honest, were not very hip, compared to the beatniks." "The function of the 21st century is to learn how to operate our brains." "The human brain is designed to design realities." "You have to face the fact that people born between 1946 and 1964 are a new species." "The way evolution, as I understand it, works is DNA, biological intelligence, Gaia wisdom, egg intelligence does not like final forms. … You’ll see the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘grow’. In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing, and it is also someone who has reached their final form. And if there is one thing you can say about evolution, she does not like final forms." "There really is an awesome epidemic of deliberate stupidity that is laid upon us by the media, by the press, by magazines and so forth. They simply do not raise any of the issues that challenge our interests or intelligence." [Quoting Abbie Hoffmann] "We may have been young, and we may have been silly, and we may have been idealistic, and we may have been too romantic, but god damn it, we were right!" "I have one cause, and that’s the goal of the performing philosopher, is to encourage you, and inspire you, and empower you, to the extent I can, to Think for Yourself and Question Authority." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Timothy Leary Archive Cody & Sancho’s Podcasting Tutorial The Conversations Network (Levelator)
3/31/20091 hour, 6 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 177 – “Surfing Finnegans Wake” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "McLuhan was synonymous with incomprehensibility in the Sixties." "In McLuhan there is a very deep strain of nostalgia for the essence of the Medieval world of what he called ‘manuscript culture’." "Joyce is, in ‘The Wake’, making his own alchemeric cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology." "Nothing is now unconscious if your data-search commands are powerful enough." "So really, like for Joyce, for McLuhan the book is the central symbol of the age, the central mystery of our time. In a sense, I sort of share that notion. It’s a very Talmudic notion. It’s a very psychedelic notion. It’s the idea that somehow the career of the word is the central, overarching metaphor of the age. And, naturally, if the book is the central metaphor for reality, then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual. And this is in fact how I think reality was seen until the rise of modern science." "The idea of the individual is a post-Medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers." "The notion of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society, this again is a print-created idea." "Reading is not looking. Reading is an entirely different kind of behavior. … Nobody opens a book and looks at print … We read print, but we look at manuscript, because manuscript carries the intrinsic signification of the individual who made it." "[Quoting Marshall McLuhan] High definition is the state of being well-filled with data." "Print is the least invisible of all media. Print is an incredible Rube Goldberg invention for conveying information."We are going beyond the entire domain of scribal humanity and actually reaching back to a shamanic feeling-tone kind of thing." "A perfect media is an invisible media, and print is the least invisible of all media." "Those who read, do not see, even when they lift their eyes from their books, they carry the attitude of print into the world. They read. They attempt to read nature. And you can’t read nature. You must look at nature. You must see nature." " ‘The Medium is the message’ means that the medium is the thing which is making the difference." "Imagine if a drug had been introduced in 1948 that we all spent six and one-half hours per day, on average, watching. And the one thing about drugs, in their defense, is that it’s very hard to diddle the message. A drug is a mirror, but television isn’t a mirror. Television is a billboard, and anybody who pays their money can put their message into the trip. This is an extraordinarily insidious situation." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/26/20091 hour, 7 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 176 – “Surfing Finnegans Wake” Part 1

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "In some ways, I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature, of the twentieth century." "The reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things, clearly. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic/eschatological." "What I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character, per se. You never know who is speaking." " ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries." "Joyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed, and only ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ survive, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this." "It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get." "Anna Livia Plurabelle is Molly Bloom on acid, basically." "People say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience." "The character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that you are supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that." "What all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language." "We are living in a terminal civilization. I don’t want to say dying, because civilizations aren’t animals. But we are living in an age of great self-summation. … Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation underway." "The purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future." "Somehow, complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Oracle Gatherings … June 2009 … The Fountain
3/18/20091 hour, 27 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 175 – “The Intelligent Use of Psychedelic Drugs”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have." "The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow." "American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently." "He [William James] later wrote the book "Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide." "The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden." "The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly." "As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some more information on exactly how evolution got started." "All of you in this room have experienced more realities, more crisis, more of life, you’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers in the past." "The generation you belong to is of key importance." "Nobody died for my sins, man. I did my time for ‘em." "Let me give you an example of set and setting. If you take LSD under the following conditions: you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber, and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention, that is bad set and bad setting." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/10/20091 hour, 13 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 174 – “Pushing the Envelope”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.] "The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place." "Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may never know what hit us." "If I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the Net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull." "All time is is how much change you can pack into a second." "You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise." "It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you." "Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected." "It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is." "This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?" "To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination." "Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating." "I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago." "It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense." "Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity, and beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences." "The momentum now is inevitable. Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable." "What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all." "When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let’s be frank about it, it is enslavement." "The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Transcript of this Talk Video of Bruce Damer’s EvoGrid This is the book Terence spoke about in this podcast.
3/5/20091 hour, 32 minutes, 1 second
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Podcast 173 – Shulgin: “How I Go About Inventing New Drugs”

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The two quotations below are by Sasha Shulgin.] "Internally, no one’s an elder. Internally everyone’s kinda around 35 or so." "The people at the industry said, ‘Gee, if you have that kind of imagination that you can look at a structure and guess at another structure that might be active, why don’t you just do whatever you want to do.’ And I did." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/26/20091 hour, 1 minute, 50 seconds
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Podcast 172 – “The State of LSD in 2003″

Guest speakers: Earth & Fire Erowid, Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Nick Sand, and Dave Nichols PROGRAM NOTES: Erowid’s LSD Vault LSD and Drug Testing LSD FAQ Part 1 LSD FAQ Part 2 "I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event." –Ralph Metzner "The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture." –Ralph Metzner "The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943." –Ralph Metzner "Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state." –Ralph Metzner "It [the prohibition of psychedelics] puts the industrial civilization in a very unique position. It’s just about the only society in the whole history of humanity that doesn’t have any use for non-ordinary states of consciousness." –Stanislav Grof "We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimention in the psyche. It’s a legitimate dimention in the universal scheme of things. It doesn’t mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously." –Stanislav Grof Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Psychedelic Party of Israel
2/16/20091 hour, 19 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 171 – “The Technology of Freedom”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Many people are afraid to be free. They’re afraid that if liberty were to seep through the land then they would loose something. The just don’t trust themselves enough to be free." "Prison is a luxury. Unfortunately it is wasted on people who don’t know how to use it." "The objective is to get as far away from The Man as you can." "There’s only one technology of freedom. It’s the human brain." "You’ve got to be smart to be free, and most people don’t want to take the responsibility to be free." "You are as old as the last time you changed your mind." (Anon quoted by Leary?) "Liberty is inexorably intertwined with intelligence." "Every time you hear that word ’security’ watch out, because somebody’s going to take some of your freedom away." "One way to become more intelligent is to migrate to where people are as intelligent or more intelligent than you." "I’m basically pro-drugs. Drugs give you more options. Now I’m not pro any one drug. I’m pro-freedom-of-drugs." "We can only go as far outward as we have gone inward." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Timothy Leary Archives ONLINE
2/10/20091 hour, 22 seconds
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Podcast 170 – “How the Web Looked Back in 1994″

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s me in Hawaii sometime in 1994. "I believe that the World Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the noogenesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it!" –Ralph Abraham "Notice that throughout history the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the blacks, they’ve taken their hits, but the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history have been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people [the Internet] utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb." –Terence McKenna "Chaotic as the Web is, what it is is a controlled psychedelic experience spreading through the populace at the highest levels of intelligentsia." –Terence McKenna "What it [the Internet] will be in the future will depend on what kind of people with whatever motives would actually go there." –Ralph Abraham "I think it’s [the Internet] built into the evolutionary morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos in that it could no more be stopped than mitocondria or societal organization."–Terence McKenna "I think it [the Internet] will supersede us. I don’t know how much monkey meat will be connected to the World Wide Web when the Web is complete. It may shed the monkey meat."–Terence McKenna "The population explosion could end, let’s say, because of the World Wide Web. This is my greatest dream." –Ralph Abraham "Nature is a world wide web. That was the first world wide web." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcasts 19 (Part 1) & 20 (Part 2) “The World Wide Web and the Millennium” a conversation between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham (August 1998)
2/9/20091 hour, 12 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 169 – “Truth is a Dangerous Thing”

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by J. Krishnamurti.] "Give your heart and your mind with every thing that you have to find out a way of living differently." "Where there is love, do what you will it will be right action, but never bring conflict to one’s life." "We are talking about a revolution, not physical, but a psychological revolution in which there is no, at the depth, conformity. … Conformity exists when there is comparison. For a mind to be totally free from comparison, that is to observe your whole history which is embedded in you." "What’s your answer to this question that human beings have lived this way for millenia upon millenia, why haven’t they changed? . . . Why don’t you, if you’re at all serious in this matter, why don’t you ask yourself that question? Why am I, a human being who has been through all of this, why haven’t I changed?" "To go into this question of bringing about a total revolution in what is, one must have an extraordinary sense of awareness." "And when observed through history, through our life, all that hope and faith have no meaning at all, because what is important is what we are, actually what we are, not what we think we are, or what we think we should be, but actually what is." "What we are trying in these discussions and talks here is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind. Not accept things as they are." "To understand is to transform what is." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More information about Krishnamurti Krishnamurti Founda.tion of America .J. Krishnamurti Online Books by Jiddu Krishnamurti
1/25/200959 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 168 – “What Hawaii Says About Evolution”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: All of the following quotations are from a private trialogue held at Terence McKenna’s home in Hawaii sometime in 1994. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think what life on islands brings home to us is that Earth itself is an island." "I think the technological principle on which the next century [21st] will operate is a mimicking of nature, solid-state, micro-miniaturized, solar-based, no moving parts, and so forth." "Any theory which has us gathering together in large crowds to chant should look back at the Third Reich before it proceeds too far with its agenda." "America is a cultural bulldozer. It just tramples and destroys everything in its path." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/24/20091 hour, 38 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 167 – “Evolution of Intelligence”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "The evolution of intelligence: Now this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter. "I think it’s time to dust off the word pagan again. The word pagan seems to mean one who loves life. A pagan is someone who loves humanity and would never dream of oppressing humanity with Original Sins and other life sentences, which distract from self-esteem and courage and self-confidence." "We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes, we are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes that didn’t grow up and develop tails and swing around in trees. . . . In many aspects, the human species is an immature species. We haven’t committed ourselves to a final form, and therein, perhaps, lies our great usefulness to the DNA code and the biological wisdom." "If you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve, and grow, and go through the changes, the many changes that are possible, at all costs avoid terminal adulthood." "If you stay in the same place, you tend, obviously, to not be exposed to new challenges, and you’re not going to be under pressure to grow. Although, it is well known though, that if you migrate, if you want to change, if you want to grow, if you want to develop, if you want to reach a higher level, a standard genetic tactic, and a standard human tactic, is to migrate to a new frontier where you have a chance to develop and grow." "People born in the same generation share an unspoken sense of reality throughout the world." "DNA uses juvenilization, mutation and change in the young, only when there’s a challenge that the old way can’t face." "The last fifty years of the twentieth century in this country are simply the history of the baby boom moving like a pig through a python through American culture." "If you find yourself in a generation that is pretty stuffy, migrate! A generation is an island in time. … You’re as old as the people you hang out with." "The intelligent evolutionary tradition has always been intelligent skepticism of authority." "Throughout human history, those in power have been wrong 99% of the time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More about Mary Pinchot Meyer
1/7/20091 hour, 30 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 166 – “Psychedelic Dreams”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] "The good. What is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky. The true. What is it? Trickier, even trickier. The beautiful. What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste." "Beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams." "On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving, the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces, near the levers of the human machine is immense." "When I say psychedelic I have something very specific in mind that a substance or a plant should do. It should not inhibit clarity, in other words not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out or confusion. It shouldn’t interfere with that, and it should transform thought. And it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed." "The biggest danger with psychedelics is that while you are in that open state some moron will mess with you." "Matter is not lacking in magic. Matter is magic." "At bedrock, the universe is more like a DMT flash than it is like an 18th century garden party, as we were previously assured by the practitioners of science." "An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change." "But if I’m right, that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the apple of its eye. … You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose, to add to the complexity. Your enemy, disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness." "The psychedelic community is cleverly invisible. Because our choices in gender expression, fashion, and so on have, by crypto-osmosis, come to dominate the values of the culture, we can no longer tell ourselves from straight people." "Basically, when you smoke DMT what happens is pure confoundment." "DMT does not provide ‘an’ experience which you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some kind of hyperdimensional inflation, instantly. And then you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can’t be downloaded into as low dimensional a language as English." "One toke [of DMT] away is this absolutely reality-dissolving, catagory-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility. And I feel like this is a truth that has to be told." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/6/20091 hour, 12 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 165 – “From Beats, to Hippies, to McKenna”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima(?) PROGRAM NOTES: "There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education." –Timothy Leary "I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made." –Allen Ginsberg [NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.] "To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances." –Terence McKenna "It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone." "Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence." "I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!" "The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream." "The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature." "The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Butterfly Hunter by Klea McKenna Psychedelic Salon Forum at TheGrowReport.com (closed)
12/20/20081 hour, 7 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 164 – McKenna: “Some thoughts about ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.] >"Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it’s quite spectacular." "It’s [ayahuasca] essentially ‘brain soup’. There’s nothing in it which doesn’t occur naturally in human neuro-metabolism." "It’s [ayahuasca] the only hallucinogen I know, where if it’s made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn’t done it." "What it [the ayahuasca experience] is is a self-generated, self-controlled immersion in a non-causal, parallel construct of some sort." "This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don’t want to clench, you don’t want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation … most of the time." "In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told." "Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/8/20081 hour, 7 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 163 – “Reality Syndromes & Cyberpunk Symptoms”

Guest speaker: Wrye Sententia PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Wrye Sententia.] "How can we have confidence in what we think we know, in our particular version of reality, in our particular take on the world? … What is real and what is false, and does it really matter if there is a difference." "Mind is built on consciousness. It’s an accumulation of life-experience over time. … Consciousness, for me, is sort of a snapshot in the photo album of the mind." "Cyberpunk, I think, is about altered states of body and altered states of mind." "And the reason I mention the decade of the drug wars [in connection with cyberpunk fiction] is because there are a lot of overlays between altering your mind through drugs and altering your mind through technologies, hard technologies." "Now we can’t protect ourselves from misconceptions. But I think we can keep from evolving them, maybe by taking the doctrine of signs and saying, instead of finding the purpose find the consequence." " ‘Augmented reality’ supplements the physical world, the external world, with additional information." "If we put filters on cameras to enhance the picture, what kinds of filters can we put on our minds to enhance our day-to-day walk?" "If cognitive liberty is the right of each individual to think independently, or autonomously, and to engage in the full spectrum of thought, and to have access to multiple modes of consciousness, if that’s what cognitive liberty is, it’s something that is a political goal." "The cultural machinery never rests." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics
11/27/20081 hour, 20 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 162 – “Cultural Healing”

Guest speaker: Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: "Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. No lasting change is effected by politics; it has to come from within." –Nina Graboi "How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies we die. We are that stream." –Robert Forte Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: FREE Mp3 Downloads "Psychedelics, Science, and WTF" (Comment thread with Robert Forte) ">Operation Mockingbird Project MKULTRA Cointelpro  9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press David Ray Griffin shows that the official story about 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true. These contradictions show, therefore, that individuals and agencies articulating the official story of 9/11 have made many false statements. Congress and the press clearly should ask which of the contradictory statements are false and why they were made. This book is purely factual, simply laying out the fact that these internal contradictions exist. As such, the book contains no theory. Politicians and journalists who deal with the issues raised herein, therefore, will not be giving credence to some "conspiracy theory" about 9/11. They will simply be carrying out their duty to ask why the official story about 9/11, arguably the most fateful event of our time, is riddled with so many contradictions.  The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers – who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers – is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 – stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves – and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day p>  9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. 1 Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world’s strongest and most technologically sophisticated country? Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that ...
11/18/20081 hour, 28 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 161 – “Reality Check”

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "We have the concept of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal city of Plato’s Republic. So casually we might call that Utopian fantasy. Although Plato did try to actually realize it in the political organization of a particular city. He ended up in jail for that effort. Another thing to kind of keep in the back of your mind as we choose whether or not to associate with this particular strand of the human endeavor [utopianism]."–Ralph Abraham "A restoration of the sense of the life of nature could lead to a new society in which heaven and Earth are mediated through human beings. Human beings would be the mediator of the marriage of heaven and Earth to bring about a harmonious relationship at the whole of nature on this Earth, somehow bringing human society into a right relationship between the Earth and the heavens." –Rupert Sheldrake "If you restrict yourself to the realm of the rational, then you only have two choices: utopia or more history. And more history is beginning to look less and less likely." –Terence McKenna "I see all these Christian fundamentalists running around, they also believe in the millennium. And they are the major anti-progressive force in most advanced societies." –Terence McKenna "We have the money, the scientific knowledge, the communications systems and so forth to solve any of our problems, feeding the hungry, curing disease, halting the destruction of the environment. The problem is our minds, that we cannot change our minds as quickly as we can redesign harbors, flatten mountains, cut rain forests, dam rivers, these things pose no problem. Changing our minds is very difficult." –Terence McKenna "We represent the individual atoms that are flowing together to make the transcendental object at the end of time." –Terence McKenna "The historical record does not support the eschaton." –Ralph Abraham   Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/6/20081 hour, 31 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 160 – “The League for Spiritual Discovery”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Psychedelic art is the public face of the communication device of our new religion." "Man’s attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination. There’s hardly anything that hasn’t been used one time or another, or in one culture or another, to get this [psychedelic] experience." "We don’t care what method people use [to turn on]. We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that can turn you on. But we also insist that no one tell us that we can’t use our sacraments that seem to work for us." "We’re convinced, and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in a meaningless, robot, assembly-line series of activities. They don’t really know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but they’re just pushed off to this assembly-line and off they go." "[By drop out] we mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in to the productive." "You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses." "There’s no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers." "We use this word ‘psychosis’ the way we used the word ‘devil’ or ‘devil-possession’ or ‘witchcraft’ two or three or four or five hundred years ago." "When the time comes, let your kids turn you on. That’s my message to the middle-age, middle-class, whiskey-drinking American suburban family." "So jail to us is not a middle class disgrace. Here I am, a former Harvard professor, I’ve been arrested three times in the last year. Isn’t that disgraceful? To me that just means I’m doing my job. And if I don’t get the establishment a little worried, I wonder if my message is not getting through." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/28/20081 hour, 15 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 159 – “Shulgin & Forte at Horizons 2008″

Guest speakers: Robert Forte, Ann Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "I think it’s extraordinarily important, again, the context of set and setting that we use these drugs in, if we’re going to succeed in the Psychedelic Renaissance, is something that needs to be underlined again and again." –Robert Forte "I would say that, arguably, the oldest use of psychedelics in our Western culture, let’s say, is the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were a psychedelic drug ceremony that occurred every year for 2,000 years in ancient Greece." –Robert Forte "Using appropriate scientific methodologies and naturalistic observations, [Timothy Leary] showed that psychedelic drugs were safe. He showed their clinical effectiveness. He showed their effects on enhancing creativity." –Robert Forte "Personally, I think my most keen friend amongst the various phenethylamines and alkaloids I’ve worked with and synthesized has been 2CB. To me, it’s a vary favorable, warm, and very comfortable compound." –Sasha Shulgin [MDMA] is the most remarkable insight drug, and is a suburb tool for psychotherapy." –Ann Shulgin "Any drug, including MDMA, the most it can do is open up what’s inside you already." –Ann Shulgin "When I have not had a good psychedelic trip for, let’s say, six months, I begin to feel that I’m beginning to get out of balance. … I think that instead of regarding psychedelics as a drain on the system, frankly, they are my favorite vitamin. That’s the effect they have on me." –Ann Shulgin "And for all I know there are three, or four, or seven lives going on that I don’t remember either awake or asleep, but I feel consciousness is my living relationship with the world." –Sasha Shulgin "My belief is that when you get involved in a psychedelic experience you are in a communication with part of yourself that you’ve given up trying to communicate with or forgotten about communicating with. So it’s not something that’s imposed by a drug. It’s something [that is already there and] the drug allows you to experience and to function with. So I look upon it as being a revealing thing from within myself, rather than a thing imposed upon myself by an external drug." –Sasha Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (2008 Conference) Horizons Conference audio online at the Internet Archive The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics “Ghosts I” from Nine Inch Nails The first 9 tracks from the Ghosts I-IV collection available as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF.
10/15/20081 hour, 33 minutes, 34 seconds
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Podcast 158 – “Can the Human Lifespan Be Extended”

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson REMOVED per REQUEST by alleged copyright holder. Download from the Internet Archive MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/1/200857 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 157 – “The Acceleration of Knowledge”

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson REMOVED per REQUEST by alleged copyright holder. Download from the Internet Archive MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/23/200855 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 156 – “Treating Schizophrenia with Psychedelics”

