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

Mar 9, 2010 • 1h 21min
Podcast 218 – “The Truth About Cannabis”
Guest speaker: Claudia Little, BSN, MPH
PROGRAM NOTES:
Below you will find the list of links to Web sites that Claudia Little refers to in her presentation about the safety, benefits, and importance of the cannabis plant.
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Marijuana – Why it Works
Supporting Studies and Articles
Growing Acknowledgments from Health Organizations regarding the Medical Benefits of Cannabis
Health Organization Endorsements
AMA Calls for Scientific Review of Marijuana’s Prohibitive Status
How Cannabis Works
The Brain’s Own Marijuana (Get link to complete article from Scientific American at this link)
Cannabis and the Brain
Marijuana Compounds Possess Synergistic Anti-Cancer Effects, Study Says
Marijuana Extracts Relieve Intractable Cancer Pain Better than THC, Study Says
Books on Specific Conditions
Aging, Arthritis, Cancer, Chronic Pain, Gastrointestinal Disorders, HIV/AIDS,
Movement Disorders, Multiple Sclerosis (Americans for Safe Access)
Comprehensive Reviews of Recent Research
Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids
Some of the Most Significant Research Results of 2009
‘Gold Standard’ Studies show that Inhaled marijuana Is Medically Safe and Effective
(CA Center for Medical Cannabis Research)
Feds’ Top Pot Researcher Says Marijuana Should be Legal
(UCLA’s Taskin/Lung Cancer Risk)
If Pot Prevented Cancer You Would Have Heard About It, Right?
(Boston University re: Head/Neck CA)
Smoke Has Contrasting Effects On Lung Function Compared to Tobacco, Study Says
Moderate Marijuana Use Not Associated with Altered Cognitive Shills, Study Says
Opposite Relationships Between Cannabis Use and Neurocognitive functioning
in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia
Review: Supposed Marijuana and Schizophrenia Link "Overstated"
Weeding Through the Hype: Interpreting the Latest Warnings About Pot and Schizophrenia
THC Shown to Help Patients with Schizophrenia
Safety of Cannabis
Addictive Properties of Popular Drugs
Conant vs Walters (Safety for your MD)
Marijuana compounds may offset alcohol-induced toxicity, study says
Marijuana Users Substitute Pot in Place of More Dangerous Substances, Study Says
Marijuana Ingredient Blocks Opiate Dependence, Study Says
Federal Agency in Charge of Marijuana Research Admits Stifling Studies on Medicinal Cannabis
Organizations to Join:
Drug Policy Alliance
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
Americans for Safe Access
Marijuana Policy Project
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Extras
2009: The Year in Review NORML’s top 10 Events that Shaped Marijuana Policy
Annual Marijuana Arrests in the US
Top 10 Cannabis Studies the Government Wished it had Never Funded
Ashland Alternative Health, LLC
The Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP) is a state registry program within the Public Health Division, Oregon Department of Human Services.
Ashland Alternative Health’s team of physicians and professional staff will successfully guide you through the OMMP process of acquiring an Oregon Medical Marijuana Card.
Our mission is to be the foremost medical marijuana advocate for patients in the state of Oregon by providing a clinic that sets the gold standard in professional, compassionate and private care while upholding the guidelines of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program.
Please call us at 541-488-2202 for more information.
Vaporizer Information

Mar 5, 2010 • 1h 26min
Podcast 217 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 3
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"The UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place. I mean it’s like a magnet for screwballs." [Terence then went on, at great length, to describe his own encounter with a UFO . . . go figure .]
"I’ve seen things that violated the laws of physics. I believe the laws of physics can be violated. I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe."
"My technique, which I recommend to you, is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite. Therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom, and freedom is the dearest thing we’ve got."
"Probe the edges."
"Psychedelics work. If you think that I’m bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness and then we’ll talk. That’s the sine qua non. It’ll work, on demand. I’m not saying, ‘And wait forty years, or purify yourself, or get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It’ll work. It’ll blow your mind to shreds. It’s real."
"What I’ve decided is that the [DMT] experience is an archetype. It’s the archetype of the circus."
"I think where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time. Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen."
"The dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else."
"Fairies respond to riddlery. This has to do with this thing about language. And the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication, faries, and language suggests that here we might have a restrictive gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns."
"As long as we pursue the destruction of the Earth, and the elaboration of materialist ideology, and the suppression of psychedelic states, and the suppression of the feminine we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology."
"The apocalypse is no longer a rumor. It has arrived in many parts of the world."
"Do what you think is right. Think about what you think is right, and once you’ve thought about it then do it!"
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Mar 1, 2010 • 1h 30min
Podcast 216 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 2
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here."
"A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate."
"It’s more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we’re not using. They [the machine elves] want us to speak in colored lights."
"I think that the subtext of the governments’ fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run. And I think this is true of any society. It isn’t an American phenomenon. It’s that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hassidic Rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises. And you get millions of people questioning the first premises, and then the powers that be become very nervous."
"Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state."
"This is a heresy for sure, I’m not that fond of LSD. I think it’s a very sloppy drug."
"It’s the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala."
"We have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present. The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future."
"History is not a random walk. It’s not a series of undirected, random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved."
"The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the New Age."
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More Terence McKenna Audio
DMT Nexus
Index of /audio/McKenna

