Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Lorenzo

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast picks up with the third section of the workshop that Bruce Damer and I led on January 28th. This section features my second presentation of the day in which I try to live up to the advanced billing for the workshop which read: “Lorenzo will take us from 2013 into the emerging era of cyber-enhanced humans, immersed in a meme-space stranger than we can suppose.”

In the Occupy segment of the podcast I feature an interview with and a talk by Chris Hedges, including his criticism of the Black Bloc hooligans who are doing their best to destroy the Occupy Movement.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

Art by Randal Roberts (who provided the art for this podcast)

Description of the elements in “Fawkes” by Randal Roberts

Video of today's podcast

What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions by John Hoopes, Ph.D.

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer

PROGRAM NOTES:

In today’s podcast we pick up with the next part of a workshop that was held on January 28, 2012 titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”. This section features Bruce Damer, who begins with his “Ode to Terence” [

In the Occupy segment I begin with a recap of what went down in Washington, D.C. the day of the eviction from McPherson Square. Also, I play a series of short audio clips. The first one is of a young man from San Diego who was speaking at the General Assembly that was held in the middle of K Street in Washington the evening after the McPhearson eviction. And while this segment also ends with a call to the barricades from Chris Hedges in different interview, between those two Hedges segments I play a three minute pep talk that Tony Benn gave to some of the occupiers in London the other day.

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Links Mentioned In This Podcast

The Adult Autism and MDMA/Ecstasy Study

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast features the first of the recordings from last weekend's workshop (titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”) that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led in the Los Angeles area on January 28, 2012. In addition to Lorenzo's remarks and some comments by those in attendance, three videos created by Bruce Damer were shown. Those videos are embedded below.

The second part of the podcast is the Occupy Movement update, which features a conversation between Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges. During the course of their conversation they debate the relative merits of pushing for a Constitutional Convention verses non-violent civil disobedience. Also included is a sound bite from one of OccupyFreedomLA's live video feeds in which a speaker addresses the actions now being taken by those who are suffering from the foreclosure epidemic that is facing so many people in the U.S.

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Video of the first session of the workshop

Books mentioned in this podcast

Land Without Evil: A Novel

By Matthew J. Pallamary

Death of the Liberal Class

By Chris Hedges

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It

By Lawrence Lessig

OCCUPY SEGMENT:

“The Occupy Movement seems deeply rational for not engaging in normal politics, because normal politics gets us Barack Obama.” -Lawrence Lessig

“All of the correctives to American democracy came through movements that never achieved formal political power.” -Chris Hedges

“Which in my mind means the system is not reformable but will have to be pushed aside. And I think in that sense the Occupy Movement is, in sort of classical terms, correctly defined as a revolutionary movement.” -Chris Hedges

“The legislative branches, both at the state and the federal level, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state.” -Chris Hedges

“But this is a moment, this is more the French Revolution moment. This is a moment when everything is falling apart at the same time, and it's another reason to be pushing on every front at the same time.” -Lawrence Lessig

This is the YouTube video from which I extracted some of the audio for this podcast.

Guest speakers: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny

PROGRAM NOTES:

The featured audio that I play in this podcast is part of a two-CD collection produced by Joe Matheny and given to the salon to podcast by the distributor, The Original Falcon Press, which you can find via originalfalcon.com. The voices you will here are those of: Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, Tiffany Lee Brown, and Joseph Matheny.

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For the Occupy Segment, I first play a few minutes that I've taken from a three hour interview that Chris Hedges gave on CSPAN 2 on the first day of this year, and in it you will hear this Pulitzer Prize winning journalist explain how corporate personhood isn't just a threat to American Democracy, it is a threat to humanity itself. . . . Following that, I play a short speech for you that Senator Bernie Sanders gave on the Senate floor as he introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will strip personhood from corporations. After those two kind of heavy duty pieces. I lighten it up with a two minute clip of country music star Willie Nelson and his wife reading a poem that he wrote about the Occupy Movement. Finally, I close with a song that was written and is sung by a young man from Salt Lake City named Noel. And this is from a YouTube video I found where Noel was singing on Day 1 of the Occupy Salt Lake City street theater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ow4lxtzBlqw

Books and links mentioned in this podcast

“The Terence McKenna Experience” a new film by Ken Adams

Pyramid Eclipse, a Symbiosis Gathering

RAW week at boingboing.net

A few random quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production."

"An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave."

"Belief is the death of intelligence."

"Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil."

"Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history."

"Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals."

"Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church."

“On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.”

“Only the madman is absolutely sure.”

“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”

“The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.”

“The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.”

“You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.”

“Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“One of the most puzzling things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in 'Oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery. Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled!”

“[DMT] is a secret of such magnitude that it's inconceivable how it has ever been kept.”

“When you get to DMT you have hit the main vein.”

“It has to do with your own intelligence. Truly stupid people aren't interested in psychedelics because they can't figure out what the point of it is. It feeds off intelligence. It's a consciousness-expanding drug. If you don't have any consciousness you can't expand it.”

“The less intelligent you are, the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes because the less capable of entertaining the implications you are.”

“A hallucination is a species of reality.”

“The world is like a novel. It's a novel in which you are a character.”

“And then I got crossed up with this mushroom, and immediately life became art.”

“If what we're embedded in is a novel, or some work of art like a novel, then what you want to do is figure out who in the novel you are.”

“We are trying to find a doorway into a new world for the spirit.”

“And I really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries this is what we will discover, is an unconditional caring, an unconditional affection that flows through all life and all matter and gives it meaning.”

“You don't have to wait for the end of the world to get this news. You can just short circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality through the use of these hallucinogens They are the doorway that the Gaian mind has installed in the historical process to let anybody out, any time they want to, provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk through the door.”