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher and Charlie Grob PROGRAM NOTES: In 1963, Dr. Gary Fisher wrote a paper titled Interim report on Research project: An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin on Hospitalized Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children (This link will take you to the full report.) Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option [From the Report] We have given treatment to 12 patients. They have ranged in age from 4 years, 10 months to 12 years, 11 months. The average age is 9 years, 10 months. All patients are severely emotionally disturbed and are considered variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism. Nine Children are considered to be childhood schizophrenics, one case of symbiotic, infantile psychosis and one case of manic-depressive psychosis. . . . We have found that the patients who have responded best to the treatment are those who: have speech; are more schizophrenic than autistic; older (10 to 12 yrs.); exhibit more blatant psychotic symptomatology . . . The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feeling and effectual states. The experiences that have produced such painful and frightening affect have been repressed and the feelings produced by such traumas have been denied. Consequently, the individual has built a massive control system wherein all experience is denied and he exists in an isolated, unfeeling condition which renders him helpless and incapacitated. The psychedelic drugs have the potential of breaking this psychotic control which then allows the individual to re-experience his trauma and to again experience his feelings. This phenomena has been amply proven with our work with these severely disturbed children, wherein they return to traumatic experiences and re-live and re-experience them. By working through these painful episodes the patient is then able to rid himself of the horror of them, to reevaluate their significance and be freed of the psychic effects of their repression. This process has been repeatedly observed in our psychotic children. The transcendental experience, often described in the literature, has occurred with 4 of our children. It might be added that we were very surprised to see this experience occur in such disturbed and young children.
9/10/20081 hour, 18 minutes, 42 seconds
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Podcast 155 – “Some Thoughts About Change (1945-1985)”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "As you well-know, I never wanted any credibility. I’m more concerned with incredibility." "I believe in change. I’m a change agent. I want to keep changing myself. … Change is going to be the norm from now on, and we’re not changing from A to B, we’re changing in an explosive, multi-directional way." "Yeah, there are forces which slow down change. Certainly, you are aware of the fact that every educational institution, from first grade up to the high altitude of The College of Marin, every institution that’s supported by taxpayers and administered by politicians is carefully designed to keep young people serenely and productively stupid." "It’s necessary to have the conservatives, but it’s also necessary to have the mutants, the migrants, and the people with new ideas." "It’s always the intelligent that move. It’s always the intelligent that migrate, because it’s simply smarter to move out than to stay back in the village and quarrel over cobblestone streets and neighborhood territory. Quarreling over territory is lower mammalian and lower primate [behavior], and it’s the smart, the evolutionary people who always move out." "Now they say that there was a counter-culture [in the Sixties]. There was no counter culture. This was a left-wing, partisan statement. There were 100 counter-cultures. There were as many counter-cultures as there were groups of friends and lovers meeting together to look into each others’ eyes and smile. That’s the point of the Sixties, there was not one orthodoxy being replaced by another orthodoxy. … You make your own world. Don’t blame your parents and don’t blame society. Figure it out for yourself." "You would not have had the drug culture movement of the Sixties if you did not have the do-it-yourself psychology movement of the Fifties." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Coalessence Festival (October 3, 4, 5, 2008) For the best drug information available online, be sure to visit Erowid.org. Dr. Timothy Leary in WikiPedia.org The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana
9/1/20081 hour, 12 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 154 – “Mind States 2003 LSD Panel”

Guest speakers: Nick Sand and Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: [The following quotations are by Nick Sand.] "This process of sharing through language our inherited ability to manipulate first stone tools, then concepts and symbols through language and printing, and then moving into the networking of electronic and virtually instantaneous world wide communication, are three quantum leaps of exponential increase in consciousness." "The continuity of these constructs through which we perceive the world is what we call tradition." "This leap across the gap into the unknown is unavoidable but it must be made. We have no choice. As we are moved to higher levels of evolution change will occur. The constructs and veils of our collective consciousness have to give way." "Purity of intention and purity of product go hand-in-hand to produce a transcendent trip." "For the chemist also, the mere intention toward purity is transformative. A path unto itself. This is Alchemy!" "It is time to become conscious, and existence has given us this valuable tool, LSD, to start this process. I pray that we have the time and courage to make this next leap in evolution. I believe that LSD is one of the gifts given to us by Spirit to do this." "I think that the psychedelics are the midwives of change. They help the change occur." [The following quotations are by Myron Stolaroff.] "Having been working with this for a number of years, and observing a lot of experiences, I’m convinced that what LSD does is simply to open the door to your unconscious." "As one who has abused LSD by trying to overcome difficulties with repeated experiences, I have found that a good meditation practice is an excellent way to keep the gains from experiences alive. … Deepening meditation practice deepens your LSD experience, and having more profound LSD experiences yields instant gains in deepening meditation practice." "When we use LSD appropriately, it can provide a direct, crystal-clear path to the height of spiritual ecstasy. It can provide the direct experience of the godhead, and our government makes this valuable tool illegal." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Hofmann’s Potion – Video Documentary Part 1 of 6 RESEARCH REPORT NO. 1 INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCED STUDY QUESTIONNAIRE STUDY OF THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25 by Malden Grange Bishop (Dodd, Mead & Company: New York, 1963)
8/25/20081 hour, 23 minutes, 21 seconds
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Podcast 153 – “Consciousness Change and the 8-Circuit Model”

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Every evaluation is an evaluation of the organism as a whole, because the nervous system interlocks with the immunological system, and the endocrine system, and the neuro-muscular system and so on. So every evaluation you make is an evaluation of your whole body, and separating it into mind and body is a fictitious dichotomy. It’s a synergistic process." "What the front brain knows does not control you at all. It just thinks it does." "The idea of reality as a singular noun doesn’t make any sense to me at all any more." "Everybody has their own neurological reality-tunnel, which is why we misunderstand one another so often, and why we misjudge one another so profoundly." "I don’t think there’s a single drug, psychedelic, antibiotic, aspirin, or anything you can name that has the same effect on two people. People have to find out for themselves which drugs are safe for them." "Among the drugs that are currently controversial, that is to say illegal, I would say marijuana is the safest." "I think the dangers of LSD have been overstated to an incredible extent." "Most problems exist because the verbal form you put them in creates the problem." "So what you experience tomorrow, if it entirely fits your beliefs today, it’s because you’re not paying attention." "Every child is intensely curious until they get to school, and the function of school is to kill the curiosity by telling them there is one correct answer, and we know it already, and don’t do any thinking of your own." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Podcasts Mentioned In This Program The C-Realm with KMO The Cannabis Podcast Network The Dopecast with the Dopefiend Lefty’s Lounge Psychonautica with Max Freakout BB’s Bungalow Pothead’s Coffee Shop Blacklight in the Attic The Entheogenic Evolution with Martin Ball Ape Reality with Tom Barbarlet Biota.org’s Artificial Life Interviews with Tom Barbarlet Shrink Rap Radio with Dr. Dave
8/19/200858 minutes, 21 seconds
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Podcast 152 – “Question Authority and Think for Yourself”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When I say think for yourself, I don’t mean think selfishly for yourself. I mean think independently." "If you’re going to think for yourself, you gotta learn to think clearly." "The person who thinks for herself or himself has to have a sense of humility, and of modesty, and of relativity because you have to realize that I’m thinking for myself, but hopefully you are too, and you’re bound to come out with something a little different from me. So there has to be an ability to listen, compassion, plus the modesty. No matter how smart we are there’s a lot we aren’t going to be able to figure out tonight." "I’m glad we’re laughing together because that’s a key. A sense of humor is the key. … That ability to laugh together certainly goes along with the ability to think together." "Any time you introduce a new technology of thought processing, or of thought communication, you change everything else." [Speaking about the biblical Eve] "I’m really pleased that the first member of my species was a woman who had the courage to stand up on her feet and think for herself." "The idea that any human being should be forced by economics, forced to do work that can be done better by a machine or a computer is totally humiliating to any concept of our human dignity and worth." "Now in the Industrial Age, a good person was someone who was prompt, reliable, dependable, productive, efficient, and replaceable." "It’s always the artists, by the way, I think. The artists, and the entertainers, and the writers, and the musicians whose job it is to prepare society, to become a comfortable way for changes that otherwise would be too frightening." "The point of the 20th century, you can argue, is to get us to accept knowledge, processing, and reality on screens." "To me, a computer is a thought processor." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A case in defense of Salvia divinorum Mythic Imagination Fred Johnson and Michael Meade Johnson sings an introduction for Ari Berk "What Was Said to the Rose" Mythic Journeys (preview trailer)
8/11/20081 hour, 17 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 151 – “Posthumous Glory”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think disease is (and I don’t want to be held to this entirely, but) largely more linguistic than people think." "The story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living." "Nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power. And it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism. Nothing is unannounced. If you’re paying attention, stuff comes down the pike, first the little waves, then the medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami. But you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected." "What it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always say. But THAT something is coming at you is usually pretty clear, pretty clear." [In response to the possible evolution of artificial intelligence] "It’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclineith toward bodhisattva-hood, then the bodhisattva are on their way. If on the other hand, intelligence doesn’t incline toward bodhisattva-hood, then probably the house-cleaning of all time is on its way. Because when these AIs come to consciousness and realize what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed, indeed." "Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiratualized the world, but we didn’t tame it." "It’s very interesting, how the re-animation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding it. That you could pass through the reductive phase of science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, and still not have a handle on what does it mean to be a being, what does it mean to be a human being, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow we got to this place without answering any of those questions." "Connectivity is the pre-condition for love." "My view of, let’s say, the last thousand years, is that it’s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it, more soul-searching afterwards, more questioning ‘Why? Why did we do that?’ " "People are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estate. But instead they’re invited to fetishize, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest. And all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own ends: The accumulation of capital investment, or the acquisition of land, or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that. Our human-ness is constantly being eroded." "The image I have of our community is, we’re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship." "Sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience." "If psychedelics don’t secure a moral community, then I don’t see what the point of it is. Otherwise we’re just another cult." "It’s good to dry out occasionally. Very occasionally." "It’s always puzzled me how this community has never really understood its roots in American Transcendentalism, or why we never used that hammer against the establishment. Because this sort of secular-mystical-Theosophical brand of thinking is just as American as mom and apple pie, and yet you rarely hear it invoked by our people. And yet it’s where our roots grow deepest, with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorn. I mean, my god, these are the people who put together 19th century America." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/7/20081 hour, 16 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 150 – “UFOs”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "I think reason can take us only a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination." "There have been many episodes in the history of science where great hope gave way to paranoia." "The [UFO] hysteria has become more explicit and has wandered in first one direction and then another, but if this is a contact it’s the most peculiarly un-contact-like contact it’s possible to imagine." "And this is something I’m going to try and convince the UFO community of, what we drug people have that you don’t is repeatability." "The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity." "Reason, but a willingness to explore the edges has been [my] method. … I have never seen a violation of physics that was not connected somehow with a psychedelic experience." "Not all psychedelics are alike. And this very small family of compounds, called the tryptomine hallucinogens, bear careful examination if we’re seriously interested in this question of exterrestial penetration of the human world." "Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff [psilocybin], Gordon Wasson, Richard Shulties, Albert Hofmann, the giants know that this stuff is animate. This is not a drug. It’s something that’s disguising itself as a drug in order not to spread alarm." "I think that the alien will be so alien that your jaw will hang in the air. And expecting to meet an anthropoid-like alien with an interest in your reproductive machinery and gross industrial capacity is as culture-bound a concept as searching NGC-321 for a good Italian restaurant. It’s absurd on the face of it." "All of human history is the signifier of the presence of the alien. Human history is what happens to an advance animal species when it is inner-penetrated on a scale of a million years by a mind in another dimension." "The flying saucer, the alien, the other is what is sculpting us out of animal organization as we move toward it in time. This is what shamanism is all about. This is what the psychedelic people are discovering as they descend into these trances." "A shaman, and a psychedelic person, and a UFO contactee, is someone who has seen the end. They simply didn’t know what they were looking at, because who knows what the end looks like." "The world is not what it appears to be." "Psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was to the re-defining of astronomy." "I think that the ‘real other’ need not be guarded by the frail efforts of a cults apologists." "Now you may have thought telepathy was you hearing somebody else think. Apparently, that’s not what telepathy is. Telepathy is you seeing what somebody else means. It’s the visual acquisition of meaning rather than the audio acquisition of meaning." "I think that we are on a collision course with a planet-transforming event, and that we have been for a very, very long time. I also believe that it lies below the horizon of rational apprehension at this point in time." "That’s where the frontier of this hyper-technical fantasy is headed, toward a revivification of knowledge systems that were ancient when the pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye." "I think we’re on the brink of a tremendous evolutionary adventure, and that it will involve physically re-designing ourselves." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Conference on Precession & Ancient Knowledge Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 117: Aliens are ‘Real’
7/28/20081 hour, 32 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 149 – “The Heavens”

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth." –Rupert Sheldrake [Speaking of the past:] "So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways." –Rupert Sheldrake "The basic idea I’m proposing is that the so-called ‘Laws of Nature’ may be more like habits. They may depend on what’s happened before and on how often it’s happened. So there may be a cumulative memory in nature, largely unconscious, which gives rise to habits and things, which accounts for the stability of nature as we know it. But this is not all governed by eternal laws that were there at the Big Bang." –Rupert Sheldrake "The English couldn’t bear this void for long, caused by the suppression of pilgrimage [by the Protestant Reformation], and within a few generations had invented tourism, which is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage." –Rupert Sheldrake "I think a great move forward would happen when astronomy and astrology link up once again." –Rupert Sheldrake "If the Sun has a kind of consciousness, then what about the entire galaxy, with this mysterious center?" –Rupert Sheldrake "What we call the imagination is actually the universal library of what is real, that you couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real, somewhere, sometime. And that to me is very empowering because that’s the truth that you learn at the center of the psychedelic experience that’s so mind boggling that you can’t really return with it, that it’s real." –Terence McKenna "Now it’s time to realize that trying to reason upward from the laws of atomic physics to organism is not going to work. That there are … emergent properties at every level." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Galaxy Map Hints at Fractal Universe
7/19/20081 hour, 39 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 148 – “Grand Rounds: Psychedelic Psychotherapy”

Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Preet Chopra.] "The ’set’ is talking about what the individual who ingests a psychedelic brings to the table in terms of their life experience, their mood, expectations, family history, their personality structure, significant relationships, and their systems of belief. ‘Setting’ accounts for all the other factors that are not internal to the person, the physical environment, location, all sorts of sensory stimuli that might be present during intoxication, and the other participants, particularly a therapist or facilitator." "A term that’s out there among recreational psychedelic users is ‘psychonaut’, which really means, from Greek, ’sailor of the mind’, and I think this is kind of the experience those folks are going for." "In terms of reducing risk, I certainly feel that anybody with certain medical contra indications, and taking prescription drugs, should really avoid taking a psychedelic." [In response to a question about the fact that there was very little dialogue between the study participant and the attending psychatrists:] "Minimal dialogue during the actual experience. And that is based on the work that Grof did, and Panke saying, hey, let this medicine do its own work." "There are some people who believe that by putting on eyeshades and listening to music there is less incidence of sensual kinds of phenomena, and that allows for more of a psychological benefit." Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The Scientists Who Revived Magic Mushroom Research Hallucinogen Gives Lasting Spiritual Boost "Spiritual" effects of mushrooms last a year Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms’ Transcendent Effect Lingers
7/14/20081 hour, 5 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 147 – RAW: “Conspiracies and TSOG”

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "Most people are living in a world they can’t understand. And when people can’t understand something they tend to go for sinister explanations of it." "I prefer to think that, at minimum, there are about 24 conspiracies afoot. . . . I cannot find any proof of any conspiracy that really existed, that was brought into court and convicted, that lasted more than ten years before everybody double-crossed everybody else, and the conspiracy fell apart." "He [John von Newman] realized that most of our perceptions are in the ‘maybe’ mode. They’re not yes or no, they’re not true or false, they’re just ‘maybes’. I think ‘maybe logic’ is probably the greatest invention of the 20th century." "I regard religion and patriotism as the two major mental illnesses afflicting this planet." "The CIA/Tsarist/Nazi Alliance began to me to seem more and more the key to everything that’s been crazy and bizarre and incomprehensible about American foreign policy in the last fifty years. I think the central thinking of the ruling class of the United States is basically within the Tsarist paradigm." "Patriotism is loyalty to a gene pool." "I would say faith is the chief fomenter of war in the whole history of the world. Even in comparatively secular societies it becomes an article of faith that the government is justified. The other side is all wrong. We’re all right. And nobody’s supposed to think about the question at all. That becomes despicable. I believe we should think about the despicable." "It absolutely stops thinking entirely if you’ve got enough faith." " ‘Faith is believing what you know aint so’. That’s why they put lightening rods on their churches." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   
7/6/20081 hour, 44 seconds
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Podcast 146 – “The Importance of Human Beings”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] "What I’ve observed, and I think it’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity." "This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine." "If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance." "Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. . . . Time is, in fact, speeding up." "No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night." "Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck." "What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think, is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. And I use ‘higher dimensional’ in the mathematical sense." Definition of ‘eschaton’: "Eschaton comes from the Greek word ‘echatos’, which just means the end." "The ‘hard swallow’ built into science is this business about the Big Bang. … This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. … Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It’s the limit case for likelihood." "We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event." "Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us." "[The psychedelic experience] is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind." "The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/29/20081 hour, 32 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 145 – “Leary-Live at the Inside Edge”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "For as long as I can remember I have been influenced by a role model who has guided me through my navigation of this amazing life. I am a great follower of Socrates." "Corrupting the minds of the young is a difficult job, god knows it’s ill-paid, somebody has to do it." "I do feel this is a wonderful time for change-agents to be alive." "I ended up growing up thinking that everybody was like me, and that is, obviously, a mistake." "As soon as you belong to a system where you’re not known individually, and where you don’t know, individually, the other people, you are by definition depersonalizing yourself, a robot cog of the Big Machine." "This [1946] was the peak of the industrial age, and the aim of psychology was to help people be ‘adjusted’. Remember? If you were well-adjusted that was it. And the worst thing you could say was someone was maladjusted, which means they were thinking for themselves. "I see Ram Das two or three times a year. He comes by my house and we split a bottle of wine or a six-pack and have a joint or two." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/21/200858 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 144 – “The Ultimate Revolution”

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: (This program marks our third anniversary of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon!) PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Aldous Huxley.] "Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows." "We are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions." "Given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country." "If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government." "The really interesting thing about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered." "Man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature." "You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect." "And then again, in the case of these very strange substances like psilocybin and lysergic acid, I think there is a great deal to be said for doing what William James talked about, which was getting people to realize that their ordinary, sort of common sense view of the world is not the only view. The universe they inhabit is not the only possible universe." NOTE FROM LORENZO: A few minutes after I posted this podcast on the Net, I checked my email and discovered that fellow saloner John H. sent me a link to the following video. After you listen to the talk by Aldous Huxley you may find it rewarding to view the following video and then do a little thinking about what is really going on in the U.S. today while you re-read "Brave New World". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Link mentioned in this podcast: The Center for Cognitive Liberty
6/10/20081 hour, 26 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 143 – “Rethinking Society”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [Quoting a friend] " ‘The apocalypse is already happening.’ The slow apocalypse is unraveling all over the world." –Terence McKenna "If it’s all on automatic, if the world is either undergoing some kind of mass extinction and soul migration into the Elysium realm, then very little has to be done. If, on the other hand, it isn’t on automatic then what is the nature of the political and social world that we should construct for ourselves and our children?" –Terence McKenna "What we have is a future-phobic society that places a great deal of stress on the preservation of a pseudo-tradition called "Family Values" by some people, but it has many names. It’s not an archaic social model, or anything rooted in long-term human organization. It’s basically the 19th century industrial model of the couple with some children fitted into an industrial economy." –Terence McKenna "It seems to me that a whole re-thinking of the notion of freedom has to come, and that it isn’t strictly a matter of more freedom." –Terence McKenna "I think we’re going to have to go back to Plato. Plato did not trust the poets, and the heirs of the poets in our hell bard are Madison Avenue." –Terence McKenna "The interesting ideas have to do with touching the taboos."–Terence McKenna "I’m basically an optimist, but not because I have faith in human institutions. But because I think there is a transcendental attractor that will eventually pull our chestnuts out of the fire." –Terence McKenna "I do believe that history is the proof of the presence of a hyperdimensional something or other, which is acting on ordinary biology." –Terence McKenna "The government follows. It doesn’t lead. We need leadership now, and leadership comes from people, that’s us." –Ralph Abraham "We’re not being led by evil people. We’re being led by jackasses at this point." –Terence McKenna "Pretending that this catastrophe [a coming global ice age] is not probable will almost certainly guarantee that it takes place real soon." -Ralph Abraham "Let’s avoid the disease of denial, because if we don’t admit a problem then there is no solution." –Ralph Abraham "What free trade means is the right to sell crap everywhere. The right to deal Coca Cola in Afghanistan, that’s what free trade is, the right to sell Volvos in Turkmenistan. It’s a bad idea, free trade. We don’t want to make trade easier. We want to make the manufacture of objects and excruciatingly expensive process and the moving of them from one market to another damn near impossible, because what we want is the de-materialization of culture." –Terence McKenna "The Great Leveling, which the Left always called for has in fact taken place in part, and that’s why you have less money. When the leveling took place did you think it was going to kick back into your pocketbook? You haven’t visited Bangladesh recently." –Terence McKenna "The Nation State has become a Fascist tool, all Nation States. What these companies stand for is unbridled gangsterism." –Terence McKenna "What we need to do is dematerialize our interphasing with nature. If we’re going to keep the body then we have to jettison material culture. We cannot have both the body and material culture." –Terence McKenna "Yes, I think that we’re going to a grand destiny, and that the planet will survive this, but consciousness is the flashlight to throw on the path." –Terence McKenna "History is an agitation in biology that proceeds the Eschaton, and it only takes it 25,000 years to rise out of the sea of chaos." –Terence McKenna "Love is what lies at the end of the historical descent into novelty. It has to be." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/8/20081 hour, 45 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 142 – “The Creation of the Future”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "The key thing about the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized adult form." "The more power you give to the young of your species, the sooner you give that power to them, the faster your species is going to grow, the farther your gene pool is going to move into the future, and of course it goes without saying, the key to everything, the more growth in the individual will result." "The future belongs to those who see the future." "The smarter you are, the higher you want to be, that’s obvious." "The key to the sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult-hive over-specialized models." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD? (Discover Magazine)
5/29/20081 hour, 1 minute, 39 seconds
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Podcast 141 – “Contemplating a Visual Psychedelic Language”

