Podcast appearances and mentions of Ralph Metzner

In this special episode, I'm sharing a conversation that originally aired on Modern Latina in Midlife with Sonia Flores, who invited me on for an open-hearted introduction to psychedelics, plant medicine, and the healing journey. This episode was created with beginners in mind. Those who are curious but maybe don't know where to start. Sonia and I explored the deep, transformational power of psychedelics. It was such a soulful, grounded conversation, and I'm honored to bring it to the Psychedelic Divas community. We talk about what psychedelics are (spoiler: not all are plant-based), how they support emotional and spiritual healing, and how to safely and intentionally approach this work, whether you're microdosing, sitting in ceremony, or simply beginning to explore. If you've been feeling the nudge to learn more, this is a safe and beautiful place to start your journey. In this episode, we talk about: ·      The difference between plant-based and synthetic psychedelics (and why both can be powerful tools) ·       What a healing journey with psychedelics actually looks like ·       Why intention + integration are everything ·       How microdosing works and how it differs from full-dose journeys ·       The importance of preparation, safe containers, and trustworthy facilitators ·       What I've learned from 40+ years in this space, including 22 years with Ralph Metzner ·       The “critical period” that opens after a journey and how to make the most of it ·       How psychedelics reconnect us with our inner knowing, intuition, and truth ·       Practical do's and don'ts for beginners, and how to tell if you're truly ready   Connect with Sonia:                                                      Website : https://www.sonia-flores.com/ Podcast: https://www.sonia-flores.com/podcast Instagram: @modernlatinainmidlife  Email:  sonia@sonia-flores.com Connect with Carla: If you're inspired by this episode and want to stay connected, follow Carla and Psychedelic Divas on social media or visit the website to get your Psychedelic Safety Guide Including What to Do When Things Go Wrong: Website:  https://psychedelicdivas.com/  Carla's Coaching: carladetchon.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/psychedelicdivas YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@carladetchon Subscribe & Review: If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review Psychedelic Divas. Your support helps amplify these important conversations and grow our community.

This episode features Cathy Coleman, Ph.D., a former dean of students at California Institute of Integral Studies, president of Kepler College, and director of IONS' EarthRise Retreat Center. We discuss her new anthology, Ralph Metzner, Explorer of Consciousness: The Life and Legacy of a Psychedelic Pioneer. Cathy was Ralph Metzner's wife of 31 years, and they worked closely together. We discuss the vast impact of Ralph Metzner's healing therapies and wisdom on colleagues, students, clients, and the fields in which he worked. Renowned as a pioneering psychologist, psychedelic elder, alchemical explorer, and shamanic teacher, the late Ralph Metzner (1936–2019) contributed profoundly to consciousness research, transpersonal psychology, and contemporary psychedelic studies across his more than 50 year career. Metzner was also an influential teacher of our host (Sam Mickey), who contributed a chapter to this wonderful volume.

In this episode, I interview a dear psychedelic sister, Cathy Coleman, who was married to my teacher, Ralph Metzner for 31 years. Cathy is the author of the recently released book, Ralph Metzner, Explorer of Consciousness—The Life and Legacy of a Psychedelic Pioneer. This book contains over 60 tributes, essays and stories from people who were deeply influenced by Ralph's work (spoiler alert, I'm one of the contributors). In addition to being Ralph's wife, Cathy earned a doctorate in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies where she also served as Director of Student Services and later Dean of Students when Ralph was Academic Dean and professor. Cathy later worked as Executive Director of EarthRise Retreat Center at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, as President of Kepler College (of Astrological Arts and Sciences) and with CIIS' Center for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research. She was co-founder, with Ralph, and is a current board member, of the Green Earth Foundation. She is also an extremely talented professional consulting astrologer, who I can personally recommend. Cathy shares personal insights into her life with Ralph, from tripping on ibogaine with Terence McKenna to intimate details surrounding Ralph's death in their home in 2019. We talk about Ralph's relationships with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and his deep commitment to integrity, forgiveness, and the expansion of consciousness, and we also talk about our personal experiences in a 12-year women's group. Learn more about Cathy's astrology work: cathycolemanastrology.com Learn more about Ralph Metzner's life and work: greenearthfound.org Get the book HERE!!!:  Ralph Metzner: Explorer of Consciousness    Connect with Carla: If you're inspired by this episode and want to stay connected, follow Carla and Psychedelic Divas on social media or visit the website to get your Psychedelic Safety Guide Including What to Do When Things Go Wrong:  •    Website: PsychedelicDivas.com •    Carla's Coaching: CarlaDetchon.com •    Instagram: @psychadelicdivas •    YouTube: @carladetchon •    Subscribe & Review: If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review Psychedelic Divas. Your support helps amplify these important conversations and grow our community.

This week, on The Conscious Consultant Hour, Sam is pleased to welcome Author, Astrologer, Dean, and Executive Director, Cathy Coleman, Ph.D.Cathy was Ralph Metzner's wife of 31 years (1988-2019). She worked at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) as Director of Student Services and later Dean of Students when Ralph was Academic Dean and professor. Cathy later worked as Executive Director of EarthRise Retreat Center at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, as President of Kepler College (of Astrological Arts and Scienes), and with CIIS' Center for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research.She was co-founder with Ralph Metzner, and is a current board member of the Green Earth Foundation. She is also a professional consulting astrologer.Her latest book, Ralph Metzner, Explorer of Consciousness: The Life and Legacy of a Psychedelic Pioneer reveals the vast impact of Ralph Metzner's healing therapies and wisdom on colleagues, students, clients, and the fields in which he worked.Tune in and share all of your questions and comments about your own psychedelic experiences on our YouTube livestream or on our Facebook page.amzn.to/4jVy7GLwww.cathycolemanastrology.comwww.greenearthfound.orgSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-conscious-consultant-hour8505/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

My dear friend, Alan Levin, interviewed me for his podcast Crossing the Boundary. I first met Alan in a Ralph Metzner circle, and we have been dear friends for decades now, sharing many, deep transformational moments together both on and off the mat. It was an honor to be featured on his podcast and to share tales of our time together with Ralph. Alan's connection with Ralph predates mine by many years, and it was fun to journey back in time together to reminisce about one of our most important teachers.   Here's what Alan wrote in the email he sent out promoting this podcast: Carla and I were in ceremonial spaces together many times with the masterful guide, Ralph Metzner. Metzner's approach to psychedelic ceremonies included what he called “divinations,” purposeful inner journeys for opening to divine guidance and healing. He would take us through mythic realms and lead us through spiritual practices, some of which aimed to heal wounded parts of ourselves and explore our relationship to the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of male and female consciousness.   Through her work as an integration coach and through her podcast series, Psychedelic Divas, Carla supports people in the preparation and integration of psychedelic journeys. She is passing along the legacy of Metzner's wisdom teachings. Her emphasis, as the podcast name makes clear, is on the feminine. While ultimately, we all need to balance the male/female within, the long suppression of the feminine in humanity calls for us to highlight that aspect of our nature. We need an affirmative action focus of our attention on HER for our personal benefit, and for the much-needed transformation of the collective human consciousness.   Learn more about Alan's work here: www.CrossingTheBoundary.org   Watch more episodes of Alan's YouTube series   Listen to more episodes of Alan's podcast   Check out Alan's useful handbook: Preparation for a Sacred Psychedelic Journey    Watch this episode on the Psychedelic Divas YouTube Channel    Get your Psychedelic Safety Guide Including What to Do When Things Go Wrong    Follow Psychedelic Divas on Instagram  

My guest for this episode of Psychedelic Divas is Valeria McCarroll, PhD, LMFT, a psychedelic educator, writer, and speaker who teaches courses on psychedelic humanities at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Having been in the field of psychedelics for over a decade, Valeria has developed and taught curriculum for the training of psychedelic guides as well as serving as a consultant in the synthesis of ethical codes and navigating rupture and repair processes.   Valeria and I first met at an underground psychedelic gathering in 2015, and that fortuitous meeting has grown into a long-term friendship involving many collaborative adventures. In this conversation, Valeria elaborates on her extensive background in psychedelic work, highlighting her experience in non-dual wisdom traditions, somatics, psychedelics, and social justice. We chat about the significance of intuition, the integration of spiritual practices with psychedelics, and the role of the divine feminine in modern psychedelic practices. We also touch on the obstacles faced by the psychedelic community, like the FDA's decision on MDMA and the challenges of harmonizing underground and above-ground practices. It includes insights on creating effective psychedelic containers and the importance of rebalancing masculine and feminine energies in healing practices.   You can learn more about Valeria and her work at ValeriaMcCarroll.com You can also follow her on Instagram.   Learn more about Ralph Metzner's work at https://www.greenearthfound.org   Download our Psychedelic Safety Guide Including What to Do When Things Go Wrong at PsychedelicDivas.com   Did you know you could watch this episode on our YouTube Channel?

I'm your host, Carla Detchon, and this episode is a little different in that it's a live talk I gave at Psychedelic First Friday, a monthly event hosted by the Santa Cruz Psychedelic Society, which is held at Green Magic Yoga. In this episode, I'm the one being interviewed by the lovely Dr. Jen Christian, who I originally met on the Clubhouse App.   Over the hour, Jen and I covered a lot of territory, and I shared some (hopefully) entertaining stories. We chatted about:   ·       My historical psychedelic perspective (historical as in dating back to the 80s LOL). ·       My experiences with Ralph Metzner and his amazing, guided group experiences. ·       All things Divine Feminine and why it's important to honor that energy. ·       What worries me about the future of psychedelic medicine. ·       How Jen and I both hold integration as the most important part of the journey, because it's the only way to make change real. ·       My favorite medicine and so much more.     ·       Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/psychedelicdivas/ ·       Website: https://psychedelicdivas.com/ ·       Be sure to check out and support our hosts for this event: https://www.greenmagicyoga.com/

This episode is sponsored by Ritual + Shelter. Are you looking for a magical place to shop and hold space? Check out Ritual+Shelter online or in Homewood, Alabama. https://www.instagram.com/ritualsheltershoppe/ https://www.pinterest.com/ritualshelter/ As this podcast goes to air, we have moved through the eclipse season, yet there is still lots of turbulence in the air. Ongoing planetary transits are continually activating cosmic energies, which in turn impact humanity. A particularly significant transit is that of Pluto, the planet associated with transformation, shadows, death, and rebirth. Pluto has been doing a little “dance” moved into Aquarius and then retrograded back into Capricorn, leading to considerable upheaval and transformation in themes related to systems, structures, business, and government. This transit encourages breaking free from traditional constraints and exploring new identities and ways of being.Expect a surge in revolutionary ideas and unconventional approaches to problems, as Pluto encourages people to challenge the status quo and seek transformative solutions. Where I am, we are moving deeper into the fall season and noticing the days are getting shorter, the light is shifting.. the Veils are thinning.  An expression used in spiritual, mystical, and even poetic contexts. It suggests that the barriers between different realms of existence— the physical and spiritual worlds—are becoming less pronounced. Opening us up to increased awareness and sensitivity to spiritual experiences, energies, or insights. it is believed that the boundary between the living and the spiritual is more permeable. It can evoke a sense of heightened intuition, connection to the unseen, or the potential for profound revelations This also speaks to a collective shift in awareness. As more people become attuned to spiritual practices and consciousness, the overall understanding of interconnectedness and spirituality may deepen. It is a time to explore your spiritual paths, embrace transformation, and connect more deeply with both yourself and the broader universe. Expanding Consciousness is the subject on my next several podcasts.. exploring ways to expand your conspicuousness, some of our formative teachers and how you can get out of your box, and allow your Soul to guide you. Are you in search of a Spiritual teacher, a mentor.. someone to guide you to create a spiritual practice that addresses your needs at this time to awaken to your inner guidance? Do you want to learn about your soul's purpose, break old energy drains and make better choices to find confidence in who you truly are?  My private mentoring programs can help you with that. Client Testimonial - Regina Crane Mednick… https://www.instagram.com/reginacranemednick/ Cathy Coleman, Ph.D., was Ralph Metzner's wife of 31 years (1988-2019). She worked at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) as Director of Student Services and later Dean of Students when Ralph was Academic Dean and professor. Cathy later worked as Executive Director of EarthRise Retreat Center at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, as President of Kepler College (of Astrological Arts and Scienes), and with CIIS' Center for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research. She was co-founder with Ralph Metzner, and is a current board member of the Green Earth Foundation. She is also a professional consulting astrologer. Green Earth Foundation Book Astrology.   Cathy Coleman compiled and edited this memorial collection of essays, known as Festschrift, which is a celebration of writings. comprises personal homages as to how Ralph impacted the contributors' lives. While some collections are strictly academic works focusing on themes of the person's life work, this compilation includes both academic and personal essays. Ralph Metzner was a visionary scholar who led a long and illustrious life.  He was considered brilliant by his colleagues and was associated with Timothy Leary, Ram Das, Allen Ginsberg,  and Albert Hoffman, the founder of LSD. He and his colleagues opened the door for so much research to follow especially in death and dying. https://terriannheiman.com/  

