Loving union with what is
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today’s program features the next installment of the reading of Leonard Pickard’s book, The Rose of Paracelsus. This program was produced by Kat and Alexa Lakey and includes a personal message from Leonard. The reading is by Gaia Harvey Jackson, and Greg Sams provides additional commentary.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-676-leonard-pickards-rose-of-paracelsus-ch-5/
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: April 2021
Guest speaker:
Leonard Pickard
Today’s Bicycle Day Podcast features a conversation that Leonard Pickard recently had with members of the London Psychedelic Society. After more than 20 years in prison, Leonard now is free to tell us about his prison ordeal and what his life is like today.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-667-a-conversation-with-leonard-pickard/
PROGRAM NOTES:
Guest speakers: Kat Lakey, Alexa Lakey, Julie Holland, Julian Vayne, and Ralf Jeutter
Today we continue our reading of Leonard Pickard’s novel, The Rose of Paracelsus. Chapter 4 is read by author and occultist Julian Vayne who was also featured in our introduction to this series. The reading of Chapter 4 is followed by commentary by Ralf Jeutter. Before the reading and commentary, Dr. Julie Holland tells about her recent conversation with Leonard Pickard.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-664-leonard-pickards-rose-of-paracelsus-ch-4/
PROGRAM NOTES:
Guest speakers: Ben Sessa, Tom Roberts, and Kat LakeyToday’s podcast features a reading of Chapter 3 from Leonard Pickard’s novel, The Rose of Paracelsus. The chapter is read by Dr. Ben Sessa who is currently leading a psychedelic research project with Professor David Nutt in the UK. The reading is followed by commentary by Dr. Thomas Roberts. Long time listeners to the salon will remember Dr. Roberts from my Podcast 633 – “The Man Who Invented Bicycle Day”.Leonard Pickard’s email address
aphrodine (dot) 1 (at) gmail (dot) com
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-662-leonard-pickards-rose-of-paracelsus-chapter-3/
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today’s podcast features a reading by Brother David Steindl-Rast of Chapter 2 from The Rose of Paracelsus, written by Leonard Pickard.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-652-the-rose-of-paracelsus-chapter-2/
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today’s podcast features a reading of Chapter 1 of The Rose of Paracelsus by the author, Leonard Pickard. Additionally, there is commentary by Ralf Jeutter, Nese Devenot, Julian Vayne, and Nikki Wyrd. This podcast was produced by the Lakey sisters, Kat and Alexa. Psychedelic Salon podcast number 609, “The Rose Garden Introduction”, provides an overview of this project, which begins today with a reading of Chapter 1.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-644-the-rose-of-paracelsus-chapter-1/
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Ram Dass.]
“I was addicted to the experience of being high. I was not addicted to the chemicals, but just to the state. I had touched something so pure, and so fulfilling, that I had to keep going back. And I tried every method I knew to stay high.”
“What is required on this trip is renunciation of attachment.”
“Psychedelics show a possibility, but beyond that you still have a lot of stuff to do.”
PROGRAM NOTES:
This lecture was recorded live in the salon on October 21, 2019.
Today’s podcast features what I hope will be the first of many more visits with Tania and Greg Manning. In addition to assisting Sasha Shulgin during the final years of his life, they continue working with Ann Shulgin to preserve the laboratory and other effects of her’s and Sasha’s life and work. In this initial conversation with “Sasha’s Sidekicks”, we reminisce about the Shulgins’ first Burning Man experience and the Mind States conferences. Additionally, Tania reads some of Sasha’s unpublished writing in which he talks about his relationship with Albert Hofmann, including an interesting anecdote about their favorite drugs, and Greg gives an emotional description of the peaceful final day of Sasha’s life.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-630-sasha-shulgins-sidekicks-001/
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today’s podcast features an introduction to The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments by Leonard Pickard. Rolling Stone once called Pickard “The Acid King”, and his book is being called a modern masterpiece. It tells the story of an international clan of secret LSD chemists. And who better to tell this story than Leonard Pickard, who is now serving two life sentences in a maximum security prison in the United States, having been accused of manufacturing large quantities of acid, billions according to one ex-DEA agent. Over the next two years we will present a reading of this book, along with commentary, by friends of Leonard’s. Today we feature an introduction of The Rose of Paracelsus with a series of readings from various chapters, followed by some commentary on the readings. In the months and years to come, we will be podcasting a reading of this entire book, chapter-by-chapter.
Guest speaker: Dr. V.S. Ramachandran
PROGRAM NOTES:
“Let’s think about what the standard explanations were [before the late 1990s] for synesthesia. The most common explanation, which we used to hear until about five or ten years ago was, ‘Oh they’re just crazy, they’re nuts,’ because it doesn’t make any sense. And this is a common reaction in science. If it doesn’t make any sense you brush it under the carpet.”
“It turns out that synesthesia is more common among acid users, but that to me makes it more interesting, not less interesting.”
“You cannot solve one mystery in science by using another mystery.”
“Synesthesia my even hold the key for understanding the emergence of language and abstract thought.”
“It turns out that it [synesthesia] is much more common among artists, poets, and novelists.”
“One of the things you know as a physician is that when you think something is crazy it usually means you’re not smart enough to figure it out.”
“Art is not about copying. It’s about distortion and exaggeration, but you cannot randomly distort an image and call it art.”
“There is only one pattern of neural activity that can exist at one time, and it will destroy any other competing patterns of neural activity. This means there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time.”
Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:56 Preet describes the study he is working on at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center where he and Dr. Charles Grob are giving psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) to end-stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety.
05:17 A description of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study.
11:01 Preet takes us through a typical session with a study participant.
