Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through...

Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a few sound bites from several of the previous podcasts featuring Myron Stolaroff, who departed this life on January 6, 2013. Not only was Myron one of the world's leading psychedelic researchers, earlier in life he was instrumental in helping the Ampex Corporation develop the audio and video tape recorders. Below are a few links,...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a wo...

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features my friend Daniel Pinchbeck as our guest speaker. As you know, Daniel wrote a book titled “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, also, he is widely known as a speaker and writer about many things psychedelic and esoteric. However, I know him best as a fellow alumnus of the Entheobotany Seminars at Palenque, where Terence McKenna and...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “[The wide variety of psychedelic plants] are the way in which the Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the in...

Guest speaker: Brian Wallace PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features Brian Wallace's 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Brian, who has been a community organizer for MAPS and other organizations, is also expert on the cacao plant. Originally, Brian titled this talk “The Entheobotany of Cacao”, however, I decided to change the title to better reflect the wide-ranging discussion o...

Guest speaker: Ken Adams “I'm almost sixty years old, and I can guaranty you that I'm fucking tired of having to whisper about psychedelics.” - Ken Adams Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the fifth Palenque Norte Lecture of 2012, which was given at the Burning Man Festival. This talk features the filmmaker Ken Adams, who was a neighbor, friend, and collaborator of Terence...

Guest speaker: Charles Shaw Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Charles Shaw.] “Having a felony conviction, and having a drug conviction, essentially makes you a second class citizen.” “For the lower classes, the poorer classes, which generally in this country are people of color, drug laws have always been used as a way to control them.” “And if you take away th...

Guest speaker: Dr. Brian Hewlett Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features the third in the series of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man festival. The speaker is Dr. Brian Hewlett and he titled his talk "An Algorithm of Human Consciousness and Implications for Artificial Intelligence". As you can see, I have re-titled the talk “Understanding the Default Proce...

Guest speaker: Dr. Maddy Corbin Watch a video of this talk PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Maddy Corbin.] “I've been a nerd for a long time. That's how you get a Ph. D.” “At least in my experience of psychedelics, and people who take psychedelics and why they value psychedelics, is because it helps to critique you. It helps to break you down. It helps to challenge your assumptions....

Guest speakers: Amanda Sage and Bruce Damer Watch a video of this talk Watch a video of Bruce Damer's brief history of the Palenque Norte lecture series PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Amanda Sage.] “Let's turn the museums into temples. I think the new museums are going to be temples.” “I'm interested in this collaboration, because I'm interested in what can we do to wake people up, to...

Guest speaker: Graham Hancock PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Graham Hancock.] “There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.” “I think that ayahuasca requires us to confront the truth about ourselves. That's one of the...

Guest speaker: Jonathan Talat Phillips PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features a talk given by Jonathan Talat Phillips in Vancouver sometime earlier this year. In it, Jonathan tells the story of how, after a devastating loss as countercultural activist, he embarked on a mystical initiation involving underground ayahuasca ceremonies, kundalini awakenings, DMT cowboys, shapeshifting extraterrestrials a...

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti J. Krishnamurti ONLINE PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by J. Krishnamurti.] “The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, and the way we live, and the way we feel. I think that is where a revolution must take place.” “No revolution, psychologically I'm talking about, is possible if there is merely the imitation...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.” “In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones...

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program consists of ten separate pieces from a June 2012 workshop at the Esalen Institute, eight of which are by Bruce Damer. Here are the titles that Bruce has given to these short talks: --Are we all becoming autistic astronauts? --On our dual bonobo and chimp nature --The things I loved about Terence --Esalen @ 50 --"Procreate only once" (and we...

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast features the final community discussions at the June 2012 Esalen workshop led by Lorenzo and Bruce Damer. Among the topics discussed were: -Creating a new myth for our community -The genesis of the Occupy Movement -Are psychedelic “mutants” among us? -Cultural Creatives -Freeing our food supply from money -Timebanks -What the mushroom...

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “In my function as a [college] lecturer, it's my obligation, it's my task, it's my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority.” “And that's one of the things that is kind of amazing today, the junk information that we're being inundated with, the cloud, the atmosphere, the smog of di...

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the next installment of the workshop that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. The majority of this program features comments by some of the workshop's participants who bring up topics that include: -Heroic doses -Body load with psychedelics -Techniques for using psychedelics -What exactly is...

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and friends PROGRAM NOTES: In this follow-up session after Bruce Damer's “Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna”, Lorenzo leads the discussion of the participants in a workshop held at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. Topics of the conversation include: - Consciousness, not drugs were the focus of McKenna's work - Heroic doses are not as important as bringing back informat...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: “Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.” -Terence McKenna According to Wikipedia, the Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world's most mysterious manuscript”, and so far it's secret code has never been broken . . . including attempts by top U.S. Governme...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Repression of psychedelic drugs Element of risk in taking psychedelics The imagination Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul Death The importance of psychedelics Bell's Theorem [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I regard [my] deg...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection. Some of the topics covered in this talk: Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic UFOs and aliens The end of history – the eschaton The psychedelic experience Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other Death and afterlife Dreams [NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.] “The cen...

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: This program is a recording of part of a live event at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. The workshop, titled “Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”, was led by Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty. This specific recording took place on Saturday morning, June 16th and consists of Bruce's “deep dive” into the mind of McKenna. It begins...

Guest speaker: Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] “At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.” “The ketemine experience is very much like...