Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna ... recorded in 1996, however, it is current enough to have been given just last night ... maybe it was :-).] "And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible to the people who...

Guest speakers: Albert Hofmann, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Dr. John C. Lilly.] "There is no such thing as drugs. There's no such thing as illegal drugs. They're only chemicals. They can change the molecular configurations within the brain itself and hence change who you are and where you're going and where you come from. Thi...

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil PROGRAM NOTES: The Albert Hofmann Papers at Erowid.org The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online) [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel...

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] "To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it." "When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man's long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instru...

Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard PROGRAM NOTES: On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org. "There's a central power syste...

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: "I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it." -Rupert Sheldrake When asked if he believed in randomness, Terence quickly said, "No," and then he went on to say, "Randomness is the least likely thing. Nowhere in nature do you encounter it." "If t...

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.] "The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you're free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim." "Methods are methods are...

Click HERE to see the video of this conversation. This program marks Our 5th Anniversary! Support the Stolaroff Collection Make a contribution to support the archiving of Myron Stolaroff's resources Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher PROGRAM NOTES: This is a conversation that took place between Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, and a group of friends at the legendary salon that Kathleen h...

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence's house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his bra...

Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future." -Ralph Abraham "In a dynamical sys...

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Because of this fact, that clear thinking can be mathematically formalized, there is a potential bridge between ourselves and calculating machinery." "Good thinking, whether you've ever studied mathematics for a moment or not, can be formally defined." "What...

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: "The development of current brain size is not the reason that there has been this explosion of technical innovation recently. Brain size hasn't changed much for 100,000 years." -Rupert Sheldrake "It's much more likely that for most of human history it was not man the huntER but man the huntED. ... It wasn't until a...

Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Alan Watts PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: The following quotations are by Sasha Shulgin.] "So I look upon these materials [psychedelics] as being catalytic, not productive, they do not DO what occurs. The allow YOU to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material." "I find that still the human animal i...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Newton himself was a man with a foot in two worlds. He was a thorough-going occultist. His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous. And yet he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society." "History itself is a kind of alchemical process. ... History is the catalyst of nature." "If we...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I've never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself." "So what you have to do is just like every other thing, everything you've been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what's really going on, which doesn't mean that you're reckless." "We've been poll...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I think, when it's all sorted out, it ALL happened in Africa. I mean, language, religion, symbolic activity, theater, all of this stuff was in place in Africa from, say, 20,000 B.C. up until around 9,000 B.C." "The African 'Cradle of Civilization', I don't even regard that as a theory. Anybody who doesn't...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic." "In a Christian context magic is heresy because it implies that man can command god to act. In other words that in some strange way the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires." "The Hermeti...

Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Jonathan Ott.] "It is, of course, absurd for humankind to presume to illegalize other organisms with which we share this planet." "A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to get tough on potheads is not walking the moral high ground." [In reference to releasing violent criminals to make room for small-time,...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing." "Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and anima...

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.] "The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup." "[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists' beliefs, they show us that life may have emerge...

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.] "Now the key thing to the human species is this: That we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized form." "It's obvious that if any quantum leaps are going to happen in evolution it's best designed to happen in a period of adolescence." "Evolution has always involved people like us getting to...

Guest speaker: Claudia Little, BSN, MPH PROGRAM NOTES: Below you will find the list of links to Web sites that Claudia Little refers to in her presentation about the safety, benefits, and importance of the cannabis plant. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Marijuana – Why it Works Supporting Studies and Articles Growing Acknowledgments from Health Organi...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean it’s like a magnet for screwballs." [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . g...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here." "A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The surface of things is not where attention should rest." "I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world." "We...