Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“[The wide variety of psychedelic plants] are the way in which the Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.”

“The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don’t believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.”

“Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there’s no hope, there’s no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!”
» Continue reading “Podcast 335 – “Is There Any Reason to Hope?””

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.”

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

Esalen Workshop
with
Bruce Damer and Lorenzo

Guest speaker: Kathleen “Kat” Harrison
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Kat Harrison.]

“If a bird you’re not used to seeing comes and sits on a tree outside your window and calls, and calls, and calls. It’s not just a bird of a trip. It’s a bird that has a message that it is sending you that may be positive, that may be a warning. It’s something you pay attention to.”

“You really need to, at least part of the time, speak [out loud] to the entity that you are invoking the presence of. That the whole idea with these medicines is to go into an active, right now, relationship between beings. It’s inter-species communication.”

“In order to do this kind of magical work, energy transforming work, you have to create a vulnerable oasis. You have to be willing to be open and be vulnerable, and in order to do that you have to set up protection around you, around the people you’re working with, or even the place you’re working. And one of the ways to set up protection is to plant plants that carry that kind of protective power around you.”

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[From their Web site: "Thank you for considering Gaian Botanicals as your source for high quality ethnobotanicals, herbs and teas. We are a small privately owned and operated specialty shop who imports direct from growers & harvesters in small quantities to ensure everything is fresh. We use our own contracted laboratory to manufacture high quality, safe and effective botanical extracts. We maintain the highest level of respect and great relationships with the plants, those who cultivate and manufacture our extracts, our customers and Gaia. We take great care with every aspect of our business and keep overhead low to save you money!"]

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[From Wikipedia] Jonathan Ott has written eight books, co-wrote five, and contributed to four others, and published many articles in the field of entheogens. He has collaborated with other researchers like Christian Rätsch, Jochen Gartz, and the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson. He translated Albert Hofmann‘s 1979 book LSD: My Problem Child (LSD: Mein Sorgekind), and On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko, into English. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Entheogen Review, The Entheogen Law Reporter, the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (AKA the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs), the MAPS Bulletin, Head, High Times, Curare, Eleusis, Integration, Lloydia, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, and several Harvard Botanical Museum pamphlets. He is a co-editor of Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, along with Giorgio Samorini.

A sampling of books by Jonathan Ott

Pharmacophilia, or, The Natural Paradises

Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History<

Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

By R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott

Shamanic Snuffs or Enthogenic Errhines

By Jonathan Ott

Ayahuasca Analogues Pangean Entheogens

By Jonathan Ott

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.>

"Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god. ... [This] is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.”

“I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.”

“Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism.”

“The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.”

“I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. … I think that these plants ‘take people’ as much as people take the plants. … When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenic fields of all the people who ever took it.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 189 – “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism” Part 3″

Guest speaker: Daniel Siebert
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PROGRAM NOTES:

05:44 Daniel tells the story about finding a Salvia plant at a Terence McKenna lecture.

12:06 He describes the traditional Mazatec way of taking Salvia divinorum.

24:39 Daniel talks about the various categories of experiences that are possible through the use of Salvia Divinorum.
» Continue reading “Podcast 081 – Salvia divinorum (Siebert Interview)”