Psychedelic Salon

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 t

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 quotati

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 r

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

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 ve

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 ma

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 fr

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

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 interactiv

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 pa

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

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 behi

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 t

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 p

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

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 you

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

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

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

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, an