Guest speakers: Adi Khavous, Jenifer Dumpert, Brett Greene, and Pol Cosineau PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: 920 Psilocybin Mushroom Day 2015 This week you’ll hear stories recorded live at Psymposia Stories Montreal from 920 Psilocybin Mushroom Day 2015. Adi Khavous: A nomadic street artist’s first time taking mushrooms. Jenifer Dumpert: One dream researcher’s story about Santa, drugs, and elves. Brett Greene: A howling tale of a Jeremiah in the wilderness kind of head trip. Pol C...
Apr 03, 2017•54 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna Alex Grey painting in his Manhattan studio Photo credit: Bill Radacinski PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 7, 1998 Today's podcast continues with a series of lectures given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute in early August 1998. It begins with Terence discussing ways in which he sees art evolving. Eventually he transitions into a discussion about the growth of the Internet and the possibility of it becoming a super intelligent entity of...
Mar 30, 2017•1 hr 32 min
Guest speaker: Ayelet Waldman PROGRAM NOTES: Today brings us the first of the Salon2 podcasts, and it is hosted by Lex Pelger, who I have asked to tell you a little about what his psychedelic clan is up to. After Lex's introduction of the Psymposia Team, he will be interviewing Ayelet Waldman about her new book titled "A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life". Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option...
Mar 27, 2017•41 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna A Sequel to DreamLand PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 6, 1998 Today's podcast features an August 6, 1998 talk about Salvia Divinorum given by Terence McKenna at the Esalen Institute. In addition to many interesting facts that Terence presents about Salvia, he tells how Daniel Siebert became the first person to identify the active ingredient of the plant, which eventually led to its widespread use today. In addition to discussing Salvia, Terenc...
Mar 22, 2017•1 hr 30 min
Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: This is the first of the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcasts. It is a very short program that answers the following questions: 1. How did the idea of Salon 2.0 come about? 2. Where did the ideas for how Salon2 will work come from? 3. How much input and control will Lorenzo have in selecting the new programs? 4. How do you provide feedback as to format (lectures, interviews, conversations), etc. 5. Psymposia's Blue-Dot tour Psymposia Blue-Dot Tour Information Curr...
Mar 20, 2017•17 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4,1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna "The nation state is now on the ropes. It's being replaced by something else, the world's one thousand companies, the world corporate state." "The interesting thing about the world corporate state is it has no real moral agenda. It only wants to pick your pocket, which when you think of what's been peddled in the ideological market place in the 20th Century, so...
Mar 08, 2017•49 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 4, 1998 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] "A certain portion of my audience is flakier than I am comfortable with." "The whole point with psychedelics was to cut through the programming and the cant, and the propaganda of culture to true truth, real reality, not to just initiate an era of intellectual permissiveness where everything in the spiritual marketplace was placed on the same pedestal as Euc...
Feb 27, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake and Joseph Chilton Pearce PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 28, 1993 Today's podcast features a conversation that was held on August 28, 1993 between Rupert Sheldrake, the originator of the Morphic Resonance theory, and Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of many books including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and other works investigating the brain, the mind, and consciousness. As their discussion proceeds they explore the concept that, as observers, W...
Feb 21, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: February 1982 [NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.] "The belief in certitude, I suspect, is a primate habit." "One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that almost all pessimism results from watching what the government is doing. . . . because the government is the last place that important change is registered. And so if you're looking at the government you're looking at the past." "Certitude only...
Feb 13, 2017•1 hr 28 min
Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: January 30, 2017 In today's podcast Lorenzo explains how he came to his decision to not vote in last year's presidential election. He begins by quoting part of a poem by William Butler Yeats which read: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of p...
Jan 30, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Guest speaker: John Gilmore - - Francis Huxley 1923 - 2016 - - Photo: The Guardian PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016 [NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore.] “Don't buy Apple products when they lock you into only using software that Apple approves of. It's really straightforward. It's like, don't buy food that poisons you. Don't buy from companies that try to control you.” [In response to whether one can get their information back from Facebook.] “I don't think there ...
Jan 14, 2017•1 hr 26 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The payoff [of psychedelic experiences] is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.” “And I think that's how we have to act. We have to each choose a small area and then act in that limited area with all the existential commitments we can muster. But not with anxiety.” “Anybody who thinks that you can save the world by setting it on fire i...
Dec 27, 2016•59 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “It's really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart. Have you seen that happen?” “The whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing, and that they can't believe it either.” “The one thing they tell you it isn't, it is! It is! It is made of magic, anything can happen.” “There's ...
Dec 13, 2016•1 hr 35 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 In today's talk from a September 1990 workshop, Terence McKenna explains that when speaking about the DMT state he says that what he calls self-dribbling basketballs “are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you're looking at them they're actually sentences. And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way.” Th...
Dec 05, 2016•1 hr 38 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990 [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “There is no closure. There are models, and there are questions. But all models are provisional, and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What's being claimed here [in the psychedelic experience] is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers. And it's different for ever...
