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Comment by lacrimacida | Hacker News Reader

I also love Terrence McKenna and though I don’t take everything he says seriously, he was a fascinating speaker.

What are the best sources for recordings of Watts and McKenna? I've found some of Watts, but somebody mixed in new age music and did other edits that I thought made things worse.

Waking Up (Sam Harris’s meditation app) has a huuuuge, high quality catalog of Watts. I am under the vague impression that the catalog was recently released/public domain’d so you may be able to find it elsewhere? But worst case, Waking Up is an excellent resource for this stuff anyway.

Shamatha (Tranquility) and Vipassana (Insight) are effectively free practices (as in beer) (and as in Nibbana!).

For the most part all you need to be able to do is sit on the floor. Well, that and lead a moral (Sila) life.

People charging for 'mindfulness' apps and products really grind my gears!

Dharma Seed [0] is a website (and there are iOS/Android apps) containing hundreds of free to access Dhamma talks.

[0] https://dharmaseed.org/

Meh, if you want it for free you can email them and they’ll give it to you for free. I’m more than happy to pay for a very very high quality experience delivering very very high quality content to me.

“People charging for biology textbooks really grinds my gears, you can just walk outside and look at trees or read free content online!”

Indeed, you sure can!

Unfortunately Terrence McKenna (or fortunately depending on how you look at things) doesn't seem to have retained the same popularity.

He does still have some decent "pithy one liners" but if I remember right, he didn't stay in a philosophical lane and was known to indulge in pop culture conspiracies and his own pet theories (based on excruciatingly little but conjecture and didn't really respond to criticism of it)

I've honestly started to consider it a little bit unbecoming to compare people to McKenna. He's a major contributor to a romantic and oversimplified/inaccurate understanding of things like shamanhood and the roles drugs played in ancient societies, so it's probably a good thing people don't talk about him like they used to.

Almost kind of the antithesis to Watts in my mind, but seemingly from the same side of the fence: McKenna was all about what he thought, and Watts never gave me the impression he even had an agenda for me to believe in, rather wanting to help people explore the world he'd discovered, he labored to find the words to depict, not to convince.

Yeah, they don’t compare in that sense. But I still find McKenna very charming to listen to, and am sometimes wowed to what cooky ideas he may have reached in his lectures. The man has a fascinating oratory skill. Despite his wild speculations he has a very interesting depiction of his own ideas and his overarching theme is one of union with the nature which no matter how reached at it’s a positive thing IMO.

Watts: A Google Drive link found on a Reddit post? https://old.reddit.com/r/AlanWatts/comments/tb2k3s/where_to_...

McKenna, possibly a YouTube downloader and a playlist like https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL83BE388A2A15A7E1 - some are short, but many are hour or two long full lectures. and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyhHqyVEk0F-k42F1nAh6...

(I didn't realise how many lectures he did; many of those I haven't heard, and many of the ones I have heard aren't mentioned in those playlists).

(For the unwary, "Alan Watt", Scottish conspiracy theorist https://archive.org/details/The_Alan_Watt_Collection is somebody else).

Excerpts from his lectures can also be heard in the game Everything. Compared to some of the other sources from commenters here, Everything's collection is much smaller.

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