12:04 “According to some of the research that was done before prohibition, it was found that people who had more internal experiences were more likely to get the psychological intervention we’re going for with this.”
24:03 “In my treatments as a psychiatrist I’ve never treated a psychedelic addiction. I’ve treated a lot of addicts who are addicted to a lot of stuff and who also used psychedelics, but that [psychedelic addiction] has never come into my emergency room or office.”
29:39 “I think it’s kind of ridiculous to be a scientist and a doctor and not investigate and try to understand how we can use these tools in a Western culture safely.”
36:11 “I think that ultimately the true wisdom about these plants comes from shamanic tradition, however, in today’s Western society people will often come to a psychiatrist to address the issue that in a different tribal kind of society they would seek out the shaman.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-088-status-of-psilocybin-study-at-harbor-ucla/
Guest speakers: George Greer and Requa Tolbert
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
06:30 George talks about how they began to use MDMA in their work.
07:37 “We didn’t want it to get in the newspapers, because we knew that because it felt good it would eventually get out on the street and be made illegal … as it was.”
08:30 How people were screened before they could be treated with MDMA. . . . “Where are you pointed?”
10:01 “The purpose for taking it [MDMA] really is the most important thing, more important than the drug even.”
12:41 Requa describes the formal structure of a therapeutic MDMA session as developed by Leo Zeff, “The Secret Chief”.
16:30 George reads the 18th century prayer that Leo Zeff recommended using before a healing MDMA session.
23:57 “My idea is that MDMA decreases fear, the neurological experience of fear. So if you have a thought that would normally be frightening to you that would make you anxious and tense up and be defensive and push it away, that reaction just is blocked.”
30:47 “Women seem to be more sensitive [to MDMA] independent of size . . . actually some research has been done showing women are more sensitive milligrams per kilogram. In Switzerland they found this.”
32:33 George describes the work of Dr. Arthur Hastings who used hypnotherapy with former MDMA users to bring back the experience of their medicine session.
33:52 A discussion of beta-blockers.
34:43 “I think that MDMA would be excellent for people who are afraid of dying and afraid of death.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-087-mdma-before-ecstasy/
Guest speaker: Michael Mithoefer
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
06:19 Michael tells a little about how his study came about and its current status.
08:27 Michael describes the screening, preparation, and flow of the experience for qualified participants.
11:56 “We were able to go back, retroactively, and offer MDMA to everybody that had gotten [only] the placebo so far.”
14:06 “Everybody who’s gotten MDMA has had a significant improvement, either temporarily or sustained. More than half, the majority of people have had a very dramatic and sustained improvement.”
18:35 “This is a pilot study, and we’re not really looking to prove efficacy. We’re looking to prove we can work safely with these subjects, and it has at least has a strong trend toward being effective.”
22:48 A discussion about the neurotoxicity of MDMA.
23:12 “There is still a question about neurotixicity (or at least decreases in some neuro functions) with heavy recreational use. It looks like there probably is some effect, although that is still controversial. . . . It looks like [using MDMA] less than 50 times there is no effect. It is still not known if there is an effect higher than that.”
28:31 “The question is about how sustainable is the effect. It really looks like, for some people, two sessions is enough to really, significantly heal PTSD.”
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:29
Bruce tells the story of the first and only Terence McKenna workshop that was held in a virtual world in cyberspace.
07:00 The story of the bizarre dreams Terence McKenna was having in the weeks before his first major seizure.
08:32 Bruce tells of Terence saying, “It’s all about love,” a few days before he died. “Terence said, ‘The whole psychedelic movement, it’s about love. It’s not about all this other stuff. It’s about love.’ “
13:20 “It seems as though the universe
is a sort of self-contained thing that never loses any information.”
18:34 An epiphany about DNA.
21:09 “What if the universe, like Chris Langton’s brain, is gradually booting up an awareness of itself, and why would it do this?”
29:07 Universe2, the second phase of this universe.
30:19
“All events that happened in the past and that will happen in the future
are happening at once. What you’re living in is a mesh. . . . Everything is
happening at once.”
Terence & Finn McKenna33:19 “Why does the universe create human beings?” . . . and what about these amazing brains we have?
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-085-the-great-project-of-the-universe/
Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
03:48 Myron Stolaroff:
“After I’d had LSD, there wasn’t anything that could come anywhere close to it. That was the most remarkable thing in my whole life.”
04:34 Myron talks about his meetings with Aldous Huxley.
07:39 Myron talks about Meduna’s mixture, carbogen.
09:42 Myron explains what a carbogen experience was like.
16:15 Why some people don’t seem to have a positive experience with psychedelics.
18:21 The importance of using psychedelics in small, supportive groups.
19:48 Myron discusses his favorite psychedelic substances.
20:37 Myron talks about Duncan Blewett
24:01Some thoughts about using music during a psychedelic experience.
25:05 Myron’s advice to psychonaughts.
28:20 Myron talks about his relationship with Timothy Leary.
31:00 Myron tells the story of removing Leary from the board of directors of the Institute for Advance Study.
33:30 Myron tells of his fist meeting with Dr. Albert Hofmann.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-084-lone-pine-stories-part-2/
Guest speakers: Jean and Myron Stolaroff
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
04:53Jean Stolaroff:Tells the story of how she first became involved with psychedelic medicines.
07:50 Myron Stolaroff: Tells how Death Valley came to be a favorite location for taking acid trips.
09:20 Myron tells some stories about Al Hubbard and Death Valley.
10:24 Myron tells of an acit trip in Death Valley that he had with Willis Harman and Al Hubbard.
15:56 Jean: “I knew I’d get a lot of fringe benefits from marrying Myron.”