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that any models [of the psychedelic experience] that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical are really, really feeble compared to the experience itself." –Ralph Abraham "It’s the Logos-world that we’ve lost the connection with." –Terence McKenna "I think the difference between a representation of the [psychedelic] state and being in the state itself is the sense of meaning, engagement, and intensity." –Rupert Sheldrake "When language became something acoustically processed it became so bloodless that it became then the willing servant of abstraction, which before had been an exotic and little explored branch of linguistic activity, that suddenly burgeoned into the major concern of a lot of people." –Ralph Abraham "I regard language as some kind of project that is uncompleted as we sit here. . . . Clearly, the whole world is held together by small mouth noises, and it’s only BARELY held together by small mouth noises." –Terence McKenna "If you buy in to the idea that psychedelics somehow are showing you the evolutionary path yet to be followed, then it seems obvious that what it entails is a further completion of the project of language." –Terence McKenna "The intellectuals, unfortunately, at the top of the pyramid are the last to get the news. They’re still pouring over Locke, and Hegel when what’s really happening is Guns n Roses and Nirvana, and I don’t mean the Buddhist state of transcendence. . . . So culture tends to be ruled by the people who are the last to get the news in terms of new technologies which are reshaping the culture." –TerenceMcKenna "Literacy is finished. It was a phase. It’s not to be preserved by anyone other than curators. The rest of us are going to live, obviously, in a culture shaped by new forms of media." –Terence McKenna Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  Spirit Matters by Matthew Pallamary
5/23/20081 hour, 19 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 140 – “Psychedelic Families”

Guest speakers: Allyson & Alex Grey plus Ralph Abraham PROGRAM NOTES: "Our parents were completely unprepared for the sixties . . . and for our behavior." – Alex Grey "[In drug education as it is practiced today] there is this kind of overriding mis-characterization of drugs, and an exaggeration of the problems that, marijuana especially, gives us." –Alex Grey "And they contradict people’s own observations."–Allyson Grey "There are perils, and we have children and we want to protect them. So drugs can lead to terrible things as well." –Allyson Grey "Basically, you want to establish a bond with your children, and not to come in with total, preconceived notions about how they ought to behave. The idea is to listen and to establish a link of trust so that you can really be there for them, instead of alienating them. So you have to learn about these substances and the possible substances they’re using, so that you can be an informed assist for them." –Alex Grey "If you’ve already been lying to your kids about drugs, then why should they listen to you about anything, including the dangers of meth?" –Alex Grey "If any of you haven’t gone a year and a half without any substances, it’s really a great experience. The altered state of sobriety is something Alex and I recommend." –Allyson Grey "This is what my mother taught me when it came to sex, and I applied it to drugs. Whenever a child asks a question you answer it, and you don’t tell them things they don’t want to know, or they’re not ready to know. But if they ask you something, you tell them honestly." –Allyson Grey "We’re part of an underground society, and that’s a heavy burden to place on a young mind if they’re not ready." –Alex Grey "The Connection Between Mathematics and the Logos" Ralph Abraham tells the story of how he became involved with the psychedelic community and how psychedelic medicines informed his work and that of the generation who developed the personal computer among other achievements. In this trialogue, Ralph poses (and answers) the question,"Have psychedelics had an influence in the evolution of science, mathematics, the computer revolution, computer graphics, and so on?" "We have to admit that mathematics has been reborn, and this rebirth is some kind of outcome of, apparently, the computer revolution and the psychedelic revolution, which took place concurrently, concomitantly, cooperatively in the 1960s." –Ralph Abraham Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  
5/15/20081 hour, 13 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 139 – “Is the Universe Waking Up”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Bruce Damer.] "It seems as though the universe is a sort of self-contained thing, never looses any information." "A mechanism called ‘life’ was able to fight against all this crud, and entropy, and fires and brimstone and preserve this little piece of information [DNA] forward, and it’s called reproduction, it’s called life. And that process has outlived the life of most stars. It’s certainly older and tougher and more resilient than all the configuration of the continents." "What if the universe, like Chris Langston’s brain, is gradually booting up an awareness of itself?" "And are you part of that great project that the universe is trying to do, which is to know itself?" "It’s like exposing you to the most powerful drug ever given to primates, which wasn’t alcohol, it’s not nicotine, it’s not MDMA, it’s not LSD. It’s the computer/human interaction." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option (click to) Contact Bruce Damer "A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You" an essay by Bruce Damer
5/8/20081 hour, 26 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 138 – “The Shulgins at Mind States 2005″

Guest speakers: Ann and Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do." . . .Sasha "Let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug." . . . Ann "I really cannot conceive of a color test that would show positive with 2C-B or 2C-I in urine because the amounts there are so small." . . . Sasha "There are many, many things that are potentially active as psychedelics and have not been assayed, not been tasted. The whole art of taking an unknown compound and beginning to find out what it’s action is going to be sounds naively simple. You just start taking more and more of it until you turn on. But the truth is your turn-on may be a convulsion. It may be sedation. It may be all kinds of other types of action. So you have to sneak up on a new compound. So if you are at all considering looking at these kinds of things, I stress: Be extremely cautious if they have not been taken in humans before. Preliminary animal screening, to me, is worthless." . . . Sasha "The hypnotic trance state is, I believe, fully as good as any drug in opening those doors inside a person’s psyche, and I do believe that instead of risking legal problems, you should go to a good hypnotherapist and find out how to discover yourself that way." . . . Ann "Sasha usually tries to remind people that it isn’t the drug that is giving you an experience, whether it’s one of love or anything else. It is your own psyche, the drugs act as keys to the inner doors. I mean, DMT will definitely open a different door than mescaline, but it’s all still what’s inside you." . . . Ann Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Ann and Sasha Shulgin:  Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story  Tihkal: The Continuation
4/30/20081 hour, 22 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 137 – “Creation of the Future”

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotes are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "When the big quake comes, be on the California side!" "So the concept that developed at Harvard, then at Millbrook, and later it seemed to have moved out to other places, was the concept of serial imprinting. That for thousands of years the smartest women and men have known that through manipulating your nervous system by getting high in any way that you can you can suspend the old imprints and have a chance to start a new reality." "Your theory of evolution is the key to your own personal development, or your understanding of what’s happening around you. . . . Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re going to lead." "Evolution is not accidental." "Every time you put your tongue in the mouth of a loved one, or vice versa, you are exchanging more information in one second than all the Libraries of Congress in history." "You either believe in nothing whatsoever than chance, or you’re going to believe in a biological intelligence which knows that she’s doing." "The point here is, if you’re going to feel ’synced’ you’ve got to be in a place where there are people who share your reality." "The way evolution works is this, evolution never tries to change grown ups. . . . Look in the dictionary for the word ‘adult’. You’ll find the word ‘adult’ is the past participle of the word ‘to grow’." "We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes." "What happened in the 1960s was this, the time had come to avoid terminal adulthood. . . . A generation of young people simply refused to buy the adult image, the adult model." "One of the messages that I have right now, the message is this: I don’t advocate anything, but I urge you to think it over. I urge you at all costs to avoid terminal adulthood." "When you look at a map that has got those hours, those meridians, those aren’t hours, those are centuries." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/21/20081 hour, 10 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 136 – “A Few Conclusions About Life”

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
4/15/20081 hour, 7 minutes, 21 seconds
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Podcast 135 – “The Dead, and the Sixties”

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
4/14/20081 hour, 30 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 134 – “Sex and Social Control, Tantra and Liberation”

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
4/4/20081 hour, 41 minutes, 30 seconds
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Podcast 133 – “The Cyber Society”

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
3/28/20081 hour, 21 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 132 – McKenna: “Shamanism”

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 ...
3/21/20081 hour, 15 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 131 – “A Model for Sustainable Psychedelic Therapy”

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.
3/19/20081 hour, 14 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 130 – Timothy Leary 1966 Radio Interview

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
3/5/20081 hour, 19 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 129 – “The Imagination and the Environment”

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
3/2/20081 hour, 36 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 128 – “The State of the Stone”

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
3/1/20081 hour, 27 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 127 – Leary: “The Cooper Union Speech”

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
2/14/20081 hour, 5 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 126 – “Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution”

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
1/30/20081 hour, 41 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 125 – Trialogue: “Crop Circles”

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
1/25/20081 hour, 42 minutes, 20 seconds
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Podcast 124 – Trialogue: “Cannabis”

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
1/18/20081 hour, 28 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 123 – “Opening the Doors of Creativity”

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
1/16/20081 hour, 15 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 122 – “Saving the World”

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
1/16/20081 hour, 25 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 121 – “Grass Roots Science”

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
12/13/20071 hour, 32 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 120 – “Notes to Myself”

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
12/8/200749 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 119 – “A Crisis of Consciousness”

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
12/7/20071 hour, 5 seconds
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Podcast 118 – “Human Nature, Synesthesia and Art”

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
12/3/20071 hour, 15 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 117 – “The Importance of Psychedelics”

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
11/29/20071 hour, 8 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 116 – “Techno Pagans at the End of History”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:40 – Mark Pesce: "I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t to escape into another dimension but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can’t always see because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us." 06:29 – Mark Pesce: "Because where we’re going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry." 15:13 – Terence McKenna:"Obviously, from the first time I had a major [psychedelic] trip on it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications." 17:09 – Terence McKenna:"Whatever it was that psychedelics were doing, it was taking anybody’s notion of reality, anybody’s mindset, and radically extending it. And if they found that comfortable they were ecstatic. And if they found it horrifying they were traumatized. But the common thread was, takes ordinary minds, makes them bigger, stranger, more grotesque, less predictable, more bizarre." 24:22 – Terence McKenna: "Our ideologies are probably lethal, obviously lethal I would say. But they are, fortunately, a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving." 27:16 – Terence McKenna: "Occasionally you flop on the seamy side. It gives a literary quality to life that’s lacking among the tight-assed." 32:24 – Terence McKenna: "If anything undoes us this will be it, that our language has failed, that we misread each other’s intent, that we could not understand each other. So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history. I mean, history is the story of languages that failed, and when language grows perfect history will end." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/23/200742 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 115 – “Bios and Logos”

Guest speaker: Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Mark Pesce.] 11:35: "The singularity is how Terence’s idea of the Eschaton is working its way now into popular cultures through scientists." 16:42: "There are periods of time when your DNA isn’t doing anything at all, when it’s quiescent. And at that time, when it’s not interacting with the world around it, it can enter what physicists call superposition. When it’s not interacting it can enter a quantum state. That quantum state says that it can be in this universe, and this universe, and this universe, and this universe. Well, it can be in a lot of different universes. In fact, it can be in ten with five hundred zeros following it, possible universes." 30:33: "The ability for you to react to your environment from your genetic code verses being able to react to your environment because you can communicate using language is probably at least ten million to one times faster. That means at the same time we acquired the ability to speak everything about us in terms of humanity, and human culture, and human thought, and human understanding suddenly went ten million times faster." 47:22: [talking about nanotechnology] "The world we’re going to, the entire physical world, can now start to look a lot more like Legos that get snapped together at will. And if you think about the difference between building a castle out of sand and building a castle out of Legos, you’re starting to understand the difference that we’re about to be presented with in the material world. So at the atomic scale level of the material world is about to become linguistically pliable. This is an ability we have never had before." 52:01: "It’s my belief, and I want you to prove me right, that the psychedelic community represents the authentic search for a middle path, because what’s happening in the psychedelic experience is that there’s a stretching of being. There’s a stretching of being that allows new forms of language and new ideas to enter. We all understand this intuitively because we come back from a psychedelic experience with some expanded sense of awareness, that we’ve been opened up to an understanding we didn’t have before." 54:08: "You can argue about the specifics of when it’s going to happen, but what you can’t argue about is that there are three waves. We can take a look at the shape of these three waves and the fact that these three waves seem to be concrescening on a single point, and that this single point is where Homo sapiens is going to be left behind, and we’re going to see the emergence of a new species." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/14/20071 hour, 33 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 114 – “Psychedelic Society”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] 04:33 "What I think a psychedelic society, what that notion means or implies to me in terms of ideology, is the idea of creating a society which always lives in the light of the mystery of being. In other words, that solutions should be displaced from the central role that they have had in social organization. And mysteries, irreducible mysteries, should be put in their place." 06:44 "Much of the problem of the modern dilemma is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected. . . . You see, if you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite." 11:59 "Experience must be made primary. The language of the self must be made primary." 12:14 "What I’m advocating is that we each take responsibility for the cultural transformation by realizing it is not something which will be disseminated from the top down. It is something which each of us can contribute to by attempting to live as far into the future as possible." 15:12 "A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks." 19:07 "We need to realize that there is a gene-swarm, not a set of species on the Earth, that half the time when you think you are thinking you are actually listening." 29:44 "I think the engineering mentality, which will [???] to change man into his machines, will have to be counter-poised by the psychedelic, Earth-oriented, imagination oriented side of things, which will create then the potential for the spiritual marriage that will be the alchemical perfection of a new form of humanity." 31:14 "You claim this higher level of freedom by the simple act of applying attention to being." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option (click for) The art of Denis Numkena Entheogens and the Future of Religion Sacred Symbols of the Dogon: The Key to Advanced Science in the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs The Science of the Dogon: Decoding the African Mystery Tradition  
11/5/200757 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 113 – “Syntax of Psychedelic Time”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] 11:53 "There’s no question but what the human imagination has taken to itself so much power that it no longer can remain on the surface of the planet. We sort of have to part company with the planet for our own good and for its [own good]." 14:15 "I think that the old evolutionary model, which was that evolution was the struggle of the fittest, and the devil take the hindmost, is pretty much discredited. And we now understand that what is maximized in evolution is not the sharpness of the fang or the length of the claw, but the ability to cooperate with other species, harmoniously. That’s what’s being maximized. … Humans are a perverse lot, and I suppose what one can reasonably hope for is incremental advances toward the good." 16:02 Terence begins talking about Ketamine. [NOTE: He is talking about injecting Ketamine, NOT snorting it, which is a more recent phenomenon.] 17:19 "It’s [Ketamine] a troubling psychedelic, because a lot of people, I think, are doing it who have never done any other, and I think that would be very, very misleading." 19:09 "On Ketamine your definitions dissolve so completely that it’s a major accomplishment to realize that you’re a human being on a drug." 22:39 [Regarding synthetic vs. natural substances] "I’ve always taken the position that it was important that the psychedelic have a relationship to a plant." 25:31 "I am Oss and my brother is Oeric. … When we wrote that, that was straight transcription. That’s what the mushroom said." [Referring to their underground classic, "Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide". 26:56 "The mushroom has this peculiar ability to invoke, or allow, or trigger a voice in the head, this logos-like phenomenon of information unrolling in your head. No other drug that I’m familiar with does that consistently." 37:52 "What freedom means is you find out how good you are by discovering what you do when you have the power to destroy yourself, and we as a species are in that position and no one can do it but us. And if we do not destroy ourselves, then very obviously the intellectual tools that we have taken in hand are the tools which will send us out to the stars." 49:57 "Science did work better in the 19th century than it’s working in the 20th because reality is slowly slipping through its fingers." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/31/20071 hour, 6 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 112 – “Psychedelic Ideas”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:11Terence McKenna:"My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it’s an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances." 09:42 Terence McKenna: "This is a think-along lecture, by-the-way, and you’re free to think-along at any point that you feel so moved to do so." 11:53 Terence begins telling the story of how the Timewave Zero hypothesis came to him during a long meditation on the King Wen sequence of the I Ching. 20:36 Terence McKenna: "We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration." 27:33 Terence McKenna: "But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it." 32:29 Terence McKenna: "We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don’t matter. And that now doesn’t matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human." 41:50 Terence McKenna: "This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies." 35:41 Terence McKenna: "And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/19/20071 hour, 16 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 111 – Establishing a Tribal Land Base

Guest speaker: Seabrook Leaf Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:25 Lorenzo introduces Seabrook Leaf who then leads a playalogue titled "The Establishment of a Tribal Land Base" during the 2007 Burning Man festival. 06:44 Seabrook begins his rap. (See YouTube video beginning at 1:30) 11:30 Anonymous: "The coercive forces of control all work to keep people apart and separate, and so tribe is the healing medicine for that." 12:05Anonymous: "You can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your family." 14:47 Seabrook Leaf: "I think it’s clear that working together like we do at Burning Man is going to be a crucial part of surviving the shift. . . . And I think this is the crucial part of this kind of tribalism, whether it’s putting up a yurt or raising food in a garden, we’re going to have to get back to the basics." 16:59 Dale Pendell begins telling about a cooperative community on San Juan Ridge he was a part of in the 60s. 18:57 Dale Pendell begins telling about the May Day and Halloween festivals that the San Juan Ridge community created. 22:35 Anonymous: "We spend most of our time in a cyber-tribe, and I still feel connected. I feel like maybe the future of tribalism is going to reach beyond geographical locations, because we can’t really afford to travel everywhere and meet all these different people." 29:25 Anonymous: "How can we expand our acceptance of people as a whole, but recognize the reality of what we can manage in our day-to-day resources and things we have to do to provide for our community?" 36:22 Anonymous: "If it doesn’t grow out of the ground it came out of a mine." 40:53 Anonymous: "Bring a love-consciousness, always, as the focus of us being awake now. It has never been more urgent." 46:37 La: "And it just came up so big for me that we have to eliminate fear as our motivator. We have to use what we see around us clue us in, but not operate out of that distress. It’s so tricky, slippery." 49:39 Anonymous: "So in the best of situations you can pick an environment that has what you imagine to be the least potential for social corruption, but at the same time there’s a very big wild card that comes with saying ‘Let’s plant this here but we don’t know what all the rest of our neighbors are going to be doing in twenty years." 53:51 Dale Pendell: "It’s wonderful for a child to know where they came from, what their tribe is, and they have a place to come back to if what they rebelled against turns out to be better than they thought it was." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/9/20071 hour, 5 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 110 – Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 4)

