Psychedelic Salon

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 psychedelic RE-imprinting." "I think that anyone who doesn’t experience, at some moment during their psychedelic sessions, and intense awe-full fear has been cheated by their psychiatrist or their bootlegger." "LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever known to man." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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 mastedons and that sort of thing, but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded." Terence McKenna: "Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward ‘outing’ the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this, as are psychedelic drugs." Terence McKenna: "High definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point on-the-ropes linear uniform unitarians, because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography. And it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within society." Ralph Abraham (in 1991): "Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation but because it’s not interactive. Interactive computer graphic games where you can watch the soap opera but also play with it to change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema." Terence McKenna: "So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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 Brittan’s hour of need, or that Gaia or the Gaian intelligence or the Gaian mind itself is involved in some ongoing dialogue or communication which principally has the effect, year by year, of attracting more and more attention. And the message year by year seems to be ‘Watch This Space’." Ralph Abraham: "I think we should bet on the red and we should bet on the black. Probably you are right. Probably it’s a hoax. In case it’s a hoax, probably military, all right. But just as the fanatics of this phenomenon can’t dis the hoaxes theory to zero, neither can we reduce the non-hoax theory to zero, therefore, we have to keep our eyes open in case it actually begins to say some understandable intelligence to us. We can’t dismiss it completely." Rupert Sheldrake: "I think this is the only rational position to adopt, namely to treat it as a natural historical phenomena, or at least a phenomenon. Let’s just say a phenomenon, to investigate it emphatically, I think, is Bacon Ian science." Terence McKenna: "I’m claiming that orthodoxy is defending itself against magic. It’s a war between reason and magic. … It’s a desperate struggle between rational orthodoxy and magic." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Crop Circle Links 1. Why real crop circles cannot be hoaxed:http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html 2. http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/ Her photos can be found here: http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/photos/ 3. Andreas Mueller’s Interview with African Shaman on Crop Formations http://www.kornkreise-forschung.de/textCredoMutwa.htm 4. Interactive site: http://www.cropcircle-archive.com/archive/index.php?language=en 5. http://swirlednews.com/index.asp 6. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/index2.html Crop Circle Videos Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 1 (This link was broken the last time it was tested.) Crop Circles The Best Evidence – Part 2 http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7441333249846634309&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Unsigned Circles http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=2802311361701974260&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Alien Signs http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5043378172083766362&q=crop+circles+duration%3Along Star Dreams – The Crop Circle Phenomena http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=966639197455233571&q=crop+circle&hl=en Julia Set http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6223143790883248313&q=crop+circle&hl=en Book mentioned in this podcast Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults by : Jacques Valle’e Also see: C-Realm Podcast Episode 118: 21st Century Koans

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 changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. … For the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology." Terence McKenna: "To my mind, the whole of Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish." Terence McKenna: "Hashish, cannabis, has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenic field you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world." Terence McKenna: "There’s a deeper issue which is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude." Ralph Abraham: "It [cannabis] is medicine for cultural evolution." Terence McKenna: "If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity." Terence McKenna: "It can turn you into a stupor, sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it, and I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it." Terence McKenna: "We [the U.S.A.] represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans." Terence McKenna: "Governments have always been, and continue to this day to be, the major purveyor of drugs, worldwide." Terence McKenna: "The day the Russians left [Afghanistan], the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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 possible for the human animal is language. … Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude with anything else going on on this planet." "Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language." "Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys. It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream." "The glory of the human animal is cognitive activity, song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent." "The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in fifteen or twenty thousand years." "The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act." "Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness." "Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. … If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found." "Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics." "The civilization that was created out of the collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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 population on the Earth." "First of all, let’s just take it at face value: Each woman should bear only one natural child. Now what would be the demographic consequences of this? Startlingly, within fifty years the population of the Earth would be cut in half, without war, epidemic, forced migration, government programs of sterilization, and so forth and so on." "A child born to a woman in a high-tech, industrial society, in the upper class of that society, will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often told." "Notice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman, ‘How would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero? All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.’ " "I don’t think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future." . . . and from there, Ralph and Rupert point out a few of the problems with Terence’s plan and go on to propose yet another clever solution for saving the world. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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 years, it’s also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems." Terence McKenna: "Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature. Science is done to make money on a vast scale." Terence McKenna: "I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military/industrial complex." Terence McKenna: "And I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified scientific data. That’s an obscene concept." Rupert Sheldrake: "The vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999% at least, which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree, about the nature of consciousness, the range of imagination, and the powers of the human mind, etc. is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact, every effort is made to suppress it." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Grass Roots Science Report mentioned in this podcast: An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays

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 am a freethinker, in charge of my own destiny. But if my beliefs own me, well, then the institutions that formulate and promulgate those beliefs, they own me." "I have finally come to grok the fact that the purpose of my life is not to reach a destination. Nor is my life a journey. No, for me at least, the purpose of life is to dance. A dance with no beginning and no end, just an endless dance." "Here and now. Here and now. All else is but memory and fantasy." TERENCE McKENNA QUOTES FROM THIS PODCAST: [The following quotes are by Terence McKenna] "People don’t take enough [psychedelics], that’s all." "When we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing." "The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting." "The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal." "These boundry-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past." "Get it straight. This is about an experience. Not my experience, your experience. This is about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard." "This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution, you are a free and indipendent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option MUSIC USED IN THIS PODCAST: "Miss About You" (with vocals by Sharon), "Counting Days", "Long Distance" LiquidAlchemy with Queerninja … queerninja@doepfiend.co.uk "Velvet Apple" the sun blindness "Anything Can Happen" Catal Huyuk Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert "the Zahir" by Paulo Coelho

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [Note: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "These are the two things we don’t have: As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves." "We have not, in this culture, awakened to the depths of the crisis that surrounds us." "Our culture is in trouble. Not trouble! We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways, horror beyond your wildest imagination, or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination." "The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs but plants. It’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way." "When you talk about Gaia, it’s only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women. It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals." "We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I’m sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing, basically, to do enough hallucinogens in the diet." "It is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally. Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in." "Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behavior are acceptable." "There are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell. One of the other." "What we deny, as a culture, as a culture of materialist positivist reductionists, it the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature." "I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence. But that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

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 copying. It’s about distortion and exaggeration, but you cannot randomly distort an image and call it art." "There is only one pattern of neural activity that can exist at one time, and it will destroy any other competing patterns of neural activity. This means there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option