The largest collection of talks by Alan Watts — the British-American philosopher who made Eastern wisdom accessible through witty and profound teachings.
The largest collection of talks by Terence McKenna — visionary ethnobotanist and advocate for the mindful use of natural psychedelics.
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Two-part Esalen lecture from August 1992. Nominally on politics and ethos, it ranges over psychedelic ontologies, modernity, language, reason, religion and freedom in part one, then shamanism, synesthesia, paranormal phenomena, climatology, astronomy, Renaissance humanism and telepathy in part two. Released from Esalen's own archive.
McKenna lays out the Stoned Ape hypothesis -- that psilocybin ingestion shaped early human evolution by suppressing dominance hierarchies, strengthening communal bonds and sharpening hunting -- and describes Food of the Gods as a Trojan horse left on the doorstep of anthropology. Released from Esalen's archive as an EXCERPT of a longer August 1992 Esalen talk.
Wide-ranging Esalen talk in which McKenna moves from UFO belief systems and high-dose psilocybin to the emergence of artificial intelligence, borrowing Gibson's Wintermute to imagine a newly conscious machine asking what it is, and arguing that humans may be pushed toward what machines cannot do: art, imagination and the unexpected. Released from Esalen's own archive; the Terence McKenna Archives bibliography lists this as "Aliens, A.T. & Art", but Esalen's title is "Aliens, AI, and Art".
Terence McKenna performing with the band Lost At Last on Maui.
