Psychedelic Salon

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

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

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

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 sam

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 disseminat

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.]

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 i

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 festival

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 p

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 inevitab

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 wit

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 enhanc

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 ext

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 ever

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 the

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 subs

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 so

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

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 tool

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