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Podcast 351 – “What Is Truth?”

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.”
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May 14, 2013 · Filed under Ayahuasca, Books, Culture, Evolution, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 345 – “Transhuman Encounters”

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.”
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March 20, 2013 · Filed under Books, Consciousness, Culture, DMT, Evolution, Extraterrestial, Imagination, LSD, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Terence McKenna

Podcast 344 – “A Global Cultural Crisis”

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.”

Books mentioned in this podcast

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

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March 13, 2013 · Filed under Ayahuasca, Books, Consciousness, Culture, Language, Psychedelics, Shamanism, Terence McKenna

Podcast 340 – “Visions and Biospheres”

Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a better understanding of not just our own local ecosystems, but of the Earth’s entire biosphere as well. It is a fascinating talk and is followed by an interesting Q&A session.

Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2
By John Allen


The publishing home of John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder

Upcoming Events

Books from the Synergetic Press

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February 6, 2013 · Filed under Books, Burning Man, Culture, Environment, Future, John Allen, Palenque Norte

Podcast 329 – “Vision Mapping for the Golden Age”

Guest speakers: Amanda Sage and Bruce Damer
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Watch a video of this talk

Watch a video of Bruce Damer’s brief history of the Palenque Norte lecture series

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Amanda Sage.]

“Let’s turn the museums into temples. I think the new museums are going to be temples.”

“I’m interested in this collaboration, because I’m interested in what can we do to wake people up, to turn people on.”

“And dream. I mean if this is about dreaming, what can each of us do to evoke the dream, a deeper dream, in another?”

Amanda Sage (official site)

eARTh Voyage:::

The mission is the art of transformation

Amanda Sage “Vision Mapping for the Golden Age” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

A brief history of Palenque Norte, from which the podcasts sprang . . . by Dr. Bruce Damer

Dr. Bruce Damer “A Brief History of Palenque Norte” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman

Dark Ages America by Morris Berman

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October 15, 2012 · Filed under 2012, Alchemy, Amanda Sage, Books, Creativity, Culture, Environment, Evolution, Family, Future, Imagination, Occupy, Palenque Norte, Shamanism

Podcast 328 – “In Praise of Ayahuasca”

Guest speaker: Graham Hancock
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Graham Hancock.]

“There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.”

“I think that ayahuasca requires us to confront the truth about ourselves. That’s one of the fundamental, universal experiences of anybody who has drunk the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon.”

“All across the world we have a venal class of dishonest, self-serving bureaucrats who are using the power we give them to impose themselves upon us.”

“You have to understand that we’ve had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the ‘War on Drugs’.”

“Do we as adults have the right to make decisions about what we put in our own bodies and what we experience with our own consciousness without reference to the powers of the state, or must we seek permission from the state in order to explore our own consciousness?”
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October 7, 2012 · Filed under Ayahuasca, Books, Cannabis, Culture, DMT, Graham Hancock, Psychedelics, Shamanism

Podcast 319 – “The Voynich Manuscript”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

“Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the ‘limit text’ of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.” -Terence McKenna

According to Wikipedia, the Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”, and so far it’s secret code has never been broken . . . including attempts by top U.S. Government cytologists. And this is the subject of today’s talk by Terence McKenna from an April 1983 lecture.

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July 20, 2012 · Filed under Alchemy, Books, Imagination, Shamanism, Terence McKenna

Podcast 311 – “The Spirit of the Internet”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This podcast features a recording of a talk that I gave in March of 2001 at The Inside Edge, a Southern California association of cultural creatives. The topic was some of the themes in my book, “The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness”. One of the more controversial aspects of this talk is my comparison of a deep Internet experience with a psychedelic experience. . . . Also included in this podcast is some discussion of the growing student strike in Quebec and the mounting student loan debt bubble here in the U.S.

Full Text of this talk (PDF)

The Inside Edge

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May 29, 2012 · Filed under Books, Consciousness, Culture, Evolution, Future, Lorenzo, Occupy, Psychedelics, Science & Technology

Podcast 309 – “In Praise of Psychedelics” Part 2

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I think it’s time to begin to talk very, very frankly about the forced engineering of consciousness, about the re-shamanising of society, about the re-birth of archaic values before it’s too late.”

“Anyone who loves adventure, and who loves life, and who loves the experience of being, has an obligation, I think, to explore this [the psychedelic realm]. It’s as much a part of your identity as your sexuality, your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to choose to play with less than a full deck. Don’t do that. Play with a full deck!”

“People didn’t care for the Holocaust, that was a moral outrage, but the policies of the Roman Catholic Church push more people into early death, disease, and poverty than the Holocaust ever did. And yet, they’re perfectly free to run their bingo games and appear among us. Why? They should have to answer for this outrage.”

“Millions of people right now are being warehoused by television. Television is the heroin of the electrified middle class.”

“I think that technology has been obscenely in the service of profit. And science, too, has whored itself to profit. But what kind of world could we build if these things were in the service of art? It’s our cultural values that are out of whack.”

“It’s ridiculous to criticize a drug you haven’t taken. It’s sheer, boneheaded, know-nothingism.”

“DMT is a reliable method for crossing into a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50,000 years. Is there an invisible, nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet your boots there is. And if you don’t think so, then tell me you don’t think so and you’ve smoked 70 milligrams of DMT. Otherwise we just don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Everything has directions. Whether you are ironing your clothes, tuning up your car, or taking psychedelics. If you don’t follow the directions, whose responsibility is it if you screw up? So we have to educate our children, educate ourselves, get these things out of the closet and make them part of the culture. That’s the way to deal with sexuality. That’s the way to deal with drugs. Maturely!

“When I think that I will close my hand into a fist, that’s a miracle. That’s mind over matter. No philosopher in human history has ever been able to explain how that simple act takes place. That tells you that philosophy has been staying well-away from the world of direct experience, because every day we experience willing our body to act, and yet we say mind cannot affect matter. Why do we have this contradiction? It’s because we don’t want to admit the primacy of mind.”

Weekend of June 15-17, 2012 "Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012"

Esalen Workshop
with
Bruce Damer and Lorenzo

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May 11, 2012 · Filed under Books, Consciousness, Creativity, Culture, DMT, Future, Psilocybin, Psychedelics, Salvia divinorum, Terence McKenna, War on Drugs

Podcast 302 – “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide”

Guest speaker: James Fadiman
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We are saddened to report that long time friend of the salon and psychedelic research pioneer extraordinaire, Gary Fisher has gone on to his next adventure.

Archive of podcasts featuring Gary Fisher

The Gary Fisher Page

PROGRAM NOTES:

“There is so much more psychedelic use in this country than any of us, even those of us who think we know a lot, are aware of. . . . According to [the government], 23 million Americans have used LSD since it became illegal. And that figure, because I’ve been tracking it, goes up 600,000 a year, pretty much rain or shine. So there’s 600,000 people this year who are going to be taking, and that just deals with LSD, that doesn’t deal with ecstasy or ayahuasca or anything else. But there’s this growing, continual large number of people, and they tend to be better educated and brighter, and we do have research on that. So what I’m doing a lot with this book is say, ‘Hey, it’s OK to admit what is true, which is the person next to you at your work probably had some acid in their background just as you did.” -James Fadiman

JamesFadiman.com

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March 12, 2012 · Filed under Autism, Books, Consciousness, Creativity, Culture, Education, Imagination, James Fadiman, LSD, Psilocybin, Psychedelic Research, Psychedelics

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