Psychedelic Salon

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

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 photo

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

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 a

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 Si

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 fab

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 c

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 tell

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 con

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

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

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,

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.

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

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 r

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

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 generati

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

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 wh

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