Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

Today’s talk features Dennis McKenna in a June 1984 presentation of his research concerning ayahuasca. This is one of the first, if not the first, public presentation of Dennis’ early work involving this sacred medicine. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of his professional life, and he is considered one of the world’s leading scientific experts in this field. As Dennis says in a recent article in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs: “In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.”

Index of Dennis McKenna Articles (from Erowid.org)

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012)

Dennis J. McKenna (Erowid Character Vaults)

“Ayahuasca and Human Destiny” by Dennis McKenna

Dennis McKenna on the Joe Rogan Experience

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.”

“It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.”

“It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.”

“And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.”

“The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.”

“In cyberspace things are built out of light.”

“Apparently, in the Avesta classical period [early Iron Age and before] no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.”

“To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.”

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
» Continue reading “Podcast 337 – “The World Could Be Anything””

Guest speaker: Brian Wallace
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This podcast features Brian Wallace’s 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Brian, who has been a community organizer for MAPS and other organizations, is also expert on the cacao plant. Originally, Brian titled this talk “The Entheobotany of Cacao”, however, I decided to change the title to better reflect the wide-ranging discussion of a little-understood, but extremely important, plant. Brian’s talk is about significantly more than chocolate treats.

Brian Wallace’s Web Site (click)

Naked Chocolate: The Astonishing Truth About the World’s Greatest Food By David Wolfe

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Following Brian’s talk I play a short segment about the work of Occupy Sandy and close with a song sent in from some fellow saloners, The Chooks. It is simply titled “Occupy” and is freely available for download immediately below.

“Occupy” (mp3 file)
by The Chooks

Podcast 256 – “A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate”
featuring Jonathan Ott

Erowid Search Results for: cacao

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
by Dennis McKenna

NY Daily News Channel on YouTube

Direct link to video of this talk

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

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

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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.

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The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman

Dark Ages America by Morris Berman

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?”
» Continue reading “Podcast 328 – “In Praise of Ayahuasca””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I’ve been telling people recently is that until there’s animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.”

“In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it’s good to stick to the natural ones.”

“I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they’re about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.”

“The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.”

“I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.”

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Links mentioned in Jon Hanna’s comments:

The bio synthesis of dimethyltryptamine in vivo.

Comments by Sasha about DMT & Tryptophan

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.