Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:31 Terence McKenna: “[The apocalypse] seems to be the unique, unifying thread throughout the Western religions Most insistently of all religious systems on Earth, it is the Western systems that have insisted on appointing an end to their world.” 05:07 Terence: “At the folkloric level, the attractor of the end of the world is very strong.” 07:47 Terence: “And these religions, which have anticipated this thing in this rather crude end of the world scenario are somehow on to something, something that is, I think, a message that is coming from the biological level, if you will, about the inherent instability of the world.” 12:14 Terence: “If in fact the concrescence is upon us then really all we can do is chat about it as it comes down around our ears over the next 25 years.” 14:37 Terence: “I think we’re standing on the lip of a hyperdimensional volcano of some sort, toward which all history is being poured at a great rate.” 29:34 Terence: “So then I thought, my god, we’re not inventing time travel here, what we’re inventing is a god whistle.” 36:01 Terence: “You see, the presence of minds is the signifier of nearby singularity.” 37:22 Ralph Abraham: “The only thing is, that from the morphogenic field point of view there are quite a number of people believing Saint John the Divine, now that I have to take seriously.” . . . Terence: “He felt a quaking in the force, that’s all, but it’s up to cooler heads to figure out what this quaking is.” 38:10 Ralph: “The present extinction is the eighth largest [as determined in 1989] catastrophes of the planet in its lifetime. And that’s happening now. So we are in something that big, and to be the biggest one it would be the apocalypse.” 38:10 Terence: “So that’s why you don’t need John the Divine to tell you there’s an apocalypse underway.”  39:49 Ralph: “It does seem to me that the ecological catastrophe is the appropriate interpretation of the apocalyptic vision at the present time.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option The book that Terence McKenna referred to in this podcast is: “Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics” by Nick Herbert

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:39 Rupert Sheldrake: “The other side of this is the reform of the existing professions.” 05:24 Ralph Abraham: “Somehow there would have to be a miracle to get the whole system onto a new track.. And the revascularization aspect that we are mostly longing for might never happen. We need to trigger it.” 07:37 Rupert: “I’m thinking of a pioneering experiment in a limited area.” 08:55 Ralph: “How could we possibly attract an eighteen year old to a workshop? What would be necessary?” [Terence McKenna] “You have to talk about psychedelic drugs.” 11:13 Rupert: [describing his concept of a series of workshop initiations] “To get there you have to be recommended by someone who’s been here, and therefore there’s a much greater sense of initiation into this world. The fact is, a lot of teenagers may not know that this world exists, or if they do they have a totally distorted view.” 17:11 Ralph: “Corruption is a known mechanism for the downward spiral of society.” 26:57 Terence McKenna: “Because the old method is breaking down. There’s either some substitute in the future, or we’re just looking at a generation in anarchy.” 34:07 Rupert: “Because right now education is one of the areas that is being insulated from free market economics by being a state monopoly run by bureaucratic institutions and operated by an old style hierarchal priesthood.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Essay referred to by Lorenzo in this podcast: “Drug Control: National Policies” by Dr. A.C. Germann, Professor Emeritus Department of Criminal Justice California State University, Long Beach

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:15 Rupert Sheldrake: “The present educational system mimics the initiation process and indeed is a kind of initiation process.” 07:18 Rupert: “And indeed it is the scientific priesthood envisaged by Bacon in the scientific world, the academic model and the priestly role as the higher initiates in running and ordering society, the more-educated.” 08:40 Rupert: “You can see this whole new frame of mind being introduced in the entire third world through UNESCO and through educational things. And the first step is literacy, you’ve got to have them reading and writing, because then you can get it across that what’s in books is actually more important than what you feel or experience.” 21:09 Terence McKenna: “The education system of the future should have a tremendous focus on history.” 22:53 Terence: “Part of reforming education has to be to teach people that history is a system of interlocking resonance’s in which they are embedded, and they are going to be called upon to make decisions which will affect the state of life on this planet millennia in the future.” 24:04 Terence: “This hierarchy of academic cant that has been built up is in fact a sham, a thing of squeaking gears and creaking pulleys that is left over from another age.” 27:50 Ralph Abraham: “I was pleased to discover that the higher educational system of Europe and America was not getting worse and worse, it was always this bad.” 32:22 Ralph: “Where is spiritual value, where is moral and ethical value, where is the fabric of society, as it were, where is that taught? If not in the schools then embedded in soap operas, or where? Somehow the curriculum has to have spiritual, moral, and social values.” 41:06 Rupert: “And then there would be some final test . . . and I think it could also involve, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, a psychedelic revelation.” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 07:18 Rupert Sheldrake: “If there were to be a true Mother Earth religion develop, it would obviously have priestesses rather than priests because its central figure was a goddess. It would be relating human life to the Earth, first and foremost . . . it wouldn’t have much emphasis on the stars or the heavens.” 08:49 Terence McKenna: “But if this Anima Mundi thing got going, this is not a fine tuning of Christianity this is, at last, the overthrow of it. . . . no more this patriarchal, masculine, dominator thing that has descended down through monotheism.” 