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:11 Ralph begins with "Fractals on my mind, an epic in four parts." . . . Part one, the sandy beach. 13:54 Ralph Abraham: "It’s the fractal boundary, the sandy beach, which destroys determinism." 16:58 Ralph Abraham: "At the age of one, or two, or three, or something, when speech is beginning, what was going on before that? Presumably, that was what everyone was doing before speech came altogether if there ever was such a time. And that childhood paradigm is not vaporized and replaced when the linguistic phase arrives." 23:36 Ralph begins his description of "a mathematical model for monogamy". 26:04 Ralph Abraham: "I’m not saying that order is always bad, but cosmos and chaos just have to be balanced. I wouldn’t elevate chaos above cosmos or vice versa, but systems, probably to be healthy, they need a certain balance." 33:08 Rupert Sheldrake: "Catholicism, in a sense, is a kind of polytheism. You have all the angels. You have all the saints. When you go into a cathedral there’s all those side chapels and shrines. It’s just like a Hindu temple." 40:34 Terence McKenna: "The form that I’ve probably fallen under the sway of is some kind of neo-Platonic pyramid of ever-ascending abstract hypothesizations that lead into the One." 1:12:58 Ralph Abraham: "Science is not mathematical, and mathematics is not science. Science is discovered about the world through the activity of people. Mathematics is an inborn ability that everybody has, like breathing." 1:25:10 Terence McKenna: "Everyone knows that cannabis is trivial and harmless, but that doesn’t mean that we’re on the brink of changing the social taboos about it. It feels to me as though they will never change." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/4/20071 hour, 34 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 109 – Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 3)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 10:50 Terence McKenna: "I see the cosmos as a distillery for novelty, and the transcendental object is the novelty of novelty. . . . a tiny thing which has everything enfolded within it. And that means you’re in another dimension, where all points in this universe have been collapsed into co-tangency." 16:56 Terence McKenna: "Biology has a complete four dimensional, five dimensional map of the planet’s history."Ralph Abraham: "What the hell, the comet’s on its way. Let’s get it on." Terence McKenna: "The planet says, the comet’s on the way. Lets get these monkeys moving towards the production of sufficient complexity that when this impact event occurs it will have a transcendental rather than simply an …" Ralph Abraham: "Have an opportunity to escape into another dimension." Terence McKenna: "Yes." 21:02 Terence McKenna: "If you pursue these psychedelic, shamanic plants there is inevitably this conclusion scenario, or this apocalyptic intuition. And I think that shamans have always seen the end. That the human enterprise in three dimensional space has always been finite." 22:47 Terence McKenna: [discussing knowledge of life after death] "But in fact, I think this is probably the paradigm-shattering, world-condensing event that is bearing down on us." 25:04 Terence McKenna: "That’s what life is. It’s a chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality." 28:52 Terence McKenna: "So even within the toolbox of ordinary quantum astrophysics there are ways of tinker-toying the syntactical bits together to produce incredibly optimistic transcendental and psychedelic scenarios." 37:22 Terence describes his "simple way" of thinking about what may happen on December 21, 2012. 39:30 Terence McKenna: "But I’m telling you, Ralph, there’s something out there. There’s something out there, and I’ll know it when I see it." 40:06 Terence McKenna: "Believe it or not, I hate unanchored speculation. And yet I find myself in the position of leading the charge in the greatest unanchored speculation in the history of crackpot thinking." 43:33 Terence McKenna: "I think people should drive out and take a look at the Eschaton at the end of the road of history. And what that means is psychedelic self-experimentation. I don’t know of any other way to do it. But if you drive out to the end of the road and take a look at the Eschaton and kick the tires and so forth, then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people." 53:56 Terence McKenna: "No one is directing or controlling the creative energies of this species. It’s being driven by thousands of micro-units called companies, all pursuing agendas they won’t discuss with anybody who hasn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement. So god knows what they’re doing out there, and they’re fiddling with life, and minds, and intelligence, and micro-dimensions, and you name it." 54:57 Terence McKenna: "It’s the future we’re living in, Hollywood creates it, and we have to swallow it until something better comes along, or until we get sick enough about that system to do something about it." 55:43 Terence McKenna: "I think here in the final moments in human history we should push the art peddle to the floor and attempt to pour as much beauty into the human design process as we possibly can." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/28/20071 hour, 17 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 108 – Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:32 Terence McKenna: "But the fact of the matter is, there is no reason to believe that time is invariant, and experience argues the contrary." 12:39 Rupert Sheldrake: "Maybe, you see, that the bonds between pigeons and their home are comparable to the bonds between people and other people, and indeed they may be related to that which holds society together. When we say "the bonds between people", we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. It may be that there is an actual connection between them. . . . This kind of social bond, this kind of linkage, may be utterly fundamental." 17:28 Ralph Abraham: "Especially for people like Americans, who watch television for seven hours a day, there is somehow not enough time away from language." 17:37 Terence McKenna: "But notice that most prophetic episodes are dream episodes. I think that supports my point that we have lost connection with a kind of fourth dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given." 25:59 Terence McKenna: "Somehow language is a strategy for holding at bay a much more complex world." 26:29 Terence McKenna: "The obsession with intellectual closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys, because nowhere is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality. I think part of what we have to do is live with unsolved mysteries that are in principle insoluble. They’re not simply unsolved problems, they are in principle mysterious. All would agree that the highest understanding resides in silence, but it’s the death of conversation." 30:57 Terence McKenna: "I question whether we actually think in words, or to what degree we do. What you notice when you experiment with these shamanic tools, such as psychoactive plants, is that as the intoxications deepen thought becomes vision, and one thinks in images. And I imagine that this is the aboriginal thought-style, and we must have thought in images for a long time before we downloaded into words." 35:48 Terence McKenna: "If a prophecy comes true, does that mean then that in principle all of the future is determined? You see, we have to avoid determinism here because a true determinism means thinking is pointless, because in a rigid determinism you think what you think because you couldn’t think anything else. So the concept of truth is utterly without meaning in a rigid determinism." 37:21 Terence McKenna: "I don’t think the meaning of human existence lies in culture. It lies in the individual. And to access that meaning a certain amount of deconditioning, i.e., alienation, has to take place from a culture. If you’re just a cheerful representative of your culture you’re a kind of mindless boor." 40:10 Rupert Sheldrake: "There are astonishing powers in the animal and the other realms of nature, which we have just simply been blind to. We’re blind to them if we think in terms of institutional science." 50:55 Terence introduces the topic of time into the discussion. 52:02 Terence McKenna: "Examine, or recall to yourself for a moment, what it is that orthodoxy teaches about time. It teaches that, for reasons impossible to conceive, the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment. Now whatever you might think about that idea, notice that it is the limit test for credulity. In other words, if you could believe that you could believe anything. It’s impossible to conceive of something more unlikely. Yet this is where science begins its supposedly rational tale of the unfolding of the phenomenal universe. It’s almost as if science is saying, ‘Give us one free miracle and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless casual explanation." 1:02:38 Terence McKenna: "When these curves [about population, climate, pollution, etc.] are extrapolated,
9/22/20071 hour, 26 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 107 – Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:18 Ralph begins by describing "Terence to himself". 05:46 Ralph Abraham: "So in our process of trialoging we find it very much enriched by Terence’s phenomenal knowledge of history, and not only that, but his special way of saying it is sort of a, you’re familiar with this here, a bardic skill. So that whatever he says will have [long pause]more effect than it actually deserves" [added with humor that was followed by laughter]. 08:36 Terence "shares his view" of Rupert. 09:12 Terence McKenna: "And my intellectual method has always been to seek out the heretical. And so when I heard that Nature had called for the burning of a book [insert title], I burned up my tires on the way to the store to see if I couldn’t obtain a copy." 16:38 Rupert introduces Ralph. 19:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "His [Ralph Abraham's] ability to visualize mathematics, I’m sure, is innate. But I think it was enhanced in the late 60s and early 70s by certain inner experiences, which would fall into the category of what Terence calls hands-on pharmacology." 22:54 Ralph begins his introduction of Rupert. 27:21 Rupert tells the story of his first meeting with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham. 32:00 Rupert Sheldrake: "Part of him [Terence McKenna] is a millenarian prophet. Part of him is a Dominican. He professes to be a pagan, but his Catholic upbringing, his Dominican reasoning, and his experience as an altar boy have never left him." 34:16 Terence tells about when he first heard of Ralph. 36:43 Terence McKenna: [Speaking about Ralph Abraham]"It’s impossible not to fall in love with the man. He’s the teddy bear of advanced mathematics." 45:07 Rupert Sheldrake: "[In science,] if you can do things cheaply, you’re completely free, because the only control that they have is through money and giving out funds. And if you don’t need the funds you can do what you like." 1:13:39 Terence McKenna: "What do I think? Well, not that." 1:14:20 Terence McKenna: "I’ve always felt that what biology is is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macro-physical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language." 1:19:36 Terence McKenna: "The real question I’m raising is, to what degree does language create the assumption of an unknown future." 1:24:03 Terence McKenna: "We alone, I think, are tormented by the anxiety of the unknowable future. And it’s an artifact, I maintain, of culture and language." 1:28:28 Terence McKenna: "And I don’t believe that time is invariant. I didn’t intend to open this up as a general frontal attack on the epistemic methods of modern science, but, in fact, the idea that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience, and it’s merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business." 1:29:36 Terence McKenna: "As a practical matter, I don’t think we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/19/20071 hour, 33 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 106 – “How Rare We Are in the Universe”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) [NOTE: All quotations below are by Bruce Damer] 08:17 Bruce tells about the three-day white out that followed the 2002 Burning Man festival. 15:59 Bruce talks about the problem of dust on the moon. 18:46"We all grew up seeing buried lunar bases and happy astronauts running around mining and other things, it ain’t going to happen. I concluded, after a lifetime of believing this and two years of actually working on this problem, that we’re not going to do this. We don’t have the technology." 21.52 "How rare are we in the universe? How rare a thing are we?" 24:02 "These solar systems are out there. They’ve been bathed by our radio waves. Are there any receivers? Is there anyone out there to pick up ‘I Love Lucy’? Probably not. Why? Because those solar systems have all the wrong properties for probably our kind of life or any kind of life." 29:39 "In this chunk of the galaxy we’re the only noisy solar system. . . . We may be extremely rare. We may be the only ones in our little quadrant. We may be the only ones in our galaxy, or the only one in our local group of galaxies. Life like ours is unbelievably difficult to create. And here we are, our concerns are can we get to the office on time. We don’t even think about the miracle each one of us is." 31:42 "What I’m trying to build up is a picture of why you don’t need religion. All you need, if you want to be awestruck, is to consider the improbability of you, the improbable miracle that is you." 35:05 [Commenting on a computer-generated depiction of an astrophysical zoom-out from Earth] "If the universe was at all attempting to find consciousness, for a split-second, a primate brain on Earth had in its little synaptic gaps a picture of the universe. The universe saw itself momentarily." 38:48 "What if the ultimate goal of life, of the universe, was to become fully conscious? And what I mean by that is the entire universe becomes, instead of this jumble of matter and quantum whatever, it becomes a single conscious being?" 42:02 "For life itself to have a chance to expand out into the universe, and populate and infuse the universe, we may be one of its only shots [at this], at least in our area. We’re one of the only chances to do this, and we have a very limited window." 46:52 Bruce talks about the possibilities ALife might explore should it ever be set free in a quantum computer. 51:18 Bruce tells the story about his vision (during the AlChemical Arts Conference in September 1999) of Terence McKenna’s ‘getaway car’. 1:03:57 Bruce begins a stream of consciousness riff about quantum reality that is packed with mind-blowing concepts and ends . . . "In the universe you are all participants. So if you think about it you change it. If you try to study it you change it." 1:08:39 "The next time you have a powerful dream consider that it may have come from the field." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Lorenzo’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival Bruce Damer’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival Matt Pallamary’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival
9/12/20071 hour, 38 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 105 – “My Life as a Shaman and Artist”

Guest speaker: Pablo Amaringo [NOTE: All quotations below are by Pablo Amaringo, as interpreted by Lorenzo from Zoe7's translation.] Pablo Amaringo was elected to the Global 500 Roll of Honor of the United Nations Environmental Program in recognition of outstanding practical achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment through the USKO-AYAR school. PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:23 Susan Blackmore introduces Pablo Amaringo 07:16 "I was born and raised Catholic, but I did not really subscribe to the way in which that religion interpreted existence and life, particularly life after death." 13:02 "From experience, I came to learn that ayahuasca bestows upon the user knowledge about a variety of topics, not only consciousness and perception, but also leads one to realize that what we perceive is an illusion." 17:57 "In 1968 I had a revelation that we live in a sort of organism, an organism somewhat like a ship in that it keeps us, and not just us humans, but every living thing in something like a cocoon. And I was told that this home of ours, this ship, is becoming endangered simply because people are not taking care of the environment." 22:30 "We should not think only about the immediate future for ourselves living on this planet, but also about the futures of our children and grandchildren. What are we going to leave for them? What are they going to find? Those are questions we should ask and resolve before it’s too late." 23:46 "One of the chief problems here is the lack of love, love for the environment and love for each other." 28:02 Pablo begins talking about the ayahuasca visions in his paintings. 47:36 "By going into the psychedelic experience, by going into the world of plants, one is able to first and foremost know about himself. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities in his eyes." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option;  Ayahuasca Visions by   Pablo Amaringo, Luis Luna, and Luis Eduardo Luna
8/22/20071 hour, 7 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 104 – “Consciousness Isn’t What It Seems To Be”

Guest speaker: Susan Blackmore PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:30 Jon Hanna introduces Susan Blackmore 08:04 "A lot of people kind of think that scientists like myself are kind of pushing the problem [of what is consciousness] away, some are, but there’s a huge excitement about what we do with this mystery, and it’s a very strange mystery indeed." 09:22 "That’s what we mean by consciousness, in contemporary science, what it’s like for you." 09:38 Susan talks about ‘the great chasm’ between mind and brain, sometimes called the ‘fathomless abyss’ . . . "It’s the chasm between subjective, how it is to me, and objective, how we believe it must be in the real physical world. Don’t underestimate this problem." 11:48 "So that’s the sense in which I mean consciousness might be an illusion: not what it seems to be." 18:48 Susan begins her discussion about free will. 24:34 "You can see the readiness potential building up in someone’s brain a long time, a long time in brain terms, before they know they are spontaneously and freely act." 26:56 "We can believe that free will is an illusion. That’s my preferred solution. I don’t want to press it on you, but it seems this way: When you look at these results, and many other results too, consciousness just doesn’t seem to be the thing that starts things off." 51:07 "I suggest, that when you’re walking around in your ordinary life, just realize how much you are not seeing, but you are not seeing it all." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books discussed in this podcast            The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human by Susan Blackmore Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett Susan Blackmore’s books on Amazon.com
8/4/20071 hour, 19 minutes, 37 seconds
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Podcast 103 – “Psychoactive Drugs Through Human History”

Guest speaker: Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) NOTE: All quotes below are by Dr. Andrew Weil 04:41 "There are no good or bad drugs. Drugs are what we make of them. They have good and bad uses." 05:04 "I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances." 06:33 "Alcohol, any way you look at it, is the most toxic and most dangerous of all psychoactive drugs. In any sense, in terms of medical toxicity, behavioral toxicity, there is no other drug for which the association between crime and violence is so clear cut . . . and tobacco, in the form of cigarettes is THE most addictive of all drugs." 08:47 "What could be a more flagrant example of drug pushing than public support of that industry [tobacco and cigarettes]." 12:38 "I see a great failure in the world in general to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse." 16:25 "Another very common use, in all cultures, of psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences. To allow them to transcend their human and ego boundaries to feel greater contact with the supernatural, or with the spiritual, or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms." 17:54 "Drugs don’t have spiritual potential, human beings have spiritual potential. And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction, and the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people." 19:59 "Why is it that the human brain and plants should have the same chemicals in them?" 22:39 "The effects of drugs are as much dependent on expectation and setting, on set and setting, as they are on pharmacology. We shape the effects of drugs. All drugs do is make you feel temporarily different, physically and psychologically." 25:26 "The effects of drugs can be completely shaped by cultural expectations, by individual expectations, by setting as well." 28:22 "The manner of introducing a drug into the body is crucially determinant of the effects the people experience. And especially of its adverse effects, both short term and long term." 31:51 "I think it’s unfortunate that in this culture we have fallen so much into the habit of relying on refined, purified durative of plants, in highly concentrated form, both for recreational drugs and for medicine. And have formed the habit of thinking that this is somehow more scientific and effective, that botanical drugs are old-fashioned, unscientific, messy. In fact, they’re much safer, and sometimes the quality and effects are better." 32:55 "It’s we who determine whether drugs are destructive or whether they’re beneficial. It’s not any inherent property of drugs." 41:36 "The use of yage, or ayahuasca, in Amazonian Indian cultures is often credited with giving people visions that have valid content." 50:25 "But I think healing, like religious experience, is an innate potential of the body. It’s not something that comes in a drug. All a drug can do is give you a push in a certain direction, and I think that even there expectation plays a great role in that." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs (Published 1983) From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (Published 2004)
7/25/20071 hour, 6 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 102 – “Build Your Own Damn Boat”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:33 Terence begins with a discussion of "the felt presence of immediate experience." 08:10 Terence McKenna: "The thing I like about the Zippy culture and the house, trance-dance, techno culture is that it’s about feeling. The combination of young people, drugs, a fairly sexually charged social environment, and syncopated music is just all designed to draw you into you and your friends and your scene, and your hood, and your place in the cosmos and not sell you out as a consumer to Hollywood, or Manhattan-manufactured forms of entertainment." 10:01 Terence McKenna: "The culture is so capable of assimilating and disarming its critics through hype and fashion. I mean, I was horrified to see that ad, ‘Alan Ginsberg work kakis’. Did you see that!" 12:28 Terence McKenna: "What Rupert’s [Sheldrake] theory carries as an implication is what Prigogine now proclaims, which is, what we thought were eternal natural laws are simply something more like habits. Habits of Nature." 26:49 Terence begins his discussion of paradigm shift. 28:57 Terence McKenna: "So, human freedom is the precondition for the assumption of man’s flaw, man’s fall. You know, what Thomas Aquinas called the felix culpa, the happy flaw." 30:12 Terence McKenna: "A paradigm is a lens through which you see the world, and everything is transformed when you look through this lens." 32:42 Terence McKenna: "If habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism. It’s more like a creature. It learns, It gains experience. As it matures it changes its strategy. As it expands its experience it gains new domains of emergent subtlety." 36:36 Terence McKenna: "The dimension of human freedom is a precondition for guilt. Only the free can be guilty because only the free can be responsible for what they do." 48:37 Terence McKenna: "What we call nature is a novelty-conserving engine, that what nature glories in is novelty." 49:48 Terence McKenna: "Sometimes for ‘novelty’ I’ve used the phrase ‘density of connection.’ " 1:01:13 Terence McKenna:"And when you think about it, if you really believe in eternal laws of nature then you have a philosophical mess on your hands." 1:05:35 Terence McKenna: "Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism there is not consciousness." 1:12:35 Terence begins a discussion about memes. 1:27:49 Terence McKenna: "We are very fortunate to live through an age of enormous reappraisal." 1:30:17 Terence McKenna: "Humor is an admission of ignorance. Ignorance is the precondition for knowledge. And in a sense, to take it to a deeper level, magic is a deeper perception than science. Because science believes that the world is truly there it is naive in its emphericism. Magic knows that the world is made of language. That the world is the construct of forceful imagination. And the people who don’t know this are walking around in the world of the people who do." 1:31:27 Terence McKenna: "Do not lease other people’s linguistic structures and live in them. Build your own virtual worlds. Build your own values and your own house of mirrors." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/20/20071 hour, 38 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 101 – “Ayahuasca Adventure”

Guest speakers: Lorenzo & James PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 07:17 James and Lorenzo begin a discussion about the fortuitous ways in which people come into contact with ayahuasca. 17:30 James describes the preparation of the ayahuasca brew the day of their ceremony. 24:05 Lorenzo and James begin a discussion of purging during the ayahuasca experience. 30:31 James explains the difference between a shaman and a yachak among the indigenous Qechua people of Ecuador. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/12/200754 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 100 – “Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference – 1983″ (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 10:09 Sasha Shulgin: "First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of balance in all aspects of the human theater." 11:00 Sasha Shulgin: "One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary, a vocabulary that might allow each human being to more consciously — and more clearly — communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche. This may be called a vocabulary of awareness." 17:47 Sasha Shulgin: [After a discussion of nuclear weapons.] "And to have such power leads to the threat to use such power, which – in time – will actually lead to its use. But, as I have said earlier, when one thing develops, there seems to spring forth a balancing, a compensatory counterpart. This balance can be realized with the psychedelic drugs. What had been simply tools for the study of psychosis (at best), or for escapist self-gratification (at worst), suddenly assumed the character of tools of enlightenment, and of some form of transcendental communication." 19:24 Sasha Shulgin: "But I feel — along with many others — that the efforts being invested in the technology of destruction does not allow sufficient time. It is possibly only with the psychedelic drugs that words of vocabulary can be established, which might tunnel through the subconscious between the conflicting aspects of the mind and psyche. It is here that I feel my skill lies, and this is exactly why I do what I do." 31:42 Sasha Shulgin: "My personal philosophy might well be lifted directly from Blake: ‘I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.’ I may be wrong, but I must do what I can. And I will do what I can as fast as I can." 38:44 Terence McKenna: "The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances." 40:15 Terence McKenna: "Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit." [NOTE: Graham Hancock's book, Supernatural, provides a detailed investigation of this subject.] 41:46 Terence McKenna: "The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness." 44:45 Terence McKenna: "The Logos is a voice heard, in the head. And the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion." 47:36 Terence McKenna: "It’s my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it." 49:47 Terence McKenna: "And yet, WE are the culture that is in crisis. When you go to the rain forest you don’t find cultures in crisis except to the degree that they are being impacted by us." 50:24 Terence McKenna: "What he [R. Gordon Wasson] discovered, in the mountains of Mexico, was nothing less than Eros, sleeping but alive. The body of Osiris preserved over an entire astrological age, metaphorically speaking. In other words, that to take the mushroom was to transcend the cultural momentum of the past c...
7/3/20071 hour, 11 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 099 – “Controlling The Culture” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Richard Glen Boire, Erik Davis, and John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:08 Richard Glen Boire: "What if the government could inoculate you so you couldn’t get high, so if you took a drug it didn’t work in you?" 07:53 Richard begins a discussion about the U.S. Government’s research into anti-drug drugs, which he calls "Neurocops". "So the question is, is it actually possible to treat illegal drug use with other drugs?" 08:25 Richard Glen Boire: "What I think the drug war is about to become is like truly a "drug" war. The war of your favorite drug against the government’s anti-drugs." 09:09 Richard Glen Boire: "One of those ["anti-high"] vaccines that is now under production (they have these for all the major classes of illegal drugs right now, including marijuana), and this is the one that’s been tested now in humans, is only known as SR141716." 10:10 Richard Glen Boire: "The most recent Drug Control Strategy Report, this year’s, has this term, ‘compassionate coercion’. This is a real government publication. [quoting] ‘Compassionate coercion requires the use of innovative techniques for fighting addiction, such as specialized pharmeceuticals." 15:40 Richard Glen Boire: "What makes this kind of thinking by the government possible: That we’re going to create a vaccine, and you druggies are going to get it so you don’t continue to transmit your disease, is what’s made the drug war itself possible, which is the government’s total disrespect for what we call Cognitive Liberty. And that is the right to control your own neurochemistry, to think the thoughts you want to think triggered by whatever inputs those may be as long as you’re not causing harm to others." 16:43 Richard Glen Boire: "I think we need in this country a Roe v. Wade of the mind." 17:11 Introduction of Erik Davis who talks about "Waking Up In The Matrix" 20:16 Erik Davis: "What I talk about in Techgnosis is the way this sort of Gnostic hunch, this sense that there is some kind of false construct that I’m in is really part and parcel of technological society." 21:02 Erik Davis: "By ’spirituality’ I really mean something very simple, which is the process of inquiry. And I mean inquiry on multiple levels. . . . Constant inquiry, such as ‘what is going on here?’ " 30:14 Erik Davis: "As Dale Pendell said in a line that has just stuck with me, ‘When one learns to face the gods directly one no longer fears facing a king." 30:37 Introduction of John Gilmore who talks about our Constitutional rights of anonymous travel and speech. 32:48 John Gilmore: "When the government says, ‘Terror . . . danger . . . evil . . . trouble,’ people sort of zoom in and look at that stuff. Instead, I kind of back away and say, ‘What are they doing around the edges while they’re trying to get your attention over here?’ " 34:10 John Gilmore: "If you focus on the ability of individuals to do evil you forget about the ability of individuals to do good." 36:40 John Gilmore: "The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, these are memes. They’re not alive. They’re not self-executing. They require human hosts to carry them and spread them around, and I’ve been infected by that meme, and I’m carrying it around." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/29/200757 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 098 – “Psychedelic Research in the 1960s” (Part 2)

