Scientific researchers Bruce Damer and Charlie Grob discuss a wide range of topics in this podcast. They delve into the origins of life, virtual worlds, and avatars. They also explore the personal and professional journey of rewriting the rules about the origin of life. The speakers share their experiences communicating with ethereal entities and the significance of nonverbal knowing. They highlight the importance of community and mentorship, as well as their personal journeys into psychedelic research. Additionally, they discuss their experiences with regulatory agencies and express optimism for more open-mindedness in the younger generation.

Terence McKenna, a psychedelic philosopher and speaker, talks about the mind-altering effects of DMT, the significance of community in building a caring society, and the potential of communicating with ancestors in the future. He also discusses the role of hallucinogens in evolution and the need for challenging doses to truly experience the benefits. McKenna emphasizes that true spirituality is rooted in concrete actions of compassion rather than drug use.

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

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

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

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

Alan Watts discusses interesting topics such as the concept of nirvana and its relationship to ordinary life, the significance of accepting mortality, the illusion of the separate self, and the importance of the void in Buddhism. The podcast also explores the resistance to death in Western society and the connection between language doubling and anxiety.

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

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

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