Air Date - 26 September 2024Fr. Sean OLaoire is co-founder and the Spiritual Director of a non-denominational community called “Companions on the Journey” based in Palo Alto and is the author of several books with pleasingly provocative titles such as Spirits in Spacesuits, Souls on Safari, “Setting God Free: Moving Beyond the Caricature We've Created in Our Own Image” and Why? What Your Life Is Telling You about Who You Are and Why You're Here” co-authored with Matthew McKay and Ralph Metzner.Fr. Sean OLaoire joins Sandie this week to discuss his journey from life as a Catholic priest in 1970s Ireland to a 14-year stint as a missionary in Kenya to a private practice as a Transpersonal Psychologist and the founding of an independent, non-hierarchical spiritual community which seeks to recognize the God/divinity within each of us and among all of us.http://spiritsinspacesuits.com/#SeanOLaoire #SandieSedgbeer #WhatIsGoingOM #InterviewsVisit the What Is Going OM show page https://omtimes.com/iom/shows/what-is-going-omConnect with Sandie Sedgbeer at https://www.sedgbeer.comSubscribe to our Newsletter https://omtimes.com/subscribe-omtimes-magazine/Connect with OMTimes on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Omtimes.Magazine/ and OMTimes Radio https://www.facebook.com/ConsciousRadiowebtv.OMTimes/Twitter: https://twitter.com/OmTimes/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/omtimes/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OMTimesTVLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2798417/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/omtimes/

Be Honest with Dr Yana Date: 07.19.24 Ep. 34 Topic: In a RELATIONSHIP with a PREDATOR: Warning Signs Guest: Robert Mitchell Bio: Robert Mitchell M.A. lives in New York City. He received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Syracuse University in 1991 where he was initiated into Theta Chi Beta, the National Religious Studies Honors Society. At Syracuse he had the good fortune of studying with Dr. David Miller, whose expertise was Carl Jung's psychological theories regarding religious experience. Robert's specific focus was the manner that the western mystery schools influenced Jung's psychology of religious experience. Jung saw Astrology and Alchemy as the esoteric religions of antiquity. Of Astrology he once said, “It contains everything that I have found in my psychology, and I've yet to find if my psychology has anything to offer her older sister.” Jung's belief that all psychological struggles were at their core, religious in nature, was an organizing principle for Robert's studies, and for his present work. During his time at Syracuse, Robert attended his first ten day Vipassana meditation retreat and began his meditation practice. It's a practice that has continued to this day. Robert received his M.A. in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 1994. While earning his Masters Degree, he acquired over two thousand hours in training as a psychotherapist, before deciding his future did not lie in conventional models of psychotherapy. At CIIS, he studied Transpersonal Models of consciousness with psychedelic pioneers Ralph Metzner, Stan Grof, and Michael Harner. At the same time, personal computers had made it possible for him to assemble astrology charts, and he found that as soon as he could print them, he could interpret them. Over the past 30 years he has worked with thousands of people from all walks of life, in several healing modalities. Originally, he used Astrology as a tool to demonstrate the identifiable structures in his client's consciousness which shaped their experiences. Over time, he has become more interested in identifying the organizing intelligence behind each person's circumstances, so that an ongoing dialogue could be created between his clients and that intelligence. Psychedelics when used properly, can be a catalyzing agency in promoting this dialogue. It is Robert's belief that a relationship with the numinous is an important aspect of the mental and physical health of each person, and the places where that experience is inhibited, is where personal difficulties, suffering and illness(both physical and emotional) emerge. His works aspires to inspire direct communication between his clients, and the invested intelligence that shapes their life. Once this relationship is established, it can continue on its own and be restorative, inspiring, practical, and directive.

Science and ParaNormal Date: 07.16.24 Ep. 38 Topic PSYCHEDELICS and DREAMS: Raw Consciousness Guest: Robert Mitchell Bio: Robert Mitchell M.A. lives in New York City. He received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Syracuse University in 1991 where he was initiated into Theta Chi Beta, the National Religious Studies Honors Society. At Syracuse he had the good fortune of studying with Dr. David Miller, whose expertise was Carl Jung's psychological theories regarding religious experience. Robert's specific focus was the manner that the western mystery schools influenced Jung's psychology of religious experience. Jung saw Astrology and Alchemy as the esoteric religions of antiquity. Of Astrology he once said, “It contains everything that I have found in my psychology, and I've yet to find if my psychology has anything to offer her older sister.” Jung's belief that all psychological struggles were at their core, religious in nature, was an organizing principle for Robert's studies, and for his present work. During his time at Syracuse, Robert attended his first ten day Vipassana meditation retreat and began his meditation practice. It's a practice that has continued to this day. Robert received his M.A. in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 1994. While earning his Masters Degree, he acquired over two thousand hours in training as a psychotherapist, before deciding his future did not lie in conventional models of psychotherapy. At CIIS, he studied Transpersonal Models of consciousness with psychedelic pioneers Ralph Metzner, Stan Grof, and Michael Harner. At the same time, personal computers had made it possible for him to assemble astrology charts, and he found that as soon as he could print them, he could interpret them. Over the past 30 years he has worked with thousands of people from all walks of life, in several healing modalities. Originally, he used Astrology as a tool to demonstrate the identifiable structures in his client's consciousness which shaped their experiences. Over time, he has become more interested in identifying the organizing intelligence behind each person's circumstances, so that an ongoing dialogue could be created between his clients and that intelligence. Psychedelics when used properly, can be a catalyzing agency in promoting this dialogue. It is Robert's belief that a relationship with the numinous is an important aspect of the mental and physical health of each person, and the places where that experience is inhibited, is where personal difficulties, suffering and illness(both physical and emotional) emerge. His works aspires to inspire direct communication between his clients, and the invested intelligence that shapes their life. Once this relationship is established, it can continue on its own and be restorative, inspiring, practical, and directive

Be Honest with Dr. Yana Date: 07.05.24 Ep. 32 Topic: WOMEN as PREDATORS: How They May Ruin Your Life Guest: Robert Mitchell, M.A. Bio: Robert Mitchell M.A. lives in New York City. He received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Syracuse University in 1991 where he was initiated into Theta Chi Beta, the National Religious Studies Honors Society. At Syracuse he had the good fortune of studying with Dr. David Miller, whose expertise was Carl Jung's psychological theories regarding religious experience. Robert's specific focus was the manner that the western mystery schools influenced Jung's psychology of religious experience. Jung saw Astrology and Alchemy as the esoteric religions of antiquity. Of Astrology he once said, “It contains everything that I have found in my psychology, and I've yet to find if my psychology has anything to offer her older sister.” Jung's belief that all psychological struggles were at their core, religious in nature, was an organizing principle for Robert's studies, and for his present work. During his time at Syracuse, Robert attended his first ten day Vipassana meditation retreat and began his meditation practice. It's a practice that has continued to this day. Robert received his M.A. in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 1994. While earning his Masters Degree, he acquired over two thousand hours in training as a psychotherapist, before deciding his future did not lie in conventional models of psychotherapy. At CIIS, he studied Transpersonal Models of consciousness with psychedelic pioneers Ralph Metzner, Stan Grof, and Michael Harner. At the same time, personal computers had made it possible for him to assemble astrology charts, and he found that as soon as he could print them, he could interpret them. Over the past 30 years he has worked with thousands of people from all walks of life, in several healing modalities. Originally, he used Astrology as a tool to demonstrate the identifiable structures in his client's consciousness which shaped their experiences. Over time, he has become more interested in identifying the organizing intelligence behind each person's circumstances, so that an ongoing dialogue could be created between his clients and that intelligence. Psychedelics when used properly, can be a catalyzing agency in promoting this dialogue. It is Robert's belief that a relationship with the numinous is an important aspect of the mental and physical health of each person, and the places where that experience is inhibited, is where personal difficulties, suffering and illness(both physical and emotional) emerge. His works aspires to inspire direct communication between his clients, and the invested intelligence that shapes their life. Once this relationship is established, it can continue on its own and be restorative, inspiring, practical, and directive.