Guest speaker: Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:20 Gary tells about his encounter with an extraterrestrial. 07:11 Stories of another encounter with otherworldly entities, this time in the desert. 09:40 The story about a man who always longed for a UFO experience. 11:36 Gary tells why he thinks extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth. 14:33 Gary tells the story of when Timothy Leary was driving him to their compound in Mexico, and Gary suddenly had an intuition that reflected back to both a psilocybin experience and a past life experience. 17:07 Gary Fisher: "In the esoteric world those are called ’sleeping karmas’, and you’ll run into a person who’s happy all the time, everything goes well for them. They don’t have any hysterics in their life, and they’re having sleeping karma. They just come in to relax." 18:15 Gary tells the story of his Caribbean adventure with Tim Leary and company. 26:55 Beginning of a discussion about Alan Watts and the time he went to Mexico for a psychedelic mushroom session with Maria Sabina and ended up getting married to Mary Jane on the spur of the moment. 29:46 Gary Fisher: "At one dinner this very proper lady said, ‘Well Doctor Watts, what do you hope to gain from your next experience with LSD?’, and Alan said, ‘Another book!’ " 35:29 We begin a brief discussion of Tim Leary. . . . Gary Fisher: "Well, he was a drunken Irishman with a silver tongue. . . . He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. Those were his two goals in life." 44:26 Gary discusses several issues relating to the age at which it may be appropriate to begin using psychedelics. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/20/200755 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 097 – “Psychedelic Research in the 1960s” (Part 1)

Guest speaker: Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) Our conversation began by looking at photos of some of Gary’s former students, patients, and famous friends. 13:12 We begin a discussion of Gary’s work in the 1960s with severely emotionally disturbed children suffering from variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism who he treated with LSD and psilocybin. 16:36 Al Hubbard is discussed 18:23 Gary Fisher: "All our model was from Hubbard, because Hubbard was the guy who taught my brother-in-law and Duncan Blewett. . . . He was the father of all this stuff. . . . He was the one who introduced Osmond and Hoffer to this whole approach." 25:45 Gary provides more details about his work with the severely disturbed children, beginning with the story of Nancy’s nearly miraculous improvement after being treated with LSD. 35:59 Gary describes the deplorable conditions in the public hospital wards where severely disturbed children were being held. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option THE LINKS BELOW will take you to several articles by Dr. Fisher that have been posted on the Web stie of the Albert Hofmann Foundationin The Gary Fisher Collection: Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia Utilizing LSD and Psilocybin by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. A Note of the Successful Outcome of a Single Dose LSD Experience in a Patient Suffering from Grand Mal Epilepsy Gary Fisher, Ph.D. Some Comments Concerning Dosage Levels Of Psychedelic Compounds For Psychotherapeutic Experiences [Print-friendly copy] by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. Death, Identity, and Creativity by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. Successful Outcome of a Single LSD Treatment in a Chronically Dysfunctional Man by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. The Psychotherapeutic Use Of Psychodysleptic Drugs by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. and Joyce Martin M.D. Psychotherapy for the Dying: Principles and Illustrative Cases with Special Reference to the use of LSD by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.; Assistant Professor, Division of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, School of Public Health. University of California, Los Angeles Counter-Transference Issues in Psychedelic Psychotherapy by Gary Fisher, PH.D
6/12/200756 minutes, 24 seconds
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Podcast 096 – “Psychedelic Research, MDMA Safety Issues, and more”

Guest speaker: Charles S. Grob, M.D. PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:20 Charlie talks about how he got into psychedelic research. 07:47 Charlie: "My interest has always been in studying the potential therapeutic effects of MDMA. I’ve always had concerns about use and abuse of the recreationally drug ecstasy. Now early on in the history of this drug, ecstasy was almost always MDMA, but over the years there has been more and more drug substitutions, to the point where now with ecstasy I think there’s less reliability in regards to it being the drug you think it is than for any other drug I’m aware of." 09:25 Charlie describes the process of obtaining approval to conduct clinical research using psychedelic drugs. 16:29 Charlie:"If you have some ambition to work in this area you have to develop certain character qualities, like having a lot of patience and persistence." 18:13 Charlie discusses the relative merits of MDMA vs. psilocybin in the treatment of end stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety. 22:33 Charlie: "So MDMA might turn out to be a very valuable compound to use with a chronic PTSD patient group, but in a medically ill group, over the years I began to question that and decided that psilocybin would be significantly safer." 20:43 Charlie begins his discussion of the human safety study of MDMA that he conducted. 23:03 Charlie: "A relative risk in regards to recreational use of MDMA is that a lot of people are oblivious to the fact that different drugs can interact with one another, and people who may have medical conditions, on medication, who then take ecstasy, which is often, though not always, MDMA, that there may be a drug-drug interaction which can cause injurious effects." 28:50 Lorenzo changes the subject by asking, "What do you tell your kids other than ‘just say no’?" . . . Charlie: "Often the most helpful thing you can do is simply be honest, and to provide the young people with the information we know today." 29:28 Charlie explains ways that the street drug ecstasy can cause significant medical problems when not properly used. 34:11 Charlie talks about the work done my Humphry Osmand, Abram Hoffer, Duncan Blewett, and others in Canada when they successfully treated and cured alcoholics using LSD as a catalyst that changing their lives. 36:17 Charlie: "It seems to me there are some very interesting implications here for Osmand’s old work with alcoholics as well as some of our more recent observations with the ayahuasca church as well as others who have observed a similar process in the Native American Peyote Church." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/8/200758 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 095 – “Energy Drinks . . . and other stuff”

Guest speaker: Jon Hanna PROGRAM NOTES: Jon Hanna enjoying an energy dring while visiting the Shulgins.Photo credit: Marc Franklin (Lordnose) (c) 2007 (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:19 Jon tells about starting the publication of The Psychedelic Resource List. 08:32 Lorenzo and Jon discuss articles in the current issue of Entheogen Review, including "DMT for the Masses" and "Security Issues in the Underground". 13:14 Jon talks about the problem of mis-labeling of botanicals that are sold on the Internet. 18:29 The discussion turns to security issues in the psychedelic community. 23:33 Halperngate and John Halpern as a DEA snitch discussed at Burning Man. 28:08 Jon Hanna: "Kind of the Golden Rule in our community is ‘Thou shallt not snitch.’ That’s the glue, the trust, that holds us all together as a community." 31:54 Jon talks about his current research into energy drinks. 46:11 The horrors of a $6.57 a day energy drink habit?!? 50:06 Jon reads the warning label on an energy drink can 1:04:46 Jon raves about the apocalyptic visionary painter,Joe Coleman. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Mind States Conferences (click) Psychedelic Resource List by Jon Hanna Essays Discussed in this Podcast "Halperngate" "Halperngate II" "The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc"   "Bogus Kratom Market Exposed" Psychedelic Shamanism by Jim DeKorne
5/30/20071 hour, 16 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 094 – “Morphogenic Family Fields” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:38 Rupert Sheldrake: quot;The primary metaphor is the magnetic field, that’s what gives you the sense of a field. But if you look at the type of physics that would be appropriate for describing these fields it would not be magnitism, it’s quantum field theory. 07:23 Ralph Abraham:"I’m extremely suspicious of the application of quantum mechanical concepts in the arena of psychology, consciousness, sociology, and so on. To me that’s much fuzzier than the face on Mars." 12:28 Terence McKenna: "Part of the problem is that physical models break down when prosecuted to quantum mechanical levels." 21:15 Ralph begins his explanation of the physics of the nimbus, otherwise known as a halo. 30:47 Terence: "The more successful psychoanalytic theories, it seems to me, are the least mathmatically driven, and depend really on this mysterious business that we call the gifted therapist." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/29/200750 minutes, 44 seconds
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Podcast 093 – “Morphogenic Family Fields” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:25 Rupert Sheldrake: "And so in human family groups we’d expect the same kind of morphic fields [as in other animal family groups]. . . . It would mean that family fields, with their morphic fields, would have a kind of memory from the families that contributed to them. The father’s and mother’s families of origin would come together in a family." 12:12 Rupert: "Whatever the merits or demerits of [Bert] Hellinger’s system, which I think is very interesting and apparently very effective, the idea of making models of the family field seems to me something that one could address in a more general sense." 20:29 Terence McKenna: "The family thing works because people really are complex chemical systems with genetic affinity." 22:16 Rupert: "There are amazing cases where young people commit suicide in a way that mimics the unacknowledged death of an ancestor, like suicide by drowning when an ancestor one or two generations before have committed suicide by drowning, but they’ve never been told about it because it was never acknowledged. And you get these extraordinary patterns that repeat." 26:58 Rupert: "We don’t have adequate models for these family systems, nor the influence of ancestors within them, which my interest in morphic resonance makes me very keen on." 49:27 Rupert (describing an indigenous belief): "But you have to be on good terms with the ancestors. And what being on good terms, above all, means acknowledging them. . . . that you name and acknowledge the key ancestors, you acknowledge all the dead in your lineage. And if you miss anyone out they’re going to be angry, and if they’re angry that means trouble." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/18/200754 minutes, 25 seconds
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Podcast 092 – “Lone Pine Stories” (Part 3)

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program)   02:29 Myron Stolarofftalks about writing "The Secret Chief", a biography of Leo Zeff. 06:06Lorenzodescribes Dr. Michael Mitthoefer’s research where he is using MDMA to treat victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 12:52 Myron tells how he strikes up conversations about psychedelics with strangers he meets while traveling. 18:00 Myron: "The DEA, they’ve been the toughest ones. To a man they’re really refuting these things with all the power that they have, and they’re not interested in learning anything about them. They’re not interested in learning if anything [positive] is possible." 25:31 Myron: "Even though it’s painful, you’re much better off, if you’re willing to experience the pain, be with it and let it go, because once it breaks through and is gone you’re at a whole new level." 30:51 Myron: "And so you try to pretend that it’s [pain] not there, but it is there. And as long as it’s there it’s going to control you." 35:32 Myron: "I used the phrase ‘worked on that’, and the working is not really struggling and trying to make things happen. It isn’t that at all. What it is is learning to just be still, to just let everything go, just absolutely be still and let our hearts open." 54:43 Myron tells about instigating, along with Al Hubbard, the meeting between Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. 58:31 Myron (in a conversation with Timothy Leary)"I don’t have it in my heart to tell you not to do what you’re doing, but, really, what you’re doing isn’t going in the right direction." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  "The Secret Chief Revealed" by Myron Stolaroff  "Thantos To Eros" by Myron Stolaroff
5/9/200751 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 091 – “The Balkanization of Epistemology” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:25 Rupert Sheldrake describes how one could go about creating a "consumer’s report" for odd-ball theories. 06:23Terence McKenna:"Ninety-five percent of the scientists who have rejected astrology cannot cast a natal horoscope, and that the ability to actually cast a horoscope never seemed to be required of these high-toned scientific critics of astrology. It was something they felt perfectly free to dismiss without understanding." 07:26 Ralph Abraham: "Well, the hypothesis of causative formation, of course, favors deeper fluff. . . . The thing about astrology is that people say it works. An argument could be made that even though the Zodiacal reference frame that it is based on no longer has any basis in the sky that it works because people believe in it, and because it is in the N-field, and that because it’s deeper fluff, basically." 08:27 Ralph: "I think it could be that scientific research, done according to the best principles, has a greater weight in impressing itself upon the morphogenic field." 12:53 Rupert: "This internalization of the use of blind techniques has, in fact, gone farthest in parapsychology, where 85% of experiments are double blind in recent journals. In medicine and psychology where everyone pays lip service to blind techniques, in practice the number of blind papers, or double blind, is in the region of six to seven percent of all published papers in the top journals." 17:09 Terence: "Well, speculation and skepticism begin to sound like novelty and habit. So maybe these things are just counter-flows in the intellectual life of the culture that redress each other. And though we do have certain long-running forms of fuzz, it does tend to correct itself over time." 19:47 Rupert: "The fact is that in the mainstream of our culture skepticism reigns supreme." 22:27 Terence:"New kinds of people are making their voices heard, people from outside the male patriarchal, usual membership in the club." 25:34 Rupert: "In most walks of life skepticism is normal. We expect it in politics, courts of law, etc." 27:30 Rupert: "[Science] is the only universal system which is not open to the normal processes of challenge from competing points of view, having to justify itself in terms of evidence." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Also mentioned in this podcast Cross-cultural Medical Ethnobotany by Nat Bletter The Ayahuasca Monologues with Jonathan Philips, Jamye Waxman, Bill Kennedy, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Nat Bletter
5/6/200742 minutes, 33 seconds
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Podcast 090 – “The Balkanization of Epistemology” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:09 Terence McKenna: "Somehow as a part of the agenda of political correctness it has become not entirely acceptable to criticize, or demand substantial evidence, or expect people, when advancing their speculations, to make, what used to be called, old fashioned sense." 04:10 Terence: "These phenomenon, which we know exist, and which we find rich in implication, would simply not be allowed as objects of discourse, they would be ruled out of order. So there’s something wrong on one level with what’s called empiricism, skepticism, positivism, it has different names." 08:09 Terence:"[Empherical science] is a coarse-grained view of nature, and what it mitigates against seeing are the very things that feed the progress of science, which is the unassimilated phenomenon, the unusual data, the peculiar result of an experiment." 11:04 Terence: "What I have a problem with is unanchored, eccentric revelations." 13:39 Terence: "Nonlocality, accepted, permits some of the things we’re interested in." 15:26 Rupert Sheldrake: "Weirdness and cults and most of the phenomenon you’ve named are phenomenon of Hawaii and California. When you live in England, things take on a rather different perspective. There’s a general level of popular skepticism, such that the general tone of an English pub is one of sort of skepticism." Terence: "Well, but aren’t crop circles, and Graham Hancock all homegrown British phenomenon?" 20:33 Rupert: "There is the possibility to return to a more common sense approach, common sense of the British pub type, and probably of standard American kind too, will often deal quite satisfactorily with the probono proctologists from outer space." 21:59 Terence: "You speak from your knowledge of the calculus and world history, and this person speaks from their latest transmission from fallen Atlantis. And this is all placed on an equal footing, and it’s crazy-making, and it also guarantees the trivialness of the entire enterprise. I just don’t think any revolution in human history can be made by fluff-heads." 23:49 Ralph Abraham: "In other words, there is no simple measuring stick of simplicity." 23:49 Ralph says he wishes we could create a measuring stick to measure the truth of something and then goes on to describe how one could be designed. 31:31 Terence: "The history of alchemy is far older than the history of science. It has always been in existence. It’s thinkers have always evolved and adumbrated their field of concern. So that’s one kind of fluff. Fluff with punch, because it has historical continuity." 34:51 Ralph: "The problem with this ’strict parent’ approach to fluff, is that some important discoveries may be shuttled aside." 39:13 Terence: "What we have to legitimize is critical discussion. So that when someone stands up and starts talking about the face on Mars people behave as they apparently behave in British pubs and just stand up and say, ‘Malarkey mate.’And force people to experience a critical deconstruction of their ideas." 48:13 Rupert: "If [scientific research] priorities were set by popular opinion, pet research would be at the top of the biological agenda, not the sequencing of more proteins, the cloning of more sheep to help the biotechnology industry. But instead, pet research isn’t even on the agenda. So it’s set by a small elite who bear no relation in their interests to the voters in a democracy who actually provide the money." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/2/20071 hour, 1 minute, 49 seconds
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Podcast 089 – “Ayahuasca: Diet, Rituals, and Powers”

Guest speaker: Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:48 Matt: "Ayahuasca doesn’t hide anything. . . . It can amplify perceptions, but it can also amplify fears or shadow aspects of yourself, the dark you’ve been avoiding. Ayahuasca has an intelligence to it that seeks out your fear and exploits it, and it’s a wonderful teaching tool." 08:39 Matt explains how the ayahuasca brew is made. 10:19 The legend of how ayahuasca was first discovered. 15:44 Preparation for an ayahuasca experience, beginning with the diet and what prescription medicines to avoid before the journey. 17:56 Details about the ayahuasca diet. 26:03 Lorenzo: "While this is true of all psychoactive substances, medicine like ayahuasca is sort of like nitroglycerine. You have to handle it with care." 27:16 Matt: "What it comes down to, ultimately, is that you have to respect it, and you have to respect its innate intelligence. That’s why, generally speaking, the closer you stick to the diet the better experience you have." 29:51 Tips for planning a trip to the Amazon for an ayahuasca experience. 32:19 Matt: "There’s a lot of responsibility that goes with this, because it’s a very powerful plant. And one of the things that I learned is that power, power in and of itself, is neutral, but the intention you put behind the power is what makes things happen." 33:58 Matt: "It has to come down, ultimately, to integrity. Integrity is the core of everything." 34:41 A discussion of chemical analogues to ayahuasca. 38:49 Matt: "It’s made to be done in a circle, and in a circle you join the energy collectively as a group. So if one particular person in the group is getting healed, everyone in the group is helping to heal that person." 39:58 Matt: "I heard it said once that ayahuasca is the river, and the icaros and songs and things are the boats that carry you on the journey." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Where to find podcasts mentioned in this program: The Cannabis Podcast Network This is where you will find the DopeCast, The Sounds of World Wide Weed, Story Time With Lefty, Zandor’s Grow Report, and Psychonautica Also, don’t miss The C-Realm podcast hosted by KMO. Books mentioned in this podcast Psychedelic Shamanism: The Cultivation, Preparation & Shamanic Use of Psychoactive Plants by Jim DeKorne Land ithout Evil by Matthew J. Pallamary Matt Pallamary’s Web Site
4/25/200754 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 088 – “Status of Psilocybin Study at Harbor-UCLA”

Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:56 Preet describes the study he is working on at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center where he and Dr. Charles Grob are giving psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) to end-stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety. 05:17 A description of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study. 11:01 Preet takes us through a typical session with a study participant. 12:04 "According to some of the research that was done before prohibition, it was found that people who had more internal experiences were more likely to get the psychological intervention we’re going for with this." 24:03 "In my treatments as a psychiatrist I’ve never treated a psychedelic addiction. I’ve treated a lot of addicts who are addicted to a lot of stuff and who also used psychedelics, but that [psychedelic addiction] has never come into my emergency room or office." 29:39 "I think it’s kind of ridiculous to be a scientist and a doctor and not investigate and try to understand how we can use these tools in a Western culture safely." 36:11 "I think that ultimately the true wisdom about these plants comes from shamanic tradition, however, in today’s Western society people will often come to a psychiatrist to address the issue that in a different tribal kind of society they would seek out the shaman." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Mentioned in this podcast "Counter-Transference Issues in Psychedelic Psychotherapy" by Gary Fisher, PH.D Additional papers by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
4/19/200758 minutes, 23 seconds
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Podcast 087 – “MDMA Before Ecstasy”

Guest speakers: George Greer and Requa Tolbert PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:30George talks about how they began to use MDMA in their work. 07:37 "We didn’t want it to get in the newspapers, because we knew that because it felt good it would eventually get out on the street and be made illegal … as it was." 08:30 How people were screened before they could be treated with MDMA. . . . "Where are you pointed?" 10:01 "The purpose for taking it [MDMA] really is the most important thing, more important than the drug even." 12:41 Requa describes the formal structure of a therapeutic MDMA session as developed by Leo Zeff, "The Secret Chief". 16:30 George reads the 18th century prayer that Leo Zeff recommended using before a healing MDMA session. 23:57 "My idea is that MDMA decreases fear, the neurological experience of fear. So if you have a thought that would normally be frightening to you that would make you anxious and tense up and be defensive and push it away, that reaction just is blocked." 30:47 "Women seem to be more sensitive [to MDMA] independent of size . . . actually some research has been done showing women are more sensitive milligrams per kilogram. In Switzerland they found this." 32:33 George describes the work of Dr. Arthur Hastings who used hypnotherapy with former MDMA users to bring back the experience of their medicine session. 33:52 A discussion of beta-blockers. 34:43 "I think that MDMA would be excellent for people who are afraid of dying and afraid of death." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Abstracts of papers by Greer and Tolbert "Subjective reports of the effects of MDMA in a clinical setting" "The Therapeutic Use of MDMA" "A method of conducting therapeutic sessions with MDMA"
4/10/20071 hour, 7 seconds
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Podcast 086 – “MDMA for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”

