Psychedelic Salon

By Lorenzo HagertySociety & Culture Science Philosophy Personal Journals Natural Sciences

Psychedelic Salon episodes

October 15, 2019 Podcast 627 – “The Birth of a New Humanity” – Part 2
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 best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses rarely. I used to say to my groups, if you haven't taken enough that you think you may have done too much, then you did too little."
"Death by astonishment is a real danger in [psychedelic] places. I mean, these places are not simply strange, or amazing, or highly peculiar. They are absolutely confounding."
"True spirituality is a very here and now matter. One should visit the sick and imprisoned, clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for orphans, feed the hungry. That's what the spiritual life is about. It's very down to Earth, straightforward."
"In terms of suggesting you are a more spiritually advanced person if you take psychedelics. I don't really see any evidence for that."
"It's too hard for the ego-maniac to take psychedelics. The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down."
"I think history is a state of chemical deprivation that allows ancient animal patterns of behavior that degrade and confuse us to re-emerge and stabilize themselves."
"Ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead people."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
A Terrible Mistake:
The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments
by H.P. Albarelli
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 20 min
October 07, 2019 Podcast 626 – “The Birth of a New Humanity” – Part 1
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Photo by Kyle Nieber on Unsplash
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"Often in what I say there is, if not the fact of contradiction, then the appearance of contradiction. This is because, to my mind, life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction."
"The great thing about the rational program of science is, pushed far enough, it reveals the irrational foundations of nature. And that's really what the crisis in science now is."
"The human imagination, married to technology, has become a force too powerful to be unleashed within the fragile ecosystem of this planet. So we must either carry ourselves elsewhere, or the planet's homeostatic drive to preserve ordinary biology will eliminate us."
"The notion of intoxication is an incredibly culture-bound idea."
"What 'psychedelic' means to me is, in structural terms, a very small number of compounds all based on indoles. The indole hallucinogens are the true psychedelics."
"I prefer to believe that [mind is] coming from the outside. That mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation, but it's not being generated in the neurons of the brain."
"We're living in a fool's paradise, trapped inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism."
"I think that the greatest disservice that science has done to humankind is the marginalizing of our own importance."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 10 min
September 30, 2019 Podcast 625 – “Nature Loves Complexity”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Photo by Brandon Green on Unsplash
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: July 17, 1998.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"You really can't understand the future without the psychedelic experience. History seems to be becoming more and more psychedelic."
"We have all made too many sacrifices in the name of fitting ourselves into the culture we find around us through the circumstances of our destiny."
"[Culture is a] toxic environment that one needs to negotiate with great care."
"Domestication and civilization are curiously intertwined concepts."
"A society has to be incredibly confident of its first premises to allow its citizens to habitually and regularly explore altered states of consciousness."
"The entire Internet- computer-revolution rides on the backs of people who were taking LSD in the Sixties. People have expressed horror at this idea and then taken opinion polls at various professional gatherings, such as Sigraph and Comdex, and gatherings like that, and have this insight confirmed overwhelmingly. The entire post-1950s edifice of information transfer and replication technology was created by psychedelic people, and it's serving them very well, as well as the corporate elite."
"Only the expansive, the generous, the psychedelic are going to be left standing when all of this stuff is sorted out, if it is ever sorted out."
"The shaman is the one who is allowed to know how the culture is wired under the board. Everyone else stands out bathed in the glow of the big screen of cultural values, but the shaman are the people who actually understand the reasons for these performances, myths, and rituals."
"We are trying to build, not a class of shamans but a shamanic culture. In other words a culture, and I think there has never been a culture of this type on the planet, a culture that actually lived in the light of the fourth dimension."
"No human being has greater insight into your circumstance than you do."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 19 min
September 23, 2019 Podcast 624 – “The Way of the Psychonaut”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Susan Hess Logeais
Lorenzo and Susan Hess Logeais in the Live Salon
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: September 16, 2019.
Today podcast is a recording from last Monday evening's Live Salon with Susan Hess Logeais, the producer/director of a feature length film about Dr. Stan Grof. The film is titled "The Way of the Psychonaut" and presents Dr. Grof's work with some stunning graphics and effects. Even if you are already quite familiar with the life and work of Stan Grof, I am sure that you will learn even more when you see this documentary.
TRAILER:
The Way of the Psychonaut
WEBSITE:
Documentary project featuring
psychedelic psychotherapy pioneer
Stanislav Grof
Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas
The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View by Richard Tarnas
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 3 min
September 16, 2019 Podcast 623 – “Timothy Leary Meets Jiminy Glick”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
PROGRAM NOTES:
Dates when these interviews were recorded: 1973 and 1992.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
