Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The ‘banks’ of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.”

“All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don’t run around announcing how they haven’t got their act together.”

“What the psychedelic thing is about, or at least for me, is it’s a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.”

“We are, literally, a schizophrenic species. We are at war with our own nature. Civilization, whatever that means, is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it’s constantly refusing to come to terms with the context in which it finds itself, which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy, and so we go outside of those things and create a generalized abstraction and reason backward.”

“The reason psychedelics, I think, are so frightening to the guardians of social order is because they represent a direct addressing of experience.”

“What the psychedelics show, that is a secret that some people don’t want told, is that we can redesign our behavior. We can change very, very quickly.”

“The whole history of humanness is a history of unexpected adaptive response to unusual circumstances.”

“Whatever the imagination is, psychedelics catalyze it, psychedelics enhance it.”

“If we could feel the consequences of what we are doing we would stop doing it. . . . We’re like someone half-awake inside a burning building.”

“Everywhere where reason has shown its light the greater darkness has been revealed.”

“The truth, for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn’t you should seek a deeper truth.”

“History is the necessary distortion of an animal species to lead it to the brink of an ontological transformation.”

“The magic, if that’s the word, or the grandiosity, the power of ecstatic exultation that resides in the psychedelic is because it is literally a change of dimensional perspective.”

“The real test of your psychedelic authenticity is your ability to write a novel.”

“The quintessence of understanding is the ability to occupy other people’s points of view.”

“Not reckless dose but committed dose. Not to see if it works. It works, other people have established that. You don’t need to do research to confirm that it’s psychoactive.”

Guest speakers: Michael Garfield & Matt Pallamary
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PROGRAM NOTES:

Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt’s novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and musician, Michael Garfield, one of my favorite topics was Michael’s very positive take on the long-term impact of the work of Terence McKenna, regardless of the fact that the Timewave theory had obviously been disproven. Michael is also a regular performer on the festival circuit, and his schedule may be found online at

Michael Garfield.net

The Psychedelic Salon Magazine

Degenerate Art: The Art And Culture Of Glass Pipes

“Is Ecstasy the Key to Alleviating Autism Anxiety?”

Horizons 2012: CHARLES S. GROB, M.D – “Why Psychedelics Matter”

Videos from the Festival Circuit

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

“Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”, a short documentary that premiered at the recent MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013 conference, is now available for free viewing online, thanks to the producers and the support of The Starck Project . Long considered “ground zero” of MDMA hitting the street, the heartbeat of the Dallas scene was the world famous Starck Club. But there was also a lot of X that was sold on the street, and this is the story of how I got involved in this fascinating scene.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.”

“Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.”

“Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.”

“National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.”

“Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.”

“In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.”

“The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.”

“Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.”

Books mentioned in this podcast

Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics [Paperback]
by Nick Herbert

Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics [Paperback] by Nick Herbert

A Vision by W. B. Yeats

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it’s discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there’s somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.”

“You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn’t depend on a state of grace. It doesn’t depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn’t even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don’t have to go to India for ten years. You don’t have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.”

“If you think that you’ve got it all figured out, and you haven’t ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you’re absolutely out to lunch. You don’t know what’s going on. It’s like the opinions of eleven year old boys about sexuality.”

“You can actually go from birth to the grave and never experience [a psychedelic trip] if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently idiotic culture.”

“I think that there is some truth to the notion that the reason we are alive is to learn the path out of the labyrinth, and that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.”

“We share this planet with some other kind of entity, and culture is a way of sealing us off from this fact.”

“Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to entertain larger perspectives than the completely piss-ant perspective that they’re being given by the popular media.”

“We must not consume. We must produce, as a community. The psychedelic community must produce art, not consume it. If they get it flowing the other way and we begin to consume it then we are depotentiated.”

Books mentioned in this podcast

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto

The Essential Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard

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: 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: 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: 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.”