
Psychedelic Salon
Quotes, comments, and audio files from Lorenzo's podcasts
Latest episodes

Mar 17, 2019 • 1h 13min
Podcast 594 – “The Edge Runner” Part 1
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The world that we are living in is not at all as the linguistic structures we have inherited would have us have it. We are actually living inside some kind of artificial construction which is potentially permeable by human understanding but to date has not been.”
“The unspeakable is the ground of language.”
“History is the story of the cancerous and unchecked growth of the ego.”
“If our god is omnipotent, omniscient, never wrong always right, utterly unforgiving, this is a jerk! Who needs this? We don’t need this. Our image of deity is pathological. Our image of deity is the image of the cancerously untamed ego.”
“Psychedelics are not an ideology. Psychedelics are an experience.”
“What the shamans say is truer than anything we can say about them.”
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Mar 11, 2019 • 1h 56min
Salon2 056 – “The Harvard Psychedelic Club”
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Guest speaker: Gunther Weil
Gunther Weil
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today's podcast from our Psychedelic Salon 2.0 track features some epic stories from a psychonaut who’s seen it all. His name is Gunther Weil.
Gunther escaped the Holocaust, worked with Tim Leary on the LSD Concord Prison Experiment, worked on Aerosmith’s first album, recieved a Ph.D. from Harvard, and hung out with Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, and Ram Dass.
These are his tales of adventure, curiosity, betrayal, and triumph. Gunther Weil shares with us a life of stories and adventures from political uprisings, government drug experiments, and his first-hand view from the start of a cultural revolution.
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Mar 6, 2019 • 1h 27min
Podcast 593 – “Understanding the Chaos at History’s End” – Part 5
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.
Today we continue with the June 1989 Terence McKenna workshop session in which he sets out his ideas about history and time in his Timewave hypothesis. And while we now know that this idea of his will never actually become an actual theory, as it is sometimes said to be, nonetheless, he points out several instances in which history appears to be following a fractal pattern. As far as I know, this particular Timewave lecture hasn't been released on the Net before.
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Videos of the Psycherence 2018 Conference in Estonia
https://videolevels.com/psycherence
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Mar 6, 2019 • 57min
Podcast 592 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 4
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"Culture is a mirror of the mind."
"What are we when we begin to take off our cultural clothing? What kind of world will be build in the pure imagination?"
"History is a kind of psychedelic trip. That's what it is. It's the big trip."
"This transcendental object probably is more like a being than an object. I just call it a transcendental object to keep those issues out of it when we try to think of it as an at tractor. No, it's a mind. It's an organizing entelechy. It is THE mind. It's probably the mind that you call your mind."
"When you go into these high dose places you are seeing a local map of this thing toward which all creation moves, at least this is my take on it."
"It's just cognitive activity. It's all that the psychedelic experience is. It's accelerated cognitive activity. ... I think that the glory of human beings is cognition."
"What psychedelics lead to is appropriate activity. Appropriate activity is the way to be straight with the psychedelic vision."
"I regard all organized religion as a plot against free thought."
"The thing which pervades the psychedelic experience is this sense of weird, sense of closeness to a bizarre secret of some sort. I don't even claim that the psychedelic experience should be put on the spectrum of spiritual experience, somewhere between moral rectitude and Buddha."
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The Imagine Convergence on Oracs Island
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Feb 18, 2019 • 1h 14min
Podcast 591 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 3
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Minoan Crete
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"Addiction to natural substances, with the exception of tobacco, is something you really have to work at."
"There is something really insidious about synthetic drugs, about concentrating what is a vegetable essence, and very diffuse. Opium was no problem until morphine came along."
"One of the things I think we have to disabuse ourselves of is that science knows anything about these things. The human studies were never done."
"You may have the notion that we are a minority that feels this is important and there is a majority that feels that it's unimportant. That isn't the case. We are a minority who feels this is important, and there is a majority that knows nothing about it whatsoever, has no data, and no realization of what it is."
