Psychedelic Salon

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.] "For the last four or five thousand years, freedom and intelligence and individualism have been moving in an unbroken chain from East to West. So that here on the banks of the Pacific Ocean we obviously have assembled the most advanced nervous systems on the planet." "We all live within the reality bubble...

Guest speaker: Alan Watts Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan! Mark Watts Said, Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out. Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you...

Guest speaker: Lorenzo NOTE: This chapter was revised for the paperback edition that was released in February 2015. Please see the Kindle edition for the current version of this chapter. PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Lorenzo.] "Forget getting a permanent job. Forget careers and the quest for financial stability. They are all false gods, sent to you by the Capitalist elite on Wall Str...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk. [NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?" "Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of a...

Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams PROGRAM NOTES: Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled "From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking." "Th...

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.] I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybod...

Guest speaker: Ethan Nadelmann PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Ethan Nadelmann.] "The War on Drugs, this policy of punitive prohibition, is a horror in our society, something that cannot be morally justified, cannot be justified in terms of health, can certainly not be justified in terms of public safety, that cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that I’ve ever h...

Guest speakers: Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and others PROGRAM NOTES: This podcast begins with a short clip of Alan Watts speaking about human consciousness. Then we join Dr. John Lilly, Laura Huxley, and a few other friends who are discussing the life of Alan Watts a few months after his death in November 1973. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Alan...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique, and this is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive. And one of the things about exploring consciousness with substances is you have to sort of learn what works for you." "If I want a more intense...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "You don’t conquer time by building vast instrumentalities and seeking a primary particle and all that. The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time." "I live in a kind of waking hallucination. I have a little aphorism which covers this....

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity." "Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, so...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it." "If you aren’t ‘cool’ then you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means, by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed. But it can’t really be faked. But the whole engi...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves." "If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of i...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present." "If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it’s paranoia." "Art is like the footprint of where the imagination has been." "Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this...

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 mai...

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...

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 betwee...

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 his...

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...

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 c...

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 conscio...

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 undergro...

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...

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...

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna]. "Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda. Ayahuasca will work with you." "The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious." [Also see The Art of Steven Rooke.] "Is there a nece...