Guest speaker: Michael Mithoefer PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:19 Michael tells a little about how his study came about and its current status. 08:27 Michael describes the screening, preparation, and flow of the experience for qualified participants. 11:56 "We were able to go back, retroactively, and offer MDMA to everybody that had gotten [only] the placebo so far." 14:06 "Everybody who’s gotten MDMA has had a significant improvement, either temporarily or sustained. More than half, the majority of people have had a very dramatic and sustained improvement." 18:35 "This is a pilot study, and we’re not really looking to prove efficacy. We’re looking to prove we can work safely with these subjects, and it has at least has a strong trend toward being effective." 22:48 A discussion about the neurotoxicity of MDMA. 23:12 "There is still a question about neurotixicity (or at least decreases in some neuro functions) with heavy recreational use. It looks like there probably is some effect, although that is still controversial. . . . It looks like [using MDMA] less than 50 times there is no effect. It is still not known if there is an effect higher than that." 28:31 "The question is about how sustainable is the effect. It really looks like, for some people, two sessions is enough to really, significantly heal PTSD." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/4/200739 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 085 – “The Great Project of the Universe”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:29 Bruce tells the story of the first and only Terence McKenna workshop that was held in a virtual world in cyberspace. 07:00 The story of the bizarre dreams Terence McKenna was having in the weeks before his first major seizure. 08:32 Bruce tells of Terence saying, "It’s all about love," a few days before he died. "Terence said, ‘The whole psychedelic movement, it’s about love. It’s not about all this other stuff. It’s about love.’ " 13:20 "It seems as though the universe is a sort of self-contained thing that never loses any information." 18:34 An epiphany about DNA. 21:09 "What if the universe, like Chris Langton’s brain, is gradually booting up an awareness of itself, and why would it do this?" 29:07 Universe2, the second phase of this universe. 30:19 "All events that happened in the past and that will happen in the future are happening at once. What you’re living in is a mesh. . . . Everything is happening at once." 33:19 "Why does the universe create human beings?" . . . and what about these amazing brains we have? Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option   Bruce Damer’s Web site Photo credits: www.damer.com
3/29/200751 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 084 – “Lone Pine Stories” (Part 2)

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:48 Myron Stolaroff: “After I’d had LSD, there wasn’t anything that could come anywhere close to it. That was the most remarkable thing in my whole life.” 04:34 Myron talks about his meetings with Aldous Huxley. 07:39 Myron talks about Meduna’s mixture, carbogen. 09:42 Myron explains what a carbogen experience was like. 16:15 Why some people don’t seem to have a positive experience with psychedelics. 18:21 The importance of using psychedelics in small, supportive groups. 19:48 Myron discusses his favorite psychedelic substances. 20:37 Myron talks about Duncan Blewett 24:01Some thoughts about using music during a psychedelic experience. 25:05 Myron’s advice to psychonaughts. 28:20 Myron talks about his relationship with Timothy Leary. 31:00 Myron tells the story of removing Leary from the board of directors of the Institute for Advance Study. 33:30 Myron tells of his fist meeting with Dr. Albert Hofmann. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books by Myron Stolaroff LSD manual mentioned in this podcast HANDBOOK FOR THE THERAPEUTIC USE OF LYSERGIC ACID DIETHYLAMIDE-25 INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP PROCEDURES by D.B. BLEWETT, Ph.D. and N. CHWELOS, M.D.
3/24/200743 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 083 – “Lone Pine Stories” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Jean and Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:53Jean Stolaroff:Tells the story of how she first became involved with psychedelic medicines. 07:50 Myron Stolaroff: Tells how Death Valley came to be a favorite location for taking acid trips. 09:20 Myron tells some stories about Al Hubbard and Death Valley. 10:24 Myron tells of an acit trip in Death Valley that he had with Willis Harman and Al Hubbard. 15:56 Jean: “I knew I’d get a lot of fringe benefits from marrying Myron.” 17:10 Jean and Myron discuss 2C-E, “One of the very best.” 18:31 Jean and Myron discuss compounds they have no desire to ever try again. 21:33 Myron talking about 2C-B and how some substances react in unexpected ways with people. 25:14 Myron describes his first LSD experience, which took place in Canada on April 12, 1956. 35:18 Myron talks about Gerald Heard’s influence on his decision to try LSD. 37:30 Myron describes his first carbogen experience. 39:53 Myron describes the preparation that was required of participants in the Menlo Park work. 47:11 Myrondescribes how he first became involved in meditation practices. 54:42 Myron: “You know, if you’re going to work with these materials, meditation is a marvelous supporter because as you use the materials you open your consciousness more, and that opens your meditation more. So then your meditation becomes more effective and more fulfilling. So it’s a growing process.” 59:58 Myron: “And the only way that you can keep developing and learning more, and getting into higher levels of consciousness, is by really exerting yourself and learning to use everything that shows up when you do have these experiences.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/15/20071 hour, 6 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 082 – Mini Trialogue (Santa Cruz)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:08 Terence McKenna: “Another way of thinking of it (the Knot of Eternity) is it’s the nexus of connectivity. It’s a place where everything is cotangent, as the mathematicians say. Everything is connected, and I think that’s the place we are growing toward.” 07:30 Ralph Abraham: “If a present moment is between a past that’s familiar and a future which is completely different, then that’s a very special moment.” 10:18 Rupert Sheldrake: Begins a brief explanation of his theory of morphic resonance. 16:08 Terence: “The great successful conspiracies, the Catholic church, capitalism, the Communist Party of China, Zionism, these things don’t call themselves conspiracies. They call themselves historical social movements." 17:07 Terence: "The task of discerning shit from Shinola looms very large at the end of history." 20:52 Ralph: Tells about the experience he and Rupert had in a crop circle. 23:53 Rupert: Tells about being arrested while inspecting a crop circle. 27:33 Terence: "I think we’re going to have to come to terms with as the world moves toward this concrescence of novelty is that it gives off spurious reflections of itself." 28:54 Terence: "The truth will be beautiful, and it will be simple. And it will be persuasive to those who doubt it. So don’t get into some closed loop of viviology. Make the truth seduce you. Don’t be thereby seduced by error." 31:10 Rupert: Talks about ley lines. 33:49 Terence gives an update on his current thinking about the Timewave (Novelty Theory). 34:17 Terence: "We have created social institutions such as consumer capitalism that are so unfriendly to our innate humaness that they are actually redesigning us, these social systems, to be more brutal, less caring, more acquisitive, more fetishistic, than we naturally would be. And, again, the antidote to this is an awareness of your immediate environment and the tricks that are being run on you and the ways in which we are being manipulated. Man is not bad. Humanity is not flawed. What is flawed are ideologies and social systems that distort humaness for purposes usually of commerce or conquest. . . . Culture is an intelligence test." 42:47 Rupert: "I think that the suppression of ritual forms of violence can lead to an outbreak of sacrificial killings by crazed maniacs." 43:20 Terence: "Well, it’s not a good idea to fear anything. Technology is prostheses. Technology is tools. We’ve always been defined by our tools. There is nothing about us that would be human if it weren’t for our tools. Language is a tool. The cutting edge is a tool. Social organization is a tool. . . . Shamanism is simply a technology." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/9/200759 minutes, 4 seconds
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Podcast 081 – Salvia divinorum (Siebert Interview)

Guest speaker: Daniel Siebert PROGRAM NOTES: 05:44 Daniel tells the story about finding a Salvia plant at a Terence McKenna lecture. 12:06 He describes the traditional Mazatec way of taking Salvia divinorum. 24:39 Daniel talks about the various categories of experiences that are possible through the use of Salvia Divinorum. 25:25 "One of the more common types of experiences people have is often people have visions of places that are reminiscent of early childhood, places like school playgrounds or the back yard of their parents’ house where they lived when they were six or seven years old." 28:49 Daniel talks about his isolation of the active ingredient in Salvia Divinorum. 31:51 "In general, when taken in the traditional fashion of chewing the leaves, the effects are gentle, the onset is gradual, the experience is enriching and it can be utilized in a very controlled, directed, conscientious manner." 43:18 Daniel talks about the varying amounts of time a Salvia experience can last depending upon dosage and method of use. 50:40 A discussion about the current legal status of Salvia. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Daniel Siebert’s Web site www.SageWisdom.org "Salvia divinorum and Salvinorin A: new pharmacologic findings" (PDF file) by Daniel J. Siebert Legal Status Of Salvia divinorum The Sage Wisdom Salvia Shop
2/28/20071 hour, 3 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 080 – Adventures of an Urban Shaman

Guest speaker: Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 12:18 Matt provides some background information about his wild youth. 20:37 Some thoughts about what at what age it is best to begin deeply exploring one’s consciousness through the use of sacred medicines. 21:31 "This is one of the key tenants of shamanism, all you can ultimately go on is your own experience." 23:40 "I want to stress that there are a lot of substances that are not good. Crystal meth, bad. Obviously, heroin, bad. Crack cocaine, bad." 30:30 The discussion turns to shamanism. 32:33 "The medicines teach you to learn how to connect with your heart, and to follow your heart instead of your head, because your heart is actually a superior ‘brain’." 34:23 Matt talks about the course of shamanism study he has been pursuing. 37:44 "The absolute best thing you can do for yourself, and for everybody, for the universe, for the cosmos, for the race, for humanity, truly the absolute best thing you can do for everybody, is to work on yourself and heal yourself. Because when you heal yourself you heal part of the collective, and you begin to realize that everybody around you is a mirror. Because we are all one" 39:28 Matt explains the difference between shamanism and organized religion. . . . "Shamanism, on the other hand, is based on experiential knowledge. Period." 43:31 "Ayahuasca has a way of finding your deepest fears and bringing them out. So when you do it within a sacred circle that’s protected with a good intention, then those parts of you that you’ve been terrified of will come out, and you can deal with them more on your own terms." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Matt Palamary’s Web site (mattpallamary.com) Books mentioned in this podcast: Land Without Evil   Food of the Gods
2/21/20071 hour, 9 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 079 – Feilding and Pesce at Burning Man

Guest speakers: Amanda Feilding and Mark Pesce PROGRAM NOTES: Amanda Feilding (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:30 "Britain is America’s greatest ally in all the dreadful things it is doing at the moment, the war on terror and the war on drugs. And without Britain America would feel isolated." 07:12 Amanda discusses the new scale for drugs that is being proposed in the UK. 09:37 "Present drug policy simply doesn’t work, and indeed it is the policy which is causing most of the damages." 10:45 "My particular interest is in separating the psychedelics and marijuana from the rest of the drugs." 13:34 "We at the Beckley Foundation have decided to do some reports which will tell the truth. Because the United Nations report doesn’t tell the truth. It tells what the Americans want to hear." 14:18 "At the last Beckley Foundation Seminar, which was held at the House of Lords in London, we had the top of drug policy of the United Nations and of the EU. . . . and the United Nations man agreed with me that the regulations on psychedelics should be altered." 16:30 "At the moment it’s not illegal to do research on controlled substances, but no one does it because it’s not good for grant funding, or careers." 19:52 Amanda begins her description of the brain imaging work that is being done with high-level meditation. 25:03 "In my opinion, to experience getting high means that you see a bit of you from higher up the mountain with a greatly enlarged area of simultaneous association of the neurons. So you get more far-reaching associations." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Amanda’s Web site: The Beckley Foundation Mark Pesce (Minutes : Seconds into program) 28:34 Mark Pesce: Talks about the Eschaton, the impending end of everything. "Knowing your expiration date is a very big thing." . . . but on what do you base your beliefs? 31:10 "Does the knowledge that there’s just a little bit more than six years left on the civilizational clock drive any individual that you have ever met anywhere? Have we seen anyone abandon their attachments and prepare themselves for this presumed, inevitable end?" 34:33 "What he [Terence McKenna] said [about 2012] was . . . take this and test it. . . . And I think his greatest disappointment was that so few people actually took that challenge." 36:36 "I have had enough of this [focus on 2012 being the end of history]." 36:54"I have often equated the Eschaton with the idea of technological singularity." 39:10 "What I would say is that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. There is only intelligence, whether it is vegetable, or animal, or mineral, all intelligence is one." 41:16 "Wikipedia is the first identifiable artifact of the age of hyper-intelligence. It is the collective, and collective knowledge, of a billion human minds. It’s not artificial intelligence. It’s just intelligence." Mark’s Web site: MarkPesce.com Photos taken at the 2006 Burning Man festival by Lorenzo . . . more of Lorenzo’s Burning Man photos
2/14/200748 minutes, 21 seconds
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Podcast 078 – The Apocalypse (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 07:58 Terence McKenna: "People should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen, not make it happen." 09:35 Rupert Sheldrake: "I would say that the Big Bang cosmology, which is an apolocyptic vision of history, with an explosive beginning and therefore implying an explosive end, is a kind of projection of this Judeo-Christian model of history. It’s not just confined to churches and synagogs. It’s the myth which encloses our entire scientific world view, which has grown up within this Judeo-Christian matrix." 12:35 Terence: "This is not paranoia. Paranoia? The Earth is on fire, haven’t you heard? There’s no reason to worry about being too paranoid. You can lift your foot off that pedal. It’s OK. You can go with that intuition now. The planet is on fire." 18:38 Terence: "So much is happening. Everything is knitting together. It cannot be stopped. There will be cellular technology and human-machine interface and uploading and downloading of clones of people and memories and places. The boundries are disolving into some kind of techno-biological informational soup of intentionality." 19:12 Terence: "It’s incomprehensible what is happening on this planet. It is like the metamorphosis that goes on inside a crysalisis, excpt this is a planet that is having its forests liquified, its oceans boiled, its populations moved, its genes streaming in all directions with all these exotic toxins mixed in. It isn’t for death that it’s moving. It’s moving towards some kind of other thing, not death." 22:20 Rupert Sheldrake: "Assuming that human consciousness doesn’t simply become extinguished at death, we have the question of what happens when millions of people die together. . . . an extraordinary flux of souls" 27:31 Terence: "We don’t know what life is for or what death is for." 28:13 Rupert: "If the state of being after death is like dreaming without being able to wake up, so that when we die we’re captured in the realm of our dreams, we pass through this tunnel, and we enter a realm which is more like the realm of dreams than the life of waking experience, that there is indeed a post-mortal life in such a form, a form glimpsed in dreams in some kinds of psychedelic epxerience where the barrier that is penetrated may be like the membrane or barrier that we penetrate at death and may therefore be akin to near death experiences, which I think DMT probably is." 30:28 Rupert: "It’s an interesting question as to why the apocolypse is such a strong attractor." 36:12 Rupert: "It seems to us unlikely, given our old-fashioned cosmological view, that anything that happens on Earth would affect the rest of the cosmos. But if lots of Earths were synchronized [through morphogenic fields] then we do indeed begin to get the sense of the possible cosmic apolypotic." 38:28 Terence: "We have to believe that the universe is stranger than we can suppose, and that’s the way, by avoiding closure and keeping that in front of us I think we will not go far wrong." 44:23 Terence: "The middle name of chaos is opportunity." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
2/7/200754 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 077 – The Apocalypse (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:31 Terence McKenna: “[The apocalypse] seems to be the unique, unifying thread throughout the Western religions Most insistently of all religious systems on Earth, it is the Western systems that have insisted on appointing an end to their world.” 05:07 Terence: “At the folkloric level, the attractor of the end of the world is very strong.” 07:47 Terence: “And these religions, which have anticipated this thing in this rather crude end of the world scenario are somehow on to something, something that is, I think, a message that is coming from the biological level, if you will, about the inherent instability of the world.” 12:14 Terence: “If in fact the concrescence is upon us then really all we can do is chat about it as it comes down around our ears over the next 25 years.” 14:37 Terence: “I think we’re standing on the lip of a hyperdimensional volcano of some sort, toward which all history is being poured at a great rate.” 29:34 Terence: “So then I thought, my god, we’re not inventing time travel here, what we’re inventing is a god whistle.” 36:01 Terence: “You see, the presence of minds is the signifier of nearby singularity.” 37:22 Ralph Abraham: “The only thing is, that from the morphogenic field point of view there are quite a number of people believing Saint John the Divine, now that I have to take seriously.” . . . Terence: “He felt a quaking in the force, that’s all, but it’s up to cooler heads to figure out what this quaking is.” 38:10 Ralph: “The present extinction is the eighth largest [as determined in 1989] catastrophes of the planet in its lifetime. And that’s happening now. So we are in something that big, and to be the biggest one it would be the apocalypse.” 38:10 Terence: “So that’s why you don’t need John the Divine to tell you there’s an apocalypse underway.”  39:49 Ralph: “It does seem to me that the ecological catastrophe is the appropriate interpretation of the apocalyptic vision at the present time.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The book that Terence McKenna referred to in this podcast is: “Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics” by Nick Herbert
2/1/200753 minutes, 16 seconds
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Podcast 076 – Education in the New World Order (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:39 Rupert Sheldrake: “The other side of this is the reform of the existing professions.” 05:24 Ralph Abraham: “Somehow there would have to be a miracle to get the whole system onto a new track.. And the revascularization aspect that we are mostly longing for might never happen. We need to trigger it.” 07:37 Rupert: “I’m thinking of a pioneering experiment in a limited area.” 08:55 Ralph: “How could we possibly attract an eighteen year old to a workshop? What would be necessary?” [Terence McKenna] “You have to talk about psychedelic drugs.” 11:13 Rupert: [describing his concept of a series of workshop initiations] “To get there you have to be recommended by someone who’s been here, and therefore there’s a much greater sense of initiation into this world. The fact is, a lot of teenagers may not know that this world exists, or if they do they have a totally distorted view.” 17:11 Ralph: “Corruption is a known mechanism for the downward spiral of society.” 26:57 Terence McKenna: “Because the old method is breaking down. There’s either some substitute in the future, or we’re just looking at a generation in anarchy.” 34:07 Rupert: “Because right now education is one of the areas that is being insulated from free market economics by being a state monopoly run by bureaucratic institutions and operated by an old style hierarchal priesthood.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Essay referred to by Lorenzo in this podcast: “Drug Control: National Policies” by Dr. A.C. Germann, Professor Emeritus Department of Criminal Justice California State University, Long Beach
1/26/200749 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 075 – Education in the New World Order (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:15 Rupert Sheldrake: “The present educational system mimics the initiation process and indeed is a kind of initiation process.” 07:18 Rupert: “And indeed it is the scientific priesthood envisaged by Bacon in the scientific world, the academic model and the priestly role as the higher initiates in running and ordering society, the more-educated.” 08:40 Rupert: “You can see this whole new frame of mind being introduced in the entire third world through UNESCO and through educational things. And the first step is literacy, you’ve got to have them reading and writing, because then you can get it across that what’s in books is actually more important than what you feel or experience.” 21:09 Terence McKenna: “The education system of the future should have a tremendous focus on history.” 22:53 Terence: “Part of reforming education has to be to teach people that history is a system of interlocking resonance’s in which they are embedded, and they are going to be called upon to make decisions which will affect the state of life on this planet millennia in the future.” 24:04 Terence: “This hierarchy of academic cant that has been built up is in fact a sham, a thing of squeaking gears and creaking pulleys that is left over from another age.” 27:50 Ralph Abraham: “I was pleased to discover that the higher educational system of Europe and America was not getting worse and worse, it was always this bad.” 32:22 Ralph: “Where is spiritual value, where is moral and ethical value, where is the fabric of society, as it were, where is that taught? If not in the schools then embedded in soap operas, or where? Somehow the curriculum has to have spiritual, moral, and social values.” 41:06 Rupert: “And then there would be some final test . . . and I think it could also involve, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, a psychedelic revelation.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/16/200753 minutes, 17 seconds
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Podcast 074 – “The Resacularization of the World” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 07:18 Rupert Sheldrake: “If there were to be a true Mother Earth religion develop, it would obviously have priestesses rather than priests because its central figure was a goddess. It would be relating human life to the Earth, first and foremost . . . it wouldn’t have much emphasis on the stars or the heavens.” 08:49 Terence McKenna: “But if this Anima Mundi thing got going, this is not a fine tuning of Christianity this is, at last, the overthrow of it. . . . no more this patriarchal, masculine, dominator thing that has descended down through monotheism.” 13:36 Terence: “Why not psychedelicize and sacrilize green politics? . . . Science and green politics can be sacrilized through the psychedelic experience.” 14:33 Terence: “I think that green politics, what makes it so wishy-washy, is its lack of a forthright metaphysics. . . . A green party that used a mystical language, a psychedelic language…would have, I think, a tremendous appeal.” 15:51 Terence: “It has to be understood that this [using psychedelic medicines] is the way to the Gaian mind. These things are sacraments, not metaphors for sacraments, real sacraments.” 16:13 Terence: “Everybody is going to try and out-green everybody else. The trick will be to tell the weasels from everybody else.” 21:50 Terence: “If it’s to be a psychedelicized green movement, the people who could lead this have been training themselves for years. They just didn’t understand that that was what they were training themselves for, but called upon to do so they could step forward and operate in those positions.” 25:00 Ralph Abraham: “The entire promise of the intellect has failed us if it’s necessary for the catastrophe to actually be upon us before people will act, and yet that seems to be the case.” 35:18 Terence: “Well they are psychedelic experiences. The authenticity is going to come from the thing itself. We’re not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.” 40:09 Terence: “The only competition for that focus on the need to save the Earth is this stupid anti-drug thing, which is the need to preserve the purity of your precious bodily essences, or something like that. . . . It’s the issue of how we relate to the vegetable matrix” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  
1/12/200752 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 073 – “The Resacularization of the World” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:48 Ralph Abraham: "So eventually the 60s happened, and probably my first experience that I would now identify as a real religious experience was the experience of LSD." 07:17 Ralph: "What’s gone wrong in the world now is a loss of connection to the sacred within and without organized religion." 13:30 Ralph: "The revascularization of music, I think, is very important. If I had to point to a single factor that I thought was destroying society faster than any other I think it would be evil music." 18:28 Ralph: "The value of getting the true partnership into the church would mean that we then wouldn’t have to replace the church just because it had been on the wrong track for 5,000 years." 18:48 Terence McKenna: "But isn’t this a little like trying to reform the Soviet Union and keeping the Communist Party around? I think the momentum of these institutions makes them hard to reform." 23:27 Rupert Sheldrake: "I think the most important aspect of this process really, because I agree with Terence about the archaic revival, is to find behind the existing forms and existing festivals the pre-Christian roots, which in all cases are the ones that feed the timing of the particular festivals and the particular locations of the sacred places, and which ground the new religion in the old." 32:39 Terence: "In America attendance at church is much higher, and it convulses the body politic because, unable to fulfill it’s sacral function, the church has become simply a lobbying force for fundamentalist social policy. . . . I think we should level [churches] to the ground and start over." 35:13 Rupert: "There is little way in which the political life in America could be sacrelized, since by definition it’s secular." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/9/200752 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 072 – “The Unconscious” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:52 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his concept of "Cannabis Day" 06:18 Terence McKenna: "One day in each lunar cycle would be Cannabis Day, I think." 10:22 Terence: "Time and attention used creatively banish the unconscious." 13:42 Ralph Abraham: "Shopping malls are actually the modern equivalent of the medieval abbeys." 20:04 Rupert: "The idea that time has its qualities is already something that has a popular following in the millions who study astrology in a vague or a professional way." 24:22 Rupert: "Drugs have qualities, and they open up different realms of experience. . . . And so what would happen, for example, if one took a powerful psychoactive that opened one to the astral realm, in the starry sense, and then invoked a particular star by name and tried to journey, or connect with, or become open to influences from that star? . . . I’d be rather frightened to try it, myself." 29:09 Ralph: "Denial [of various experiences] I think is a recent phenomenon, and here there is a serious danger for evolution because once experience is denied then evolution is shunted off its track." 35:50 Ralph: "We may have great powers that aren’t being used since we don’t believe in them." 41:20 Ralph: "A dangerous hypothesis: The first one we want to transcend is the seperation of the human unconscious from the other unconscious." 42:32 Ralph: "So associated with this animal domestication and eating habit, addiction, is denial of consciousness of the animal." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/6/200754 minutes, 45 seconds
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Podcast 071 – “The Unconscious” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:48 Ralph Abraham: Explains his bifurcation theory of the unconscious 08:01 Ralph: "We can speak of the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of plants, the consciousness of Mother Earth." 11:57 Ralph: "Chaos goes to the basement, and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness, giving us the unconscious, which appears to be gaining ever since." 17:02 Ralph: "I think we want Saint George and the Dragon getting it on together in a May Day celebration where Dionysian elements are accepted." 18.21 Terence McKenna: "The orgies driven by the psychedelic religion completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity." 21:21 Terence: "Basically the choice was between fun [through orgies] and full knowledge of the flow of your genes, and once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue, then the concept of ‘mine’ comes into existence. . . . And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundry-disolving mushroom religion was holding at bay. It was literally a pharmacological intervention to keep that kind of a psychology [patriarchal] from getting going." 23:33 Terence: "They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy to a drunken reverie of warriors and whores." 30:16 Ralph: "And in this sense, a restrictive society which narrows the choice of addictions is somehow anti-evolutionary in that it promotes the growth of unconsciousness, insensitivity, is a danger to the biosphere and so on." 31:11 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his proposal to legalize psychedelics in an ‘age-related manner’. 33:55 Rupert: "And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit. However conscious we think we become we don’t become fully conscious of the unconscious embryonic habits that formed us." 40:03 Ralph: "And so we would have to work at maintenance of consciousness as we work at maintenance of the garden." 46:47 Terence: "It [coffee] is the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of the coffee break." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
1/3/200755 minutes, 3 seconds
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Podcast 070 – “Entities” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:40 Terence McKenna: "Going back to this thing about language, you get this same peculiar emphasis on language and letters in the esoteric doctrine that surrounds the chakras." 06:57 Terence: "Linearity in print conferred upon language an inability to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology, but now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this and move it forward." 09:55 Ralph Abraham: "There is very little discussion of the intelligent science, mythology, and so on of these 100-, 200-, 300-thousand B.C., what is going on during these previous interglacials, and it could be that there was agriculture. There would be no way to rule that out." 15:30 Rupert Sheldrake: "If that’s possible [communicating with a star entity], what kind of information would such beings impart?" 17:27 Ralph: "Myth is from mythos. Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the song from the rituals. Myth gained the power it now has in our conscious and unconscious life through its secondary role in the ritual. The ritual and the myth together, I think, is one of the most important things for us to regain." 19:11 Ralph: "Peace [in Crete], I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm in a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm. There was also the conscious interaction with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere in bringing peace down." 22:12 Terence: "I think when you go to the edges . . . then you discover there is an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomenon around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors." 25:02 Rupert: "The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm. . . . So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a demon. It’s in fact a Satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles. . . . How seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money?" 28:34 Rupert: "If we take seriously these entities, how much can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities, like Mammon or Satanic powers or fallen angles, which are actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology?" 30:50 Terence: "Probably the process of civilization is going to reveal the final status of this shadow within us." 36:12 Ralph: "I think we need the Gaian, and we need the Chaotic, that is the celestial sphere, to be re-connected, to be coupled, to the human spirit . . . that is the ultimate partnership." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/29/200645 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 069 – “Entities” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:24 Terence McKenna: "When you start looking at the question of these disincarnate entities, the first thing that strikes you is their persistence in human experience and folklore. This is not something unusual or statistically rare." 07:57 Terence: "The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal concomitant with the rise of modern science." 10:01 Terence: "If we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science by disincarnate entities." 12:59 Terence: "The aversion to the irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity." 17:59 Ralph Abraham: "I think it was in 879 in the council of Byzantium that spirit was made illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul . . . and this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the difference between spirit and soul and thinks that they’re the same." 21:01 Terence: "Did you know that the dogma of purgatory, in Christian theology, was not created by theologians in Rome. It was created by Saint Patrick in an effort to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk beliefs in the process of converting Ireland to Christianity?" 22:12 Terence: "The major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is psychedelic compounds, especially DMT and the tryptamines. And those sort of experiences seem to line up pretty well with the Celtic fokelore." 27:37 Terence: "The irrational, in this objectified form, is very active in the process that we call history. It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry." 33:57 Rupert Sheldrake: "The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly journeying into these realms of other entities." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/28/200648 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 068 – “Light and Vision” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:38 Ralph Abraham: "It does seem very attractive to think of the electromagnetic field as some kind of favored intermediary among all the physical fields." 07:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "There’s this mystery of light. I still think Maxwell’s electromagnetic formulations of light are much too simple." 10:56 Ralph: "I think that we ought to think about the possibility that this effect [the paranormal] will not be confirmed in laboratories." 15:39 Rupert: "There is some sense in which our imagination, our image-making facility, is self-luminous." 25:54 Ralph: "We have therefore in our individual consciousness a particular affinity with the electromagnetic field . . . as epitomized by vision." 30:41 Terence McKenna: "Why is divine omniscience a necessary concept? Can’t the universe get along just being partially aware of what’s going on? . . . What problems are solved by hypothesizing that notion?" 33:36 Rupert: "I find it more reasonable to find that our minds are in touch with larger minds and are in many ways shaped by larger mental systems." 33:57 Terence: "The mind of the whole universe seems unnecessary to hypothesize and unlikely to be encountered." 45:14 Rupert: "I think that the cosmic mind may be largely unconscious because I think that most things that happen in the cosmos are habitual and therefore unconscious." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/23/200659 minutes, 14 seconds
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Podcast 067 – “Light and Vision” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:52 Rupert Sheldrake begins a discussion about light. 10:55 Rupert "What kind of influence could be moving outward through the eyes as part of the image-forming perceptive process, and in this outward projection in some sense project the image we see, the image we see is part of this outward flux." 14:17 Terence McKenna begins his commentary on Rupert’s ideas about light, expanding them into the realm of imagination. 21:08 Ralph Abraham challenges Terence and Rupert on some of their points. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/22/200650 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 066 – “Chaos and Imagination” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:29 Terence McKenna: "The ego is essentially paranoia institutionalized." 03:53 Ralph Abraham: Considers the possibility that ego became strengthened when psychedelic usage became less frequent. 05:29 Terence: Talks about a "psychedelic rebirth." 08:15 Terence: "A calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing, and I have just the calendar all worked out." 09:48 Terence: "It’s an effort to deny man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and what we actually want is a calendar that says ‘all is flow, all is flux, all relationships are in motion to everything else. It’s a truer picture of the world." 13:22 Rupert Sheldrake: Comments on the fact that the Islamic calendar fits the definition of Terence’s suggested calendar. 16:22 Rupert: "One of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine, and creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb, coming out of darkness." 20:56 Terence: "I think it’s the notion of as above so below." . . . "In talking about these things you can’t force closure." 22:14 Ralph: Explains how the painting in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the black virgin) is actually a representation of the goddess chaos. 26:19 Terence: Explains how the Faustian pact with the physical world that humans have made by adopting the "deadly cultural forms" of written language, moveable type, etc. have had a negative impact on our self-image. . . . "In the absence of this boundary-dissolving ecstasies, and replacing that with the machinations and plottings of the ego leads very, very quickly into a cultural cul de sac. . . . This was the wrong-turning." 29:15 Terence: Explains the difference between dominator and partnership. 33:17 Terence: "You cannot trust the dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end." . . . "Who is it who has the power to pry the dead fingers of the dominator culture from the instrumentality of power?" . . . "Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor." 39:14 Terence: Discusses the question of whether there can be consciousness without an object. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/18/200649 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 065 – “Chaos and Imagination” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:29 Ralph Abraham: "So I should like now to speak about the chaos of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination." 05:41 Ralph: "Chaos, Gaia, and Eros are the gods, or concepts, of the primitive types." 13:56 Ralph: "People have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base." 20:55 Terence McKenna: "Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language." 22:16 Terence: "The birthright that connects us to the divine is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination." . . . "We have a secret history. Knowledge of which has been lost to us and only now is recoverable . . . " . . . "We are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species." 24:34 Terence: "Once we lived in dynamic balance with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost." . . . and then he explains what it is that we have lost and how it was lost. 27:46 Terence: "There are certain episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving." 29:00 Terence: "The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s going on." . . . "For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and the attempt to bring out of it ideas." 32:37 Terence: "For me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams." 37:30 Terence: "There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left us no choice." 45:01 Terence: "Fear it is that guards the vineyard." . . . "So the fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/15/200654 minutes, 53 seconds
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Podcast 064 – “Confessions of a Dope Dealer”