13:36 Terence: “Why not psychedelicize and sacrilize green politics? . . . Science and green politics can be sacrilized through the psychedelic experience.” 14:33 Terence: “I think that green politics, what makes it so wishy-washy, is its lack of a forthright metaphysics. . . . A green party that used a mystical language, a psychedelic language…would have, I think, a tremendous appeal.” 15:51 Terence: “It has to be understood that this [using psychedelic medicines] is the way to the Gaian mind. These things are sacraments, not metaphors for sacraments, real sacraments.” 16:13 Terence: “Everybody is going to try and out-green everybody else. The trick will be to tell the weasels from everybody else.” 21:50 Terence: “If it’s to be a psychedelicized green movement, the people who could lead this have been training themselves for years. They just didn’t understand that that was what they were training themselves for, but called upon to do so they could step forward and operate in those positions.” 25:00 Ralph Abraham: “The entire promise of the intellect has failed us if it’s necessary for the catastrophe to actually be upon us before people will act, and yet that seems to be the case.” 35:18 Terence: “Well they are psychedelic experiences. The authenticity is going to come from the thing itself. We’re not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.” 40:09 Terence: “The only competition for that focus on the need to save the Earth is this stupid anti-drug thing, which is the need to preserve the purity of your precious bodily essences, or something like that. . . . It’s the issue of how we relate to the vegetable matrix” Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:48 Ralph Abraham: "So eventually the 60s happened, and probably my first experience that I would now identify as a real religious experience was the experience of LSD." 07:17 Ralph: "What’s gone wrong in the world now is a loss of connection to the sacred within and without organized religion." 13:30 Ralph: "The revascularization of music, I think, is very important. If I had to point to a single factor that I thought was destroying society faster than any other I think it would be evil music." 18:28 Ralph: "The value of getting the true partnership into the church would mean that we then wouldn’t have to replace the church just because it had been on the wrong track for 5,000 years." 18:48 Terence McKenna: "But isn’t this a little like trying to reform the Soviet Union and keeping the Communist Party around? I think the momentum of these institutions makes them hard to reform." 23:27 Rupert Sheldrake: "I think the most important aspect of this process really, because I agree with Terence about the archaic revival, is to find behind the existing forms and existing festivals the pre-Christian roots, which in all cases are the ones that feed the timing of the particular festivals and the particular locations of the sacred places, and which ground the new religion in the old." 32:39 Terence: "In America attendance at church is much higher, and it convulses the body politic because, unable to fulfill it’s sacral function, the church has become simply a lobbying force for fundamentalist social policy. . . . I think we should level [churches] to the ground and start over." 35:13 Rupert: "There is little way in which the political life in America could be sacrelized, since by definition it’s secular." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 03:52 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his concept of "Cannabis Day" 06:18 Terence McKenna: "One day in each lunar cycle would be Cannabis Day, I think." 10:22 Terence: "Time and attention used creatively banish the unconscious." 13:42 Ralph Abraham: "Shopping malls are actually the modern equivalent of the medieval abbeys." 20:04 Rupert: "The idea that time has its qualities is already something that has a popular following in the millions who study astrology in a vague or a professional way." 24:22 Rupert: "Drugs have qualities, and they open up different realms of experience. . . . And so what would happen, for example, if one took a powerful psychoactive that opened one to the astral realm, in the starry sense, and then invoked a particular star by name and tried to journey, or connect with, or become open to influences from that star? . . . I’d be rather frightened to try it, myself." 29:09 Ralph: "Denial [of various experiences] I think is a recent phenomenon, and here there is a serious danger for evolution because once experience is denied then evolution is shunted off its track." 35:50 Ralph: "We may have great powers that aren’t being used since we don’t believe in them." 41:20 Ralph: "A dangerous hypothesis: The first one we want to transcend is the seperation of the human unconscious from the other unconscious." 42:32 Ralph: "So associated with this animal domestication and eating habit, addiction, is denial of consciousness of the animal." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 06:48 Ralph Abraham: Explains his bifurcation theory of the unconscious 08:01 Ralph: "We can speak of the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of plants, the consciousness of Mother Earth." 11:57 Ralph: "Chaos goes to the basement, and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness, giving us the unconscious, which appears to be gaining ever since." 17:02 Ralph: "I think we want Saint George and the Dragon getting it on together in a May Day celebration where Dionysian elements are accepted." 18.21 Terence McKenna: "The orgies driven by the psychedelic religion completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity." 21:21 Terence: "Basically the choice was between fun [through orgies] and full knowledge of the flow of your genes, and once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue, then the concept of ‘mine’ comes into existence. . . . And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundry-disolving mushroom religion was holding at bay. It was literally a pharmacological intervention to keep that kind of a psychology [patriarchal] from getting going." 23:33 Terence: "They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy to a drunken reverie of warriors and whores." 