In the last episode, I briefly described my grandfather, who was a lifelong mystic, and his reactions to the dream I'd had about my father and his ring, which was followed by its mysterious disappearance. I also mentioned another unusual incident concerning the ring that took place about twenty years later, when a friend told me about a vivid dream he'd had where my father had given him a message for me, saying that I should “remember the ring.” Now this wasn't a childhood friend, he knew nothing about my father, and had no idea if this message was going to mean anything to me at all.  As you can imagine, the fact that it had come through a completely objective third party and had happened a full twenty years after the original incident made quite an impact on me. So, that completes this part of the narrative. In summary, even though my life had been turned upside down by the sudden death of my father, which had been accompanied by two inexplicable events that had defied all logic, I put it all behind me, or so I thought. I continued with my eleventh-grade life, which basically meant that I returned to my everyday state of constant activity.           Now, as I've mentioned a few times earlier, this podcast narrative focuses on the massive evolution of consciousness that began in the early1960s, as experienced through my own individual lens, which brings us now to the middle of 1966. On a larger level, at this time two huge influences were beginning to shake American society to its core – First, the enormous evolution of the Beatles and their profound impact on popular culture, and second, the war in Vietnam.           With the Beatles, as we mentioned in the last episode, at the end of 1965, they had come out with their revolutionary album, Rubber Soul, which George Harrison said was the first music they made when they were all regularly smoking marijuana. It had enormous appeal and was having a major effect on all of popular music.           By the way, their old friend Bob Dylan was breaking some new ground of his own. In March of 1966, he brought out a radical new song that caught everyone's attention. Its free-wheeling, raucous sound was far more in the style of a New Orleans Dixieland band than of rock and roll. And in the wild chorus, with his background musicians singing along in high hysterics, he kept repeating the signature line, “Everybody must get stoned.” The song was over four and a half minutes long and got a ton of airplay on almost every pop radio station.  So, on a daily basis, with a clever twist of words and a message that was unmistakable, millions of music fans would listen to Dylan constantly urge them to try marijuana. It was quite an advertisement.           A few months later, the Beatles took it all one step further when they released their groundbreaking album, Revolver. Again, according to George Harrison, while Rubber Soul was the first album they made under the influence of marijuana, Revolver was the first one they made under the regular influence of LSD.           The easiest way to describe this remarkable collection of songs is that it was incredibly trippy. One song, “Love to You” followed the form of a classic Indian raga, complete with sitar and tablas. Nothing like it had ever been heard in the west before. Another major breakthrough was the soul-stirring “Eleanor Rigby,” which brought an entirely new level of depth to the Beatles repertoire. All the other songs on the album became instant classics as well, but one track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” deserves some special attention because it was specifically designed to boost the evolution of consciousness.           Apparently, John Lennon had been influenced by a book called, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. The book claimed that under the influence of LSD, it was possible to shed the limiting nature of constant ego identification and emerge into a higher, more enlightened level of awareness. And it gave step by step instructions on how to do it.           Supposedly, after Lennon bought the book, he took LSD and followed the instructions to a tee. Soon after that, he wrote the song, with the psychedelic nature of the music combined with the mind-expanding lyrics. He said he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting on top of a mountain, as he enlightened the public to the message of possible God realization that underlies the LSD experience. “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream,” he sang.  “It is not dying, it is not dying. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void. It is shining, it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within. It is being, it is being. That love is all and love is everyone. It is knowing, it is knowing…” Some years later, George Harrison offered an interesting perspective on the song as well as on their evolving perspective at the time. “From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought,” he said.  “Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn't always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind. “The whole point is that…the self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world. . . is just clutter.” Then he concluded, “The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So, the song is really about transcending, and about the quality of the transcendent.” Of course, this understanding about the higher nature of our consciousness was extremely advanced for its time. And whether the public understood it or not, the message was still pouring out to millions of people on a daily basis, subtly or not so subtly affecting their consciousness. The innovative album caught on in a flash and the influence of psychedelic music began to grow significantly. Over the next few months, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors all gained enormous popularity, along with many, many other groups. A new idea of a higher, more evolved state of being was clearly being born in the culture. And speaking of the culture, in a larger context, something called the “counter culture” was beginning to emerge, which not only challenged the mainstream norms and values, but also advocated for social change. Embracing ideals of peace, love, and unity, it was all vibrant, inspiring, alive, and unmistakably - young. But at the same time, another enormous, yet rather sinister influence was in the early stages of taking over the consciousness of the country as well. As you probably know, it was the ever-broadening tragedy of the war in Vietnam.  Even though no one seemed to be paying much attention to it, like an undiagnosed cancer, it just kept metastasizing. President Lyndon Johnson continued to insist that the constant build-up of US troops was the right thing to do because at all costs, we had to prevent communism from taking over the Pacific Rim. And the costs were getting pretty serious.  In 1964, we spent $53.4 billion on the effort in Vietnam. In 1965, we spent another $54.5 billion and in 1966, it escalated to 66.4 billion. That's a total of $174.4 billion. Not that anyone looked at it this way, but in those three years, instead of being used for warfare, that amount of money could have abundantly fed well over a billion people. And the human costs were building as well. The US troops which had numbered 23,300 in 1964, grew to 184,300 in 1965, then onto 385,300 by the end of 1966. And with that, the truly horrible number - how many people actually died there – kept swelling. In 1964, 216 US soldiers died. It grew to 1,928 in 1965, then onto 6,350 in 1966. Now that's just US troops. When it comes to how many of the North and South Vietnamese people died, no one really knows for sure, but an estimate of 10-1 is used as a conservative approximation. So here are the basically revolting numbers related to those three years of war - $174.43 billion just plain wasted on destruction, with a total of over 96,000 human beings needlessly killed. Even so, at that point, there still was very little opposition to the war and President Johnson stood resolute and strong. Afterall, he wasn't about to let the Pacific Rim go communist. And on a side note, he was damned if he was going to be the first US President to ever lose a war. So that brings us to 1967, which would go down in history as a truly magical year. Many volumes have been written about it and there's not a whole lot to say that hasn't already been said. On the grim side, the US involvement in Vietnam got much worse, to nobody's surprise. We went up another 100,000 troops to a deployment of a staggering 485,600 soldiers. And US deaths went up an additional five thousand to 11,363. That's 17,713 families who buried their young sons and daughters who had died trying to protect the Pacific Rim from going communist. Not that any of us even knew what that concept meant. So. the dark side had gotten darker.  But incredibly, the light side was about to get much lighter. On May 26, 1967, the Beatles released what was probably the most monumental album of their entire career, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. This major phenomenon, turned the pop world completely upside down. The album was filled with references to transcendent states of consciousness that were being now being experienced by millions of baby boomers around the world.  It featured the most psychedelic song anyone had ever heard yet, called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The music was absolutely hypnotic and the mind-altering lyrics broke radical new ground on many levels. The initials of the title happened to be LSD, but according to John Lennon, that was just a coincidence. However he always said it with a smile. George Harrison took his Indian raga theme one step further in his song, “Within You, Without You.” It was what is called a “Satsang Song” in the Indian tradition because it expresses some of the deeper truths of their ancient wisdom. “Try to realize that it's all within yourself, no one else can make you change,” he sang. “When you see beyond yourself you may find that peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you realize that we're all one and life flows on within you and without you.” Meanwhile, on the very last song of the album, “A Day in the Life,” after a mind-blowing journey through some seemingly random news of the day, to mesmerizing music played by a 40-piece orchestra John hypnotically repeats the stanza, “I'd love to turn you on.” By then, several million people knew exactly what he was talking about. Now, I still wasn't one of them yet, but that part of the story is coming up soon. Which makes this an ideal place to end this episode. As you might guess, things keep on evolving, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let's get together in the next one.

Ospite della 105° puntata di Illuminismo psichedelico - andata in scena alla Bocciofila Vanchiglietta di Torino, per il tramite della gentilissima ospitalità di Mens Ex Machina - è lo scrittore, intellettuale e buddista Gianluca Didino. Grazie a Didino abbiamo affrontato il tema del rapporto tra psichedelia occidentale e filosofie orientali, legati sin da subito a doppio filo coi temi della morte e dell'interpretazione dell'esperienza psichedelica. Siamo infatti andati dritti dritti a ripescare il grande classico "The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead", libro col con cui Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner e Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) hanno istituito un legame tra immaginari decisamente lontani, tra le cui pieghe tuttavia risuonano significative assonanze. 

This week's episode features the Earth poet, author, artist, and herbalist, Jesse “Wolf” Hardin. Thomas and Wolf sit down and share a fun-loving, spiritually charged conversation, filled with wise words and many laughs. Truly a master of all trades, Wolf is the Co-Founder of Plant Healer Magazine and the annual international Good Medicine Confluence and carries his wild-natured spirit through every realm of his work and writings. The international Good Medicine Confluence was founded by Wolf and his wife Kiva Rose in 2008, and has since been an annual celebration bringing together an impassioned group of plant healers, culture-shifters, visionaries, and all who fall between for an empowering and transformative journey like none other. Be sure to check out the links included below to learn more about The Good Medicine Confluence and see how you can experience this unique gathering with your own eyes, mind, body, and spirit. As always, we thank you for joining us on another botanical adventure, and we'll see you next week to embark on our next journey through the ever-expanding world of herbalism.

If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review.  The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom. Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we're doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it's well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!✨ Mentioned & Related Links:The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki's Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Ralph Metzner PROGRAM NOTES: RALPH METZNERImage source: Wikipedia Today we're going to dip back in time to 1988 and the recording of a talk by Ralph Metzner at the Transpersonal Vision Conference. Ralph has been mentioned by several or our past speakers, but this is my first podcast in which Ralph is the main speaker. Ralph was a German-born American psychologist, writer and researcher, who worked with Leary and Ram Das at Harvard. Sadly, Ralph died in 2019. In addition to being a psychotherapist, he was also Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Welcome to The Awaken Podcast, hosted by Natasja Pelgrom. Join us on an exploration of profound topics encompassing self-discovery, conscious leadership, and personal growth. After a brief hiatus, Natasja returns with fresh insights and a renewed sense of purpose.Through solo episodes and engaging discussions, we'll embark on a journey that blends ancestral wisdom with modern self-leadership principles. You'll uncover valuable tools to navigate life's complexities, embrace moments of stillness, and work towards manifesting your dream life.Natasja's guiding quote, "The work is rewarded by the gifts you receive in silence," sets the tone for this transformative season. In this episode, Natasja embarks on a transformative journey with, 'Rites of Passage: Navigating Change and Transformation.' Exploring the significance of these age-old rituals in both traditional societies and modern psychedelic experiences, and gaining unique insights into navigating life's transitions in today's changing world. Join us for a profound exploration of transformation on The Awaken Podcast.Enrol to our virtual course:Living in Ceremony, Embracing the Sacred in Everyday Life:https://www.stewardsofthesacred.com/living-in-ceremonyIn this episode Natasja refers to:1. Eliade, Mircea. "Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth." HarperOne, 2004.2. Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure." Aldine Transaction, 1969.3. James L. Carroll, Egyptian Craft Guild Initiations4. Richard G. Geldard, Eleusis: The Secret and Meaning of the Mysteries5. Iordanis Poulkouras, The Eleusinian Mysteries6. Byron Stuhlman, The Rites of Christian Initiation: The Evolution and Interpretation7. Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage 8. Documentary  "Rize." Directed by David LaChapelle9. Mircea Eliade "Rites and Symbols of Initiation," 10.Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces"11. Maureen Murduck "The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness," 12. . Studies like "Going to College and Unpacking Hazing" (2005) and "The Anticipation of a Severe Initiation" (2005) 13. “Frat House” 1998 documentary directed by Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland14. The Awaken Podcast: Elizabeth Bast on the four pillars of Iboga  15. Aldous Huxley's novel "Island"16. Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and Ralph Metzner "The Psychedelic Experience," Connect With Me:Website: https://natasjapelgrom.com/the-awaken-podcast/https://www.awakenthemedicinewithin.com/Instagram: @natasja_pelgrom@awaken_the_medicine_within

In this radio interview from 1977, Ram Dass explores the power of psychedelics and the importance of a guru, plus he leads a guided meditation that connects us to a place of no place.Want to be part of the discussion about this episode of Here and Now? Join the Ram Dass Fellowship virtual meetup on December 19 at 3 pm EST. Sign up for the General Fellowship group here to receive more information.Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/ramdassThis episode of Here and Now is taken from an interview with Ram Dass at the local college radio station in Santa Cruz. The interview is from October of 1977, right after Ram Dass had taken part in a conference that featured Albert Hoffmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and other luminaries of the early psychedelics scene:Ram Dass begins by sharing some of his personal history, especially as it pertains to the university audience and psychedelicsHe and the host discuss the profound experiences that can occur with psychedelics versus using them as a recreational vehicleThey explore the importance of having a guru on the spiritual path, but Ram Dass talks about how the process of awakening is ultimately a journey that must be taken aloneRam Dass leads a beautiful guided meditation that aims to connect us to a place of no place and help us see that the true guru lives within us“Any thoughts which come to your mind, let them go, breathe them out along with the out-breath. Any feelings, sensations, memories, plans… This is only going to take five minutes, you can set aside five minutes out of your busy life just to connect with a place of no place. To get behind your melodrama. Just keep the focus in the middle of the chest. Breathing in; breathing out.” – Ram Dass----In a world that often feels like it's teetering on the edge, it's not surprising that so many of us grapple with feelings of instability and overwhelm. On Tuesday, December 19th, join acclaimed Buddhist meditation teachers Sharon Salzberg and Ethan Nichtern for a free online conversation on staying grounded, available, and engaged, even when the world is on fire.Sharon and Ethan will also discuss the upcoming Dharma Moon Yearlong Buddhist Studies program and offer their insights on how studying Buddhism can help us show up more fully for ourselves and others during these challenging times.Visit dharmamoon.com/event for more info and to reserve your free spot!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

 In this, the second of two solo episodes with host Amanda Yates Garcia on "The Grail Knight", we discuss the mythologies of the Knight of Cups. Specifically, we focus on the Celtic legend of the Grail Knight Percival, his travels through the Forest of Arroy (the Forest of Adventure), and his encounter with the Fisher King. We talk about the Well Maidens, and the Wasteland. We describe the pursuit of the Grail as one of the founding myths of Western Civilization, because it describes the desecration of the sacred, but also prophesies what medicine must be found in order to  restore the world to right order. We give study questions, and also rituals you can use when themes related to the Knight of Cups show up in your reading, or your life. Join us!Enroll in our new workshop: QUEEN OF CUPS, SONG OF THE SIREN: Chants, Prayers, and Invocations. To join Amanda's MYSTERY CULT on Substack click here.Listen to Carolyn's podcast for artists and writers with Beth Pickens Mind Your Practice, and join their Homework Club. **********************************BETWEEN THE WORLDS QUEEN OF CUPS, SONG OF THE SIREN: CHANTS, PRAYERS, AND INVOCATIONS WORKSHOPIn this course, you'll learn how to call your longings into being through the timeless art of prayer, chanting, and invocation. You'll learn to create spells and rituals simply by using your voice, with the tarot as your guide. By the time you complete this course you'll be able to offer prayers at your gatherings, write chants to help you access your intuition, and devise invocations to call your intentions into the material world. Inspired by the Queen of Cups, this workshop will teach you to access your inner muse, awaken your creative spirit, use your voice as a tool for meditation, magic, and offerings from your heart to the world.FIND OUT MORE You can buy this as a one off or become a member of our coven where you get workshops, monthly tarot studio classes, and lots of other goodies included in the cost of membership.Become a Between the Worlds Weird Circle Subscriber, click here.**********************************REFERENCES FOR THIS EPISODE“The Tarot Handbook” by Angeles Arrien (an overview of Tarot and its symbolism, including Arthurian legend).“The Mythic Tarot” by Juliet Sharman Burke and Liz Greene“The Encyclopedia of Tarot” by Stuart R. Kaplan, Jean Huets, and Elizabeth Foley O'Connor - a reference book“The Quest for the Holy Grail” by Pauline Matarasso, translation of medieval texts“Grail Alchemy: Initiation into the Celtic Mystery Tradition,” by Mara Freeman“The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe,” by Ralph Metzner."Sir Perceval of Galles" by Jessie L. Weston: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/arthurian/west/west05.htm“Tarot of the Holy Light: A Continental Esoteric Tarot”, by Payne-Towler, Christine.“The Cathars: Persecuting Heretical Christians In The 13th Century” by Jack Crawford, MPhilBetween the Worlds Episode # 21 Ancestral Magic of the Ancient Celts with Mara Freeman“Crazy Heart” a film with Maggie Gyllenhall and Jeff Bridges**********************************Learn More About Your Host Amanda Yates GarciaTo join Amanda's MYSTERY CULT on Substack click here.To order Amanda's book, "Initiated: Memoir of a Witch" CLICK HERE.Amanda's InstagramTo book an appointment with Amanda go to www.oracleoflosangeles.com*********************************Original MUSIC by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs**********************************Get in touch with sponsorship inquiries for Between the Worlds at betweentheworldspodcast@gmail.com.CONTRIBUTORS:Amanda Yates Garcia (host) & Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs (producer, composer). The BTW logo collage was created by Maria Minnis (tinyparsnip.com / instagram.com/tinyparsnip ) with text designed by Leah Hayes.