"The best philosophers often end up in prison. ... Most of the men that I model myself after have been lucky if they just got away with being in prison for their ideas."
"I have no more to do with drugs that Einstein has to do with the atomic bomb."
"I based my entire life on Socrates. He's the guy that caused all the troubles in history. His motto was, 'The aim of human life is to know thyself.' And this is very subversive."
"As soon as I studied books about Socrates, I realized that [philosophy] is a dangerous profession because you're teaching people to question authority. I realized that this job which I was going to undertake, the corrupting of the minds of youth, pays poorly, it gets you in serious difficulty with authorities."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Skip E. Lowe Obituary
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 1 min
September 09, 2019 Podcast 622 – “Nirvana Is Where You Are”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Alan Watts
Alan Watts
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.]
"The Bodhisattva returns into the world, that means he has discovered that you don't have to go anywhere to find Nirvana. Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it."
"But the main thing [about death] is the attitude that death is as positive as birth and should be a matter for rejoicing because death is the symbol of the liberation."
"The ordinary world and the Nirvana world they are the same worlds. But what makes the difference is the point of view."
"Everything you know is remembered."
"Always surround death with joyous rites because this is an opportunity for the greatest of all experiences when you can finally let go because you know there's nothing else to do."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
The Imperfectionists
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 8 min
September 02, 2019 Podcast 621 – “Insanity and Psychedelics”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"If you insist on, I don't want to use the word 'abusing' it, but if you insist on using psychedelics frequently, at high doses back-to-back, you will unlock your way into a set of assumptions, and perceptions, and feelings that not very many people can follow you into. And then the question is have you gone into a spiritual domain or have you just fallen off the track? And it's hard to tell, and maybe it can happen both ways."
"What does it mean if it becomes harder and harder to take these things? Does it mean you're getting out of balance? Does it mean you're just getting older? Where should the blame be put, and what can you do about it."
"Maybe [the psychedelic community is] a special slice. First of all, it is a monkey brain that we're operating with here. Nowhere is it writ large that it can actually encompass 'the truth'. Why should it? . . . So then, if you're into these consciousness-expanding techniques, whether it's just paying attention, or using psychedelic drugs, or something else, then you actually get to a place where there is an abyss of knowing."
"Nowhere is it writ that the universe should be rationally apprehendable."
"Abstract expressionism, all of these things, Freudianism, Jung, National Socialist, it's all anti-reasonable. From the point of view of the 19th Century we don't have to worry about madness, we are mad, every last one of us. We've so thoroughly imbibed the values of modernity that we are incomprehensible to our own past."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 17 min
August 26, 2019 Podcast 620 – “Psilocybin and the Mycology of Consciousness”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Paul Stamets
Lorenzo and Paul StametsOrcas IslandMarch 2019
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: March 21, 2019.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Paul Stamets.]
"As we reach down and we find a mushroom, we have a Eureka moment that as we touch the mushroom we are touching a portal into an underground network of wisdom."
"In a single cubic inch of soil there can be more than eight miles of mycelium."
"Mushrooms had their form well before we had ours. These are ancestral organisms. These are not just miscellaneous little fungi growing on the ground. These are elders. These are ancient individuals. These are bastions of knowledge. Encyclopedic in their history of evolution."
"[Consuming psilocybin mushrooms] would be a shared community experience. And it wouldn't happen one time. It wouldn't happen ten times. It would happen millions upon millions upon millions of times over millions of years. Circumstantially, you cannot deny the possibility that the constant ingestion of magic mushrooms would have an impact on the evolution of human consciousness."
Books by Paul Stamets
Fungi Perfecti
Makers of Host Defense Mushrooms
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Mushroom Stones
Paul Stamets' Mushroom Stones
A young Paul Stamets
Breitenbush Mushroom FestivalHalloween 1999
Lorenzo is on the bus!
Microdosing Foumula
1 hr 47 min
August 19, 2019 Podcast 619 – “RAW and the Information Age” – Part 2
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: December 1988.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]
"Anything that becomes a cliche eventually makes people stupid."
"You've gotta deal with the future because that is where you are going to be spending the rest of your life."
"Most of human history shows that we only do things the intelligent way only after we have tried every possible stupid way and found out that none of them worked."
"I see interest disappearing, along with rent, in the next several years."
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr 8 min
August 12, 2019 Podcast 618 – “Rick Strassman’s Groundbreaking Research”
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
Guest speaker: Rick Strassman
Joseph Levy Escapes Death
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: August 5, 2019.
Today's podcast features a conversation with Dr. Rick Strassman, author of DMT The Spirit Molecule that took place last Monday evening in the Live Salon. During this wide-ranging interview Dr. Strassman discussed DMT, psilocybin, Gary Fisher, science, medicine, psychedelic research, mysticism, and the Bible.
Joseph Levy Escapes Death by Rick Strassman
Rick Strassman MD, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule
Interviewed by Graham Hancock
Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Download free copies of Lorenzo's latest books
1 hr