17:10 Jean and Myron discuss 2C-E, “One of the very best.”
18:31 Jean and Myron discuss compounds they have no desire to ever try again.
21:33 Myron talking about 2C-B and how some substances react in unexpected ways with people.
25:14 Myron describes his first LSD experience, which took place in Canada on April 12, 1956.
35:18 Myron talks about Gerald Heard’s influence on his decision to try LSD.
37:30 Myron describes his first carbogen experience.
39:53 Myron describes the preparation that was required of participants in the Menlo Park work.
47:11 Myrondescribes how he first became involved in meditation practices.
54:42 Myron: “You know, if you’re going to work with these materials, meditation is a marvelous supporter because as you use the materials you open your consciousness more, and that opens your meditation more. So then your meditation becomes more effective and more fulfilling. So it’s a growing process.”
59:58 Myron: “And the only way that you can keep developing and learning more, and getting into higher levels of consciousness, is by really exerting yourself and learning to use everything that shows up when you do have these experiences.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-083-lone-pine-stories-part-1/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
03:08 Terence McKenna: “Another way of thinking of it (the Knot of Eternity) is it’s the nexus of connectivity. It’s a place where everything is cotangent, as the mathematicians say. Everything is connected, and I think that’s the place we are growing toward.”
07:30 Ralph Abraham: “If a present moment is between a past that’s familiar and a future which is completely different, then that’s a very special moment.”
10:18 Rupert Sheldrake: Begins a brief explanation of his theory of morphic resonance.
16:08 Terence: “The great successful conspiracies, the Catholic church, capitalism, the Communist Party of China, Zionism, these things don’t call themselves conspiracies. They call themselves historical social movements.”
17:07 Terence: “The task of discerning shit from Shinola looms very large at the end of history.”
20:52 Ralph: Tells about the experience he and Rupert had in a crop circle.
23:53 Rupert: Tells about being arrested while inspecting a crop circle.
27:33 Terence: “I think we’re going to have to come to terms with as the world moves toward this concrescence of novelty is that it gives off spurious reflections of itself.”
28:54 Terence: “The truth will be beautiful, and it will be simple. And it will be persuasive to those who doubt it. So don’t get into some closed loop of viviology. Make the truth seduce you. Don’t be thereby seduced by error.”
31:10 Rupert: Talks about ley lines.
33:49 Terence gives an update on his current thinking about the Timewave (Novelty Theory).
34:17 Terence: “We have created social institutions such as consumer capitalism that are so unfriendly to our innate humaness that they are actually redesigning us, these social systems, to be more brutal, less caring, more acquisitive, more fetishistic, than we naturally would be. And, again, the antidote to this is an awareness of your immediate environment and the tricks that are being run on you and the ways in which we are being manipulated. Man is not bad. Humanity is not flawed. What is flawed are ideologies and social systems that distort humaness for purposes usually of commerce or conquest. . . . Culture is an intelligence test.”
42:47 Rupert: “I think that the suppression of ritual forms of violence can lead to an outbreak of sacrificial killings by crazed maniacs.”
43:20 Terence: “Well, it’s not a good idea to fear anything. Technology is prostheses. Technology is tools. We’ve always been defined by our tools. There is nothing about us that would be human if it weren’t for our tools. Language is a tool. The cutting edge is a tool. Social organization is a tool. . . . Shamanism is simply a technology.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-082-mini-trialogue-santa-cruz/
PROGRAM NOTES:
05:44 Daniel tells the story about finding a Salvia plant at a Terence McKenna lecture.
12:06 He describes the traditional Mazatec way of taking Salvia divinorum.
24:39 Daniel talks about the various categories of experiences that are possible through the use of Salvia Divinorum.
25:25 “One of the more common types of experiences people have is often people have visions of places that are reminiscent of early childhood, places like school playgrounds or the back yard of their parents’ house where they lived when they were six or seven years old.”
28:49 Daniel talks about his isolation of the active ingredient in Salvia Divinorum.
31:51 “In general, when taken in the traditional fashion of chewing the leaves, the effects are gentle, the onset is gradual, the experience is enriching and it can be utilized in a very controlled, directed, conscientious manner.”
43:18 Daniel talks about the varying amounts of time a Salvia experience can last depending upon dosage and method of use.
50:40 A discussion about the current legal status of Salvia.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-081-salvia-divinorum-siebert-interview/
PROGRAM NOTES:
12:18 Matt provides some background information about his wild youth.
20:37 Some thoughts about what at what age it is best to begin deeply exploring one’s consciousness through the use of sacred medicines.
21:31 “This is one of the key tenants of shamanism, all you can ultimately go on is your own experience.”
23:40 “I want to stress that there are a lot of substances that are not good. Crystal meth, bad. Obviously, heroin, bad. Crack cocaine, bad.”
30:30 The discussion turns to shamanism.
32:33 “The medicines teach you to learn how to connect with your heart, and to follow your heart instead of your head, because your heart is actually a superior ‘brain’.”
34:23 Matt talks about the course of shamanism study he has been pursuing.
37:44 “The absolute best thing you can do for yourself, and for everybody, for the universe, for the cosmos, for the race, for humanity, truly the absolute best thing you can do for everybody, is to work on yourself and heal yourself. Because when you heal yourself you heal part of the collective, and you begin to realize that everybody around you is a mirror. Because we are all one”
39:28 Matt explains the difference between shamanism and organized religion. . . . “Shamanism, on the other hand, is based on experiential knowledge. Period.”
