Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and Peter Gorman

ROBERT VENOSA

January 21, 1936 - August 9, 2011

Dear Friends and Community,

A great soul has completed his earthly journey and graduated to the next level.

The great Venosa left his body on Tuesday August 9, 2011 at 6:56 PM.

His transition was graceful and accomplished in the same composed and calm manner that he exuded throughout his life.

I feel honored to have been able to accompany him to the gate, having walked 30 beautiful years together in this life.

Robert had a long and brave healing journey with cancer and showed incredible strength on this path as well as tremendous courage in facing this great dragon.

He believed in the natural healing ability of the human body and proved the doctors wrong time and again, who only gave him a few month’s to live upon his diagnosis over eight years ago.

He was a powerful human being. Together he and I, held the piece of his physical struggle safely tucked away from the eyes of the world like a precious pearl.

It is with great sadness that I’m sharing this news today but also with

deep gratitude, for his magical and special life; fully lived.

Even in death he gave those surrounding him a powerful initiation into the scared mysteries of the unknown.

We will carry him in our hearts forever, remembering the light he shone on so many. He so appreciated the light that others shone upon him.

In loving memory of my great love, compañero, best friend and artistic accomplice.

Martina Hoffmann and family

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.]

“I think that ayahuasca is actually much more controllable than mushrooms. . . . I think that it is quite an amazing tool for self-understanding and for exploration. I think that it's good for you, actually physically and psychologically good for you.”

“It's no different than it ever was. When the Jesuits and the missionaries came to meso-America the first things to go, the first things to be stamped out was the knowledge of the sacred plants and the practice of using the sacred plants.”

“I think that Christianity linked with Calvinism has a hard time dealing with what you might call facts of biology, which in another phrase is sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. In some ways, life is about sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Biology is about those things.”

“All experience is a drug experience. Whether it's mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it's mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it's all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.”

“He [Terence McKenna] will never let a fact get in the way of making a provocative statement. He's a good story teller, but I think it's important to remember that they are stories, and that he often makes mistakes in his lectures.”

“In that position, a guy who can pack the houses every time, I feel has a larger responsibility to the psychedelic community to refrain from making these completely off-the-wall comments, and to actually tell it like it is, not how he imagines it to be.”

“I'm sure that Terence views it as theater. I can't believe that he takes what he says seriously. I mean, I can tell you that he doesn't. Much of what he says he says it because it's going to get a rise out of somebody. He's always been that way.”

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Peter Gorman

Writer, Explorer, Naturalist

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