Dive into the archives of psychedelic thought. Lorenzo Hagerty hosts essential conversations on entheogens, science, and the counterculture.
The largest collection of talks by Alan Watts — the British-American philosopher who made Eastern wisdom accessible through witty and profound teachings.
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Six-and-a-half hours of the 1989 weekend Terence McKenna shared with Amazon explorer and medicinal-plant researcher Nicole Maxwell. Sound Photosynthesis sold the full event as a seven-and-a-half-hour set (5 audio cassettes #A478-89 / 4 video cassettes #V192-89) under the title "Shamanology of the Amazon"; this collection previously held only a one-hour video excerpt of it. McKenna opens by noting "last year I was here with Riane Eisler", which places this at the Ojai Foundation the year after that 1988 weekend. Maxwell is audible throughout, trading Amazonian pharmacopoeia -- contraceptives, abortifacients, plant taxonomy -- against McKenna's overview of shamanism and the ecological crisis.
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".
