Psychedelic Salon

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

SASHA SHULGIN:

"So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive, they do not do what occurs, they allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get into and express yourself without the help of the material."

"My main argument for continuing to use the term [psychedelic] is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about."

ANN SHULGIN:

"My interest in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche. They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be."

"The psychedelics, the visionary plants, allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning, because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge."

"The ’shadow work’ is, perhaps, the most important use of these materials, as far as I’m concerned, that there is. Because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it’s not a monster, that it’s not a terrible, horrible beast, that it is the uncultivated, the unsophisticated and slightly, sometimes, unlawful part of ourselves, which can be one of our greatest allies as long as we can find the courage to do the work necessary to discover it and become one with it and to negotiate with it."

"I consider them [psychedelics] basically spiritual tools."

BABA RAM DAS:

"The place we share is that place that stands nowhere, not the place that’s caught in these spirals that involve intellectual advance, or ‘Now we know it!’, and so on. That’s all like little ripples on the ocean."

"The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised."

TIMOTHY LEARY:

"…neuro-geography that tells us that where you are determines who you are, habitat determines species."

"We are literally at a position where collectively, working in harmony, we can do most of the things, and take the responsibilities, which in the past have been attributed to the great deities of the past. I think the Golden Age is ahead. It’s the age of humanist science, humanist technology, pagan science, pagan technology, high tech, high touch."

"I think it’s our duty as explorers and as frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminology. … I really feel that words are tremendously important. . . . We’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years because more people have been killed in the name of god that any other word around."

TERENCE MCKENNA:

"Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment."

“Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!”

"On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It’s crawling all over you! And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification. So that it comes towards you – they come toward you – they divide, they merge, they’re bounding, they’re screaming, they’re squeaking – and they hold out objects, which they sing into existence, or which they pull out of some other place. And these things are, you know, like jewels and lights, but also like consommé and old farts and yesterday and high speed; in other words, they are made of juxtapositions of qualities that are impossible in three-dimensional space. What they’re like is – and in fact, this is probably what they are – what they’re like is, they’re like three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is… it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun is really funny it’s an A,B,C,D pun; and it’s simultaneously all these things… well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output – in other words, a printed pun – in the DMT world, objects can do this. Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once. And, like a pun, the result is always funny. It’s amusing! You cannot help but be delighted by this thing doing this thing."

"History is a con game run by frightened men and their obedient stooges."

"The transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind."

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Terence McKenna Audio

Sasha Shulgin Audio

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]

"Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy, because it’s all a play of energy that we’re involved in."

"Now the message I have is an old one, the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It’s those six words: Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in. It’s a rhythm."

"Now how do you turn on? Well, I’ll tell you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking. You can’t think your way out of this sticky black checker board of an American education. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on you’ve got to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament."

"Now with all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Viet Nam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house."

"The educational system, at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug."

"The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully because you’re likely to get hooked."

"You, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out, and by drop out I mean all the way. You can’t vote, I urge you not to do politics, don’t picket, don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference."

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences."

"For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status." (This was in response to a question about legal highs.)

"Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them." (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.)

"Science fiction is the gateway drug."

"I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in."

"Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist."

"I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I’m interested in finding one doorway that works."

"Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced, free house calls in our homes. This could almost be a litmus test for sanity."

"Whether achieved through some yogic or some quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways."

"It’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight [that we are creatures of language] is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. … Code is the primary reality."

"I’ve always felt in a way that the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was ‘We’ll try anything as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work,’ and that automatically exempts psychedelics."

"Once you find psychedelics you’re not looking for the accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine, or oneness, or something like that."

"Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously, since the sixteenth century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language, and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on."

"Computer code is magical language. It’s language which when executed causes something to actually happen."

"So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis."

"Drug-taking and drug-using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap we’ve had to put up with we would have gotten some kind of remediation from the Justice Department."

"You know, the dirty little secret of Northern California’s vast economic success down at Silicon Valley is the creativity that was injected into this area in the 1960s through the LSD revolution. In many, many significant cases it’s the same people."