30:16 Ralph: "And in this sense, a restrictive society which narrows the choice of addictions is somehow anti-evolutionary in that it promotes the growth of unconsciousness, insensitivity, is a danger to the biosphere and so on." 31:11 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his proposal to legalize psychedelics in an ‘age-related manner’. 33:55 Rupert: "And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit. However conscious we think we become we don’t become fully conscious of the unconscious embryonic habits that formed us." 40:03 Ralph: "And so we would have to work at maintenance of consciousness as we work at maintenance of the garden." 46:47 Terence: "It [coffee] is the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of the coffee break." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:40 Terence McKenna: "Going back to this thing about language, you get this same peculiar emphasis on language and letters in the esoteric doctrine that surrounds the chakras." 06:57 Terence: "Linearity in print conferred upon language an inability to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology, but now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this and move it forward." 09:55 Ralph Abraham: "There is very little discussion of the intelligent science, mythology, and so on of these 100-, 200-, 300-thousand B.C., what is going on during these previous interglacials, and it could be that there was agriculture. There would be no way to rule that out." 15:30 Rupert Sheldrake: "If that’s possible [communicating with a star entity], what kind of information would such beings impart?" 17:27 Ralph: "Myth is from mythos. Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the song from the rituals. Myth gained the power it now has in our conscious and unconscious life through its secondary role in the ritual. The ritual and the myth together, I think, is one of the most important things for us to regain." 19:11 Ralph: "Peace [in Crete], I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm in a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm. There was also the conscious interaction with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere in bringing peace down." 22:12 Terence: "I think when you go to the edges . . . then you discover there is an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomenon around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors." 25:02 Rupert: "The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm. . . . So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a demon. It’s in fact a Satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles. . . . How seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money?" 28:34 Rupert: "If we take seriously these entities, how much can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities, like Mammon or Satanic powers or fallen angles, which are actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology?" 30:50 Terence: "Probably the process of civilization is going to reveal the final status of this shadow within us." 36:12 Ralph: "I think we need the Gaian, and we need the Chaotic, that is the celestial sphere, to be re-connected, to be coupled, to the human spirit . . . that is the ultimate partnership." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 02:24 Terence McKenna: "When you start looking at the question of these disincarnate entities, the first thing that strikes you is their persistence in human experience and folklore. This is not something unusual or statistically rare." 07:57 Terence: "The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal concomitant with the rise of modern science." 10:01 Terence: "If we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science by disincarnate entities." 12:59 Terence: "The aversion to the irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity." 17:59 Ralph Abraham: "I think it was in 879 in the council of Byzantium that spirit was made illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul . . . and this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the difference between spirit and soul and thinks that they’re the same." 21:01 Terence: "Did you know that the dogma of purgatory, in Christian theology, was not created by theologians in Rome. It was created by Saint Patrick in an effort to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk beliefs in the process of converting Ireland to Christianity?" 22:12 Terence: "The major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is psychedelic compounds, especially DMT and the tryptamines. And those sort of experiences seem to line up pretty well with the Celtic fokelore." 27:37 Terence: "The irrational, in this objectified form, is very active in the process that we call history. It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry." 33:57 Rupert Sheldrake: "The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly journeying into these realms of other entities." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: (Minutes : Seconds into program) 05:38 Ralph Abraham: "It does seem very attractive to think of the electromagnetic field as some kind of favored intermediary among all the physical fields." 07:41 Rupert Sheldrake: "There’s this mystery of light. I still think Maxwell’s electromagnetic formulations of light are much too simple." 10:56 Ralph: "I think that we ought to think about the possibility that this effect [the paranormal] will not be confirmed in laboratories." 15:39 Rupert: "There is some sense in which our imagination, our image-making facility, is self-luminous." 25:54 Ralph: "We have therefore in our individual consciousness a particular affinity with the electromagnetic field . . . as epitomized by vision." 30:41 Terence McKenna: "Why is divine omniscience a necessary concept? Can’t the universe get along just being partially aware of what’s going on? . . . What problems are solved by hypothesizing that notion?" 33:36 Rupert: "I find it more reasonable to find that our minds are in touch with larger minds and are in many ways shaped by larger mental systems." 33:57 Terence: "The mind of the whole universe seems unnecessary to hypothesize and unlikely to be encountered." 45:14 Rupert: "I think that the cosmic mind may be largely unconscious because I think that most things that happen in the cosmos are habitual and therefore unconscious." Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option