43:31 “Ayahuasca has a way of finding your deepest fears and bringing them out. So when you do it within a sacred circle that’s protected with a good intention, then those parts of you that you’ve been terrified of will come out, and you can deal with them more on your own terms.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-080-adventures-of-an-urban-shaman/
Guest speakers: Amanda Feilding and Mark Pesce
PROGRAM NOTES:
Amanda Feilding delivering her 2006 Palenque Norte Lecture
Amanda Feilding
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:30
“Britain is America’s greatest ally in all the dreadful things it is doing at the moment, the war on terror and the war on drugs. And without Britain America would feel isolated.”
07:12 Amanda discusses the new scale for drugs that is being proposed in the UK.
09:37 “Present drug policy simply doesn’t work, and indeed it is the policy which is causing most of the damages.”
10:45 “My particular interest is in separating the psychedelics and marijuana from the rest of the drugs.”
13:34 “We at the Beckley Foundation have decided to do some reports which will tell the truth. Because the United Nations report doesn’t tell the truth. It tells what the Americans want to hear.”
14:18 “At the last Beckley Foundation Seminar, which was held at the House of Lords in London, we had the top of drug policy of the United Nations and of the EU. . . . and the United Nations man agreed with me that the regulations on psychedelics should be altered.”
16:30 “At the moment it’s not illegal to do research on controlled substances, but no one does it because it’s not good for grant funding, or careers.”
19:52 Amanda begins her description of the brain imaging work that is being done with high-level meditation.
25:03 “In my opinion, to experience getting high means that you see a bit of you from higher up the mountain with a greatly enlarged area of simultaneous association of the neurons. So you get more far-reaching associations.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-079-feilding-and-pesce-at-burning-man/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
07:58 Terence McKenna:
“People should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen, not make it happen.”
09:35 Rupert Sheldrake:
“I would say that the Big Bang cosmology, which is an apolocyptic vision of history, with an explosive beginning and therefore implying an explosive end, is a kind of projection of this Judeo-Christian model of history. It’s not just confined to churches and synagogs. It’s the myth which encloses our entire scientific world view, which has grown up within this Judeo-Christian matrix.”
12:35 Terence:
“This is not paranoia. Paranoia? The Earth is on fire, haven’t you heard? There’s no reason to worry about being too paranoid. You can lift your foot off that pedal. It’s OK. You can go with that intuition now. The planet is on fire.”
18:38 Terence:
“So much is happening. Everything is knitting together. It cannot be stopped. There will be cellular technology and human-machine interface and uploading and downloading of clones of people and memories and places. The boundries are disolving into some kind of techno-biological informational soup of intentionality.”
19:12 Terence:
“It’s incomprehensible what is happening on this planet. It is like the metamorphosis that goes on inside a crysalisis, excpt this is a planet that is having its forests liquified, its oceans boiled, its populations moved, its genes streaming in all directions with all these exotic toxins mixed in. It isn’t for death that it’s moving. It’s moving towards some kind of other thing, not death.”
22:20 Rupert Sheldrake:
“Assuming that human consciousness doesn’t simply become extinguished at death, we have the question of what happens when millions of people die together. . . . an extraordinary flux of souls”
27:31 Terence:
“We don’t know what life is for or what death is for.”
28:13 Rupert:
“If the state of being after death is like dreaming without being able to wake up, so that when we die we’re captured in the realm of our dreams, we pass through this tunnel, and we enter a realm which is more like the realm of dreams than the life of waking experience, that there is indeed a post-mortal life in such a form, a form glimpsed in dreams in some kinds of psychedelic epxerience where the barrier that is penetrated may be like the membrane or barrier that we penetrate at death and may therefore be akin to near death experiences, which I think DMT probably is.”
30:28 Rupert:
“It’s an interesting question as to why the apocolypse is such a strong attractor.”
36:12 Rupert:
“It seems to us unlikely, given our old-fashioned cosmological view, that anything that happens on Earth would affect the rest of the cosmos. But if lots of Earths were synchronized [through morphogenic fields] then we do indeed begin to get the sense of the possible cosmic apolypotic.”
38:28 Terence: “We have to believe that the universe is stranger than we can suppose, and that’s the way, by avoiding closure and keeping that in front of us I think we will not go far wrong.”
44:23 Terence:
“The middle name of chaos is opportunity.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-078-the-apocalypse-part-2/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:31 Terence McKenna:
“[The apocalypse] seems to be the unique, unifying thread throughout the
Western religions Most insistently of all religious systems on Earth, it is
the Western systems that have insisted on appointing an end to their world.”
05:07 Terence:
“At the folkloric level, the attractor of the end of the world is very strong.”
07:47 Terence:
“And these religions, which have anticipated this thing in this rather crude end of the world scenario are somehow on to something, something that is, I think, a message that is coming from the biological level, if you will, about the inherent instability of the world.”
12:14 Terence:
“If in fact the concrescence is upon us then really all we can do is chat
about it as it comes down around our ears over the next 25 years.”
14:37 Terence:
“I think we’re standing on the lip of a hyperdimensional volcano of some
sort, toward which all history is being poured at a great rate.”
29:34 Terence:
“So then I thought, my god, we’re not inventing time travel here, what we’re
inventing is a god whistle.”
36:01 Terence:
“You see, the presence of minds is the signifier of nearby singularity.”
37:22 Ralph Abraham:
“The only thing is, that from the morphogenic field point of view there
are quite a number of people believing Saint John the Divine, now that I have
to take seriously.” . . . Terence: “He felt a quaking in the force,
that’s all, but it’s up to cooler heads to figure out what this quaking is.”
38:10 Ralph:
“The present extinction is the eighth largest [as determined in 1989] catastrophes of the planet in its lifetime. And that’s happening now. So we are in something that big, and to be the biggest one it would be the apocalypse.”
