Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.” “What you call man is time.” [Quoting the mushroom.] “It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.” “What happens wit...

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff and Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording from the spring of 2006, at Kathleen's Salon in Venice Beach, California, where Robert Forte and Myron Stolaroff came to tell their stories about the recent festivities in Basil, Switzerland celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. After telling a little about the...

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features Dr. Timothy Leary reading a few selected chapters from his autobiography, Flashbacks. Interestingly, he begins this recording with Chapter 19, which details with his departure from Harvard. [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “We agreed that as much as we loved and respected Harvard University, this finishing school for...

Guest speaker: Lorenzo RIP: Zoe7 & Dr. Andrew Sewell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcasts is from the audio book edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation. It consists of a reading of Chapter 9, Catlin's Salon. This is a fictional account of what was once the most fashionable psychedelic salon on the West Coast. Once each month, for more than eight years, an amazing group of people would gather to di...

Guest speaker: Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.] “Plant medicines have long been the domain of women.” “We are taught to escape in this culture, and so what these [psychedelic] medicines will do is they'll take you to the heart of the truth of who you are and what needs to be addressed.” “I think of myself as a spiritual warrior, and a spiritual warrior seeks...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History has been the pursuit of a false god, the god of stability, the god of permanence, the god of the unchanging, and we've become just neurotic on this subject.” “What's being said here is re-claim experience. Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future,...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think if we ever tease apart this psychedelic thing, what we'll discover is it's an inter-species communication system.” “I'm at war with the keepers of the secrets.” “One of the motivations for my career is to get other people to check [DMT] out, because here is truly confounding data that you don't ha...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.” “The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to ...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The 'banks' of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.” “All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don't run around announcing how they haven't...

Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a panel discussion with Annie Oak, Twilight, and Bruce Damer that took place at the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures held at that year's Burning Man Festival. “Women tend to vote against drug law reforms in greater numbers than men, because they're worried about their kids. And without the full participation o...

Guest speakers: Michael Garfield & Matt Pallamary PROGRAM NOTES: Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt's novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.” “Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.” “Because the planetar...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it's discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there's somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.” “You see, the amazing t...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.” “The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.” “If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.” “So t...

Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.] “Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you're never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don't know what it is, which t...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.” “Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they g...

Guest speaker: Dr. Naughtilee PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features the 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture that Dr. Naughtilee gave at the Burning Man Festival. Natalie is a Licensed Naturopathic Doctor in private practice in San Francisco. Naturopathic Medicine is a unique, holistic healthcare system that promotes a proactive, preventative approach to health and wellness, blending the science of moder...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don't actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it's the phenomenon of our own existence” “These religions that are so fr...

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer /* A brief history of Palenque Norte (video) PROGRAM NOTES: Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of "global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism" where you "put yourself on the shelf" and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission desig...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.” “By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.” “Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and u...

Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women's Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psych...

Guest speaker: Allyson & Alex Grey PROGRAM NOTES: “If it's a psychedelic family business, then you've got to consider the 'top line' [as contrasted with 'the bottom line']. What's the top line? The top line is: You have one unique life, and what do you love to do? What do you want to spend your life doing? What is the highest impact you can have on the world in a positive way?” -Alex Grey “We know...

Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's talk features Dennis McKenna in a June 1984 presentation of his research concerning ayahuasca. This is one of the first, if not the first, public presentation of Dennis' early work involving this sacred medicine. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of his professional life, and he is considered one o...

Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a b...