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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”
“The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”
“If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”
“So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That’s why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.”
“I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.”
“I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”
“Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 351 – “What Is Truth?””
Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther
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[NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.]
“Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you’re never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don’t know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.”
“The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.”
“[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it’s letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don’t want to become like that. Maybe that’s not why you’re there.”
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Just because you have a nut theory it doesn’t mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there’s a limited pool there that we’re all after.”
“Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what’s happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.”
“Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.”
“I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 349 – “A Higher Dimensional Sectioning of Reality””
Guest speaker: Natalie Metz
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Today’s program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Natalie Metz gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of modern medicine with the wisdom of the natural healing arts. In this engaging talk, and through interaction with her audience, Dr. Natalie discusses some of the foods, medicines, and poisons that we obtain from plants and helps us to better realize what a deep connection we humans have to the plant world.
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don’t actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence”
“These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.”
“Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.”
“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.”
“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”
“For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 347 – “This counts, somehow it matters””
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of “global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism” where you “put yourself on the shelf” and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says “there is no dominator culture” and that if we aren’t careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others’ unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop “critical intelligence”. If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn’t feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme.
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.”
“By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.”
“The question is being asked, ‘Are we alone?’ ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we’re not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?”
“People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.”
“Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state, it’s that we haven’t demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 345 – “Transhuman Encounters””
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.”
“Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it’s going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.”
“Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.” (quote from 1983)
“Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.”
“I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.”
“If I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism.”
“So it’s [shamanism] a kind of a profession. It’s almost like clergy. It’s to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.”
“The history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of.”
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present
By Howard Zinn
Burr: A Novel
By Gore Vidal
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated
By Gore Vidal
Guest speaker: Annie Oak
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PROGRAM NOTES:
Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psychedelic community she has these powerful words, “We’re not the counter-culture. We are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.”
The Women’s Visionary Congress
Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice
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