38:10 Terence:
“So that’s why you don’t need John the Divine to tell you there’s an apocalypse
underway.”
39:49 Ralph:
“It does seem to me that the ecological catastrophe is the appropriate interpretation
of the apocalyptic vision at the present time.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-077-the-apocalypse-part-1/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:39 Rupert Sheldrake:
“The other side of this is the reform of the existing professions.”
05:24 Ralph Abraham:
“Somehow there would have to be a miracle to get the whole system onto a new track.. And the revascularization aspect that we are mostly longing for might never happen. We need to trigger it.”
07:37 Rupert:
“I’m thinking of a pioneering experiment in a limited area.”
08:55 Ralph:
“How could we possibly attract an eighteen year old to a workshop? What would be necessary?” [Terence McKenna] “You have to talk about psychedelic drugs.”
11:13 Rupert:
[describing his concept of a series of workshop initiations] “To get there you have to be recommended by someone who’s been here, and therefore there’s a much greater sense of initiation into this world. The fact is, a lot of teenagers may not know that this world exists, or if they do they have a totally distorted view.”
17:11 Ralph:
“Corruption is a known mechanism for the downward spiral of society.”
26:57 Terence McKenna:
“Because the old method is breaking down. There’s either some substitute in the future, or we’re just looking at a generation in anarchy.”
34:07 Rupert:
“Because right now education is one of the areas that is being insulated from free market economics by being a state monopoly run by bureaucratic institutions and operated by an old style hierarchal priesthood.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-076-education-in-the-new-world-order-part-2/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
03:15 Rupert Sheldrake:
“The present educational system mimics the initiation process and indeed is a kind of initiation process.”
07:18 Rupert:
“And indeed it is the scientific priesthood envisaged by Bacon in the scientific world, the academic model and the priestly role as the higher initiates in running and ordering society, the more-educated.”
08:40 Rupert:
“You can see this whole new frame of mind being introduced in the entire third world through UNESCO and through educational things. And the first step is literacy, you’ve got to have them reading and writing, because then you can get it across that what’s in books is actually more important than what you feel or experience.”
21:09 Terence McKenna:
“The education system of the future should have a tremendous focus on history.”
22:53 Terence:
“Part of reforming education has to be to teach people that history is a system of interlocking resonance’s in which they are embedded, and they are going to be called upon to make decisions which will affect the state of life on this planet millennia in the future.”
24:04 Terence:
“This hierarchy of academic cant that has been built up is in fact a sham, a thing of squeaking gears and creaking pulleys that is left over from another age.”
27:50 Ralph Abraham:
“I was pleased to discover that the higher educational system of Europe and America was not getting worse and worse, it was always this bad.”
32:22 Ralph:
“Where is spiritual value, where is moral and ethical value, where is the fabric of society, as it were, where is that taught? If not in the schools then embedded in soap operas, or where? Somehow the curriculum has to have spiritual, moral, and social values.”
41:06 Rupert:
“And then there would be some final test . . . and I think it could also involve, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, a psychedelic revelation.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-075-education-in-the-new-world-order-part-1/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
07:18 Rupert Sheldrake:
“If there were to be a true Mother Earth religion develop, it would obviously have priestesses rather than priests because its central figure was a goddess. It would be relating human life to the Earth, first and foremost . . . it wouldn’t have much emphasis on the stars or the heavens.”
08:49 Terence McKenna:
“But if this Anima Mundi thing got going, this is not a fine tuning of Christianity this is, at last, the overthrow of it. . . . no more this patriarchal, masculine, dominator thing that has descended down through monotheism.”
13:36 Terence:
“Why not psychedelicize and sacrilize green politics? . . . Science and green politics can be sacrilized through the psychedelic experience.”
14:33 Terence:
“I think that green politics, what makes it so wishy-washy, is its lack of a forthright metaphysics. . . . A green party that used a mystical language, a psychedelic language…would have, I think, a tremendous appeal.”
15:51 Terence:
“It has to be understood that this [using psychedelic medicines] is the way to the Gaian mind. These things are sacraments, not metaphors for sacraments, real sacraments.”
16:13 Terence:
“Everybody is going to try and out-green everybody else. The trick will be to tell the weasels from everybody else.”
21:50 Terence:
“If it’s to be a psychedelicized green movement, the people who could lead this have been training themselves for years. They just didn’t understand that that was what they were training themselves for, but called upon to do so they could step forward and operate in those positions.”
25:00 Ralph Abraham:
“The entire promise of the intellect has failed us if it’s necessary for the catastrophe to actually be upon us before people will act, and yet that seems to be the case.”
35:18 Terence:
“Well they are psychedelic experiences. The authenticity is going to come from the thing itself. We’re not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.”
40:09 Terence:
“The only competition for that focus on the need to save the Earth is this stupid anti-drug thing, which is the need to preserve the purity of your precious bodily essences, or something like that. . . . It’s the issue of how we relate to the vegetable matrix”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-074-the-resacularization-of-the-world-part-2/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
03:48 Ralph Abraham:
“So eventually the 60s happened, and probably my first experience that I would now identify as a real religious experience was the experience of LSD.”
07:17 Ralph:
“What’s gone wrong in the world now is a loss of connection to the sacred within and without organized religion.”
13:30 Ralph:
“The revascularization of music, I think, is very important. If I had to point to a single factor that I thought was destroying society faster than any other I think it would be evil music.”
18:28 Ralph:
“The value of getting the true partnership into the church would mean that we then wouldn’t have to replace the church just because it had been on the wrong track for 5,000 years.”
