Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.” “It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.” “Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.” “In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.” “The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.” “The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.” “The human brain is the god of technological innovation.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. Alicia Danforth, and Gabrielle Agin-Liebes PROGRAM NOTES: This program features a recording of a panel discussion and Q&A session that took place at the 2013 Burning Man Festival with three people who are currently on the front lines of psychedelic research: Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. Alicia Danforth, and Gabrielle Agin-Liebes. This is an overview session covering a wide range of psychedelic research currently underway. Their detailed talks about their work is available in earlier podcasts. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Dr. Roland Griffiths Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin & Spirituality Current Psilocybin Research Projects Q&A with Roland Griffiths Dr. Alicia Danforth MDMA-assisted Therapy for Social Anxiety in Autistic Adults Gabrielle Agin-Liebes NYU Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study

Guest speaker: Sarah Lovering PROGRAM NOTES: Today we travel back in time once again to the 2013 Burning Man Festival where Sarah Lovering gave a Palenque Norte Lecture detailing her work with the Marijuana Policy Project. It was MPP that led a coalition of cannabis activists over a several year period leading up to the legalization referendum in Colorado. Sarah not only explains how that campaign unfolded, but she goes on to describe the community's long term plans for the ultimate legalization of cannabis in the U.S. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: During the 1980's, before the birth of the Web, Terence McKenna's workshops were just about the only source of information about psychedelics that reached the streets. While there was some information about psychoactive plants available in professional journals and university libraries, it took Terence to pull out this information and repackage it for the rest of us. In this June 1989 workshop, he does what he did best back then, give us a detailed inventory, continent by continent, of the psychoactive plants native to each area, along with a brief history of how humans interacted with them in the distant past. [The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.” “In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: On June 2, 2014 Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin passed on to his next adventure. Although this podcast is a tribute to his life and work, I have decided to let it be told mainly in his own words. First you will hear the audio portion of a video tribute to Ann and Sasha Shulgin. Following that is a short interview of Sasha that was conducted by Terence McKenna. In closing I play the famous talk that Sasha gave at the 1983 Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option A Tribute to the Shulgins /*

Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.] “Once you've produced the scientific data that's necessary to make a drug into a medicine, you've gone a long way towards mainstreaming the acceptance of these drugs as having beneficial properties. And then the step to legalization is not that far behind that.” “The government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana that you can use in FDA-approved research. So even though there are 20 states and the District of Columbia [that have legalized medical marijuana], and there's marijuana everywhere, we've spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research. We're the only people in America that can't get 10 grams of marijuana.” “We are all dying and we all have some anxiety about it. And so people are more scared of dying than they are of drugs. If we can show that people who are facing death can be assisted with psychedelics that's a powerful message.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MAPS Sponsored: MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Research “The New Drug They Call 'Ecstasy' ” (New York Magazine, May 20, 1985) "Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate" (video) "Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate" (podcast)

Guest speakers: Glenn Greenwald and Stefan Molyneux PROGRAM NOTES: “What the NSA has done is essentially converted the Internet from this unprecedented zone of freedom into the most powerful means of surveillance ever known in human history.” -Glenn Greenwald [NOTE: The following quotations are by Stefan Molyneux.] “If we have a bitcoin universe, you don't get to print money for war. You don't get to have money for a prison/industrial complex. You don't get money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.” “So bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do.” “Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.” “To limit money is to limit political power.” “If we have a bitcoin universe, you don't get to print money for war. You don't get to print money for a prison/industrial complex. You don't get to print money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.” “When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.” “There is going to be enormous amounts of resistance to the adoption of bitcoin, but I really believe that it's about the most peaceful revolution that we can have in this world.” 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.] “We can step out of the assumption of a universal history in which we're trapped, and realizing this is the beginning of a kind of liberation.” “Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.” “When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.” 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.] “The moment is where we spend most of our time.” “Reality is a term that if it's used at all it's used in philosophy, in ontology, in epistemology. It is not a concept that you hear very often on the lips of scientists.” “The 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' is the belief that there is something, somewhere which is real, which can be depended upon, which everything else can be referenced back to. And as long as you are victim of this fallacy you are philosophically naive and probably not at ease psychologically.” “The ego is this strange transference of loyalty from the group to the self, the individual body.” 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.] “Occam's Razor is fine in the formation of physical theory, but it doesn't take us far in understanding human motivation.” “What the psychedelics seem to me to argue for is that reality is not reality. There may be no reality, but certainly this is not it. This is some kind of highly provisional, culturally sanctioned, hallucination that we are all participating in.” “Reality, whatever it is, is temporary and yields to non-existence.” “Thought can't go where the roads of language have not been built.” “Culture is a kind of environment that we have learned how to interpose between ourselves and whatever is really out there.” “I just don't think that a monkey species had the wherewithal to evade the mechanisms of control and constraint that guide and direct everything on the planet. There is a purpose to history.” “What is to be done? You can't begin to answer that question until you have some notion of what reality is.” “But all it takes [when two people are sitting together in silence] is somebody breaking that silence and stating the contents of their mind for the assumption of our shared reality to completely collapse upon us.” “I think great relationships are built in silence, because then nobody ever finds out what's really going on.” “Reality is a naive concept and should probably be abandoned as quickly as possible.” “What we call reality is, in fact, nothing more than a culturally-sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination of some sort.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option