Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[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.”

Hamilton Souther, Medicine Hunter

Blue Morpho Ayahuasca Center

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.]

“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:

This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Repression of psychedelic drugs
Element of risk in taking psychedelics
The imagination
Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul
Death
The importance of psychedelics
Bell’s Theorem

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don’t really; there is no degree in shamanism.”

“This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.”

“There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn’t, but I think that the risk is worth it.”

“Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.”

“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 318 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

In today’s podcast we pick up with the next part of a workshop that was held on January 28, 2012 titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”. This section features Bruce Damer, who begins with his “Ode to Terence” [< - click for full text]. Following this there is a wide-ranging question and answer session with topics such as the EvoGrid, emergence and novelty, how your body works (at the cellular level), Terence McKenna on Y2K and 2012, the future of virtual worlds, and more.

In the Occupy segment I begin with a recap of what went down in Washington, D.C. the day of the eviction from McPherson Square. Also, I play a series of short audio clips. The first one is of a young man from San Diego who was speaking at the General Assembly that was held in the middle of K Street in Washington the evening after the McPhearson eviction. And while this segment also ends with a call to the barricades from Chris Hedges in different interview, between those two Hedges segments I play a three minute pep talk that Tony Benn gave to some of the occupiers in London the other day.
» Continue reading “Podcast 299 – “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012” Part 2″

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
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PROGRAM NOTES:

Occupy Segment alone is available at: Occupy Updates Day 31

[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

“Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it’s basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what’s to come.”

“There’s perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn’t. It’s a neurological experience. It’s a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it’s basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.”

“To summarize, I’m an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are ‘leave the planet’, ‘get smarter’, and ‘learn how to live as long as you want’.”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 003 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

This talk was given in December 1982
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.”

“It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth.”

“The demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.”

“There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things [psychedelics] on your feet. And that means that you have an I/thou relationship, and you say … ‘you’re long on talk, but what can you show me?”
» Continue reading “Podcast 270 – “Tryptamine Consciousness””

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!

PROGRAM NOTES:

This lecture was recorded in November 1982. A more complete version of this talk may be found in Podcast 317.]

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they’re metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.”

“What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.”

“Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 267 – “Exploring the Abyss””

Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and David Ellenbogen
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Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project:

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.] 

“The brain is essentially a communications network … all this complex network of neurons that cross-talk to each other through these neurotransmitters.”

“We think of ourselves as separate from the environment. We’re kind of here, and our skin separates us from the environment, but we’re not like that at all. We’re semi-permeable membranes. Things are coming in all the time in the form of food, drugs, smoke, other things that we absorb, and we’re putting out things all the time at the same time. So we’re part of this chemical communication system.”

“If it weren’t for the linkage to symbols, or significance, which are abstractions, we wouldn’t be conscious. That is the sine qua non of consciousness, is that we’re immersed in this world of ideas and abstractions, and dreams. And this kind of experience is as real as the external world for us. And not really separated from us. That’s what sets us apart from animals.”

“Consciousness is something you detect, like tuning a television set to different channels, as much as it is something that the brain generates. I think the brain modulates signals that come from outside, but consciousness is probably more primal than matter.”

“It’s not only up to us. Life probably permeates the universe, and that means intelligence permeates the universe. And that’s good. So if we blow it, and it looks like we’re probably going to, others will carry on. And if we wake up in time maybe we can be part of that. Our challenge is to propagate these understandings through enough people that people do wake up and they realize that we’ve got to get cracking.” » Continue reading “Podcast 266 – “Interview with Dennis McKenna””

Program moderator: Timothy Leary
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PROGRAM NOTES:

Today’s podcast features a recording from the Timothy Leary archive. According to the label on the file, this is a recording of a television show that originated in Toronto, Canada. It was called Enterprise, or something like that, and this program took place sometime in 1983. The guest host that night was none other than Dr. Timothy Leary, and his topic for discussion that evening was Artificial Intelligence. … For me, one of the highlights was to hear a famous MIT professor predict that home computers would never catch on!

MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

Fall & Winter (the movie)

The Coming Technological Singularity:
How to Survive in the Post-Human Era

Vernor Vinge
Department of Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
(c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge

BB’s Bungalow Number 44
Remembering the “Bear”

(Note: There is no direct link to the above podcast.
You will have to search for in after clicking the link above.]