“Let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together.”

“We are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves. Extend the design process to human destiny and produce something that will redeem 10,000 years of pogroms, and migrations, and attempted genocides, and pointless wars, and stupid religions that make people hate themselves, and all the rest of it. If we're going to redeem that legacy then we have to do something quite spectacular.”

“A concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.”

“Organized religion is as concerned with controlling social groups as organized politics is.”

“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

“We all want our children to be well-adjusted, unfortunately there is nothing to be well-adjusted too. So that's a real problem.”

“The reason shamans can do their magic is because they are outside the belief system.”

“I think alienation, extra-environmentalism, shamanism, whatever you want to call it, is simply individualism, in the context of cultures that don't value individualism, and cultures don't.”

“It's said nature acts to preserve the species. Cultures act to preserve the illusions of the population.”

“There are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists, but there are no old, bold psychedelicists.”

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Culture denies experience. We all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things. These are all experiences, which cultures deny.”

“We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises.”

“We're literally at the end of our rope. Reason and science and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm.”

“So we're in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.”

“Boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People, meaning government institutions, become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.”

“I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology.”

“We have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years.”

“What psychedelics do, and I think this isn't too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise.”

“Notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.”

“We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort.”

“Our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent.”

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions

Future Theater Radio – Interview with Lorenzo

TERENCE MCKENNA: BEYOND 2012

A one-day seminar celebrating the life and ideas of Terence McKenna and taking the next steps beyond 2012 with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo

Guest speakers: David Graeber & Tim Pool

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast takes a look back at some of the roots of the current Occupy Movement on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Today is also the eve of the third anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and so I have put together an audio collage that ranges from some early sounds of the movement to interviews with David Graeber and Tim Pool, as well as some comments by fellow saloner Jaret, and a couple of sound bites from Lawrence Lessig and Senator Bernie Sanders to round things out.

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Links to topics discussed in this podcast:

Battle in Seattle

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - Lawrence Lessig Interview

Brian Leher Program with David Graeber

Majority Report interview with Tim Pool

Jaret Johnston's FEEDBACK ART

Guest speaker: Peter Lamborn Wilson

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Peter Lamborn Wilson.]

“Why are artists still meddling, or mediating, between people and their desires?”

“All livelihoods are arts, from midwifery to war, nothing is mere labor.” [In reference to gift economies.]

“The artist sacrifices talent for money. The audience sacrifices money for talent.”

“One can no longer distinguish between cops and cop-culture, the media-induced hallucination of a society designed by its lawyers and police.”

“Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.”

“The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desires.”

“I will argue that illegality means more than mere law-breaking. Illegality as a positive attribute of the Temporary Autonomous Zone implies that the very structure, or deepest motivation of the TAZ-group necessitates the overcoming of consensus values, and that this is true when even no statute or regulation has been broken.”

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone should serve as the Matrix for the emergence of a Sorelian myth of uprising.”

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise any more than the revolution can be realized without dancing, as Emma Goldman put it.”

“Today quilts. Tomorrow, perhaps, The Uprising!”

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BrainMeats Podcast

Episode 1 Occupy BrainMeats

The inaugural episode of the BrainMeats podcast is devoted to the Occupy movement and what hackers and makers can do to support the protesters on the ground. Willow spoke over Skype to Ari Lacenski, Eleanor Saitta, Matthew Borgatti, Rubin Starset, and Smári McCarthy about the history of OWS, the meaning of illegibility within the movement, software tools for protesters, and more.

Guest speaker: Makana

Please support MAKAKAMUSIC.COM

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Makana.]

“This whole war that we're fighting is a war of consciousness versus ignorance, of controlling human behavior by controlling people's thoughts, by directing their awareness.”

“There's always going to be disagreements as to what the solutions are, and even what the problem is, but if people in their own personal process start to face their own fear and let go of the prison that they are in, and that prison is the concern about what someone else thinks of them, if they get over that then they can be free. And then it's up to them to facilitate the change they want to see. But we have to at least help them to get to that point, and that's what I try to do with my music.”

“The only way we can bring about a revolution of freedom is to bring about a revolution of perception.”

“There are millions of people like me, who care about their future and will say something.”

“Aloha isn't about representing yourself in a way that people will like you. Aloha is about valuing the well being of the other person, because you realize that you're interconnected to them by the nature of life.”

“I know this sounds kind of silly, but for years I've been thinking to myself, it's the musicians' fault why things are so fucked up, because they have been programming people to not care for so many years now. And hopefully the musicians will start to not be afraid to say the things they really want to say, because music does something to you. It hits your emotions, and it goes right past that part of your brain that controls you.”

“When we can transcend this illusion that we are so different from each other, then we become powerful.”

“I feel that in the process of what we're attempting to facilitate, to consider how people orient themselves to these issues is of utmost importance. Not just to present these issues, but to really know how to get inside and behind the barriers that have been put in place there by systems, an education system and a media that work to create an unthinking workforce, and people that don't challenge authority and status quo. So I'm a big fan of understanding how nature works.”

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ALSO SEE:

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

by Matt Taibbi

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]

“I think we're in a period of fractal chaos, and the whole system is collapsing, and every week is a new surprise.” (1990)

“Things are happening so fast that the only prediction I'll make is that everything is going to happen faster than we expect it.”

“That's why I don't believe in monolithic conspiracy theories, there's one group that runs everything. If there was one group that runs everything the world would make a little sense.”

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This program was made possible by the copyright owner, Joe Matheny, and the publisher, The Original Falcon Press.

Tim Pool, Journalist Extraordinaire, (link to his live video feed from Occupy Wall Street)

GENERAL STRIKE, by Moe Shinola

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"The Bat Signal"

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