Psychedelic Salon

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speakers: John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Cory Doctorow

John Perry Barlow Photo source: EFF.org

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: November 17, 2006

Today we pay tribute to the late John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an important leader in the struggle to keep the Internet free. In addition to John Perry's remarks, we will also hear John Gilmore, another of the co-founders of EFF.org. One of the most important essays written by Barlow is his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and at the end of this podcast you will hear John Perry Barlow reading that declaration himself.

"If information is power, then the public needs to have more of it than the government, or the public will not be able to control the government."

-John Gilmore

"I think the city-state is going to have the biggest Renaissance since the Renaissance."

-John Perry Barlow

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

 

John Perry Barlow Library

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow

 Electronic Frontier Foundation

 

Download a free copy of

Lorenzo's latest book

The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

"And that's what we are now, semi-human. We're capable of enormous acts of kindness and appalling acts of brutality."

"All of our institutions have been built up on the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchies, and deconstructing that is really what the future is all about."

"I think the modern family is, first of all a very modern invention, and basically a cauldron for the production of neurosis."

"Ego is like a cyst which will begin to grow in you, whether you are male or female, unless you take a psychedelic. The psychedelic will dissolve this cyst. The cyst is in your personality. It's a tumor. It shouldn't be there. We do need to have egos, little egos."

"What is impressionism but LSD thirty minutes in?"

"I don't think there's much chance of survival without a major effort to reestablish archaic styles and institutions."

"Hallucinogens are intra-species pheromones of some sort. They carry information across species lines."

"History is the consequence of an animal species losing its connection to the Gaian mind."

"I don't think we can fix ourselves through rhetoric. If we could fix ourselves through rhetoric then Buddha and Christ would have done the job."

"The private issue, certainly for me and probably for most of you, [is that] it's easy to take psychedelics the first time because you don't know what you're getting into. Ever after that you have to really have a little chat with yourself, and there are barriers to overcome."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book

The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

"I think the great overlooked factor in any model of human evolution, and indeed of evolutionary models of many other species, is we have not given enough emphases to diet."

"What seems to me to be one of the most centrally interesting questions to be asked of this world, and that is: What is human consciousness? Where did it come from? And why does it exist at all?"

"It still is a very challenging thing to dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness, and abandon yourself to the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in."

"I think this is a frightening thing to contemplate, but the earliest cities, I will argue, were pens for human beings. That's what a city is. They're a pen for human beings."

"What is the plant hallucinogen experience in all times and all places for all people? I don't know if you can be that general, but it's important to try. What it is, is it's an experience of boundary dissolution. It's an experience of having categories obliterated, of having previously defined boundaries and differences eliminated."

"History is a progressive de-humanizing of the human experience."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book,

The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1.

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

"Psychedelics are like any other social phenomenon. There are a lot of wannabes. There are a lot of people who are along for the ride."

"I want to talk about what to my mind is the quintessential hallucinogen, and consequentially the quintessential spiritual and magical tool of this dimension. And that is DMT, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine."

"A long, long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret. I won't keep it. I'm against secrets. I'm against hierarchies, lineages. All assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I am a true anarchist, first and foremost."

"The psychedelic mantra: I've done it this time!"

"And yet, the DMT thing, it's like and avalanche of orgasmic beauty, but a certain kind of beauty. The only words that I can find for the kind of beauty that it is are bizarre, alien, outlandish, freaky, and at the very edge of what the human mind seems to be able to hold."

"What we are about to discover is probably the least likely thing any of us expected out of our dilemma. What we're about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort."

"I never imagined that a through exploration of life's mysteries would lead to the conclusion that, in fact, this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of some sort. Our lives are gestations, and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves into what it means to be human. This is some kind of a metamorphic stage, like the pupa of a butterfly, and so this is deep water."

"I think that the human body, the human mind, these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny."

"A drug that you take and forty-eight hours later you're laying around in warm baths and refusing telephone calls is a drug you shouldn't have taken."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

 

Burner Podcast Episode 74

Interview with Lorenzo Hagerty

 

Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1.