Guest speaker: Sheldon Norberg PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:40 News of a Mexican informant for the DEA who committed murder while wearing a wire for the U.S. 05:30 Reminiscences of (and synchronicities at) Burning Man 2006 08:15 Discussion about Sheldon’s book, Confessions of a Dope Dealer 10:44 How Sheldon got into the dope dealing business 18:24 Using cannabis is a socializing ritual for young people 24:25 On being un-comfortably numb and doing work with psychedelics 31:08 Do most heavy users eventually reach a point where they move from using psychedelics primarily for pleasure to using them primarily for a studied expansion of their own consciousness? 34:36 Psychedelics are astronomically more powerful and completely different from alcohol 36:40 The "Third I" theory of tripping 43:38 Living in tripland isn’t always beneficial Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Links: Sheldon Norberg – Progressive Drug Educator "Confessions of a Dope Dealer"
12/14/200659 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 063 – “Creativity and Chaos” (Part 2)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:14 Ralph Abraham: Takes issue with McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s interpretation of chaotic attractors. . . . To a mathematician, the word ‘attractor’ does not necessarily imply attraction. 07:23 Rupert Sheldrake: "But Newtonian physics and the triumph of the mechanistic system, in my opinion, only works because what it was seeking to deny was introduced into it by a kind of subterfuge and pretended that this was a mechanical principle whereas it was something else." 09:37 Ralph: "The idea of two dimensional time could aid us here." . . . The problem with the teleological approach is that the cause is in the future. 10:54 Ralph: "The more interesting idea is to make a model for evolution itself." . . . "The determinant of evolution [in the case being discussed] is the free will in the moment as the collective action of the citizens in the present." 13:24 Rupert: … discuses the concept of morphic attractors as a way of dealing with the fact that somehow, in the present, the person, etc. is subject to the influence of a potential future state that hasn’t yet come into being. "But that future state is what directs and guides and attracts the development of the present system." 14:26 Terence McKenna: "Well, this is all very interesting." . . . "The modeling task, ne plus ultra, is history. This is where you’re no longer playing a little game to demonstrate something to a group of students or colleagues." . . . "I think the whole reason history has bogged down in the 20th century is because of the absence of belief in an attractor." 20:31 Terence: "Our cultural phase transition that we are going through, vis a vie machines, may signify that we are not, as I have always thought, very close to the maximized state of novelty, but that we’re out there somewhere in the middle of that wave . . . " 22:41 Rupert: "I think there’s a very big difference between spoken language and written language." 25:16 Ralph: "Well, I imagine, just to be contrary, that mathematics preceded not only writing, but mathematics probably preceded language as well." . . . "We could reach a point where we had models that were decent in some sense to aid us in the understanding of complex social relationships." 33:06 Terence: "[Ralph] do you still cling to the mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy?" 34:16 Terence: "And in a way that’s what I see the three of us and others mentionable as doing. We’re trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s such a good idea that it will act as an attractor, and the world will move toward that form." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/12/200651 minutes, 11 seconds
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Podcast 062 – “Creativity and Chaos” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 01:23 Ralph Abraham: A short primer on chaos theory. . . . The emergence of form from a field of chaos. 08:57 Rupert Sheldrake: "The problem I have with chaos theory . . . " The issue of indeterminacy in the real world. . . . The illusion of total predictability. . . . Indeterminacy may exist not just at the quantum level but at all levels of natural organization. . . . How form arises from chaos. . . . In some sense, energy may be seen as an agent of change. 21:24 Rupert: The question of how do new fields, new forms, come into being in the first place? Where do they come from? . . . The nature of the mathematical realm, the formative realm. Is there a kind of mathematical realm before the universe, somehow beyond space and time. [lozo: he goes on a kind of Olaf Stapelton riff] . . . 26:04 Rupert: "The view that I want to consider is that the world soul, or the world imagination, makes up these forms as it goes along, that there isn’t, out there, a kind of mathematical mind already fixed or already full." 28:40 Ralph: "I think that with mathematics we can make a model for anything." . . . "Mathematics could be regarded simply an extension of language. . . . Words, I think, are frequently inadequate." 34:18 Ralph: "But the truth is this theory can be used to model everything. So it never settles any questions as to the origin of things or the true nature of ordinary reality." 37:40 Rupert: "Are the fields of reality more real than the models we use to model them with. Or is there a kind of mathematics yet more fundamental the fields?" 38:57 Ralph: What mathematics means to me . . . a description of the mathematical landscape. . . . "Mathematics is the supreme tool for the extension of our language for dealing with complex systems." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/8/200650 minutes, 54 seconds
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Podcast 061 – “Creativity and Imagination” (Part 2)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 01:34 Rupert Sheldrake: "It’s like the creative process is like the welling up of new forms." . . . "I think in our own case the one model for this is dreams." . . . "It seems almost impossible to have an expected dream." . . . "Our imagination is also released through psychedelics, in its extreme form." . . . "Is there a kind of Gaian dreaming taking place on the night side of the planet?" 05:03 Terence McKenna: "I think a Gaian dream would be human history." . . . "It [the psychedelic experience] seems rather to be an ontological reality of its own that the human being has simply been privileged to briefly observe." . . . "To my mind, the imagination is the source of all creativity." 07:53 Rupert: "So do you think that the psychedelic experience is then the tapping into the Gain imagination?" 08:02 Terence: "Absolutely, and I think psychedelic experiences and dreams are different only in degree." . . . "Imagine in hindsight the wisdom we would impute to Gaia if we were to suddenly realize that what is happening on this planet is that nature knows that the sun is going to explode.". . . Perhaps our species has been called forth to organize an escape. . . . "The Gaian mind is a real mind, and its messages are real messages, and our task . . . is to try and extract this message…" 14:54 Rupert: "The question for me is this . . . how is the Gaian imagination related to the solar system, and how is the solar system’s imagination related to the imagination of the galaxy . . . ?" 15:21 Terence: "Well, I’m not sure I want to follow you into the cosmic Christ." . . . "I think there should always be some physical stuff to hang these things on." . . . "There are enough places in the solar system where there is enough complex chemistry that I can imagine these very large, self-reflecting entelechies to get going over billions of years." 17:41 Rupert: "I think a factor that changes everything is the discovery of dark matter. . . . This recent discovery effectively tells us the whole cosmos and every material thing in it has a kind of unconscious." 18:34 Terence: "I assume that psychedelics change your channel [of the imagination] . . . to a channel which is playing the classical music of an alien civilization . . . " . . . "Appearances are merely the local slice of the divine imagination." 29:26 Terence: "A new phenomenon has been discovered in the universe, which is its drawing togetherness, its tendency towards cohesion, its tendency to move toward greater and greater states of wholeness, and not incrementally but in sudden highly punctuated stages that allow phenomenon like history or the 20th century to come into being. These are great leaps forward that nature pushes toward." . . . "We each have our own apocalypse, and so I think we should live life in anticipation of it." 32:02 Terence: "I think probably self-reflection arose fairly early in the history of the Earth, and that the Earth is a minded, integrated kind of entity. . . . The planet thinks. It perceives." 35:05 Rupert: "The Earth is alive, and it involves some kind of organizing principle." . . . What kind of consciousness, then, does it have? . . . "Does Gaia have dreams and imaginings?" 42:24 Terence: "Language seems to be seeking to decouple itself from matter." . . . "This now is apparently the only way we can keep from destroying the planet, is by literally going off into the imagination, which is not a dimension of the physics of space and time, it’s actually a syntactical dimension." . . . "For my money, language is on a journey to the eternal imagination through the process of creativity, having begun in chaos and having a kind of inevitable end in chaos more properly re-visioned, re-met, re-understood. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/6/200651 minutes, 18 seconds
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Podcast 060 – “The Future of Human Consciousness”

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:13 "My talk is about the future of human consciousness." 08:18 " The discovery of who we are and what our potential can be was given an enormous boost when Dr. Albert Hofmann came forward with LSD." 11:11"What is it like to enter the dimensions of higher consciousness? . . . I have been unusually blessed to have the privilege of entering dimensions never previously imagined.. . . just having experienced glimpses is enough to muster determination to press forward, for it is now clear that our Real Self, the true I that resides in the heart of each of us, is present and available, and is worth far more than anything one could possibly imagine." 14:45"There is no question that the appropriate use of LSD can open many important doors." 16:51 "The greatest sources of pain come from mistreatment, particularly at a young age where comprehension has not yet developed. Fear, pain, neglect, accidents, forced restrictions, are all sources of such discomfort that our psyche buries these feelings deep into the unconscious. A good psychedelic experience can open us to these restricted levels, and permit discharging these uncomfortable feelings." 20:36"It is essential to put into action what one has learned. Otherwise our inner self can get discouraged, and depression can follow." 23:13"The more we progress, the more we learn to open up and resolve inappropriate material. In general, most of us don’t care for pain. but I have learned that pain is an excellent teacher." 28:51"Since 1965 I learned that psychedelic substances were the most powerful learning tools available to mankind. Complex, powerful, they are easily misused and abused. Yet for the sincere seeker, armed with honesty, courage, and an unquenchable thirst for Self discovery, I know of no other means that can so readily provide self-understanding, and the ultimate nature of Reality. Nor that can so readily reveal the source of most of the difficulties of the human race, and the most appropriate path to their resolution." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Photos by Higinio Gonzalez
12/5/200644 minutes, 13 seconds
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Podcast 059 – “Creativity and Imagination” (Part 1)

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:36 Rupert Sheldrake: Bringing together the idea of creation and imagination, or evolutionary creativity. . . . There is a profound crisis in science that will change science as we know it because the two fundamental models concerning the basic nature of reality that we have are coming to a head-on collision. "If the universe is evolving, then the laws of nature are evolving as well." . . . [Perhaps] "things are as they are because they were as they were." . . . "There must be an interplay between habit and creativity." . . "Could there be a kind of imagination working in nature?" . . . 16:32 Terence McKenna: "If the laws of nature are eternal, where were they before the big bang?" . . . . "The immense improbability that modern science rests on, but cares not to discuss, is this: The belief that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment." . . . "History is the tracks in the snow left by creativities wandering in the divine imagination." . . . "Chaos is the birthplace of order. Chaos is not the problem. Chaos is the answer." 33:55 Rupert: "Matter is in a sense dense because it is so deeply habitual." . . . "I’m interested in the posibility that the imagination isn’t all there, all worked out in potential in advance, but rather that the world truly is made up as it goes along." . . . "And instead of [imagination] emerging, as it were, from the light in the future, or from a kind of Platonic mind, it may emerge from something much more like the unconscious mind. It may come into light from darkness, and the formative processes of the imagination may not be sparks leaping from the mind of god but rather new forms welling up from the womb of chaos." 41:24 Terence: "It seems to me that the problem revolves around this notion of purpose." . . . "Time is a topological manifold over which events must flow subject to the constraints of the manifold, and I call the surface of the manifold "novelty". 46:50 Rupert: "The question is, ‘Are the new forms arising in the attractor, or is the attractor simply attracting what is already a diversity of forms through a process that lies between them, as it were, the imagination?’ " Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
12/1/200651 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 058 – “Cast of Characters”

