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.]

“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: 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

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 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

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

“In my function as a [college] lecturer, it’s my obligation, it’s my task, it’s my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority.”

“At all costs avoid terminal adulthood.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 322 – “The Evolution of Intelligence””

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: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic
UFOs and aliens
The end of history – the eschaton
The psychedelic experience
Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other
Death and afterlife
Dreams
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

“The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”

“Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”

“The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace””

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

“At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called ‘drugs’.”

“The key to evolution is the individual, the intelligent individual, the self, finding a self within.”

Psychedelics and Language

The Institute for the Encouragement of Outrageous Ideas