The Knight of Cups is guided by visions. They're spiritual, on a quest for meaning and purpose. This person is an artist, a poet, they've been wounded, they've become wise, they're pursuing their dreams. If you get this card in a reading, it's an invitation to get curious about your inner world and and the inner world of others. In this, the first of two Amanda solo episodes on "The Grail Knight", we discuss the basic meaning of the knight, correspondences, pop culture references, and all the reasons why you don't want to date this Knight if they come up in reverse. Join us!Enroll in our new workshop: QUEEN OF CUPS, SONG OF THE SIREN: Chants, Prayers, and Invocations. To join Amanda's MYSTERY CULT on Substack click here.Listen to Carolyn's podcast for artists and writers with Beth Pickens Mind Your Practice, and join their Homework Club. **********************************BETWEEN THE WORLDS QUEEN OF CUPS, SONG OF THE SIREN: CHANTS, PRAYERS, AND INVOCATIONS WORKSHOPIn this course, you'll learn how to call your longings into being through the timeless art of prayer, chanting, and invocation. You'll learn to create spells and rituals simply by using your voice, with the tarot as your guide. By the time you complete this course you'll be able to offer prayers at your gatherings, write chants to help you access your intuition, and devise invocations to call your intentions into the material world. Inspired by the Queen of Cups, this workshop will teach you to access your inner muse, awaken your creative spirit, use your voice as a tool for meditation, magic, and offerings from your heart to the world.FIND OUT MORE You can buy this as a one off or become a member of our coven where you get workshops, monthly tarot studio classes, and lots of other goodies included in the cost of membership.Become a Between the Worlds Weird Circle Subscriber, click here.**********************************REFERENCES FOR THIS EPISODE“The Tarot Handbook” by Angeles Arrien (an overview of Tarot and its symbolism, including Arthurian legend).“The Mythic Tarot” by Juliet Sharman Burke and Liz Greene“The Encyclopedia of Tarot” by Stuart R. Kaplan, Jean Huets, and Elizabeth Foley O'Connor - a reference book“The Quest for the Holy Grail” by Pauline Matarasso, translation of medieval texts“Grail Alchemy: Initiation into the Celtic Mystery Tradition,” by Mara Freeman“The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe,” by Ralph Metzner."Sir Perceval of Galles" by Jessie L. Weston: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/arthurian/west/west05.htm“Tarot of the Holy Light: A Continental Esoteric Tarot”, by Payne-Towler, Christine.“The Cathars: Persecuting Heretical Christians In The 13th Century” by Jack Crawford, MPhilBetween the Worlds Episode # 21 Ancestral Magic of the Ancient Celts with Mara Freeman“Crazy Heart” a film with Maggie Gyllenhall and Jeff Bridges**********************************Learn More About Your Host Amanda Yates GarciaTo join Amanda's MYSTERY CULT on Substack click here.To order Amanda's book, "Initiated: Memoir of a Witch" CLICK HERE.Amanda's InstagramTo book an appointment with Amanda go to www.oracleoflosangeles.com*********************************Original MUSIC by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs**********************************Get in touch with sponsorship inquiries for Between the Worlds at betweentheworldspodcast@gmail.com.CONTRIBUTORS:Amanda Yates Garcia (host) & Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs (producer, composer). The BTW logo collage was created by Maria Minnis (tinyparsnip.com / instagram.com/tinyparsnip ) with text designed by Leah Hayes.

An dem Podium mit dem Titel „Was ist Bewusstseinserweiterung? Pioniere der Forschung berichten über eigenen Erfahrungen“ nahmen teil: Richard Baker-Roshi, Betty G. Eisner, Roland Fischer, Felicitas D. Goodman, Albert Hofmann, Hanscarl Leuner, Ralph Metzner und Alexander T. Shulgin. Moderation: Gero von Boehm und Rolf Verres. Dieses lebendige und lehrreiche Gespräch aus dem Jahre 1996 ist ein einzigartiges und durchaus auch ein hoch aktuelles Dokument. Die Beforschung der Möglichkeiten (und zu berücksichtigenden Risiken), die in der Verwendung bewusstseinsverändernder Substanzen wie Psilocybin liegt, gewinnt seit einiger Zeit wieder enorm an Aufmerksamkeit. Alle Folgen der "Autobahnuniversität" finden Sie auch hier: www.carl-auer.de/magazin/autobahnuniversitat Die anderen Podcasts des Carl-Auer Verlags finden Sie hier: Heidelberger Systemische Interviews www.carl-auer.de/magazin/heidelberger-systemische-interviews Sounds of Science www.carl-auer.de/magazin/sounds-of-science sich-sicher-sein www.carl-auer.de/magazin/sich-sicher-sein

Jesse Wolf Hardin joins us for a very special podcast episode with Thomas Dick, to discuss the importance of in-person herbal events. The timing couldn't be more perfect as many herbal events are taking place throughout the country. Wolf poetically describes the tradition and range of herbal events as well as how to choose which herbal event is best for you. Perhaps most touching, Wolf reminds us that herbal events are a space of holding community, sharing knowledge, forming support systems, and building your plant loving family. Whether you're new to herbal events or a seasoned veteran, be prepared to be inspired by the potential of attending an in-person herbal event this year. Learn more about the Good Medicine Confluence taking place in Lake George, Colorado, July 18th-22nd, 2023 Herbal Event Resources: Events as the Backbone of the Herbal Community by Kiva Rose 2023 Herbal Events Calendar   Jesse Wolf Hardin is an impactful author, ecosopher, ecological and societal activist, personal counsel, graphic artist, musician, and historian – a champion of both human and bio diversity, as well as of nature's medicines. Wolf was a leading organizer of and presenter for Earth First!, becoming a featured presenter at hundreds of conferences and universities, and was the creator of cross cultural ecospiritual collaborations appropriately called “Medicine Shows” that melded his powerful spoken word with live music, indigenous presenters, and focused activism. With his wife Kiva Rose, he founded the international Good Medicine Confluence gathering in 2008, along with the in-depth digital magazine for herbalists, healers and folklorists Plant Healer Quarterly.  He is the author of over 800 published articles in over 200 different publications, as well as of over 25 books, his work earning the praises of luminaries such as Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, Ralph Metzner, Starhawk, and Rosemary Gladstar. He has been featured in The Encyclopedia of Nature & Religion (Continuum 2005) and many other compilations. His published works include early titles Full Circle , Kindred Spirit and Gaia Eros, along with The Practice of Herbalism and http://www.planthealer.org/bookstore.html covering the core whys and hows of an herbal practice, The Healing Terrain on sense of place, cultivation, and the healing power of nature... as well as an inspiring historical novel  The Medicine Bear, a book of herbs and empowerment for kids I'm a Medicine Woman Too! (Hops Press 2009), and The Traveling Medicine Show: Pitchmen & Plant Healers of Early America. His inspiring book The Enchanted Healer also comes in a version for an audience beyond herbalists titled Wonderments, with both being focused on heightened awareness, the senses, plant spirit and the spiritual heart of healing.  His most recent creation is the Hedge Guild Oracle deck and book, iconic art and text bringing clarity to our self exploration and daily options and choices.  The Oracle and most of his Ebooks and softbound books are available through PlantHealerBookstore.com.  Wolf's work is also featured in the lauded Plant Healer Quarterly as well as the free Herbaria Monthly which you can subscribe to on the Plant Healer website.  As Terry Tempest Williams opined, “Wolf's voice inspires our passion to take us further —seeing the world whole — even holy.” Visit Wolf at PlantHealer.org Register for the virtual Fall Free Herbalism Project here: https://info.mountainroseherbs.com/free-herbalism-project   Join our community! Subscribe to the Mountain Rose Herbs newsletter Subscribe to Mountain Rose Herbs on YouTube Follow on Instagram Like on Facebook Follow on Pinterest Follow on Twitter Read the Mountain Rose Herbs blog Follow on TikTok Strengthening the bonds between people and plants for a healthier world. Mountain Rose Herbs www.mountainroseherbs.com

For access to the full Sus Psychedelics, Inc. series and other premium episodes, subscribe to the Al-Wara' Frequency at patreon.com/subliminaljihad. PHASE THREE: RUNNING THE SHOW Dimitri's high school experiences with 2C-B and MDMA, the synchronicity of the Hyphy/Thizz movement sprouting up in Alexander Shulgin's East Bay backyard, the extremely different vibes around drugs in 2005, Dimitri's 2009 documentary about suburban Thizz dealers in the Bay… The origins of the Multidisciplinary Association for Pyschedelic Studies (MAPS), “Early Therapeutic Use of MDMA, 1977-1985”, the Boston Group, Shulgin turning on Lt. Colonel Leo Zeff aka “The Secret Chief” to MDMA in 1977, ARUPA at Esalen, Jungian lay therapist Ann Shulgin, her theory that using MDMA helps you recognize the positive aspects of the totally selfish demon inside you, Chilean Dr. Claudio Naranjo and Sasha Shulgin's collaboration from 1962 onward, Jack Downing's Exuma Island Institute in the Bahamas, Dr. George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert, Catholic priest Michael Clegg who began selling ecstasy in Dallas night clubs in 1983, Dr. Rick Ingrasci promoting MDMA therapy on Donahue in 1985, Tim Leary's former Harvard research partner Ralph Metzner, Doblin founding the Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories (EMDL) in 1984, Physical Abuse in MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy, founding MAPS advisors Francesco Di Leo and Rick Ingrasci both losing their therapist licenses for having sex with patients during MDMA sessions… Background on Psychedelic godfather Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, Shulgin's decades-long relationship with the DEA, his membership at Bohemian Grove, Shulgin's infamous bad vibes concoction STP/DOM, German pharma companies selling 2C-B aka “Nexus” in 1990s South Africa, PHASE FOUR: DIMITRI'S TRIP Dimitri reveals for the first time his journeys with “Gustavo”, a Peruvian shaman to the 0.01% in 2011, getting psyopped by ayahuasca utopianism, and which billionaires were secretly getting EnLiGhTeNeD years before the new corporadelic renaissance hit the mainstream.

