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.]

“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””

Have you had a “bad trip”
on psilocybin mushrooms?

If so, please take this anonymous
Johns Hopkins survey,

and please tell others about it.

www.ShroomSurvey.com

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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.”

“Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.”

“I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that’s because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that’s a thrill, you’ll probably love psychedelics.”

“The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.”

“We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.”

“Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.”

“The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.”

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This podcast features the final community discussions at the June 2012 Esalen workshop led by Lorenzo and Bruce Damer. Among the topics discussed were:
   -Creating a new myth for our community
   -The genesis of the Occupy Movement
   -Are psychedelic “mutants” among us?
   -Cultural Creatives
   -Freeing our food supply from money
   -Timebanks
   -What the mushroom has to say about the future
   -The Importance of myth
   -Developing a “Medicine Circle” app
   -Building new cultures through shared global experiences
   -The ‘superfood’ revolution and our connection to the Earth
   -Indra’s Net
   -The Temple at the Burning Man Festival

FindTheOthers.net

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and friends
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PROGRAM NOTES:

In this follow-up session after Bruce Damer’s “Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna”, Lorenzo leads the discussion of the participants in a workshop held at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. Topics of the conversation include:
– Consciousness, not drugs were the focus of McKenna’s work
– Heroic doses are not as important as bringing back information
– The healing and love value of teaching plants
– We all contributed to making Terence McKenna a cultural icon
– Building a new civilization in the shell of the old
– The Eschaton as another step in human evolution

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This program is a recording of part of a live event at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. The workshop, titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”, was led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty. This specific recording took place on Saturday morning, June 16th and consists of Bruce’s “deep dive” into the mind of McKenna. It begins with Bruce’s “Ode to Terence” and is followed by Bruce’s readings of parts of the soon-to-be published book by Terence’s brother, Dennis . . . the book’s title: “Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”.

“Ode to Terence”

by Bruce Damer

“Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss”

by Dennis McKenna

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.”

“The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 310 – “Introduction to the Valley of Novelty Workshop””

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.”

“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.”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

This is the first part of an evening lecture given by Terence McKenna in early February, 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

“Our [Western] civilization touches everyone on this planet. We are involved in a species-wide crisis, and it’s a crisis of adaptation and intelligence. If we can meet the crisis, if we can re-design the cultural machinery so that it can glide in to the new value systems that a limited Earth, and an electronically activated population demands, then we can use the crisis as a stepping stone to further exploration of the universe, further evolution, further unfolding.”

“So we are like dysfunctional children. Something terrible happened to us in the childhood of our intelligence. We lost our connection to the Gaian matrix, to the goddess mother of the Earth who gives coherency to life, and when the connection was lost we fell into history.”

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

» Continue reading “Podcast 302 – “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide””