Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott PROGRAM NOTES: In today's podcast Jonathan Ott unfolds a parade of history setting out the use and prohibition of psychedelic medicines throughout the course of human history. Although this talk was originally given at a 1996 entheobotany conference, it remains as current as if it were given yesterday. After Jonathan describes human uses of psychoactive plants stretching back into prehistory, he goes on to explain how what he calls “the overdeveloped world” has used r...
Jun 29, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Guest speaker: Michael Garfield PROGRAM NOTES: Today's program features Michael Garfield who went to school for paleontology and then psychology before leaving academia to embark on a decade-long "trans-disciplinary" independent study of the intersections between art, science, and philosophy. As an experimental acoustic-electronic guitarist-singer-songwriter, as a scientific illustrator turned performance painter, and as a writer and speaker, Michael's work is an attempt to help articulate a vis...
Jun 22, 2016•1 hr 7 min
Guest speakers: Shonagh Home and Sally PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and a cannabis grower in the State of Washington, where both medical and recreational cannabis are now legal. Among other things, we learn how cannabis can be grown without the use of any chemicals to keep the pests away, thus providing their customers with truly healthy medicine. We also learn about an organization named Certified Natural Cannabis, which is uniting farms that use c...
Jun 14, 2016•1 hr 10 min
Guest speaker: Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a talk given by Sasha Shulgin in 1996. In many ways this is a perfect Shulgin talk for a podcast because he didn't use any photos or the chalkboard to assist in his presentation. This talk is also one of Sasha's best presentations as for not just the chemistry but also for some of the personal stories he tells. Also, he clarifies the Urban Legend about LSD occurring in nature. “I suddenly realized the fatuousness of people sayi...
Jun 06, 2016•1 hr 25 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today we pick up on the third section of a Terence McKenna workshop that was held in December of 1989. An interesting feature of this session is a report that Terence asked one of his friends to give about the state of ayahuasca use in Amazonian Peru. As one of the earliest accounts of what a Westerner will encounter when searching for an ayahuasca experience, we get to hear what it was like in the jungle before the plague of ayahuasca tourism took h...
May 30, 2016•1 hr 30 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I tend to think that there is a kind of unconscious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture but of humanism itself is in Africa.” “[The psychedelic experience] is about what is real, not what is culturally sanctioned.” “The ego lives by constraint. It draws lines, and this drawing of lines is a denial of the primary truth of the world, which is that it is seamless and o...
May 23, 2016•1 hr 18 min
Guest speaker: Marian Goodell PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a Palenque Norte Lecture given at the 2015 Burning Man Festival by Marian Goodall who is Burning Man's Chief Engagement Officer (CEO). This was actually a focused Q&A session during which many of the community's most pressing issues were discussed. Even if you aren't interesting in attending Burning Man yourself, this discussion may hold some important answers if you are considering becoming involved in producing large eve...
May 16, 2016•1 hr 16 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “History is, in fact, the quenching and the withdrawal of this relationship of symbiosis to the rest of nature.” “Hedonists are people who don't take hallucinogens, to my mind, because it largely is very hard work. I mean it isn't always hard work, but as a life, as a path, it's extremely hard work.” “The issue of psychedelics, of plant transformation, of losing the ego, is the most closely held facet of...
May 10, 2016•1 hr 18 min
Guest speaker: Neşe Devenot Help Neşe complete her Psychedelic Humanities Research PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features three short talks by Neşe Devenot who is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches classes on psychedelics and literature. Nese received her PhD in 2015 in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the study of psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (wh...
May 02, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, & Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a retrospective of some of the highlights of podcasts with several of the elders who are no longer with us. These clips include talks by Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, and Sasha Shulgin. Interspersed with these clips Lorenzo tells a few stories of his own. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option ...
Apr 25, 2016•1 hr 52 min
Guest speaker: Neal Goldsmith PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Neal Goldsmith.] “Personality is a strategy devised by a two year old.” “Parenting is like that. You don't want to be directing your child. You want to be more like a forest ranger than a farmer, making sure that if lightening strikes and there's fires you go put it out. But other than than you let the bramble grow, beautifully, and wholly, and healthfully.” “If you have a psychedelic experience, then your meditation pract...
Apr 18, 2016•54 min
Guest speakers: Nathan Ehrlich & Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today the first feature is a story by Nathan Ehrlich which first appeared on the Israel Story Podcast this past January. This is a story of healing, both physically and psychologically by two men from different countries who discovered the healing properties of psychedelic medicines. We then close with a short rap by Terence McKenna who explains what he believes to be the best method for smoking NN-DMT. Download MP3 PCs – Right ...
Apr 11, 2016•56 min
Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a lengthy reading by Bernardo Kastrup from his new book, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief. This reading comes from Part 3 of the book, which is a fictional account of a young scientist who participated in a research program that is investigating the nature of reality through the use of psychedelic medicines and brain scans during the experience. During the course of the experiments this fictional scien...
Apr 04, 2016•1 hr 21 min
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a series of raps by Bruce Damer who is backed up by the Faye Steen House Band led by: Joe Oppenheimer on loops, FX, and acoustic, with Darcy Davis on keys, and Aengus Donald on percussion. The recording was made in Melbourne, Australia in 2015. This is followed by Lorenzo giving a few of his thoughts about the state of the world today and a way in which alchemy may be applied to heal it. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select opt...
Mar 28, 2016•1 hr
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Trust your perceptions. Trust your intuition. And then accept the consequences, because this is what existential validity must be.” “Must it not be that humanity is the yeast of of the Gaian alchemical rarefaction, and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation.” “Speciation of a single plant can occupy fifty or sixty thousand years. It never happens more quickly than th...