"People such as ourselves, we are the cutting edge of neuro-psychopharmacology, because the content is the frontier, and these scientists know very little about it."
"The official version of what can happen with these hallucinogens is very limited. There was never stress on content. The individual content of the psychedelic trip was treated like the ravings of a psychotic. In other words, it was never examined from the point of view that this person might be a reliable witness."
"What does it mean that the most powerful of all hallucinogens occurs naturally in the human brain? What does it mean that the most powerful of all natural hallucinogens is the shortest acting?"
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The Lands of the Saracen by Bayard Taylor
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10924
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Feb 10, 2019 • 1h 35min
Podcast 590 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 2
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Mushroom ManLogo for the Palenque Norte LecturesPhoto by Lorenzo
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.
Today we continue with a workshop that Terence McKenna led at the Esalen Institute in June of 1989. Although he begins with an exploration of ideas surrounding the use of sound during psychedelic experiences, he also tells some great stories, including one of my favorites. I'd only heard it once before, and for me it's the funniest story I've heard him tell, and this is a new version that you won't want to miss. Additionally, this may be one of the earliest talks in which Terence addressed the issue of global climate change. Also, for the first time I remember hearing it, Terence talks about his ideas concerning the concept of exo-pheromones.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"Language is sound that stimulates ideas."
"Interesting, the world wide reliance on sustained tone in spiritual exploration."
"The ego is a neurotic response to separateness, and you cannot maintain your ego in the presence of strong hallucinogenic plant patterns of usage."
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Feb 4, 2019 • 1h 4min
Podcast 589 – “Understanding Chaos at History’s End” – Part 1
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Finn and Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today marks the official beginning of the 3.0 track of the Psychedelic Salon. The main difference between Salon 3.0 and the earlier podcasts from the salon is that this 3.0 track on Patreon.com will be where you will hear the programs three months before they appear on the "classic salon" feeds. So to mark this new beginning I am playing a recording of a Terence McKenna weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute that, as far as I know, has never been published before.
Date this lecture was recorded: June 23, 1989.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"What is history? What is it that is acting on us to propel us, in such a short time, out of the matrix of organic nature and into a matrix of our own creation, the world of culture, and epigenetic coding systems, and the human imagination as created by the modality of language. What is it that is pushing us in this direction?"
"We fell into history. We became neurotic. We are, in a sense, the children of a dysfunctional relationship that we have forgotten all about."
"I've had to come to term with the fact that bad drugs have been a major part of the human story."
"The psychedelics are not ancillary. They're not peripheral. They're not secondary. They are the way to propel ourselves into these higher dimensional phase spaces. Eventually we will drag our computers with us."
"What we see in our visions is not hallucinations. What we see in our visions is the higher truth."
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Jan 27, 2019 • 1h 22min
Salon2 055 – “Matt Pallamary Live in the Psychedelic Salon”
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Guest speaker: Matt Pallamary
Matt Pallamary delivering his 2007 Palenque Norte Lecture
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: January 21, 2019
Today's podcast features a recording from a recent live session of the Psychedelic Salon in which writer and ayahuasca researcher Matt Pallamary regaled us with his tales of jungle adventures.
Matt Pallamary's Website
n0thing Gets Swatted
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Jan 21, 2019 • 39min
Salon2 054 – “Lorenzo at Entheo Medicine”
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Guest speaker: Lorenzo
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: January 19, 2019
Today's podcast is part of a presentation that I made at a recent Entheo Medicine event in Santa Barbara, California. The title of my little talk was "Psychedelic Renaissance – Creating Your Own Community", and the program notes said that I would talk about how I came out of the "psychedelic closet" and began podcasting episodes of the Psychedelic Salon.
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About Entheo Medicine
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Jan 14, 2019 • 13min
PREVIEW of Podcast 597
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Date this lecture was recorded: March 19, 1998.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"Repeated exposure to cannabis socializes it dramatically, and it becomes a much more manageable thing."
"I can imagine the culture crisis getting so crazy that the people at the top will have to turn to their cohorts and say, "Call in McKenna and his friends."
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