Paul F. Austin sits down with Dr. Alexander Shester to discuss his new book, Visionary Healing: Psychedelic Medicine & Shamanism. Find episode links, summary, and transcript here. In this intimate, in-person conversation, Alex humbly shares his wisdom and perspective from decades of experience as a psychiatrist and visionary psychedelic explorer. He sheds light on the intersection of shamanism, psychedelics, and mental health, and recalls captivating stories from his time being mentored by the late psychologist and psychedelic researcher Ralph Metzner. Alexander Shester, M.D. is a medical doctor, board-certified psychiatrist, and Jungian Analyst. He has over thirty years of experience studying and participating in guided Vision Quests using shamanic principles in nature settings. His recently-published book, Visionary Healing: Psychedelic Medicine and Shamanism, is his personal first-hand memoir of using entheogens including ayahuasca, jurema, psilocybin, San Pedro cactus, peyote, iboga, toad, and more, for deep spiritual exploration and his own healing journey. Highlights: On visionary art and the power of psychedelic plant medicines. Ayahuasca and the transpersonal journey into the collective unconscious. Alex recalls his primary mentor, Ralph Metzner: his visionary circles and contributions to the psychedelic renaissance. The value of community in Alexander's healing. Alex's paths to psychiatry and psychedelics. How Alex's psychedelic experiences informed his psychiatry practice. What can shamanism offer to the field of psychiatry? Remembering our nature-relatedness with the aid of plant medicines. Endarkenment: facing the shadow. Alex's sage advice for those seeking psychedelic experiences. Episode Links: Alex's book, Visionary Healing: Psychedelic Medicine and Shamanism These show links may contain affiliate links. Third Wave receives a small percentage of the product price if you purchase through the above affiliate links. Episode sponsors: This episode is brought you by Psyched Wellness, creators of Calm, an over-the-counter Amanita muscaria extract that may help to reduce stress, ease muscular tension and promote restorative sleep. Go to shop.psyched-wellness.com and use code THIRDWAVE23 to get 15% off. This episode is sponsored by Beckley Retreats, a leading holistic wellbeing company that offers transformative self-development programs by leveraging the science-backed power of psychedelics in concert with supportive therapeutic modalities. As a trusted partner of Third Wave, we strongly recommend the upcoming retreats for Beckley in Jamaica, as well as many other locations. Head to go.beckleyretreats.com/thirdwave to book your transformational psilocybin program today. This podcast is brought to you by Third Wave's Mushroom Grow Kit. Get the tools you need to grow mushrooms along with an in-depth guide to finding spores.

Fr. Seán ÓLaoire was born in Ireland and earned a B.Sc. degree (major in Mathematics) from the National University of Ireland. Ordained a catholic priest in 1972, he spent 14 years working in Kenya. He is multi-lingual and has an M.A. and Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology; he is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in private practice. He is co-founder and the Spiritual Director of a non-denominational community called “Companions on the Journey” based in Palo Alto. He is the author of five books and co-author of a sixth: “Ukweli ni Nini?” (What is truth?) – written and published in Swahili in 1983 “Spirits in Spacesuits - A Manual for Everyday Mystics”- published in 2003 “Souls on Safari” - published in 2006 - Translated into German in 2007 “A Sensible God” – published in 2008 “Why? What Your Life Is Telling You about Who You Are and Why You're Here” - published in 2013 (with Matthew McKay, PhD and Ralph Metzner, PhD) - Translated into Korean in 2015 “Setting God Free: Moving Beyond the Caricature We've Created in Our Own Image” - published in 2021 Transcript of this interview Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group Interview recorded February 25, 2023 Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

Welcome to this week's conversational interview with Earth poet, author, artist, and herbalist, Jesse Wolf Hardin. Thomas and Wolf reminisce on Wolf's activist past, his work as an author, his advice for newcomers wanting to learn about plants, the beauty and excitement of herbalism, and much more. We hope you enjoy this truly special and inspiring talk. Jesse Wolf Hardin is an impactful author, ecosopher, ecological and societal activist, personal counsel, graphic artist, musician, and historian – a champion of both human and bio diversity, as well as of nature's medicines. Wolf was a leading organizer of and presenter for Earth First!, becoming a featured presenter at hundreds of conferences and universities, and was the creator of cross cultural ecospiritual collaborations appropriately called “Medicine Shows” that melded his powerful spoken word with live music, indigenous presenters, and focused activism. With his wife Kiva Rose, he founded the international Good Medicine Confluence gathering in 2008, along with the in-depth digital magazine for herbalists, healers and folklorists Plant Healer Quarterly.  He is the author of over 800 published articles in over 200 different publications, as well as of over 25 books, his work earning the praises of luminaries such as Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, Ralph Metzner, Starhawk, and Rosemary Gladstar. He has been featured in The Encyclopedia of Nature & Religion (Continuum 2005) and many other compilations. His published works include early titles Full Circle , Kindred Spirit and Gaia Eros, along with The Practice of Herbalism and http://www.planthealer.org/bookstore.html covering the core whys and hows of an herbal practice, The Healing Terrain on sense of place, cultivation, and the healing power of nature... as well as an inspiring historical novel  The Medicine Bear, a book of herbs and empowerment for kids I'm a Medicine Woman Too! (Hops Press 2009), and The Traveling Medicine Show: Pitchmen & Plant Healers of Early America. His inspiring book The Enchanted Healer also comes in a version for an audience beyond herbalists titled Wonderments, with both being focused on heightened awareness, the senses, plant spirit and the spiritual heart of healing.  His most recent creation is the Hedge Guild Oracle deck and book, iconic art and text bringing clarity to our self exploration and daily options and choices.  The Oracle and most of his Ebooks and softbound books are available through PlantHealerBookstore.com.  Wolf's work is also featured in the lauded Plant Healer Quarterly as well as the free Herbaria Monthly which you can subscribe to on the Plant Healer website.  As Terry Tempest Williams opined, “Wolf's voice inspires our passion to take us further —seeing the world whole — even holy.” Visit Wolf at PlantHealer.org  Register for the virtual Fall Free Herbalism Project here: https://info.mountainroseherbs.com/free-herbalism-project Join our community! Subscribe to the Mountain Rose Herbs newsletter Subscribe to Mountain Rose Herbs on YouTube Follow on Instagram Like on Facebook Follow on Pinterest Follow on Twitter Read the Mountain Rose Herbs blog Follow on TikTok Strengthening the bonds between people and plants for a healthier world. Mountain Rose Herbs www.mountainroseherbs.com  

Hugh T Alkemi welcomes a very well spoken, personable, dare we say funny yet experienced (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) guest to the show. Brigitte has lived a life with natural stuff and the drug legends of American Culture including Timothy Leary. She's been there and seen almost all of it. Will this interview pass the ACID TEST FOR YOU? Don't know what the acid test is? Tune in, turn on and update your human processor by listening to this PART TWO of a two part episode!ENTHEORADIO is sponsored by MushroomShaman BrandHttps://linktr.ee/MushroomShaman+Alkemi.Gold Products Brigitte Mars BioBrigitte Mars is a medical herbalist and nutritional consultant of Natural Health with over fifty years of experience. She teaches Herbal Medicine at Naropa University, and The School of Health Mastery in Iceland. She has taught at Omega Institute, Esalen, Kripalu, Sivananda Yoga Ashram, Arise, Tribal Visions, Envision and Unify Festivals, and The Mayo Clinic. She is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild. She has a private practice, leads herb walks to identify edible and medicinal plants worldwide and has a weekly radio show called Naturally. She is also an end-of-life doula.Brigitte is the author of many books and DVDs, including The Natural First Aid Handbook, The Home Reference to Holistic Health and Healing, The Country Almanac of Home Remedies, The Desktop Guide to Herbal Medicine, Beauty by Nature, Addiction Free Naturally, The Sexual Herbal, Healing Herbal Teas, Rawsome! and co-author of The HempNut Cookbook. Her latest project is a phone app called IPlant.Brigitte has been holding space for psychedelic ceremonies both in groups and with individuals for over fifty years. In the early 1970's Brigitte lived with Rosemary Leary (wife of Dr. Timothy Leary) and explored in depth how to create sacred set and setting for psychedelic ceremonies. She has been the faculty advisor for The Psychedelic Club at Naropa University and is the voice for the audio version of The Psychedelic Prayers, based on The Tao Te Ching and translated by Dr. Leary and Dr. Ralph Metzner. She is a long time member of MAPS and a recent graduate of The Psychedelic Sitter's School based in Boulder, Colorado. Brigitte is also featured in Gaia TV's series, Psychedelica.SHOW NOTES:Wild carrot (Daucus carota) (anti-conception)Silphium (Ancient Contraceptive) (extinct now)Witch Doctor's Apprentice Book: https://www.amazon.com/Witch-doctors-apprentice-Nicole-Maxwell/dp/B0007E0ODC"Get off your grass!" Lawn Gone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH5CfhT0imUhttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/psychedelic-refugeehttps://brigittemars.com/Link or name of your app: "iplant"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iplant-brigitte-mars-wild/id302363747Psychedelic Ceremony: https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-ima-remarklist&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-remarklist&hspart=ima&p=psychedelic+Ceremony+brigitte+Mars&type=q3020_A1IXH_set_bcrq#id=1&vid=14cf2df936bfa19a3b98c6dd2ec20036&action=clickHere is an article I wrote for Huffington Post on edible lawns: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/get-off-your-grass-and-cr_b_533359

Hugh T Alkemi welcomes a very well spoken, personable, dare we say funny yet experienced (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) guest to the show. Brigitte has lived a life with natural stuff and the drug legends of American Culture including Timothy Leary. She's been there and seen almost all of it. Will this interview pass the ACID TEST FOR YOU? Don't know what the acid test is? Tune in, turn on and update your human processor by listening to this PART ONE of a two part episode!ENTHEORADIO is sponsored by MushroomShaman BrandHttps://linktr.ee/MushroomShaman+Alkemi.Gold Products Brigitte Mars BioBrigitte Mars is a medical herbalist and nutritional consultant of Natural Health with over fifty years of experience. She teaches Herbal Medicine at Naropa University, and The School of Health Mastery in Iceland. She has taught at Omega Institute, Esalen, Kripalu, Sivananda Yoga Ashram, Arise, Tribal Visions, Envision and Unify Festivals, and The Mayo Clinic. She is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild. She has a private practice, leads herb walks to identify edible and medicinal plants worldwide and has a weekly radio show called Naturally. She is also an end-of-life doula.Brigitte is the author of many books and DVDs, including The Natural First Aid Handbook, The Home Reference to Holistic Health and Healing, The Country Almanac of Home Remedies, The Desktop Guide to Herbal Medicine, Beauty by Nature, Addiction Free Naturally, The Sexual Herbal, Healing Herbal Teas, Rawsome! and co-author of The HempNut Cookbook. Her latest project is a phone app called IPlant.Brigitte has been holding space for psychedelic ceremonies both in groups and with individuals for over fifty years. In the early 1970's Brigitte lived with Rosemary Leary (wife of Dr. Timothy Leary) and explored in depth how to create sacred set and setting for psychedelic ceremonies. She has been the faculty advisor for The Psychedelic Club at Naropa University and is the voice for the audio version of The Psychedelic Prayers, based on The Tao Te Ching and translated by Dr. Leary and Dr. Ralph Metzner. She is a long time member of MAPS and a recent graduate of The Psychedelic Sitter's School based in Boulder, Colorado. Brigitte is also featured in Gaia TV's series, Psychedelica.SHOW NOTES:Wild carrot (Daucus carota) (anti-conception)Silphium (Ancient Contraceptive) (extinct now)Witch Doctor's Apprentice Book: https://www.amazon.com/Witch-doctors-apprentice-Nicole-Maxwell/dp/B0007E0ODC"Get off your grass!" Lawn Gone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH5CfhT0imUhttps://www.innertraditions.com/books/psychedelic-refugeehttps://brigittemars.com/Link or name of your app: "iplant"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iplant-brigitte-mars-wild/id302363747Psychedelic Ceremony: https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-ima-remarklist&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-remarklist&hspart=ima&p=psychedelic+Ceremony+brigitte+Mars&type=q3020_A1IXH_set_bcrq#id=1&vid=14cf2df936bfa19a3b98c6dd2ec20036&action=clickHere is an article I wrote for Huffington Post on edible lawns: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/get-off-your-grass-and-cr_b_533359

Most people believe the loss of the body is the loss of life, but when Matthew McKay's 23-year-old son Jordan was suddenly shot and killed, for Matthew, it was not the end of Jordan's life. It was the beginning of a quest to penetrate the veil of death through some extraordinary communications. These virtual conversations led Matthew to co-author a book, with his son. Matthew McKay, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and professor at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA. The Wright Institute offers Masters and Ph.D. programs to psychologists and provides support and evaluation for the research needs of its students. McKay is also the founder and publisher at New Harbinger Publications. He is the author and co-author of many books, including: The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation ^ Tolerance (coauthor Jeffrey Brantley) (New Harbinger Publications 2007) and Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe (New World Library 2016).Interview Date: 4/28/2016 Tags: Matthew McKay, hypnosis, Michael Newton, Allan Botkin, Ralph Metzner, channeled writing, past life regression, Akashic records, reincarnation, afterlife, consciousness, God, time, broken vase Wabi Sabi, post traumatic growth, Death & Dying, Parapsychology/Paranormal, Intuition/Psychic, Personal Transformation

Soem reading Resources The Mind Body Code by Dr. Mario Martinez The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic and Sacred Journeys by James Fadiman The Mind Body Self by Dr. Mario Martinez TIP 57: Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services Downloadable from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Click Link Above)  Drug Use for Grown Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear by Dr. Carl L. Hart How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence by Michael Pollan Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin and Ayahuasca by Dr Richard Louis Miller Psychedelics and Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Expanded States by Tim Read The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert

This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article."  Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show.  Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there,  you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me".  The other, "Day Tripper",  was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV,  The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though.  As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]

Amy Emerson, Director of Clinical Research at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); Martin Lee, Director of Project CBD; and Ralph Metzner, legendary psychedelic research pioneer, share their insights into the state of knowledge about the potential curative properties of psychedelic substances.