"Where do the ideas come from? You know, people who don’t take psychedelics think it’s all moving lights and little concentric circles. They don’t understand that these are tremendously emotionally moving dramatic scenarios that one could not possibly generate out of one’s mind."

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ALSO SEE:

"The Virtual AllChemical Powwow" for Terence Mckenna at his house in Hawaii on February 25th 1999

Erik Davis’ Interview of Bruce Damer for Wired Magazine feature about Terence McKenna

Forum on KQED with Michael Krasny

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"It seems to me that it [Nature] is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language."

"Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity."

"Nature is actually the goal at the end of history."

"Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination."

"And what we’re looking toward is a moment when the artificial language structures which bind us within the notion of ourselves are dissolved in the presence of the realization that we are a part of nature. And when that happens, the childhood of our species will pass away, and we will stand tremulously on the brink of really the first moment of coherent human civilization."

"We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what’s going on or that the generation which follows us will know what’s going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what’s going on?"

"It’s no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other."

"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."

"Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society."

"Living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding. So that every day you know more, and see into things with greater depth, than you did before."

"Culture is another dimention."

"The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation."

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Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

PROGRAM NOTES:

NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]

"Of course, what the politicians debate about is really irrelevant because they’re in basic agreement. They believe in the system. They just want the power to run it. So they give us the illusion about fighting fiercely about words and tactics and promises, but we know, don’t we, that there’s no choice there."

"What’s it all about? What’s life all about? Why are we here? To build bigger and bigger machines? To do things faster and faster and think more and more? In fifty years everyone will know what I’m telling you tonight. That the only reason for being here is to get on this glorious adventure of finding the Divine, unraveling the great conscious mystery story. That’s the only point, ecstatic being, that is, get high and stay high."

"Dope is going to be the religion of the future."

"You just can’t drop LSD the way you slug a beer. It’s much too intricate"

"Once you start playing around with reality you are never the same."

"Most of you aren’t ready to take psychedelic drugs now because you haven’t done much work on the yoga of the senses. To put it in a word, most of you are senseless."

"It may not come as a surprise to an audience of Catholics that the sensory realm has, since the dawn of human history, been recognized as one of the great sacramental approaches to the divine. And any religion that has lasted for any time at all has utilized the sensual experience as a way of turning on the beholder, getting him high, getting him ameliorated to a god-intoxicated state."

"If you don’t have a sacred place stick to beer."

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Guest speakers: Robert Anton Wilson, Dr. John Lilly, Dr. Timothy Leary

PROGRAM NOTES:

"Creativity has a touch of the bizarre" –Robert Anton Wilson

"Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate." –Robert Anton Wilson

"We need something to replace death as an intelligence increaser. Generally, the only way that intelligence could grow was to get rid of the people who haven’t taken any new imprints since adolescence, as Tim would say." –Robert Anton Wilson

"The bizarre, the unthinkable is where creativity comes from." –Robert Anton Wilson

"In that process [Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures], we are dissipating, collapsing, out of all the structures we know, not into chaos, not into the collapse of civilization, but into a higher level of coherence." –Robert Anton Wilson

"There seem to be more optimism about psychedelics. They seem to be treated now with more rationality, as I was hoping they would be back in the Sixties, but they couldn’t be then. We were too ignorant." –Dr. John Lilly

"The dumb people in the Sunbelt have all gone to Washington and New York to seek their fortunes there, people like Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. He’s just plain dumb. He’s got a track record not where everything he touches is turning wrong simply because he’s betting on the past." –Timothy Leary

"The doomsday sayers, the people who are warning of and hoping for some sort of apocalyptic crisis, an earthquake, an end to everything. Now anyone who lays that trip on you, just look at them and smile and say, ‘Listen, the world isn’t coming to an end. You have come to an end of your vision. It’s you who feel that your end is at hand. The evolutionary picture is moving along beautifully.’ " –Timothy Leary

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Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

PROGRAM NOTES:

This recording was made at a conference held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981. Panelists include: Dr. Timothy Leary, Frank Baron, Dr. Andrew Weil,Walter Houston Clark, Robert Anton Wilson, and Paul Krasner

[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

"I think it’s all about the brain, or certainly the brain as the key to consciousness and intelligence. The brain, as we well know, is the taboo organ of the 20th century."

