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...

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...

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 sup...

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 cam...

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...

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 ove...

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 purs...

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...

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 veter...

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...

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast comes in two parts. We begin with the Palenque Norte Lecture that Grover Norquist gave at the 2015 Burning Man Festival. This talk was actually in the form of a question and answer session in which the somewhat liberal audience found several areas in which they held goals in common with the more conservative Mr. Norquist. Following that...

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Danny Sugarman, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features talks by Dr. Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and Danny Sugarman, as well as audio from the trailer for DeepWebTheMovie.com. This is a podcast that you may want to listen to if you value your right to freely use the Internet, among other things. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option...

Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Alicia Danforth. In her talk, plus a question and answer session, Alicia describes some of the difficulties that a professional woman researcher may encounter in the area of sexism at work. She also discusses what has been called “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”, the psychedelic jerk. At the en...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Boundary-dissolving internal hierophany does in fact reliably occur in the presence of these [psychedelic] plants and compounds.” “We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer that even as a community we have a lot of trouble figuring out how you just fact the answer, how you come to terms with the...

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “The mushroom has a wildness to it because it is wild, just as our minds once were wild.” “I see the mushroom as the ultimate test of the initiate because you're on your own. There's no shaman to guide you, and so it is up to you to determine how this [experience] is about to look.” “What is the point of doing t...

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “In the jungle, the ayahuasca is used traditionally to heal what are known as mystical, non-ordinary, problems.” “I came to look at it and realize that what we [North Americans] were looking for wasn't specifically an experience that would produce healing, but we were looking for a shift in consciousness...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the February 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that we began with Podcast 472. When he gets to his overview of habit and novelty and then moves into a discussion of time, his poetic language provides several interesting mental footholds from which we can expand on some of his thinking about the topic of time. As he says, “We are very na...

Guest speakers: Borka Cafuk & Shonagh Home Today's program features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Borka Cafuk, who is a remarkable medicine woman. Not only does Borka provide interesting details about plant medicines such as ayahuasca, sapo, and nu-nu, she also tells the fascinating story of her transition from working as an environmental journalist from Europe into a South American medi...

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow cory (at) eff (dot) org PROGRAM NOTES: Update! October 27, 2015 Victory for Users: Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Uses   Today's podcast features a 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Cory Doctorow at this year's Burning Man Festival. Cory is a well-known science fiction writer and lecturer who warns us about how much of our freedom has...

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “We deliberately keep kids dumb by treating them like kids.” “We all know that if voting would change anything it would be illegal.” “The future belongs to those who can see the future.” “The smarter you are, the higher you want to be.” “The key to the Sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery,...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.” “In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.” “...

Guest speakers: Janine Sagert, Saj Razvi, Ryan LeCompte, & Shonagh Home FROM SHOCK TO AWE (Indiegogo Campaign) /* Click image to see video From Shock to Awe is a feature-length documentary that will chronicle the journeys of military veterans as they seek relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with the help of ayahuasca, MDMA (“Ecstasy”), and cannabis. It will be an intimate look at how these...

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature Shonagh Home from a talk that she gave at the recent Women & Entheogens Conference that was held in Cleveland, Ohio. The focus of Shonagh's presentation has to do with breaking the spell of our cultural constructs that are preventing us from living informed and satisfying lives. She begins with an excellent overview of how, over the centu...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We don’t produce enough seritonin for living above 20 degrees latitude.” “I’m not a big advocate of mixing drugs, anyway. If you really want to get out into unknown territory, where there is the potential for danger, then start pouring these things together.” “It’s a funny thing the way people relate to d...

Guest speaker: Peter Gorman PROGRAM NOTES: “I have never gone to bed in Peru without having learned something new that day.” -Peter Gorman Today’s podcast features the second part of an interview with Peter Gorman, one of the larger-than-life figures to be found among our psychedelic elders. The program begins by picking up with a story about river pirates in the Amazon, migrates to tales of runni...