Until recently, it has been very difficult to get approval for serious research into “mind-manifesting” plants and drugs. Leading figures in the field describe that potential and the status of current research. Hosted by Kat Harrison; with Ralph Metzner, Charles Grob, Mariavittoria Mangini, Ph.D., and Alicia Danforth.

In this episode of the Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers podcast, Dr. Steve Thayer and Dr. Reid Robison discuss qualities and skills they think are essential for therapists who provide psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. They cover the following topics:(1:15) Introduction to the topic(3:21) The art and science of psychedelic trip-sitting episode(3:44) The value of the podcast media platform (6:27) Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, by Geneen Roth(7:14) Being present and attentive(10:17) Transference, countertransference, and awareness of your triggers(10:50) Strategic use of silence(12:55) The art and science of psychotherapy(17:07) The importance of doing your own work as a therapist(17:58) Developing Guidelines and Competencies for the Training of Psychedelic Therapists, by Janis Phelps(18:16) Empathetic abiding presence (19:25) Trust enhancement (23:50) Spiritual intelligence (27:15) Knowledge of the physical and psychological affects of psychedelics (31:30) Therapist self-awareness and ethical integrity (34:04) Proficiency in complementary techniques(35:34) The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, by James Fadiman and infectious energy(39:25) Patience, compassion, and intuition (41:00) The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard AlpertEmail us questions and feedback at psychfrontiers@novamind.ca Learn more about our podcast at https://www.psychedelictherapyfrontiers.com/Learn more about Novamind at https://www.novamind.ca/Disclaimer: The content of this podcast does not constitute medical advice or mental health treatment. Consult with a medical/mental health professional if you believe you are in need of mental health treatment.

Saatekülalised Marina Paula Eberth ja Peep Vain. Saatejuht Hardo Pajula. Tähenduse teejuhtide 136. vestlusring on pühendatud saksa juurtega USA psühholoogile Ralph Metznerile, täpsemalt tema raamatule ["Alkeemiline kaemus"](https://www.apollo.ee/alkeemiline-kaemus.html). "Käesolev raamat on nende muljetavaldavate isiklike kogemuste destillaat, milles Metzner kirjeldab šamanismi, jooga ning alkeemiliste distsipliinide sünteesist loodud meetodit – alkeemilist kaemust. See sisaldab füüsilise, psüühilise ning vaimse transformeerumise õpetusi ning harjutusi, mille aluseks on inimese enese sisemistest tarkuseallikatest pärinevate ressursside kasutamine vaimsete uuringute, tervenemise ning enesearengu eesmärkidel," kirjutatakse teose sisututvustuses. Stuudios on raamatu tõlkija Peep Vain ja Marina Paula Eberth. Peep osaleb Tähenduse teejuhtide vestlusringis esimest korda, Marina võttis koos Alar Tamminguga osa 94. saatest ["Tuleviku psühholoogia"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSgd9Dz355E&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHDxAx9Oncmkc556IRanB9n&index=94), mis oli pühendatud tšehhi juurtega USA psühholoogile [Stanislav Grofile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeOvEzX_ik&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHQl6nbDthnn-SbK6vnRwCG&index=2). Head uudistamist! H.

Saatekülalised Marina Paula Eberth ja Peep Vain. Saatejuht Hardo Pajula. Tähenduse teejuhtide 136. vestlusring on pühendatud saksa juurtega USA psühholoogile Ralph Metznerile, täpsemalt tema raamatule ["Alkeemiline kaemus"](https://www.apollo.ee/alkeemiline-kaemus.html). "Käesolev raamat on nende muljetavaldavate isiklike kogemuste destillaat, milles Metzner kirjeldab šamanismi, jooga ning alkeemiliste distsipliinide sünteesist loodud meetodit – alkeemilist kaemust. See sisaldab füüsilise, psüühilise ning vaimse transformeerumise õpetusi ning harjutusi, mille aluseks on inimese enese sisemistest tarkuseallikatest pärinevate ressursside kasutamine vaimsete uuringute, tervenemise ning enesearengu eesmärkidel," kirjutatakse teose sisututvustuses. Stuudios on raamatu tõlkija Peep Vain ja Marina Paula Eberth. Peep osaleb Tähenduse teejuhtide vestlusringis esimest korda, Marina võttis koos Alar Tamminguga osa 94. saatest ["Tuleviku psühholoogia"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSgd9Dz355E&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHDxAx9Oncmkc556IRanB9n&index=94), mis oli pühendatud tšehhi juurtega USA psühholoogile [Stanislav Grofile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeOvEzX_ik&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHQl6nbDthnn-SbK6vnRwCG&index=2). Head uudistamist! H.

• Includes contributions from the late Ralph Metzner, Chris Bache, Whitley Strieber, Jeffrey Kripal, Angela Voss, Bill Richards, Chris Timmermann, Michael Winkelman, Luis Eduardo Luna, Anton Bilton, Bernard Carr, Daniel Pinchbeck, Dennis McKenna, Ede Frecska, and David Luke• Explores DMT beings, alien abduction, plant sentience, neuroscientific DMT research, the connections between LSD and DMT entities, and the nature of mind and realityFound throughout the plant and animal kingdom, DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is also naturally occurring in humans, where it is released during near-death and actual death experiences, earning it the title “the spirit molecule.” When taken as a psychedelic, either via ayahuasca or in pure form, DMT is experientially considered to be the strongest and strangest of all entheogens. The majority of high-dose users report visions of unknown yet curiously familiar alien worlds and encounters with sentient nonhuman presences.At a four-day symposium at Tyringham Hall in England in 2017, twenty of the world's psychedelic luminaries gathered to discuss entheogenic entity encounters, consciousness expansion, visionary experiences, and the future of research in this field. Contributors to the talks and discussions include many leading thinkers, including the late Ralph Metzner, Chris Bache, Whitley Strieber, Je rey Kripal, Angela Voss, Bill Richards, Chris Timmermann, Michael Winkelman, Luis Eduardo Luna, Anton Bilton, Bernard Carr, Daniel Pinchbeck, Dennis McKenna, Ede Frecska, and David Luke.This book distills the potent exchange of ideas that occurred at Tyringham Hall, including discussions about DMT beings, encounter experiences, alien abduction, plant sentience, the shamanic use of ayahuasca, neuroscientifi c DMT research, the connections between LSD and DMT entities, and the nature of mind and reality.David Luke, Ph.D., is associate lecturer of psychology at the University of Greenwich and honorary senior lecturer at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College. He has published more than 100 academic papers on transpersonal experiences and altered states of consciousness and regularly gives public lectures and conference presentations. A cofounder and director of Breaking Convention, a biennial international conference on psychedelic research, he lives in East Sussex, England. Rory Spowers is an ecological writer, fi lmmaker, and author. He is the founder of the Web of Hope, a UK charity and ecological education resource, and the creative director for the Tyringham Initiative. He lives in Ibiza, Spain.

Tähenduse teejuhtide 136. vestlusring on pühendatud saksa juurtega USA psühholoogile Ralph Metznerile, täpsemalt tema raamatule "Alkeemiline kaemus" [1]. "Käesolev raamat on nende muljetavaldavate isiklike kogemuste destillaat, milles Metzner kirjeldab šamanismi, jooga ning alkeemiliste distsipliinide sünteesist loodud meetodit – alkeemilist kaemust. See sisaldab füüsilise, psüühilise ning vaimse transformeerumise õpetusi ning harjutusi, mille aluseks on inimese enese sisemistest tarkuseallikatest pärinevate ressursside kasutamine vaimsete uuringute, tervenemise ning enesearengu eesmärkidel," kirjutatakse teose sisututvustuses.Stuudios on raamatu tõlkija Peep Vain ja Marina Paula Eberth. Peep osaleb Tähenduse teejuhtide vestlusringis esimest korda, Marina võttis koos Alar Tamminguga osa 94. saatest "Tuleviku psühholoogia" [2], mis oli pühendatud tšehhi juurtega USA psühholoogile Stanislav Grofile [3].Head uudistamist!H.———————————————[1] https://www.apollo.ee/alkeemiline-kaemus.html[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSgd9Dz355E&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHDxAx9Oncmkc556IRanB9n&index=94[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeOvEzX_ik&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHQl6nbDthnn-SbK6vnRwCG&index=2 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“A ‘Portal to Presence’ is exactly what it says,” writes Gunther Weil, “a simple doorway that points to the realm of Consciousness or Presence. It would be stretching the meaning of the word 'technique' or 'method' to apply it to this idea. One just walks through the portal as one becomes aware of its existence…. The portal opens, and Presence arises spontaneously.” Weil is a Harvard-trained psychologist, executive coach, and lifelong student of consciousness. His diverse and colorful life includes working as a music business executive and being instrumental in the production of Aerosmith’s first album; teaching at Brandeis University, recruited and mentored by psychologist Abraham Maslow; coaching international executives in leadership, wellness, organizational development, and conflict resolution in the private and public sectors; studying and teaching Tai Chi and becoming a recognized master teacher of Qigong; and perhaps most famously, pioneering the mass consciousness movement that began in the 1960s with Dr. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (a.k.a., Ram Dass), Ralph Metzner and others that popularized the field of psychedelic therapies.  As a young child, Weil and his parents fled the Holocaust “on one of the last boats leaving for America.” They settled in Nebraska, then Milwaukee, with psychology, philosophy, and classical music infusing their family culture. His father was an internationally regarded psychologist and pioneering researcher in Europe on synesthesia, the phenomenon of crossed senses, like smelling colors or seeing music. Education was of paramount importance; it was his father’s academic work that was their ticket to the US. Weil went on to study psychology and philosophy at Kenyon College, receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in Norway. While there, he often visited Paris in his free time, inspired by the expat beatniks, literati, and jazz musicians who preceded the hippie generation. Upon returning to the States, he earned his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University. His assigned faculty advisor was a prominent researcher in the field of personality — Dr. Timothy Leary. Among their research studies was the Concord Prison Experiment, a randomized, controlled study designed to evaluate whether psilocybin mushrooms, combined with psychotherapy, could have a healing effect on young adults convicted of felonies in a maximum-security prison. In addition to improved recidivism rates (the degree of which has been debated), personality tests before and after these interventions showed positive changes.  In the 1970s, Weil worked in the music industry, as CEO at Intermedia Recording Corporation and senior vice president of Intermedia Systems Corporation, a publicly held multi-media production firm. Two of his numerous music projects were the 1973 debut album, “Aerosmith,” and the 1978 recording of the song “Jet Airliner,” by the Steve Miller Band, which hit both gold and platinum for sales exceeding two million. The bulk of Weil’s life work sits at the intersection of his formative influences of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, bringing others to what he calls a Portal to Presence — a simple doorway that effortlessly opens to an expansive awareness. He has conducted personal growth seminars in leadership, creativity, emotional intelligence and wellness for executives and their organizations throughout the world. He is certified in the HeartMath Inner Quality Management Program, Cultural Transformation Tools (CTT), and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), and is a Master Values Mentor of the Minessence Group. In 2001, he was personally invited by Eckhart Tolle, bestselling author of The Power of Now, to teach and facilitate the Practice of Presence. An important Portal to Presence for Weil has been the internal arts of Tai Chi and Qigong. Fifty years ago, Weil began his studies in New York City in the Yang Style Cheng Man-Ching lineage, followed by the Dong Family Yang style and Chen Beijing style lineages. He deepened his experience of Qigong by traveling the world co-teaching with Master Mantak Chia, a renowned teacher of Taoist Inner Alchemy who, Weil recounts, “would scribble down Qigong practices like the microcosmic orbit onto scraps of paper,” with Weil scrambling to pick them up and study them. In 1996, Weil became the founding chairman of the National Qigong Association and has studied or taught with direct lineage holders in the wisdom traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita, and The Gurdjieff Work.  Please join David Bonbright and Cynthia Li in conversation with this quintessential student of life and consciousness. 

