Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Modern philosophy is a desert for my money, and who cares about it? Nobody cares about it. Who's living their life according to the conceptions of modern philosophy, nobody as far as I can see.”

“We live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.”

“We're like people who don't remember who we are or where we came from. And we just wander mumbling through the streets of our cities, foraging in garbage cans and frightening other people.”

[Quoting another] “Coming into being is nothing else than presentation through sense.”

“Too much light is trapped in the organic matrix.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“A child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it.”

“Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root.”

“Modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of Cartesian rationalism.”

“The imagination is central to the alchemical opus, because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical dimension.”

“We cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination.”

“Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism.”

“Authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what alchemical gold really is. That's what they're talking about, authentic being.”

“Somehow it's possible for an informing voice to come into cognition that knows more than you do. It is a connection with the collective unconscious, I suppose, that is convivial, conversational, and just talks to you about the nature of being in the world and the nature of your being in the world.”

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Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

by Frances A. Yates

Guest speakers: Veronica Hernandez & Shonagh Home

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast features a conversation between Veronica Hernandez and Shonagh Home. Veronica Hernandez, is a clinical psychologist and shamanic practitioner. Born in Peru, since 2006 she has been trained on shamanic facilitation. She received her clinical training at the Institute of Rational-Emotive Therapy, New York, under the supervision of Dr. Albert Ellis. She was assistant professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and research assistant at the Hospital Psiquiátrico Noguchi de Lima (Peru). In the United States, she worked as a Social Services Clinician at John Muir Health Hospital’s Inpatient Psychiatric Adolescent Unit, California. Currently she is completing her doctoral degree at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, where she is carrying out research on the healing and transformative benefits of entheogens, especially Ayahuasca. Among other topics, Veronica and Shonagh talk about children using pharmaceuticals, personal growth, spirituality, Jung's concept of a shadow, and processing psychedelic experiences.

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Guest speaker: Annie Oak

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast features the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the Burning Man Festival. In her talk, Annie takes us on a tour of the various factors involved in organizing events such as festivals, dance parties, and theme camps. As a co-founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress, now in its 10th year, and as a co-founder of a major theme camp at Burning Man, not to mention numerous other events that Annie has helped organize. Also, in this podcast the tragic death of fellow saloner Kai Wingo is discussed.

Women's Visionary Congress

Camp Soft Landing

 Kai Wingo Obituary

Go Fund Me Contributions to help Kai's family

Podcast 458 – “Practical Mushroom Activism”

featuring Kai Wingo

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Guest speaker: Emanuel Sferios

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast features a conversation that Lorenzo had with Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe and the producer of “MDMA The Movie”. In addition to discussing the movie that Emanuel is producing their conversation included a discussion of the way young people now perceive the differences between MDMA, Ecstasy, and Molly. Also their discussion touched on the current medical uses of MDMA and ways in which parents can talk with their children about drugs in an honest and sensible way.

MDMA the Movie

Ecstasy Data.org - Anonymous Drug Testing

DanceSafe

Students for Sensible Drug Policy

The Secret Chief Revealed: Leo Zeff, MDMA Pioneer

By Myron J. Stolaroff

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Guest speaker: Rick Doblin

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.]

“We need to move to a post-prohibition world.”

“The spiritual/mystical experience has profound implications of the kind that we need now.”

“Not in our studies only, but world wide there have now been over 1,100 people who have taken pure MDMA in research since the early '90s. And there's never been anybody who overheated and died. . . . We've never had anybody overheat. We've never had anybody have a heart attack. We've never had anybody have a mental breakdown. So we've shown in a clinical setting MDMA can be administered safely.”

“We are currently estimating that MDMA will be a prescription medicine in 2021.”

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The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Lorenzo's Interview on the Natural Born Alchemist Podcast

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Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast features the final section of a Terence McKenna workshop that took place in February 1991. In addition to more stories about the machine-elves and DMT, Terence covers evolution, the imagination, virtual reality, shamanism, and falling in love. The title of today's podcast comes from my favorite quote by McKenna: “Apparently, if you pursue the weird, it won't take you very long before you get to [psychedelics]. This is the main vein of the peculiar.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast begins with Terence talking about the elephant in the ayahuasca room: purging, puking, barfing, vomiting or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately he moves on and speculates that the human break with nature came about due to a change in the climate. And he ends this part of the workshop talking about the dire state of affairs on the planet on that February day in 1991 as the First Gulf War was raging. Two of my favorite quotes from this talk are: “The modern nuclear family, and I've got one I know whereof I speak, is just a cauldron for neurosis. It makes impossible demands on everybody involved.” . . . and “The way you prove your worthiness is by not wrecking your home planet. You can't join the galactic club if you wreck your home planet. They withdraw your membership application.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I don't think you are going to spend very long involved with these things at a deep level without scaring your socks off eventually. One of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle with beginners. And then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans.”

“You see, I just don't feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own? How about that you can't do it yourself unless humble yourself to cut a deal with a plant? That seems more logical to me.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The great emphasis for the fall into history is this broken connection with this Mind in nature.”

“We can move no faster than the envelope of language which we generate to describe our journey.”

“We need to take the engineering of our language seriously.”

“The poverty of our language, that it's such a low-grade signal, that we're using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and coordinate a global population of six million people. And having media to change that into an electronic signal has not apparently helped us all that much.”

“I heard the electronic media described as the ability to spread darkness at the speed of light.”

“And somewhere in between eloquence and poetry there is a side tree into demagoguery, which you have to watch out for.”

“I think the whole thing about psychedelics is that they synergize cognition, and that cognition allows us to image each other and to understand each other.”

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