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 04:36 – Terence McKenna introduces the Trialogue concept and history 08:46 – Rupert Sheldrake introduces himself, talks about his theory of morphogenic resonance, and tells of his first meeting with Terence and Ralph 20:16 – Terence talks about his fascination with natural history, gives a little more background on his life, and explains how he came to develop his theory of novelty 32:50 – Ralph Abraham tells how he and Terence met, how Rupert joined the group, and he gives an overview of chaos theory and how it opened up previously unavailable areas of investigation to mathematical analysis. Then he explains how the three of them will attempt to conduct this, their first public trialogue. 46:55 – Terence "The flutter of the moth’s wings can trigger a hurricane. This is not a poetic statement. This is a fact of the matter within this kind of description of nature." "The world is not an engine running down toward a heat death, but a tremendous kaleidoscope of unpredictable, creative, open-ended activity on every level." "How the world fits together, it fits together through the infusion of its invisible soul." 52:33 – Rupert tells "the story of the bunny." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/28/200658 minutes
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Podcast 057 – “Aliens, Elementals, and the Daimonic Realm”

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: Here is Daniel Pinchbeck speaking at the Oracle Gathering in Seattle at the end of October 2006 where he discussed "meeting the other". In this presentation he asks, are the entities met in aliens abductions, fairy stories, and psychedelic visions actual "others" or projected aspects of our own psyche? How can we understand and articulate these encounters in a meaningful way? Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/27/200642 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 056 – “The Other Side of 2012″

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This is a talk that Lorenzo gave at an Oracle Gathering in Seattle at the end of October 2006. In it he discusses three possible approaches to the 2012 meme: Muddling along, waiting for a mystical/magical transformation, or taking charge of your own life and planning for a personal change even though no major external events occur. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/14/200652 minutes, 29 seconds
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Podcast 055 – “Horizon Anarchism”

Guest speaker: Dale Pendell PROGRAM NOTES: In his 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, Dale Pendell introduced the concept of Horizon Anarchism, and we are fortunate to be able to present this talk in its entirity in this edition of the Psychedelic Salon. If you think you know everyting there is to know about anarchism, you owe it to yourself to hear Dale’s talk about this interesting new approach. One of my favorite soundbites is "Isolation is one of the keys of state power. So it is very important for us to get together and have fun." Photo (at right) taken at Burning Man 2006 by Lorenzo Dale Pendell’s new book, Inspired Madness: The Gifts of Burning Man is now available in your local bookstore and in Lorenzo's Amazon store. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
11/7/200650 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 054 – “Synergistic Combinations in the Future”

Guest speaker: Nick Sand PROGRAM NOTES: In his 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, Nick Sand explains how best to use some of the more interesting combinations of sacred medicines. Additionally he answered a wide range of questions that included such diverse topics as the relationship of the atomic bomb to LSD and the reasons he left the quiet life of academia to create Orange Sunshine, which was considered to be some of the best acid available in the 1960s. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/23/200659 minutes, 57 seconds
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Podcast 053 – “Ask the Shulgins” (Burning Man 2006)

Guest speakers: Ann & Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: This program features Ann and Sasha Shulgin in their 2006 appearance at Burning Man where they participated in the Palenque Norte lecture series with their ever-popular "Ask the Shulgins" question and answer session. Questions that the Shulgins answered that day included such diverse issues as: What is your favorite drug? What do you think about using drugs with psychotherapy How do you feel about chronic drug use How do you know that the psychedelic path is one you should go down What advice do you have for couples who are on a psychedelic path What do you think about polydrug use Also, Sasha describes how his first mescaline experience led to his future experiments with various compounds . . . and he warns about the unpredictability of these substances. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option More Burning Man 2006 photos
10/10/20061 hour, 10 minutes
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Podcast 052 – “The Future of Visionary Art” Part 2

Guest speakers: Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Martina Hoffmann, and Roberto Venosa This program is part two of the Art Panel presentation for the Palenque Norte lectures at the 2006 Burning Man festival. In this program Alex Grey talks about the purpose of visionary art, Allyson Grey explains her vision of personal sacred spaces,Martina Hoffmann advises us to not underestimate our own creativity, and Roberto Venosa describes the process of channeling energy from higher dimensions into visionary art. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/3/200650 minutes, 50 seconds
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Podcast 051 – “The Future of Visionary Art” Part 1

Guest speakers: Alex & Allyson Grey, Martina Hoffmann, Roberto Venosa PROGRAM NOTES: This program is part one of the Art Panel presentation for the Palenque Norte lectures at the 2006 Burning Man festival. In this program Alex Grey talks about the purpose of visionary art, Allyson Grey explains her vision of personal sacred spaces, Martina Hoffmann advises us to not underestimate our own creativity, and Roberto Venosa describes the process of channeling energy from higher dimensions into visionary art. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
10/3/200656 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 050 – “Cancel the Apocalypse”

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: Daniel Pinchbeck brings us up to date with his current thinking about mythical cycles, the Mayan calendar, time as aquality, psychic evolution, and a wide range of other topics that he investigated while researching his new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Among other things Daniel discusses in this, his 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, is "a massive upsurge in synchronicities" and "reality becoming more psychically malleable". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/22/20061 hour, 13 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 049 – “Pharmacology and the Posthuman Phuture”

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: In his inspiring 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, Erik Davis takes a peek at what the future may have in store for us. And contrary to so much of the doom and gloom we hear all around us these days, Erik’s message is that there is much hope for humanity in the future. This talk is certainly thought-provoking and is not to be missed. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option You might also want to take a look at Erik’s new book, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape
9/20/20061 hour, 10 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 048 – 2006 Palenque Norte Lectures Sample

Guest speakers: Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, and Nick Sand PROGRAM NOTES: This was the most ambitious schedule yet for the Palenque Norte lectures, 39 speakers in four days. Thanks to the good folks at Entheon Village who provided the facility, which was one of the largest tents on the playa this year, they took place without too many problems sneaking up on us. In this podcast you will hear sound bites from the talks given by Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, and Nick Sand. In the weeks ahead, their complete presentations will be podcast for those of you who weren’t able to make it to the burn this year. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Photo (at right) taken at Burning Man 2006 by Lorenzo More of Lorenzo’s photos from the 2006 Burning Man Festival
9/12/200651 minutes, 52 seconds
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Podcast 047 – “The Day the Universe Becomes Conscious”

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer and Galen Brandt PROGRAM NOTES: Terence McKenna once called Bruce Damer “a visionary’s visionary,” and Bruce certainly lived up to that reputation in his 2003 Burning Man presentation. Combining subjects as diverse as evolution, psychedelic experiences, and physics, he builds a mental construct to rival Olaf Stapleton’s classic workStarmaker. In addition to Bruce’s ideas about a conscious universe, we were also treated to an inspiring rap by his wife, Galen Brandt, as she explains the lure of the Burning Man experience. Download      MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/23/20061 hour, 11 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 046 – “Reproducible Experiences on Different Entheogens”

Guest speaker: RafaelO Aisner PROGRAM NOTES: RafaelO Aisner explains how to create reproducible experiences with MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, 5-MEO-DMT, 2CI, 2CB, 2CT7, 2CT2, and mescaline. This talk was originally given at the 2004 Palenque Norte lectures at Burning Man. You can also hear RafaelO in podcast #040 where he gives a talk titled "Psychedelogy: A Novel Paradigm of Self . . . Mastering The Power of Belief". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/12/20061 hour, 20 minutes, 2 seconds
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Podcast 045 – “Rave Culture And the End Of The World”

Guest speaker: Fraser Clark PROGRAM NOTES: Fraser Clark returns to the Psychedelic Salon with a brilliant talk he gave as a guest lecturer at Stanford University. In his introduction to this podcast, Lorenzo calls this one of the most important programs we have heard so far in this series. In this talk you’re going to hear one off the most concise explanations of the evolution from beat to hippy to zippy to raver that you’re probably ever going to hear. Adopting the philosophy of the rave culture, at least the way Fraser explains it in this talk, is perhaps our species’ best hope for a sustainable, peaceful, and beautiful place to continue chugging along on our evolutionary path. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/24/20061 hour, 25 minutes, 49 seconds
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Podcast 044 – “A Conversation About How Communities Come About”

Guest speakers: Ken Vanosky and Jerry Candelaria PROGRAM NOTES: Ken Vanosky and Jerry Candelaria moderated the most interactive of the 2003 Palenque Norte conversations at Burning Man, and in this recording you will also hear from several members of the audience who added some significant thoughts of their own. If you have never been to a burn and think that the Burning Man experience is nothing more than the world’s greatest party (which is also is), this conversation will open up an entirely new dimension of the festival to you. And if you are a conservative, you might want to listen closely to this conversation, for these are some of the people who are creating the future you are about to inhabit. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/17/20061 hour, 5 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 043 – “The Politics of Psychedelic Research”

Guest speaker: John Gilmore PROGRAM NOTES: John Gilmore talks about the politics involved in legitimate psychedelic research at a conference in the Netherlands. What The Hack is an outdoor hacker conference/event that took place on a large event campground in the south of The Netherlands from 28 until 31 July 2005. Events like What The Hack take place every four years, and originate from a group of people that was originally centered around a small hacker magazine called Hack-Tic. The magazine’s last issue was published in 1993, but for reasons unknown the events have so far refused to die. In this talk, John describes the work of doctors who are giving MDMA, psilocybin, and soon LSD to patients in ongoing clinical trials. The new focus is on proving that these drugs can help to cure otherwise intractable conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, fear of death in cancer patients, and cluster headaches. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
7/7/20061 hour, 3 minutes, 46 seconds
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Podcast 042 – “Using Psychedelics for Rational Work”

Guest speaker: James Fadiman PROGRAM NOTES: From the Mind States conference in 2003, James Fadiman gives an entertaining account of his early days in psychedelic research. The Mind States program that year had this to say about Dr. Fadiman: James Fadiman, Ph.D. has been involved in both teaching and facilitating creative problem-solving with and without psychedelics for more than three decades. His experience ranges from early experimentation with Ram Dass and Tim Leary at Harvard to government-sanctioned legal research with Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman at Stanford. He co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where he now teaches, is the co-author of Essential Sufism, and has just released a novel, The Other Side of Haight. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Books mentioned in this podcast: The Other Side of Haight What the Dormouse Said Scrapbook of a Haight- Ashbury Pilgrim "Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics" The Discovery of Love
6/27/200659 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 041 – “Grassroots Peer Reviews of Vital Information”

Guest speaker: Earth and Fire Erowid PROGRAM NOTES: Earth & Fire Erowid return to the Psychedelic Salon with a talk they gave at the 2002 Mind States conference that was held in Jamaica. In this presentation, Fire and Earth begin what has become an ongoing discussion among psychonaughts regarding ways in which to judge the validity of information in an age when information overload has become an everyday experience for many people. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/21/20061 hour, 5 minutes, 5 seconds
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Podcast 040 – “Psychedelogy: A Novel Paradigm of Self”

Guest speaker: Rafael Aisner PROGRAM NOTES: RafaelO Aisner founded The Rosetta Method School of Thought, to teach and develop his novel philosophical blend of Science, Mysticism, Psychology, Health, Urban-Shamanism and Empowerment. Rafael believes that each of us are multidimensional mystical creatures; gods, goddesses and deities, as well as physical beings, embodiments of Gaia, placed here on Earth to enjoy the beauty and love of life. He seeks to liberate us from the limitations imposed by repressive cultures, religions, and mythologies, and awaken us to the higher consciousness of Gaia, so that we can, once and for all, live in harmony with ourselves, and our environment. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/14/200649 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 039 – Mind States Sound Bites and Lorenzo in Venice Beach

Guest speakers: Julie Holland, Rick Doblin, Charles Grob, Ann & Sasha Shulgin, Alex Grey, and LorenzoPROGRAM NOTES: Here are a few samples from the 2005 Mind States conference that was held in Berkeley, California in May of that year. Sound bites from the following talks are included here: Dr. Julie Holland: "Medical Ecstasy: A Harm Reduction Model" Dr. Rick Doblin: "Psychedelic Psychotherapy & Culture" Dr. Charles Grob: "Psilocybin Use in Psychiatry" Ann & Sasha Shulgin: "Ask the Shulgins" Alex Grey: "Artists & Their Drugs" Additionally, this podcast includes a talk by Lorenzo at a salon in Venice Beach, California in 2003, where he recapitulates his "Living Under the Radar" talk from Mind States IV. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/6/20061 hour, 10 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 038 – Mind Machines, Entheogens, and Consciousness”

Guest speaker: Zoe7 PROGRAM NOTES: Zoe7 is a multi-dimensional synergy personality cluster who inhabits the body and mind of consciousness researcher, Joseph Marti. (The other five personalities are: Max McCullan, Ebhrious, Jiebro, Kzark Prestidius, and Lee Steel.) His book, Into The Void Exploring Consciousness, Hyperspace and Beyond Using Brain Technology, Psychedelics and Altered-Mind States, depicts Marti’s experiments with mind machines, entheogens, and psychological time travel, how the Zoe7 cluster came to be, as well as new theories on parallel universes and probable Earths, the mechanics of reality and existence, and the mind of God. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/21/200654 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 037 – “Imprisonment & Liberation Aspects of Consciousness”

Guest speaker: Nick Sand PROGRAM NOTES: In this program, Nick Sand, one of the original psychedelic guides from the Millbrook commune, alchemist, yogi, spiritual practitioner, and drug war victim, discusses the psychological states encountered as an underground chemist, a fugitive, and his five years in prison. The topics dealt with will be how attitude, intention, and time, reveal the reality of true inner freedom. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/17/200651 minutes, 41 seconds
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Podcast 036 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 10)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this last of a ten part series, Terence McKenna closes this workshop with some thoughts about psychedelics as time machines, the forest of the Internet, the erotization of our technology, a form of circus called the DMT experience, and ending with some practical tools you can use to prepare for a psychedelic experience. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/8/200655 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 035 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 9)

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
4/27/200659 minutes, 9 seconds
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Podcast 034 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 8)

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
4/17/20061 hour, 26 seconds
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Podcast 033 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 7)

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
4/6/200656 minutes, 28 seconds
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Podcast 032 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 6)

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.
4/2/20061 hour, 48 seconds
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Podcast 031 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 5)

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,
3/21/200654 minutes, 38 seconds
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Podcast 030 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 4)

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...
3/15/200650 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 029 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 3)

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...
2/27/200642 minutes, 40 seconds
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Podcast 028 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 2)

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"...
2/14/200652 minutes, 32 seconds
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Podcast 027 – “In the Valley of Novelty” (Part 1)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program)
2/4/200656 minutes, 51 seconds
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Podcast 026 – “The Role of Drug Geeks in Society”

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
1/27/200641 minutes, 47 seconds
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Podcast 025 – “Cacti: A Discourse by Sasha Shulgin”

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
1/20/20061 hour, 3 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 024 – “The Art of Alex Grey”

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
1/12/200659 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 023 – Mind States IV (2003) Sound Bites

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
12/16/200547 minutes, 7 seconds
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Podcast 022 – “Natural vs. Synthetic Psychedelic Chemicals”

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
11/17/20051 hour, 10 minutes, 48 seconds
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Podcast 021 – “Psychedelic Psychotherapy and the Shadow”

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
11/10/200552 minutes, 10 seconds
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Podcast 020 – “The World Wide Web and the Millennium” (Q&A)

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
11/3/200551 minutes, 22 seconds
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Podcast 019 – “The World Wide Web and the Millennium”

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
11/2/20051 hour, 3 minutes, 56 seconds
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Podcast 018 – “Visionary Art/Visionary Design”

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
10/20/20051 hour, 6 minutes, 43 seconds
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Podcast 017 – “Stop Worrying and Love the Dimensional Shift”

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
10/13/200559 minutes, 27 seconds
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Podcast 016 – “A Short History of the Human Species”

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
10/6/20051 hour, 6 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 015 – “Treating Schizophrenia With LSD and Psilocybin”

Guest speaker: Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: The description of Gary Fisher’s work with the amazing little girl, Nancy, is what the title of this podcast refers to. However, the conversation also covers a wide range of other topics, including: an amazing cancer cure involving ayahuasca, early psychedelic research, and the first scientific paper to discuss what is now called poly-drugging. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/29/200556 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 014 – “Medical Marijuana On The Offensive”

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: Dr. Rick Doblin and others present an overview of the current state of medical marijuana research. Also included in this podcast is the story of activist Steve McWilliams, who lost his life in America’s War on People who use non-prescription drugs. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/22/200547 minutes, 58 seconds
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Podcast 013 – “Cancer Anxiety Study Tests Psilocybin”

Guest speaker: Dr. Charles Grob PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Dr. Charles Grob in July 2005. The topic was his current FDA-approved research project using the active ingredient from "magic mushrooms" to treat anxiety in cancer patients. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/15/20051 hour, 3 minutes, 19 seconds
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Podcast 012 – “Witches Ointments and Aphrodisiacs”

Guest speaker: Christian Räetsch PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Christian Räetsch at the Chan Kah hotel in Palenque, Mexico. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
9/8/20051 hour, 16 minutes, 59 seconds
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Podcast 011 – “Culture and Ideology are not your friends”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Terence McKenna in Denver – April 1999 TRANSCRIPT OF THIS TALK . . . (PDF Version) "This is a struggle between novelty and habit." . . . "[Your culture] is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency." . . . Cultures are virtual realities made of language." One of the things Terence covers in this talk is his take on virtual reality, VR. On February 25th, about two months before this talk, Terence participated in an experiment in avatar-based random in 3D virtual worlds on the Internet. "We were operating live from Terence’s jungle retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii on a wireless packet radio network. The hosting area was finished off in the couple of hours before we went live at 3 pm Hawaii time. Fans were already arriving by that time and helping out by finding audio files to be linked in, images and other Terence netmorabilia. Approximately 40 fans showed up with very short notice from an announcement posted on Terence’s fan lists. Another 20 or show streamed in for days after the event, to be met by "super fan" Roy Batty. In the meantime, see Cathie Leavitt’s "Trip Report" for an excellent first hand newbie view of the experience." [From DigitalSpace.com . . . article about Terence and 3D virtual worlds] Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option  
8/4/20051 hour, 13 minutes, 8 seconds
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Podcast 010 – “The Lacandón People And Palenque”

Guest speaker: Christian Räetsch PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Christian Räetsch at the Mayan ruins, Palenque, Mexico – 2001. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
8/3/200555 minutes, 31 seconds
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Podcast 009 – “Waking Up from the American Dream”

Guest speaker: Michael Brownstein PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Michael Brownstein at Burning Man 2004. Michael Brownstein is the author of nine books of poetry and three novels:The Touch, Country Cousins, Self-Reliance: A Novel. His most recent book,World on Fire, is a prophetic, impassioned examination of corporate globalization. A personal book, World on Fire moves back and forth between the present and the post-apocalyptic future. Michael has read from it on many radio programs and at conferences and universities here and abroad. Michael is also involved in using psychoactive substances to provide the vision to see us through the end times. His main concern now is not blaming and accusing, but waking up. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/24/200551 minutes, 55 seconds
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Podcast 008 – “Art, Love, Family, and Psychedelics” (Part 2)

Guest speaker: Zena, Allyson, & Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: This is the second part of a talk by Alex, Allyson, and Zena Grey at Burning Man 2003. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/17/200541 minutes, 36 seconds
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Podcast 007 – “Art, Love, Family, and Psychedelics” (Part 1)

Guest speaker: Zena, Allyson, & Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Alex, Allyson, and Zena Grey at Burning Man 2003. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
6/10/200551 minutes, 26 seconds
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Podcast 006 – “Drug Inspired Metaphysical Concepts”

Guest speaker: Jon Hanna PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Jon Hanna at Burning Man 2003. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/27/20051 hour, 4 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 005 – “Psychedelics: Therapy, Recreation & Politics”

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Dr. Rick Doblin at Burning Man 2004. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/13/20051 hour, 13 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 004 – “2012…A Change in How We Experience Time”

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Daniel Pinchbeck at Burning Man 2003. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
5/6/20051 hour, 2 minutes, 12 seconds
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Podcast 003 – “Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man”

Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Erik Davis at Burning Man 2003. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/23/200542 minutes, 15 seconds
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Podcast 002 – “Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Terence McKenna at the Palenque Entheobotany Conference in 1999. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
4/19/20051 hour, 12 minutes, 6 seconds
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Podcast 001 – “Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: A talk by Lorenzo presented at the Mind States II conference in Berkeley, California in May of 2001. Full text of Lorenzo's talk Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
3/17/20051 hour, 4 minutes, 59 seconds