Feb 20, 2010 • 1h 42min
Podcast 215 – McKenna “Under the Teaching Tree” Part 1
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"The surface of things is not where attention should rest."
"I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world."
"We’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu."
"I came to feel, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it [DMT] is secret. It is not a secret. It is THE secret. There is a secret, and this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is. It’s that the way the world is, is a way that you can’t think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity."
"You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told."
"Without this [the smoked DMT experience] in the picture, half the world is missing."
"What we have discovered in DMT is, literally, a chemical doorway to the bardo."
"One thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure, is to convince you that what’s real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what’s real."
"The biological object is made of time itself as much as it’s made of space and matter."
"I’ve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul."
"The Twentieth Century is analogous to the birth canal of human history."
"What’s interesting about DMT is that it occurs naturally in the human brain. We all make it all the time. And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all. This is a human metabolite that you’re getting a tremendous of, but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, bio synthetic pathways, that can deal with it."
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Feb 12, 2010 • 1h 9min
Podcast 214 – “Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 1
Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
"For the last four or five thousand years, freedom and intelligence and individualism have been moving in an unbroken chain from East to West. So that here on the banks of the Pacific Ocean we obviously have assembled the most advanced nervous systems on the planet."
"We all live within the reality bubble that our nervous system projects."
"Neurology was the real revolution of the Sixties."
"Your theory of evolution determines, really, what kind of a life you’re gonna lead."
"The old theory, by old I mean the one they’re still teaching in your colleges, says that new speciation takes tens of millions of years to create a new species. Well if that’s so let’s go back to Quaaludes. Why bother?"
"The Sixties was a genetically designed and programmed paedomorphic revolt against adult authority."
"I’m sure that most of the people who have felt alienated, I think many of the people who are put in mental hospitals, are simply people who were born with nervous systems that we call futique, as opposed to antique."
"It’s so simple, that to be in the right place you’re in the right time. Tune the place you are to the vibrations of the brain circuits that you want to activate at the time."
"Evolution never tries to change grown-ups."
"We didn’t grow from the apes. We refused to become apes."
"I urge you, at all costs, to avoid terminal adulthood."
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Feb 8, 2010 • 1h 22min
Podcast 213 – “The Alchemy of LSD”
Guest speaker: Alan Watts
Alan Watts' son sent the following message requesting that his father's talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon ... bye bye Alan!
Mark Watts Said,
Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out.
Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive.
PROGRAM NOTES:
If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege. ... Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this?
... although, if you Google "alan watts mp3 torrent" you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material.
Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. ... So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to.
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.]
"So we have to think again and try and find out, think deeply, what is fundamentally taboo in this culture and perhaps in other cultures as well. What information, in other words, would really let the cat out of the bag and give away the show?"
"But you see, the trouble about deep secrets is they can’t be repressed indefinitely."
"And we don’t even think that we had anything personally to do with the fact that our fathers once had an evil gleam in their eyes, but that evil gleam was you … coming on."
“And so underneath the opposition, or the polarity, between self and other or between any other pair of opposites you can think of there is something in common.”
“This is the description of anxiety: Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other … forever."
"So one of the problems of the various chemicals which can change the human mind in certain ways so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together is that they do rather give the show away. And people who take these chemicals and see through the human game cannot be trusted."
"What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you do."
"When you are told, from childhood, that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily you remain permanently mixed-up."
"You can’t have pleasure in life without skill, but it isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill."
"It’s very bad form if an actor always acts the same way. That’s what’s called a Star, as distinct from an actor. A real actor can become anything."
"LSD is simply an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope, except this one’s inside you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge, you can use a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So in the same way, according to your capacity and your knowledge you can use an interior instrument to your advantage … or just for kicks!"
"The thing that we’ve learned from history is nobody ever learns from history."
"Any law which in a way tries to enforce by the power of the state its private morals, or your own business in looking after your own nervous system, is in a fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization."
"The rule for all terrors is head straight into them. … Whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it, and it will disappear."
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The Soft Pack
on MySpace
iTunes
Band Website
Spirit Plants Radio on the air 24/7