"The introduction of a new technology, a new paradigm, a new world model to a primitive society takes a lot of delicate doing. You can’t spook them too quickly. … You have to attach the new model to some of the old theories."

"It is now possible to access your brain. It is now possible to activate circuits that were undreamed of before. … There’s no limits to the creativity, and imagination, and novelty, and intelligence that can be generated by this instrument, the brain, whose function we are now realizing is to fabricate reality."

"The more you understand about the complexities of the brain, and the psychopharmeucedicals which activate it, the more cautious, the more careful, the more experimental, the more scientific you are before you rush around activating this instrument."

"The function of human life from now on is to learn how to access, to activate, to direct, manage, and control your own brain."

"It’s not the survival of the fittest. It’s the survival of the people with a sense of humor who can say, ‘Hey, look at those dinosaurs. We won’t go that way."

"You can only evolve and mutate when you can laugh at your old form and go beyond it."

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Guest speakers: Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Allen Cohen

PROGRAM NOTES:

"The Houseboat Summit" was held in February 1967, and has been documented in several places on the Web. In addition to the quotes below, which are from this podcast, you can read a more complete transcript of this historic meeting here.

"I think that, thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership." -Alan Watts

"What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed." -Alan Watts

"My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it’s always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form." -Timothy Leary

"Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life." -Alan Watts

"That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality." -

"And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom." -Alan Watts

"Increasingly, we’re developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it." -

"Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with." -Timothy Leary

"What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks." -Alan Watts

"Half the things I’ve done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn’t have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat." -Timothy Leary

"In other words, when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting. See, we’ve left this game and it bores us." -Alan Watts, February 1967

"I would agree to change the slogan to

‘Drop out. Turn on. Drop in.’ " -Timothy Leary

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Matt Muirhead’s e(n)tymology

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

[NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]

"So to me, that Summer of Love [1967] was kind of a coming out party, a coming of age party, of the first wave, the first year of the baby boom [when the first boomers turned 21]."

"It’s kind of interesting that the military, and the police, and these bureaucrats, they live in a germ-free society. They live in shells of bureaucratic boot kissing."

"I’m very much against addicts and drug fuck-ups."

"At those moments in human history where it’s time for our species to confront a new reality, whether it’s going from four foot to two foot, or it’s to make love face-to-face or whatever, there’s a certain breed of human beings in every gene pool who come along at that time and make us feel comfortable. They explain, they personalize, they popularize what’s really happening. Now you know who these people are. They are the artists, the musicians, the playwrights, the poets, the myth makers, the wizards, the jugglers, the story tellers, the crazed scientist, the mischievous physicist, you know who they are. In every epic of human history these people come along."

"So finally we catch on, it’s the governments that cause all the fuck-ups."

"It doesn’t do any good to think for yourself if you don’t know how to think."

"They say, never mind about politics or economics or religion, it’s language that controls society and that controls the individual. And who controls the language controls everything. … If you control the language, and the technology of the language, you control the mind."

"The personal computer allows you to do exactly what these French philosophers say we gotta do, control your own screen."

"The real message I get from the 20th century is learn how to be cyber-hip."

"Literacy my friends is the oppressive chains of the educated middle class."

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More Timothy Leary Recordings (MP3 Format)

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Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 1

Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 2

Superintelligence Seminar – Recorded 5/19/85 TAPE 3

The Sordid Story of a DEA Informant

Halperngate (PDF)

by Jon Hanna

Halperngate II (PDF)

by John Beresford, M.D.

The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc (PDF)

by Erik Davis

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable."

"This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human."

"It’s a relationship [ingesting mushrooms] like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers."

"I said [to the mushroom], ‘What are you doing on this planet?’, and it said, ‘You’re a mushroom, you live cheap.’ "

"To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back."

"One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life."

"Memory training is great psychedelic training."

"There’s something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology."

" ‘Drugs’ and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position."

"Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image."

"I can’t think of a society on Earth where people don’t take drugs

that any of us would want anything to do with."

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