“A ‘Portal to Presence’ is exactly what it says,” writes Gunther Weil, “a simple doorway that points to the realm of Consciousness or Presence. It would be stretching the meaning of the word 'technique' or 'method' to apply it to this idea. One just walks through the portal as one becomes aware of its existence…. The portal opens, and Presence arises spontaneously.” Weil is a Harvard-trained psychologist, executive coach, and lifelong student of consciousness. His diverse and colorful life includes working as a music business executive and being instrumental in the production of Aerosmith’s first album; teaching at Brandeis University, recruited and mentored by psychologist Abraham Maslow; coaching international executives in leadership, wellness, organizational development, and conflict resolution in the private and public sectors; studying and teaching Tai Chi and becoming a recognized master teacher of Qigong; and perhaps most famously, pioneering the mass consciousness movement that began in the 1960s with Dr. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (a.k.a., Ram Dass), Ralph Metzner and others that popularized the field of psychedelic therapies.  As a young child, Weil and his parents fled the Holocaust “on one of the last boats leaving for America.” They settled in Nebraska, then Milwaukee, with psychology, philosophy, and classical music infusing their family culture. His father was an internationally regarded psychologist and pioneering researcher in Europe on synesthesia, the phenomenon of crossed senses, like smelling colors or seeing music. Education was of paramount importance; it was his father’s academic work that was their ticket to the US. Weil went on to study psychology and philosophy at Kenyon College, receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in Norway. While there, he often visited Paris in his free time, inspired by the expat beatniks, literati, and jazz musicians who preceded the hippie generation. Upon returning to the States, he earned his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University. His assigned faculty advisor was a prominent researcher in the field of personality — Dr. Timothy Leary. Among their research studies was the Concord Prison Experiment, a randomized, controlled study designed to evaluate whether psilocybin mushrooms, combined with psychotherapy, could have a healing effect on young adults convicted of felonies in a maximum-security prison. In addition to improved recidivism rates (the degree of which has been debated), personality tests before and after these interventions showed positive changes.  In the 1970s, Weil worked in the music industry, as CEO at Intermedia Recording Corporation and senior vice president of Intermedia Systems Corporation, a publicly held multi-media production firm. Two of his numerous music projects were the 1973 debut album, “Aerosmith,” and the 1978 recording of the song “Jet Airliner,” by the Steve Miller Band, which hit both gold and platinum for sales exceeding two million. The bulk of Weil’s life work sits at the intersection of his formative influences of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, bringing others to what he calls a Portal to Presence — a simple doorway that effortlessly opens to an expansive awareness. He has conducted personal growth seminars in leadership, creativity, emotional intelligence and wellness for executives and their organizations throughout the world. He is certified in the HeartMath Inner Quality Management Program, Cultural Transformation Tools (CTT), and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), and is a Master Values Mentor of the Minessence Group. In 2001, he was personally invited by Eckhart Tolle, bestselling author of The Power of Now, to teach and facilitate the Practice of Presence. An important Portal to Presence for Weil has been the internal arts of Tai Chi and Qigong. Fifty years ago, Weil began his studies in New York City in the Yang Style Cheng Man-Ching lineage, followed by the Dong Family Yang style and Chen Beijing style lineages. He deepened his experience of Qigong by traveling the world co-teaching with Master Mantak Chia, a renowned teacher of Taoist Inner Alchemy who, Weil recounts, “would scribble down Qigong practices like the microcosmic orbit onto scraps of paper,” with Weil scrambling to pick them up and study them. In 1996, Weil became the founding chairman of the National Qigong Association and has studied or taught with direct lineage holders in the wisdom traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita, and The Gurdjieff Work.  Please join David Bonbright and Cynthia Li in conversation with this quintessential student of life and consciousness. 

(Psychedelic Renaissance Series) Robert Forte has been around the psychedelic world for decades as an author, facilitator and researcher. For three decades, Forte has worked closely with many of the most prominent leaders of the psychedelic movement, including Dr. Stanislav Grof, Timothy Leary, R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others.#BenStewartPodcast #RobertForte #Psychedelics #Culture #Historyhttps://www.alteredstatesofamerica.net/Produced live, Thursdays at 5:00 PM EST. CoHost/Producer: IG@Gordon_CummingsBen Stewart Podcast strives to offer awareness and solutions to a rapidly evolving world, while building community… Join our kickass Discord community!https://discord.gg/7QadgxEK4zSupport & Access Exclusive Content!https://www.benjosephstewart.com/plans-pricingCheck Out My Latest Documentaries -  “Awake In The Darkness” - https://www.aubreymarcus.com/"DMT QUEST" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My95s6ZryPgVisit https://www.BenJosephStewart.com/ to get more involved.Check out my Gaia shows "Psychedelica" & "Limitless" with a free trial. - https://www.gaia.com/invite/join?rfd=AGvFiE&utm_source=iafMake sure to hit the like button and Follow me on:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BenJosephStewartMinds:  https://www.minds.com/BenJosephStewart/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/BenJosephStewart/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BenJosephStewRumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-1044023BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/aanpGqOQt8ZX/

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy are tuning in and dropping out as we talk all things Acid. We hear a history of the psychedelic movement within the Anglophone world, taking in the accidental maiden trip of chemist Albert Hoffmann, the activities of Timothy Leary at Millbrook and the Merry Pranksters on their Magic Bus, and The Beatles' musical rendering of the classic trip. Tim and Jeremy also consider how dancing is incorporated into the Acid experience, with a grateful nod to the role played by the Dead and their sound engineer Owsley Stanley, and draw out the tensions between the post-war consumer culture and the emergent psychedelic movement that rendered Acid such a uniquely potent political - as well as pharmacological - phenomenon. Note: At Love is the Message, we don't encourage our listeners to take Acid, which is of course illegal! Also, more prosaically, in this episode Jeremy refers to Ralph ‘Metzinger' - he is of course talking about Ralph Metzner, the American psychologist and not Thomas Metzinger the contemporary American philosopher. Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert are authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. They've been friends and collaborators since 1997, teaching together and running parties since 2003. With clubs closed and half their jobs lost to university cuts, they're inevitably launching a podcast. Produced and edited by Matt Huxley. We are committed to making Love is the Message free to everyone who wants it, but if you have the means, please become a supporter by visiting www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod for as little as £3 a month so we can stay free. Tune in, Turn on, Get Down! Tracklist: Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar - Raga Palas Kafi The Grateful Dead - Alice D. Millionaire The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows Country Joe and the Fish - The Acid Commercial Country Joe and the Fish - Colours for Susan Charles Earland - Leaving This Planet

Täna vestlesime koos Alari ja Henriga Šveitsi antropoloogi Jeremy Narby [1] raamatust "Kosmiline siug" [2].Narby endaga oli mul pikem intervjuu Tähenduse teejuhtide viiendas numbris [3].Meie jutuajamisest lipsasid läbi õige mitme raamatu ja filmi nimed. Minu konspekti said neist kirja järgmised:1. Michael Harner, "Šamaani tee" [4].2. Monica Gagliano, "Thus Spoke the Plant" [5].3. Louie Schwartzbergi dokumentaalfilm, "Fantastic Fungi" [6].4. Gordon Wasson, "The Road to Eleusis" [7].5. Roger Wals; Charles S. Grog (toim.), "Kõrgem tarkus" [8].6. Ralph Metzner, "Alkeemiline kaemus" [9].7. Ralph Metzner, "Meeleruum ja ajavoog" [10].8. Ken Wilber, "Kõiksuse lühilugu" [11].9. Ken Wilber, "Arm ja meelekindlus" [12].10. Fritz Riemann, "Hirmu põhivormid" [13].11. Fritz Riemann, "Astroloogia on eluabi õpetus" [14].12. Fritz Riemann, "Vananemise kunst" [15].13. Undo Uus, "Blindness of Modern Science" [16].14. Charles T. Tart, "Teadvuse seisundid" [17] 15. Ram Das, "Still Here" [18].16. Ram Das, "Be Here Now" [19].17. Wilhelm Reich, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" [20]18. Roberto Assagioli, "Transpersonaalne areng" [21].Siin peaks nüüd olema lugemist õige mitmeks õhtupoolikuks.H.————————[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RlivUUAztE&list=PLhpEK-_b7mfHV67I6wxQvcb1n1UOqIY7T&index=12[2] https://www.rahvaraamat.ee/p/kosmiline-siug-dna-ja-teadmiste-l%C3%A4tted/1029613/en?isbn=9789949959389&fbclid=IwAR1P3SNCdvnolG5sRwA2YJKGXORlS9UgEK4Mrb71gfT3WKq_9kqxWyrTv08&gclid=Cj0KCQiA4feBBhC9ARIsABp_nbVBSaSWNCNBVCdnyoPxuXNYnNby48SMQJXZ8PChp68ykGRTnMBXq0MaAvWYEALw_wcB[3] https://teejuhid.postimees.ee/7160703/epistemoloogiline-vahejuhtum-belgia-politseiga[4] https://www.apollo.ee/samaani-tee.html[5] https://www.amazon.com/Thus-Spoke-Plant-Groundbreaking-Discoveries-ebook/dp/B079WL73XL/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1614693473&sr=8-1[6] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fantastic+fungi&crid=ZQ5UI3EDLKIH&sprefix=Fantastic+fungi%2Caudible%2C243&ref=nb_sb_ss_fb_1_15_ts-doa-p[7] https://www.amazon.com/Road-Eleusis-Unveiling-Secret-Mysteries/dp/1556437528/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MOQSN965DJ3R&dchild=1&keywords=gordon+wasson&qid=1614695457&sprefix=Gordon+Wasson%2Caps%2C257&sr=8-1[8] https://www.apollo.ee/korgem-tarkus.html[9] https://www.transpersonaalne.ee/toode/ralph-metzner-alkeemiline-kaemus-hingetarkuse-kasutamine-tervendamiseks-ja-juhiste-saamiseks-2012/[10] https://www.transpersonaalne.ee/toode/ralph-metzner-meeleruum-ja-ajavoog-teadvusseisundite-moistmine-ja-oskus-neid-kasutada-2012/[11] https://www.transpersonaalne.ee/toode/ken-wilber-koiksuse-luhilugu-2013/[12] https://www.apollo.ee/arm-ja-meelekindlus.html[13] https://www.apollo.ee/hirmu-pohivormid.html[14] https://www.apollo.ee/astroloogia-on-eluabi-opetus.html[15] https://www.apollo.ee/vananemise-kunst.html[16] https://www.raamatukoi.ee/blindness-of-modern-science[17] https://www.apollo.ee/teadvuse-seisundid.html[18] https://www.amazon.com/Still-Here-Embracing-Aging-Changing-ebook/dp/B00FPWS4ZG/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1614698143&sr=8-1[19] https://www.amazon.com/Here-Now-Enhanced-Ram-Dass-ebook/dp/B005R9HK8O/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1614698228&sr=8-1[20] https://www.amazon.com/Mass-Psychology-Fascism-Third-ebook/dp/B00DFFLD62/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1614698387&sr=8-3[21] https://www.transpersonaalne.ee/toode/roberto-assagioli-transpersonaalne-areng-2016/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Joe interviews Director of ecological think tank The Institute of Ecotechnics, and publisher and CEO of Synergetic Press, Deborah Snyder. Snyder talks about her past- meeting people from the Institute of Ecotechnics at a conference about the solar system, time working with Richard Evans Schultes, participating in a traveling theatre company, and the early days of the Heraclitus (a research ship built for a 2-year expedition through the Amazon, which is now being rebuilt to soon visit and chronicle remote coastal cultures). She also discusses Biosphere 2, ecotechnics (the discipline of relating the technosphere to the biosphere), regenerative agriculture, and the idea of natural capital- assigning economic (or other) value to an ecosystem as a way of both identifying keys to ecological longevity and increasing corporate or governmetal interest in the environment.  She talks about books she's published or work she's been inspired by from a veritable who's-who of names listeners of this podcast should be familiar with: Dennis McKenna, Wade Davis, William S. Burroughs, Mark Plotkin, Ralph Metzner, John Perry Barlow, and Claudio Naranjo. And she's very excited about a 2-day symposium Synergetic Press will be putting on in May to commemorate the launch of Volume 1 of Sasha Shulgin's course curriculum on the nature of drugs.  Notable Quotes “I’m from Illinois. I’m from the rural midwest. All my family are farmers. There is a gulf of understanding about plant medicines and the potential of these medicines in places where people are really desperate for these kinds of tools to help with youth health and mental well-being- good well-being. So, I’m interested in bridging that gulf with the work that we’re doing next, because I think that part of the divide is this physical divide between suburban city and rural country to some degree, which we’ve seen growing over a 50-year period of time.” “Many of our shoulders on which we stand- we’re losing them. So I feel more necessity, you might say, to capture these voices.” “In doing anything, it’s very hard to do anything by yourself. You need to find a group of other individuals that have some commonality or ally yourself with other organized groups already to get something of a coalescence of wills to make something happen.”  Links Synergeticpress.com Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Institute of Ecotechnics Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy, by Don Lattin Where The Gods Reign: Plants and Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, by Richard Evans Schultes Imdb.com: Embrace of the Serpent White Gold: the Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon, by John C. Yungjohann Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine, by Luis Eduardo Luna & Steven F. White Kissthegroundmovie.com Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, by Ram Das and Ralph Metzner Wikipedia.org: John Perry Barlow Spaceshipearthmovie.com The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness, by Claudio Naranjo Thefarmatsouthmountain.com About Deborah Snyder Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews writer, director, and producer of the recent documentary, "The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof's Journey of Consciousness," Susan Hess Logeais.  The film, which we streamed and presented a panel for back in October, was co-produced by Stan Grof himself, and tells of his journey from his youth in Nazi-occupied Prague to Esalen to today, with much of Logeais and her theory-affirming life story mixed in. It features interviews with many big names, including Fritjof Capra and Rupert Sheldrake, and full-length interviews can now be found on the film's website; 2 of which are conversations between Grof and legends we've lost recently: Ralph Metzner and Michael Harner. It is Joe's favorite film on Grof and his work. Logeais talks about making the movie and meeting such big names in the field, wonders how differently children might grow up if quantum physics and a respectful agreement with nature were taught in school, discusses cesarian births and the differences they could create in fear or stress response in comparison to kids born traditionally, and talks about the power of breathwork and its enormous influence on psychedelic-assisted therapy. Notable Quotes “When I met Stan and heard him speak and heard what he spoke about- tantric science, mythology, Eastern spiritual traditions, even quantum physics, Shamanic journeywork- there were so many things that he spoke about that I had explored on my own before I met him. And then in the course of making the movie, I realized that he had introduced many of those concepts during his 14 years at Esalen. And so I was resonating with him on a level-- it’s like he was impacting my life before I met him.” On using MDMA with psychedelics: “Perhaps as an introduction to a psychedelic experience, especially for people who are older, it might not be a bad idea. I know the anxiety that I had occasionally when something was going really fast and very deep. But I agree with you in that the depth and that anxiety passes, and it’s in the learning to get past that anxiety that we develop capacity for reflection and to move away from reactivity. So I think maybe for the first trip, just to say, ‘Ok, this is what you’re in for, and next time we’re not going to do this.’” “I just want to say how valuable I think Stan’s contribution is, and how proud I am, or how, I guess, grateful I am to have worked with him in the creation of this film. And I’m so glad that you enjoyed it because I wanted to take his theories, his discoveries, his contributions, and make them accessible and interesting so that people could watch it and come away with an understanding that would hopefully inspire them to then go and do the deep work. And I hope people come to the website and visit the live stream archive page so that they can gain a deeper understanding of all these amazing concepts that Stan participated in sharing during his time at Esalen and his ITA conferences.”  Links Susanhesslogeais.com Thewayofthepsychonaut.com The Way of the Psychonaut facebook Blackfoot Physics: A Journey Into the Native American Worldview, by F. David Peat Stangrof.com Grof-legacy-training.com Holotropic.com: Grof Transpersonal Training About Susan Hess Logeais Susan holds a demonstrated history of working in the entertainment industry. She is skilled in Music Videos, Film, Documentaries, Commercials, and Theatre. She demonstrates strong entrepreneurship professional with a Interdisciplinary Degree focused in Transformational Entertainment and Human Consciousness from Marylhurst University. She is an actress and producer, known for Gone (2012), Not Dead Yet (2009) and The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof's Journey of Consciousness (2020). Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

