Psychedelic Salon

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Ram Dass

Ram Dass & Lorenzocirca: 2001

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."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: September 1987.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]

"I used to be a Libertarian, but they had too many rules."

"And by 1968 a Gallup Poll showed that 70% of the population were against war. There's never been a time in the history of this country where 70% of the people opposed the government on a thing like war. So I regard LBJ as a pacifist president because he made pacifism so popular."

"Alan Watts said to me 20 years ago the chief error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire fell. It never did. It still controls the Western World through the Vatican and the Mafia. Well, Alan was exaggerating. It doesn't control the Western World. It's just trying to."

"The American people are the most policed and governed and watched and observed and snooped upon people in the whole world."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]>

"The horrible thing about UFO-people who claim contact is that the aliens they present to us are so incredible mundane. [They are] so much more mundane than what you would encounter on a DMT flash. They're just like the neighbors next door."

"With alien intelligence the trick is not to find it but to to recognize it when it's in front of you."

"Intelligence is a very slippery concept. Sometimes we can't even identify it in the person sitting next to us on the bus."

"I think the world is a lot stranger than we can suppose without invoking benevolent aliens who prefer vegetarian diets and who come from the stars. Why do they so fit our preconception of what they would be?"

"I think the best protection against unpleasant experiences on psychedelics is to do it with care and attention in environments that are safe and low on sensory input. In other words, you don't take it and go to a crowded singles bar, or even a rock 'n roll concert. If you have to combine psychedelics with rock 'n roll, do it with low doses."

"I am terrified of psychedelics. I never take them without a sense of sickening dread."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Psychedelic researcher Sasha Shulgin in his lab

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"Matter is becoming a fairly uncomfortable dimension for us to be in, and I daresay matter would probably be highly relieved to have us just move on so that the rainforest, chipmunks, glaciers, and schooling salmon can go back to doing what they do best."

"There is no reason to expect rationality to be apprehensible."

"A little courage on the part of these almighty scientists would go a long way toward overwhelming the fearful strictures placed on them by politicians who are trying to maintain a social equilibrium that is fairly odious anyway."

"Mantras, with psychedelics, work like magic. Yoga, breath control, drumming, visualization, simple prayer, it all works amazingly well in the presence of psychedelics."

"Unfortunately, these non-psychedelic spiritual techniques are very quickly co-opted by the beady-eyed priests among us who then peddle it back to us with a menu of moral do's and don't s."

"I think the real spiritual frontier lies in the community. . . . We must, somehow, carry everyone with us."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Tom Roberts

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today's podcast features a conversation from last Monday's Live Salon with Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D., who is a professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University. Tom not only began teaching the world's first university catalog-listed psychedelics course in 1981, he is also a founding member of MAPS, former visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins, editor of Spiritual Growth with Entheogens, and author of Psychedelic Horizons and The Psychedelic Future of the Mind. In this interview, Tom talks about his latest book, MindApps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design. However, you most likely know him as the man who created the first Bicycle Day celebration.

Date this lecture was recorded: November 18, 2019

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Tom Roberts.]

"I'm attempting to broaden the field [of psychedelics], and trying to get people who are interested in history and literature and philosophy interested in psychedelics."

"We can install ideas in our brain/mind complex, just as we install apps on our devices."

Thomas Roperts, Ph.D. Publications

Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

ALSO MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

Boohbah: Skipping Rope (Episode 1)

A visual trip - no drugs needed :-)

A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Jonathon Miller Weisberger

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: October 28, 2019.

Today's podcast features a conversation that a few of my friends and I had with Jonathon Miller Weisberger, who is the founder of the Ocean Forest Ecolodge Retreat in Costa Rica. Jonathan is also the author of Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon. For almost 19 years he has also been facilitating plant medicine council gatherings in Costa Rica and Ecuador. Jonathon was born in Berkeley, raised in Ecuador, and began his training in the Amazon with Maestro Don Cesareo in the early 90s.

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon

Ocean Forest Ecolodge Retreat, Costa Rica

Rainforest Medicine Gatherings

The Difference between Ayahuasca and Yagé

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Tim Scully

Tim Scully & Nick Sandcirca 2015Photo: @headsnews

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: October 12, 2019.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Tim Scully.]

"The LSD experience doesn't really carry a message with it. It's an amplifier. And it's much more dependent on set and setting than I believed at first. I should have paid more attention to what people like Tim Leary and Ralph Metzner had been saying."

"It also slowly became clear, from observing my friends who'd taken a lot of acid, and some of whom were still behaving like assholes, that taking LSD was not a cure for being an asshole."

"I think that maybe Huxley might have been right. Huxley wanted to turn the world on from the top down."

"I still think it's much better, if you're going to take a substantial dose of a psychedelic, to do it in a quiet, calm, controlled environment, preferably with a very limited number of people present."

Stuff Stoners Like

Tim Scully

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speakers: Tania and Greg Manning

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.

Shulgin Research Institute

Sasha Shulgin's Joke Book

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

A Video Podcast

Today we feature our first video podcast from the Psychedelic Salon. Our normal audio podcast features the audio portion of this short documentary. However, the best way to experience this program is to watch the video version, which you may also download in various formats.

Free Leonard Pickard

PROGRAM NOTES:

Guest speakers: David Luke, Ben Sessa, Mark McCloud, Julian Vayne, Michael Dupler, Gregory Sams, Carlo Rovelli, Nese Devenot, Shane Mauss, and Dr. David Nutt

These interviews were recorded in 2019.

In preparation of the audio edition of Leonard Pickard's The Rose of Paracelsus, Kat Lakey has traveled far and wide while gathering recordings from friends of Leonard's, all of whom have volunteered to read and record a chapter for this project. After meeting with some of these volunteers, Kat also recorded brief interviews with them. These interviews are presented in this video podcast. Some of these people, such as Nese Devenot, and Dr. David Nutt, have appeared before in the Psychedelic Salon. Also included in the interviews in today's podcast are Dr. Carlo Rovelli, David Luke, Ben Sessa, Mark McCloud, Julian Vayne, Gregory Sams, Shane Mauss, and attorney Michael Dupler. During the months ahead you will also hear each of them read one of the chapters from The Rose of Paracelsus.

In case you missed it, here is an overview of this project.

The Rose Garden (001) - Introduction

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Charlie Grob

Terence McKenna's logo, Bruce Damer's flight suit, Lorenzo and Charlie Grob

PROGRAM NOTES:

These lectures were recorded on Orcas Island during March of 2019.]

This podcast features two interviews that I conducted last March at the Orcas Island Convergence. The first is a conversation that I had with Dr. Bruce Damer, and that is followed by my interview with Dr. Charlie Grob. Between them, their scientific inquiries span a wide range of inquiries. Bruce, with his work for NASA and his research into the origins of life, works with mega issues. And Charlie, whose human research work includes studies using MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, works with human-sized issues.

"I think a lot of people don't realize it, but in the fifties and into the early sixties psychedelic research was the cutting edge of psychiatry." -Dr. Charles Grob

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Bruce Damer's Website

Bruce Damer's Patreon Page

Charlie Grob - Publications

Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books