Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Cory Doctorow.]

“This world of computers exists in a principle-free environment. The Internet of Things is the Internet of absolute, self-serving bullshit.”

“The Internet of Things needs principles.”

“The real struggle here, it's not making computers free, it's making people free. The reason we want to save computers is not because computers are more important than racial justice, or gender equity, or getting rid of homophobia and transphobia, or the climate. The reason we want to make computers free and open is because we cannot win those fights without a few and open information infrastructure.”

“Considered atomically, one thing at a time all the things computers can do, we live in an age of unparalleled wonders. But all civilizations fall, and we have the shared responsibility to the civilizations that come after us to build the infrastructure that will lead to a future in which technology exists to server its users, not destroy their lives in service to surveillance capital, and the global war on terror, and self-serving bullshit so noxious that you can see it from orbit.”

“No one puff [of a cigarette] is going to give you cancer, but statistically given enough puffs you're getting a tumor. If that tumor erupted with the drag there would be no second drag. The reason people smoke is because the tumors happen years later. And the reason people give up their private information is because the privacy stuff that bites them in the ass almost always happens years and years later too.”

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Books by Cory Doctorow

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org)

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Shannon Clare Petitt, and Rick Doblin

PROGRAM NOTES:

In this 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture, Annie Oak, founder of the Women's Visionary Congress, teaches how to use Naloxone to help a person who has had an opioid overdose. She is followed by Shannon Clare Petitt who tells us about some of the work being done by MAPS' Zendo Project. Finally, we get to hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, talk about how he first learned about MDMA and what his first experience with that substance was like.

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Naloxone

John Oliver Blasts Pharma's Role in U.S. Opioid Epidemic:'This Is Happening Everywhere'

"Some towns have been devastated," Oliver warned.

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What we're doing is we're building a nervous system. We're building a nervous system the size of this planet.”

“The marketplace has an appetite for lies about the future.”

“I cannot conceive of post eschatonic life. I think of it, just to make things simple for myself, as death, because that's the other thing in my life that I have no grip on whatsoever.”

“An organism is chemistry abducted into hyperspace.”

“If you're a guru these days, you're almost condemned to spending a life with foolish people.”

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig

What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrodinger

"Shamans of the Global Village"

Episode 1 Launch

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today we get to hear Terence McKenna's lecture about his TimeWave hypothesis (it never became a true theory). This 1997 talk was given less than three years before Terence's death and thus represents some of his latest thinking about this topic. He defines the TimeWave as a mathematical model of how the world works, as based upon the I Ching. Also, he clearly states that where the end point is set determines all of the other data points fall. However, in true Terence McKenna fashion he points out that even if he was 0.001% off, that gave him a range of 60,000 years in which his prediction would still be valid. He then goes on to discuss his correction to the Watkins objection that was discussed in podcast 472.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“We are involved in the most accelerated, asymptotic ascent into change, so far as we can tell, that the cosmos has ever known.”

“In the one sample we know of, biology has proven itself to be four times as enduring as the stars themselves.”

“I won't defend it [the TimeWave] though. I've decided to get a life after 2012 no matter what happens.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“A nature trip is an eyes wide open trip.”

“I think LSD is abrasively psychoanalytic.”

“I don't see an intellect outside of space and time guiding things, and certainly not watching with baited breath the machinations of the human monkeys. I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.”

“The universe is a self-creating mystery of some sort.”

“Maybe reality is a far more perishable concept than we ever dared or feared to suppose.”

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What Are the Benefits and Boiling Points of Cannabis Vaporization?

Matt Lamkin's Bandcamp Site

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The only path in to the supernormal that I've found are the psychedelics. Everywhere else I found chicanery and fraud.”

“It's fun to be a free person. It's fun to not depend upon an institution, an ideology, an other person, a place, a time. And it's very hard to sell this form of fun. People are afraid. People have been dis-empowered, I think, through the process of juvenilization.”

“Millions and millions of people live larval, low-awareness lives warehoused in the burbs, plugged in to Costco and the tele. And as long as the magazine subscriptions stay subscribed and the credit cards continue to be serviced the illusion that there is life happening here is allowed to continue.”

“I think that every single one of us should be learning how to expand our communications skills.”

“It's not about rejecting the media or the marketplace. It's about changing your relationship to it. Do not consume. Produce! . . . Inject your own art.”

“I don't believe alien spaceships are visiting Earth to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, or to do anything much else of interest, but I do think there is an alien presence. It's non-material. You contact it in the psychedelic experience. . . . Its nature is informational.”

“What the alien needs to manifest among us is a suitable landing zone.”

“In a sense, the Internet is a net to catch an alien.”

“In other words, the imagination is like a field of data that is at the Bell level of connectivity in the quantum mechanical universe.”

“Physically, we are alone, physically. But in the imagination we're surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our religions, our culture.”

“We have exhausted the exterior world, and yet the interior world beats like an enormous ocean. And what is ordinary, historical consciousness but a tiny island protruding above that ocean.”

“There was a period in my life where I formed my taste by saying I liked what I didn't like.”

“I think the worst setting for taking drugs is complex social environments, especially public social environments.”

“I believe in large doses . . . rarely.”

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Psychedelic Book Listing

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The real news is no one is in control, not the central bank, not the Jews, not the communist party, not the pope. Nobody's in control.”

“I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models. You have to be incredibly naive about what people are to believe that a role model is in fact worthy.”

“If you want to talk to the Dali Lama close the door of your bedroom and have a dialogue with the mirror. You're as good as the Dali Lama for crying out loud. Who could suppose otherwise?”

“Buddhism without psychedelics is armchair Buddhism. How can you possibly know anything about these modalities if you sit there, shastras to the eyebrows, and never actually push off into the ocean of mind?”

“Crop circles are the con that will not die.”

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The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia

By Paul Devereux

Entheogens and the Future of Religion

Edited by Robert Forte

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it's a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we're basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our social systems, our religious ontologies, our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing, all of this is 19th Century at best. And so, really whether we live or perish as a species probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise from any source available.”

“If consciousness is not part of our future then what kind of future can it be?”

“Culture is an intelligence test.”

“I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology.”

“I think primates are most interesting when cornered.”

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The Psychedelic Salon 2.0

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Democracy is this innate belief in people. It's a psychedelic way of doing it. It's the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy to my mind is, of course, the ideal. But anarchy has to be mediated with policy, and the way you do that is through democracy.”

“The Earth is in far worse shape than we think.”

“This notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics is, as far as I can see, the only way out.”

“The most dangerous habits in the world today are not drug habits. They're idealogical habits, unexamined ways of thinking about reality.”

“Besides the monotheistic thing, the really odd thing about Western religion is the persistent idea that god will come tangential to history.”

“People think psychedelic consciousness is a permission to escapism. I don't think so. I think it's an invitation to a high degree of awareness.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken's right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn't done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?”

“I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a week. And it's really changing how they look at the world.”

“Isn't it interesting that the 'fix' turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we're just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There's an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego.”

“Psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area. The area of thought and cognition.”

“I've seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning.”

“The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics, in a generalized sense, is that they are inspiration for ideas. And when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto an ocean of ideas.”

“What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?”

“If mind were not constrained by the rules of physics we don't know what we are. We don't know the castles we would build in the air.”

“I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination. The imagination is a place. It's a world. It's a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we somehow have to marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it's the only safe haven there is.”

“What we are cannot be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet.”

“I think, based on the Timewave and based on reading the newspaper, that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane, global agenda is religious fundamentalism.”

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It's All Happening With Zach Leary