Nov 21, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about [the psychedelic experience]. It's like not finding out about sex or something. It's just too weird. It's a part of our birthright. It's not a cultural artifact. . . . This is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.” “We have to be very careful...
Nov 08, 2016•1 hr 13 min
Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Grover Norquist.] “You don't lose something because of partisan fights at the state level.” “States rights is a stupid concept, since states don't have rights. People have rights. States have power they use against people.” “People who have concealed carry permits go to jail or get in trouble with the law one-sixth as often as cops. So they're safer than cops.” “All the groups that want to be left alone have something to ...
Nov 01, 2016•1 hr 38 min
Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Cory Doctorow.] “This world of computers exists in a principle-free environment. The Internet of Things is the Internet of absolute, self-serving bullshit.” “The Internet of Things needs principles.” “The real struggle here, it's not making computers free, it's making people free. The reason we want to save computers is not because computers are more important than racial justice, or gender equity, or getting rid of homopho...
Oct 26, 2016•1 hr 34 min
Guest speakers: Annie Oak, Shannon Clare Petitt, and Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: In this 2016 Palenque Norte Lecture, Annie Oak, founder of the Women's Visionary Congress, teaches how to use Naloxone to help a person who has had an opioid overdose. She is followed by Shannon Clare Petitt who tells us about some of the work being done by MAPS' Zendo Project. Finally, we get to hear Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, talk about how he first learned about MDMA and what his first experience with that ...
Oct 18, 2016•1 hr 17 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we're doing is we're building a nervous system. We're building a nervous system the size of this planet.” “The marketplace has an appetite for lies about the future.” “I cannot conceive of post eschatonic life. I think of it, just to make things simple for myself, as death, because that's the other thing in my life that I have no grip on whatsoever.” “An organism is chemistry abducted into hyperspa...
Oct 06, 2016•1 hr 38 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we get to hear Terence McKenna's lecture about his TimeWave hypothesis (it never became a true theory). This 1997 talk was given less than three years before Terence's death and thus represents some of his latest thinking about this topic. He defines the TimeWave as a mathematical model of how the world works, as based upon the I Ching. Also, he clearly states that where the end point is set determines all of the other data points fall. However...
Sep 29, 2016•2 hr 5 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A nature trip is an eyes wide open trip.” “I think LSD is abrasively psychoanalytic.” “I don't see an intellect outside of space and time guiding things, and certainly not watching with baited breath the machinations of the human monkeys. I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.” “The universe is a self-creating mystery of some sort.” “Maybe reality is a far more perishable concept than we ever d...
Sep 20, 2016•1 hr 16 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The only path in to the supernormal that I've found are the psychedelics. Everywhere else I found chicanery and fraud.” “It's fun to be a free person. It's fun to not depend upon an institution, an ideology, an other person, a place, a time. And it's very hard to sell this form of fun. People are afraid. People have been dis-empowered, I think, through the process of juvenilization.” “Millions and milli...
Sep 13, 2016•1 hr 44 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The real news is no one is in control, not the central bank, not the Jews, not the communist party, not the pope. Nobody's in control.” “I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models. You have to be incredibly naive about what people are to believe that a role model is in fact worthy.” “If you want to talk to the Dali Lama close the door of your bedroom and have a dialogue with the mirr...
Sep 06, 2016•1 hr 37 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it's a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we're basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our ...
Aug 23, 2016•1 hr 13 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Democracy is this innate belief in people. It's a psychedelic way of doing it. It's the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy to my mind is, of course, the ideal. But anarchy has to be mediated with policy, and the way you do that is through democracy.” “The Earth is in far worse shape than we think.” “This notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics is, as far as I can see,...
Aug 15, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken's right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn't done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?” “I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a ...
Jul 27, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Guest speakers: Ellen Brown, Letitia Pepper, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features insights from Ellen Brown and Latitia Pepper in regards to California's upcoming ballot measure Proposition 64. As you will hear, this measure will eliminate the current medical marijuana laws in the state. And while anyone over the age of 21 will be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, the days of medical patients going to a local dispensary will be over. Also, medical patients will ne...
Jul 20, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Guest speaker: Erik Davis PROGRAM NOTES: “The whole history of Buddhism in the West, the whole thing in the post war period as Buddhism starts to become really popular, is inextricable from psychedelics.” -Erik Davis Today's podcast features a talk that was given by Erik Davis in which he unravels the history of both the Tibetan Book of the Dead and its psychedelic sister, the Psychedelic Experience, that was written by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner during their infamous Harvard years. Erik Davis, ...
Jul 13, 2016•1 hr 20 min
Guest speaker: Professor David Nutt PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2016 talk that Professor David Nutt gave at the annual Glastonbury Festival. His topic was “Do psychedelics matter?”. Although demonised, and attracting severe criminal penalties for users during the half century of the “war on drugs”, psychedelics are now undergoing a renaissance – both in terms of scientific research and in people’s personal and spiritual worlds. It is once again a time of oriented explorations of ...
Jul 06, 2016•1 hr 11 min