Mar 22, 2016•1 hr 11 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “What we would call manic depression, despair, and that chaotic, near psychotic state of unbounded hopelessness is the precondition then for the alchemical work.” “An angel chartered modern science. It's the alchemical angel, which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and people toward an unimaginable conclusion.” “The alchemical spirit lives on. It never really died...
Mar 17, 2016•1 hr 11 min
Guest speakers: Rose Kiseato & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Rose Kiseato Shepherd Davis, who is a Navajo-Hopi water woman of the Native American Church of North America. She is from the tobacco clan and is a 5th generation grandmother in her maternal line. Rose is an accomplished artisan bead-worker who teaches classes on this ancient craft. She is recognized both by her tribe and by the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, an...
Mar 15, 2016•1 hr 20 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “Modern philosophy is a desert for my money, and who cares about it? Nobody cares about it. Who's living their life according to the conceptions of modern philosophy, nobody as far as I can see.” “We live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.” “We're like people who don't remember who we are or where we came from. And we just wander mumbling through the streets of our ci...
Mar 07, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “A child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it.” “Buddhism would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a context for Buddhist language to take root.” “Modernity has fixed our minds in the categories of Cartesian rationalism.” “The imagination is central to the alchemical opus, because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imaginat...
Feb 29, 2016•1 hr 32 min
Guest speakers: Veronica Hernandez & Shonagh Home PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation between Veronica Hernandez and Shonagh Home. Veronica Hernandez, is a clinical psychologist and shamanic practitioner. Born in Peru, since 2006 she has been trained on shamanic facilitation. She received her clinical training at the Institute of Rational-Emotive Therapy, New York, under the supervision of Dr. Albert Ellis. She was assistant professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano He...
Feb 22, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Guest speaker: Annie Oak PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the Burning Man Festival. In her talk, Annie takes us on a tour of the various factors involved in organizing events such as festivals, dance parties, and theme camps. As a co-founder of the Woman's Visionary Congress, now in its 10th year, and as a co-founder of a major theme camp at Burning Man, not to mention numerous other events that Annie has helped organize. Also, in this...
Feb 15, 2016•1 hr 8 min
Guest speaker: Emanuel Sferios PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features a conversation that Lorenzo had with Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe and the producer of “MDMA The Movie”. In addition to discussing the movie that Emanuel is producing their conversation included a discussion of the way young people now perceive the differences between MDMA, Ecstasy, and Molly. Also their discussion touched on the current medical uses of MDMA and ways in which parents can talk with their children a...
Feb 03, 2016•59 min
Guest speaker: Rick Doblin PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.] “We need to move to a post-prohibition world.” “The spiritual/mystical experience has profound implications of the kind that we need now.” “Not in our studies only, but world wide there have now been over 1,100 people who have taken pure MDMA in research since the early '90s. And there's never been anybody who overheated and died. . . . We've never had anybody overheat. We've never had anybody have a heart attac...
Jan 26, 2016•1 hr 36 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features the final section of a Terence McKenna workshop that took place in February 1991. In addition to more stories about the machine-elves and DMT, Terence covers evolution, the imagination, virtual reality, shamanism, and falling in love. The title of today's podcast comes from my favorite quote by McKenna: “Apparently, if you pursue the weird, it won't take you very long before you get to [psychedelics]. This is the main vein of...
Jan 18, 2016•1 hr 29 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast begins with Terence talking about the elephant in the ayahuasca room: purging, puking, barfing, vomiting or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately he moves on and speculates that the human break with nature came about due to a change in the climate. And he ends this part of the workshop talking about the dire state of affairs on the planet on that February day in 1991 as the First Gulf War was raging. Two of my favorite quotes from...
Jan 11, 2016•1 hr 23 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “I don't think you are going to spend very long involved with these things at a deep level without scaring your socks off eventually. One of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle with beginners. And then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans.” “You see, I just don't feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on you...
Jan 04, 2016•1 hr 27 min
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna PROGRAM NOTES: [NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.] “The great emphasis for the fall into history is this broken connection with this Mind in nature.” “We can move no faster than the envelope of language which we generate to describe our journey.” “We need to take the engineering of our language seriously.” “The poverty of our language, that it's such a low-grade signal, that we're using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and co...
Dec 28, 2015•1 hr 29 min
Guest speaker: Grover Norquist PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast comes in two parts. We begin with the Palenque Norte Lecture that Grover Norquist gave at the 2015 Burning Man Festival. This talk was actually in the form of a question and answer session in which the somewhat liberal audience found several areas in which they held goals in common with the more conservative Mr. Norquist. Following that are two clips dealing with the government's persecution of Ross Ulbrich, who is now a political pri...
Dec 22, 2015•1 hr 17 min
Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Danny Sugarman, & Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: Today's podcast features talks by Dr. Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and Danny Sugarman, as well as audio from the trailer for DeepWebTheMovie.com. This is a podcast that you may want to listen to if you value your right to freely use the Internet, among other things. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Dec 14, 2015•1 hr 17 min
Guest speaker: Alicia Danforth PROGRAM NOTES: Today we feature the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Alicia Danforth. In her talk, plus a question and answer session, Alicia describes some of the difficulties that a professional woman researcher may encounter in the area of sexism at work. She also discusses what has been called “the 800 pound gorilla in the room”, the psychedelic jerk. At the end of this podcast, Lorenzo explains why he raised the price of the paperback copy of his novel to $3...
Dec 07, 2015•1 hr 1 min