Feb 4, 2010 • 1h 7min
Podcast 212 – “The Genesis Generation”
Guest speaker: Lorenzo
NOTE: This chapter was revised for the paperback edition that was released in February 2015. Please see the Kindle edition for the current version of this chapter.
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Lorenzo.]
"Forget getting a permanent job. Forget careers and the quest for financial stability. They are all false gods, sent to you by the Capitalist elite on Wall Street, whose primary goal is to trap you into a life of servitude."
“You still haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” began Shadow. “It should behoove us all to take the words of the Empire’s leaders at face value. They have declared what they call a War on Drugs. Of course, that’s a lie on its face, because they aren’t putting drugs into prison cages, they’re putting people in them. This is no war on drugs, William, this is a war on consciousness, as Richard Glen Boire says. It’s a war on people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo. It is a war on the very people that we are going to need to get us humans out of this mess we’ve created for ourselves. And if this is really a war, as they want to call it, then you and I, young William, you and I are their sworn enemies."
"We are at what many believe to be the most pivotal moment in human history that we know of. The arrow of unsustainable consumption, powered by the bow of credit, has reached the top of its flight. There is nowhere for that arrow to go now but down, and where it is going to land is anyone’s guess."
“A thousand years from now, humans will most likely still be walking the Earth, as we have done for over a million years already. Some of those future humans will have genetic links to us. . . . And those people of the future will be alive because they had at least one ancestor, maybe you, who was a part of what their historians will call the Genesis Generation.
"We are raising our children to become serfs!"
"Our families are detaching from the monetary system and applying their energy in different directions, like raising some of their own food, and entertaining ourselves without spending exorbitant amounts of money."
“Unlike that insidious John Galt, I am advocating that We the People go on strike and remove our minds from their System of servitude. For we are fully aware that it isn’t the handful of CEOs who are the producers. No, in fact, they are the looters now. It is time to keep our best ideas to ourselves, here in our own community."
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Jan 29, 2010 • 1h 30min
Podcast 211 – “Empowering Hope in Dark Times”
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk.
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
"What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?"
"Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances."
"We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings"
"[We] often feel like hapless atoms, running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever. We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else."
"There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it."
"Every society, in the moment of its existence, has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation (good alchemical word), a distillation of what has preceded before."
"Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball."
"What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it."
"The mushroom said to me once, ‘Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage,’ and I said, ‘What’s the payoff on that?’ And it said, ‘It shows you it loves courage because it removes obstacles.’ You make a commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up."
"It is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites."
"It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas."
"We are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery if we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer. Then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast that says, ‘May ye be alive at the end of the world.’ "
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Leo Plaw at the Temple of Visions Gallery (Los Angeles)
Fantastic Visions Exhbition Berlin
the sun blindness

Jan 22, 2010 • 1h 24min
Podcast 210 – “From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower”
Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams
PROGRAM NOTES:
Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled "From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking."
"The suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic thinking, began roughly two thousand years ago. And you get more intense socio-economic and socio-spiritual hierarchies … until you get to where we are today where there is state control of consciousness as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life." -Anna Waldstein
"They’re incredibly good at convincing us that we need a new car, and that new shirt, and the toys for our kids, or whatever, but very good at also convincing us that we don’t need this type of thing any more, this psychedelic thinking. But despite the Powers’ attempts to eradicate this, it bubbles up. … The power elite doesn’t want us to think like this because it disengages us from consumerism, it connects us with the environment, and makes us question what’s going on." -Ivan Casselman
"Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact the box itself is figmentary and illusory . And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates one cannot be truly original in thought. So once we are stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on top of the groove or the bottom of the groove, its still going down that same path." -Cameron Adams
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Jan 12, 2010 • 1h 13min
Podcast 209 – “An Audio Collage of Aldous Huxley”
Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.]
I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control."
"I mean, what I feel very strongly is that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do."
"That if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy."
"Democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time."
"Ulysses is obviously a very extraordinary book. I mean, I don’t exactly know why he wrote it, because I mean, a great deal of Ulysses seems to me to be taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written."
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The complete recordings
of the Aldous Huxley
1961 London interview
may be found at:
The Grey Lodge Occult Review