18:48 Terence McKenna:
“But isn’t this a little like trying to reform the Soviet Union and keeping the Communist Party around? I think the momentum of these institutions makes them hard to reform.”
23:27 Rupert Sheldrake:
“I think the most important aspect of this process really, because I agree with Terence about the archaic revival, is to find behind the existing forms and existing festivals the pre-Christian roots, which in all cases are the ones that feed the timing of the particular festivals and the particular locations of the sacred places, and which ground the new religion in the old.”
32:39 Terence:
“In America attendance at church is much higher, and it convulses the body politic because, unable to fulfill it’s sacral function, the church has become simply a lobbying force for fundamentalist social policy. . . . I think we should level [churches] to the ground and start over.”
35:13 Rupert:
“There is little way in which the political life in America could be sacrelized, since by definition it’s secular.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-073-the-resacularization-of-the-world-part-1/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
03:52 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his concept of “Cannabis Day”
06:18 Terence McKenna: “One day in each lunar cycle would be Cannabis Day, I think.”
10:22 Terence:
“Time and attention used creatively banish the unconscious.”
13:42 Ralph Abraham: “Shopping malls are actually the modern equivalent
of the medieval abbeys.”
20:04 Rupert:
“The idea that time has its qualities is already something that has a popular following in the millions who study astrology in a vague or a professional way.”
24:22 Rupert:
“Drugs have qualities, and they open up different realms of experience. . . . And so what would happen, for example, if one took a powerful psychoactive that opened one to the astral realm, in the starry sense, and then invoked a particular star by name and tried to journey, or connect with, or become open to influences from that star? . . . I’d be rather frightened to try it, myself.”
29:09 Ralph:
“Denial [of various experiences] I think is a recent phenomenon, and here there is a serious danger for evolution because once experience is denied then evolution is shunted off its track.”
35:50 Ralph:
“We may have great powers that aren’t being used since we don’t believe in them.”
41:20 Ralph:
“A dangerous hypothesis: The first one we want to transcend is the seperation of the human unconscious from the other unconscious.”
42:32 Ralph:
“So associated with this animal domestication and eating habit, addiction, is denial of consciousness of the animal.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-072-the-unconscious-part-2/
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
PROGRAM NOTES:
06:48 Ralph Abraham: Explains his bifurcation theory of the unconscious
08:01 Ralph:
“We can speak of the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of plants, the consciousness of Mother Earth.”
11:57 Ralph:
“Chaos goes to the basement, and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness, giving us the unconscious, which appears to be gaining ever since.”
17:02 Ralph:
“I think we want Saint George and the Dragon getting it on together in a May Day celebration where Dionysian elements are accepted.”
18.21 Terence McKenna: “The orgies driven by the psychedelic religion completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity.”
21:21 Terence:
“Basically the choice was between fun [through orgies] and full knowledge of the flow of your genes, and once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue, then the concept of ‘mine’ comes into existence. . . . And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundry-disolving mushroom religion was holding at bay. It was literally a pharmacological intervention to keep that kind of a psychology [patriarchal] from getting going.”
23:33 Terence:
“They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy to a drunken reverie of warriors and whores.”
30:16 Ralph:
“And in this sense, a restrictive society which narrows the choice of addictions is somehow anti-evolutionary in that it promotes the growth of unconsciousness, insensitivity, is a danger to the biosphere and so on.”
31:11 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his proposal to legalize psychedelics in an ‘age-related manner’.
33:55 Rupert:
“And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit. However conscious we think we become we don’t become fully conscious of the unconscious embryonic habits that formed us.”
40:03 Ralph:
“And so we would have to work at maintenance of consciousness as we work at maintenance of the garden.”
46:47 Terence:
“It [coffee] is the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of the coffee break.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-071-the-unconscious-part-1/
PROGRAM NOTES:
05:40 Terence McKenna: “Going back to this thing about language,
you get this same peculiar emphasis on language and letters in the esoteric doctrine that surrounds the chakras.”
06:57 Terence:
“Linearity in print conferred upon language an inability to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology, but now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this and move it forward.”
09:55 Ralph Abraham: “There is very little discussion of the intelligent
science, mythology, and so on of these 100-, 200-, 300-thousand B.C., what is going on during these previous interglacials, and it could be that there was agriculture. There would be no way to rule that out.”
15:30 Rupert Sheldrake: “If that’s possible [communicating with a star entity], what kind of information would such beings impart?”
17:27 Ralph:
“Myth is from mythos. Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the song from the rituals. Myth gained the power it now has in our conscious and unconscious life through its secondary role in the ritual. The ritual and the myth together, I think, is one of the most important things for us to regain.”
19:11 Ralph:
“Peace [in Crete], I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm in a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm. There was also the conscious interaction with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere in bringing peace down.”
22:12 Terence:
“I think when you go to the edges . . . then you discover there is an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomenon around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors.”
25:02 Rupert:
“The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm. . . . So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a demon. It’s in fact a Satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles. . . . How seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money?”
28:34 Rupert:
“If we take seriously these entities, how much can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities, like Mammon or Satanic powers or fallen angles, which are actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology?”
30:50 Terence:
“Probably the process of civilization is going to reveal the final status of this shadow within us.”
36:12 Ralph:
“I think we need the Gaian, and we need the Chaotic, that is the celestial sphere, to be re-connected, to be coupled, to the human spirit . . . that is the ultimate partnership.”
PROGRAM NOTES:
02:24 Terence McKenna: “When you start looking at the question of
these disincarnate entities, the first thing that strikes you is their persistence in human experience and folklore. This is not something unusual or statistically rare.”
07:57 Terence:
“The eradication of spirit from the visible world has been a project prosecuted with great zeal concomitant with the rise of modern science.”
