Psychedelic Salon

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 op

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." . . . Sash

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 cha

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

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 lyr

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 insatiabil

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 ever

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 ...

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.

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 fe

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 profoun

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 spec

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 psychedel

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 maste

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 B

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 change

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 pos

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 pop

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 y

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