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: April 1999

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

"The electronic media and the psychedelics work together in a peculiar way to accentuate archaic values, values which are counter to the print constellated world."

"The shaman is like a designated traveler into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people and go behind the stage machinery of cultural appearances. And has collective permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of healing."

"All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future."

"The Earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of morphogenetic order. And that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the Earth itself is growing conscious."

"Human beings are the agents of a new order of being."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book,

The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1.

https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: August 1993

In today's podcast Terence McKenna waxes eloquent about the writing of Marshall McLuhan, whose work in the 1960 was considered a revolutionary break with traditional ways of thinking about media. As Wikipedia says about McLuhan, he "was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. ... McLuhan is known for coining the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Listening to Ayahuasca:

New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety

by Rachel Harris

Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book

The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: March 10, 1996

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

"This synesthesia thing seems to be the direction in which language has to go in order to be universal. It has to be beheld, acoustical signals don't do it."

"No matter how abstract the meaning may be it ultimately is a feeling of recognition."

"If you can somehow realize that the purpose of your existence is to figure it out, and then figure it out, you will be in some sense liberated from it."

"The reason we are so controlled and abused and misused by our institutions is because we are divided from each other."

"You cannot be a public figure and a practicing alchemist."

"So if I disappear off the grid until 2005, I'll be back for the last act, I'm sure, unless, of course fate drops the cosmic safe on my head. There's always that."

"Our real glory is our imagination, and we seem to be the creature with this relationship to the imagination. It is an attractor for us into the future."

"Virtual reality is a place where the creativity, the staggering creativity, of psychedelics can actually find a home."

"What is the designing of a drug but the building of a nano-machine?"

"Belief is toxic, all belief. Don't believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt fact of immediate experience, everything beyond that is conjecture."

"In contemporary society we're always in the past and in the future, but what is real are feelings. And feelings attain a nexus only in the moment, only in the moment. So explore the edges, keep your logical razors sharp, trust nothing that you haven't verified for yourself. My faith is that the universe will take you in and share with you its meaning, and its intent, and its conclusion."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download a free copy of Lorenzo's latest book,

The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch Source: WikipediazClick to see larger image

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: August 1993

Today's podcast features the last talk that Terence McKenna gave during his August of 1993 Scholar-in-Residence program at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. His topic for the evening was the way in which artists like Bosch and poets like Yeats imagined a trans-historical future in their work. Along the way, Terence inserts his views about art history and appreciation, and tells us why he believes that their work remains important to us yet today.

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: George Greer

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2017

Today's podcast features Dr. George Greer, one of the co-founders of the Hefter Research Institute. In this Palenque Norte Lecture that he delivered at the 2017 Burning Man Festival, Dr. Greer not only covers the current state of psychedelic research, he also provides several interesting anecdotes about ways in which research participants have had their lives significantly improved through the use of psychedelic medicines.

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Hefter Research Institute

 

Abstracts of papers by Greer and Tolbert

“Subjective reports of the effects of MDMA in a clinical setting”

“The Therapeutic Use of MDMA”

“A method of conducting therapeutic sessions with MDMA”

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist

Grover Norquist delivering his 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival

PROGRAM NOTES:

Date this lecture was recorded: August 29, 2017

[NOTE: All quotations are by Grover Norquist

"The best coalitions come from the hard right and hard left. Center coalitions don't get you anything except more of the same. Each of them are part of the status quo. So you're not going to get dramatic changes there."

"What makes it enduring and work is that there's a level of trust between people who disagree, on many issues, but can agree on a series of principles."

"The secret sauce of democracy is the rule of law."

"There's a threat of violence behind any law, and if there's no threat of violence then the law will be ignored."

"[Throughout] history more people have been murdered by their governments than by foreign invaders. So I kind of think fear of one's state is a rational fear in history."

Download

MP3

PCs – Right click, select option

Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option