10:01 Terence:
“If we examine the history of early modern science, we discover that some of the major movers and shakers were in fact being guided and directed in the formulation of early science by disincarnate entities.”
12:59 Terence:
“The aversion to the irrational is something that science inherited from Christianity.”
17:59 Ralph Abraham: “I think it was in 879 in the council of Byzantium
that spirit was made illegal, and then we went from three to two, so there’s only body and soul . . . and this is, I think, the reason why no one knows the difference between spirit and soul and thinks that they’re the same.”
21:01 Terence:
“Did you know that the dogma of purgatory, in Christian theology, was not created by theologians in Rome. It was created by Saint Patrick in an effort to make Christian doctrine more commiserate with Celtic folk beliefs in the process of converting Ireland to Christianity?”
22:12 Terence:
“The major tool for contacting these entities in any kind of controllable fashion is psychedelic compounds, especially DMT and the tryptamines. And those sort of experiences seem to line up pretty well with the Celtic fokelore.”
27:37 Terence:
“The irrational, in this objectified form, is very active in the process that we call history. It’s just that we don’t like to admit that because we’re committed to an official philosophy of reason and casuistry.”
33:57 Rupert Sheldrake: “The realm of our dreams is a personal nightly journeying into these realms of other entities.”
PROGRAM NOTES:
05:38 Ralph Abraham: “It does seem very attractive to think of
the electromagnetic field as some kind of favored intermediary among all the physical fields.”
07:41 Rupert Sheldrake: “There’s this mystery of light. I still
think Maxwell’s electromagnetic formulations of light are much too simple.”
10:56 Ralph:
“I think that we ought to think about the possibility that this effect [the paranormal] will not be confirmed in laboratories.”
15:39 Rupert:
“There is some sense in which our imagination, our image-making facility, is self-luminous.”
25:54 Ralph:
“We have therefore in our individual consciousness a particular affinity with the electromagnetic field . . . as epitomized by vision.”
30:41 Terence McKenna: “Why is divine omniscience a necessary concept?
Can’t the universe get along just being partially aware of what’s going on? . . . What problems are solved by hypothesizing that notion?”
33:36 Rupert:
“I find it more reasonable to find that our minds are in touch with larger minds and are in many ways shaped by larger mental systems.”
33:57 Terence:
“The mind of the whole universe seems unnecessary to hypothesize and unlikely to be encountered.”
45:14 Rupert:
“I think that the cosmic mind may be largely unconscious because I think that most things that happen in the cosmos are habitual and therefore unconscious.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-068-light-and-vision-part-2/
PROGRAM NOTES:
04:52 Rupert Sheldrake begins a discussion about light.
10:55 Rupert
“What kind of influence could be moving outward through the eyes as part of the image-forming perceptive process, and in this outward projection in some sense project the image we see, the image we see is part of this outward flux.”
14:17 Terence McKenna begins his commentary on Rupert’s ideas about light, expanding them into the realm of imagination.
21:08 Ralph Abraham challenges Terence and Rupert on some of their points.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-067-light-and-vision-part-1/
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:29 Terence McKenna:
“The ego is essentially paranoia institutionalized.”
03:53 Ralph Abraham:
Considers the possibility that ego became strengthened when psychedelic usage became less frequent.
05:29 Terence:
Talks about a “psychedelic rebirth.”
08:15 Terence:
“A calendrical reform would be a wonderful thing, and I have just the calendar all worked out.”
09:48 Terence:
“It’s an effort to deny man’s mortality, this solar calendar. It’s reinforcing a false notion of permanence, and what we actually want is a calendar that says ‘all is flow, all is flux, all relationships are in motion to everything else. It’s a truer picture of the world.”
13:22 Rupert Sheldrake:
Comments on the fact that the Islamic calendar fits the definition of Terence’s suggested calendar.
16:22 Rupert:
“One of the things that’s clear is that chaos is feminine, and creation out of chaos is like the creation out of the womb, coming out of darkness.”
20:56 Terence:
“I think it’s the notion of as above so below.” . . . “In talking about these things you can’t force closure.”
22:14 Ralph:
Explains how the painting in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the black virgin) is actually a representation of the goddess chaos.
26:19 Terence:
Explains how the Faustian pact with the physical world that humans have made by adopting the “deadly cultural forms” of written language, moveable type, etc. have had a negative impact on our self-image. . . . “In the absence of this boundary-dissolving ecstasies, and replacing that with the machinations and plottings of the ego leads very, very quickly into a cultural cul de sac. . . . This was the wrong-turning.”
29:15 Terence:
Explains the difference between dominator and partnership.
33:17 Terence:
“You cannot trust the dominator style not to go psychotic here at the end.” . . . “Who is it who has the power to pry the dead fingers of the dominator culture from the instrumentality of power?” . . . “Everyone should understand this, that chaos provides opportunity for commandos of the new persuasion to rush forward and jam vital machinery of the dominator metaphor.”
39:14 Terence:
Discusses the question of whether there can be consciousness without an object.
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-066-chaos-and-imagination-part-2/
PROGRAM NOTES:
02:29 Ralph Abraham: “So I should like now to speak about the chaos
of ordinary life and the relationship of this chaos to the imagination.”
05:41 Ralph:
“Chaos, Gaia, and Eros are the gods, or concepts, of the primitive types.”
13:56 Ralph:
“People have a resistance to their own creative imagination, and I’m suggesting that this resistance has a mythological base.”
20:55 Terence McKenna: “Chaos is feminine. Chaos is intuitional. Chaos has a very flirtatious relationship with language.”
