Psychedelic Salon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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”

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

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/

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

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)

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.

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

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