22:16 Terence:
“The birthright that connects us to the divine is our poetic capacity, our ability to resonate with an idea of ideal beauty and to create that which transcends our own understanding in the form of art through the imagination.” . . . “We have a secret history. Knowledge of which has been lost to us and only now is recoverable . . . ” . . . “We are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood as a species.”
24:34 Terence:
“Once we lived in dynamic balance with nature, not as animals do, but as human beings only could but in a way that we have now lost.” . . . and then he explains what it is that we have lost and how it was lost.
27:46 Terence:
“There are certain episodes in the life of a female which are guaranteed to be boundary dissolving.”
29:00
Terence: “The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is the ability to accept an inherent messiness in your explanation of what’s going on.” . . . “For me, the creative act is the letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.”
32:37 Terence:
“For me the imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
37:30 Terence:
“There will come a moment which will be an absolute leap into space, and we will simply have to have the faith that there is something waiting there, because the dominator style has left us no choice.”
45:01 Terence:
“Fear it is that guards the vineyard.” . . . “So the fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-065-chaos-and-imagination-part-1/
Guest speaker: Sheldon Norberg
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:40 News of a Mexican informant for the DEA who committed murder while wearing a wire for the U.S.
05:30 Reminiscences of (and synchronicities at) Burning Man 2006
08:15 Discussion about Sheldon’s book, Confessions of a Dope Dealer
10:44 How Sheldon got into the dope dealing business
18:24 Using cannabis is a socializing ritual for young people
24:25 On being un-comfortably numb and doing work with psychedelics
31:08 Do most heavy users eventually reach a point where they move from using psychedelics primarily for pleasure to using them primarily for a studied expansion of their own consciousness?
34:36 Psychedelics are astronomically more powerful and completely different from alcohol
36:40 The “Third I” theory of tripping
43:38 Living in tripland isn’t always beneficial
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-064-confessions-of-a-dope-dealer/
PROGRAM NOTES:
02:14 Ralph Abraham: Takes issue with McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s interpretation of chaotic attractors. . . . To a mathematician, the word ‘attractor’ does not necessarily imply attraction.
07:23 Rupert Sheldrake:
“But Newtonian physics and the triumph of the mechanistic system, in my opinion, only works because what it was seeking to deny was introduced into it by a kind of subterfuge and pretended that this was a mechanical principle whereas it was something else.”
09:37 Ralph:
“The idea of two dimensional time could aid us here.” . . . The problem with the teleological approach is that the cause is in the future.
10:54 Ralph:
“The more interesting idea is to make a model for evolution itself.” . . . “The determinant of evolution [in the case being discussed] is the free will in the moment as the collective action of the citizens in the present.”
13:24 Rupert:
… discuses the concept of morphic attractors as a way of dealing with the fact that somehow, in the present, the person, etc. is subject to the influence of a potential future state that hasn’t yet come into being. “But that future state is what directs and guides and attracts the development of the present system.”
14:26 Terence McKenna:
“Well, this is all very interesting.” . . . “The modeling task, ne plus ultra, is history. This is where you’re no longer playing a little game to demonstrate something to a group of students or colleagues.” . . . “I think the whole reason history has bogged down in the 20th century is because of the absence of belief in an attractor.”
20:31 Terence:
“Our cultural phase transition that we are going through, vis a vie machines, may signify that we are not, as I have always thought, very close to the maximized state of novelty, but that we’re out there somewhere in the middle of that wave . . . “
22:41 Rupert:
“I think there’s a very big difference between spoken language and written language.”
25:16 Ralph:
“Well, I imagine, just to be contrary, that mathematics preceded not only writing, but mathematics probably preceded language as well.” . . . “We could reach a point where we had models that were decent in some sense to aid us in the understanding of complex social relationships.”
33:06 Terence:
“[Ralph] do you still cling to the mathematical proof of the impossibility of monogamy?”
34:16 Terence: “And in a way that’s what I see the three of us and others mentionable as doing. We’re trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s such a good idea that it will act as an attractor, and the world will move toward that form.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-063-creativity-and-chaos-part-2/
PROGRAM NOTES:
01:23 Ralph Abraham: A short primer on chaos theory. . . . The emergence of form from a field of chaos.
08:57 Rupert Sheldrake:
“The problem I have with chaos theory . . . ” The issue of indeterminacy in the real world. . . . The illusion of total predictability. . . . Indeterminacy may exist not just at the quantum level but at all levels of natural organization. . . . How form arises from chaos. . . . In some sense, energy may be seen as an agent of change.
21:24 Rupert:
The question of how do new fields, new forms, come into being in the first place? Where do they come from? . . . The nature of the mathematical realm, the formative realm. Is there a kind of mathematical realm before the universe, somehow beyond space and time. [lozo: he goes on a kind of Olaf Stapelton riff] . . .
26:04 Rupert:
“The view that I want to consider is that the world soul, or the world imagination, makes up these forms as it goes along, that there isn’t, out there, a kind of mathematical mind already fixed or already full.”
28:40 Ralph:
“I think that with mathematics we can make a model for anything.” . . . “Mathematics could be regarded simply an extension of language. . . . Words, I think, are frequently inadequate.”
34:18 Ralph:
“But the truth is this theory can be used to model everything. So it never settles any questions as to the origin of things or the true nature of ordinary reality.”
37:40 Rupert:
“Are the fields of reality more real than the models we use to model them with. Or is there a kind of mathematics yet more fundamental the fields?”
38:57 Ralph:
What mathematics means to me . . . a description of the mathematical landscape. . . . “Mathematics is the supreme tool for the extension of our language for dealing with complex systems.”
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-062-creativity-and-chaos-part-1/