What realities are you exploring? I feel very grateful that ‘true elder' Ray Hillis who I interviewed on episode 14 of the #earthconversepodcast, has returned for this courageous conversation. To explore pathways to consciousness, psyche and the soul, focusing on hallucinogenics, art and dreams. In doing so he highlights the difference between reality and consensual reality. Enroute we talk about the current context, miracles, disruptors and change. We also explore cognitive enhancing drugs in the workplace and cannabis justice being racial and environmental justice. And archetypes and ego. A ‘mind blowing' conversational opportunity with a wise and wonderful soul. So many gems including… “These forces of change are tapping into what wants to be born” “What is out there is relative to who is there to see it” “One of the attractions of having a psychedelic experience is the way you get an opportunity to let go of consensual reality for a time” “Getting too tightly locked into a consensual reality prevents exploring art” “We have a sacred responsibility to live the life we have been given” “The ego desperately wants to feel what we do know” “Ultimately we don't know what reality is” “Learning to give the ego courage to let go” EPISODE EXTRAS:…so many resources here On Being with Krista Tippett (5 November 2020) Karen Murphy The Long View, II: On Who We Can Become https://onbeing.org/programs/karen-murphy-the-long-view-ii-on-who-we-can-become/ The Social Dilemma (2020), Netflix https://www.netflix.com/es-en/title/81254224 Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin https://animas.org/books/ Lucy (2014) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) Yuval Noah Harari (2014) Sapiens: A brief history of Human Kind https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2/ If a tree falls in the forest, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest Green Earth Foundation (the website of Ralph Metzner who Ray mentioned): https://www.greenearthfound.org Amos Lozano quote on cannabis justice: https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/cannabis Carl Cederström (2016), Like It or Not, “Smart Drugs” Are Coming to the Office, Harvard Business Review, May 19, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/05/like-it-or-not-smart-drugs-are-coming-to-the-office Charles Eisenstein, (2013) A New Story of the People: Charles Eisenstein at TEDxWhitechapel. 13 Feb 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjoxh4c2Dj0 Reefer Madness (1936) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhQlcMHhF3w Erich Neumann (1955) The Great Mother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Mother Carl Jung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung NEW HERE? ABOUT EARTH CONVERSE AND I Hi, I am Penelope Mavor, podcast host and founder of Earth Converse a nature-based leadership collaborative helping leaders have the conversations they need to: with themselves, each other and the earth. Please get in touch for executive coaching and leadership development programmes. https://linktr.ee/EarthConverse Email: info@earthconverse.com And the wind, the trees...

We all have trauma and pain that is buried deep inside us. It's not a matter of IF we do, but of what it is.On this episode of Connecting Minds, I talk with Peter Conley of Integration Station about healing past wounds by accessing and releasing stored traumas using various modalities. We also discuss the all-important topic of integrating peak experiences so we may truly benefit from them.Peter Conley is the Founder of Integration Station, a resource for Psychedelic Integration. Integration Station provides protocols, tools, and awareness of modalities to improve your mental health and performance. He is a certified yoga instructor, completed a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, and advocates for the responsible use of altered states of consciousness as therapeutic modalities. Episode show notes here: https://christianyordanov.com/05-peter-conley/ Links to Peter's website and social media: Integration Station website: https://integration-station.com/Peter's Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterDConley

Today we are joined by Gunther Weil, the only remaining contactable member of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The 60s was an eventful decade for psychedelics, among many other global and national events, and included famous studies such as the Concord Prison Experiment and the Good Friday Experiment. Gunther was involved firsthand and worked side by side with notable members such as Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner and many more. We have the pleasure of hearing his stories from this era enriched with detail and charisma. We share personal experiences and discuss psychedelic therapies then, now and in the future..Gunther Weil was one of the core graduate student members of the Harvard Psilocybin project in 1960-1963. He worked closely with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass). He escaped the Holocaust, helped Tim Leary run the Concord Prison Experiment with Psilocybin mushrooms, edited the book “The Psychedelic Reader: Classic Selections from the Psychedelic Review”. Gunther is also a 50-year practitioner of Tai Chi and is recognized as a master teacher of Qigong. He was a founding chairman of the National Qigong Association. .Show notes:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gweil/https://valuementors.com/https://www.facebook.com/gunther.weil

Where do I even start explaining this week's episode? Probably with a vignette: someone came up to me after I was on this all-star panel discussion featuring five living legends — psychedelic researchers Ralph Metzner and Dennis McKenna, author Allan Badiner, film-maker Gay Dillingham, and former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson — and asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I was the youngest person on stage by twenty years, and had done nothing with my life yet that put me in the same weight class as any of them. And yet there I was to offer my synthetic insights and play music to a packed house in a geodesic dome on an utterly magical evening. We had an intense discussion about nuclear disarmament, ecological destruction, and psychedelic medicines hosted by my then-new friends at Synergia Ranch. Rick Doblin of MAPS and Johnny Dolphin of Biosphere 2 fame got up on stage that night as well (although not for this panel). It was a night I'd dreamt about weeks in advance with uncanny accuracy, and was the catalyzing moment that ultimately led to my moving to Santa Fe in 2018. I'm deeply grateful to Synergetic Press for hosting the event, inviting me to join this panel, and letting me share this recording as a podcast episode.Read all about this awesome April 2016 symposium and salon here:https://www.synergeticpress.com/raising-earth-consciousness-at-the-synergetic-symposium-and-salon/So much has changed since then and honestly, it isn't the most timely episode to publish at this moment, but I'm working hard to get some awesome people on the show soon who can speak to what we're living through in history right now.I would have more to say about this, but it's been a very busy week. If you'd like more new listening material, I strongly recommend checking out the recent conversation that I had with physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute about how the science of cities undercuts the economic myth of endless open growth and forces us to seriously study other paths to a sustainable planetary culture.Please take a moment to leave a glowing review of Future Fossils at Apple Podcasts.If you would like to link up with other amazing Future Fossils listeners, please email me and I'll invite you to our Discord server.Support this show on Patreon for over a dozen secret episodes, the Future Fossils Book Club (next up: Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler!), and muuuuuch more.Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).Additional Intro Music: "Lambent" by Michael Garfield.Thank you for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

LIVE LIFE HAPPY- THE UNCONVENTIONAL BOOK CLUB  with Andrea Seydel  Sign up to my LIVE LIFE HAPPY Newsletter and start putting knowledge into action right away...   https://www.andreaseydel.com Written Book Club Show Notes: https://www.andreaseydel.com LIVE LIFE HAPPY AUDIO: https://apple.co/2LItU8b LIVE LIFE HAPPY TV: http://tiny.cc/LLHTV THIS EPISODES BOOK     WHY? What Your Life Is Telling You About Who You Are and Why You're Here Do you wonder what your true path in life is? We each have a purpose and a mission. However, uncovering this purpose can be challenging, and often daunting. If you are like most, you have probably asked yourself, “Why am I here?” But where do you turn for answers? Religion? Psychology? Spirituality? Written by psychologist and bestselling author Matthew McKay, charismatic Silicon Valley spiritual leader Seán ÓLaoire, and bestselling author Ralph Metzner, Why? will help you see what your past and present experiences are telling you about the spiritual theme in your life; one that is visible when you know how to read the signs. By showing you how to uncover your unique path, this book will help you discover your life’s true meaning. This book will help you dismantle tired, old traditions that tell us that we should avoid pain and seek pleasure or pursue power, and shows us that even pain can play an important part in how we choose to live. So get ready to reveal your personal path in life, and begin living life to its fullest. Let's discover Why are we living this life? and make the best of it. What did you come here to learn and do? HIGHLIGHT:   For a full book highlight and worksheet go to Book Vault at:  https://www.andreaseydel.com SUBSCRIBE, COMMENT, REVIEW & SHARE: (Spread Happiness) If you like my channel and my book highlights, like and share us on social media:  https://www.instagram.com/livelifehappy_as https://www.facebook.com/LiveLifeHappyCommunity If you love books and knowledge, subscribe to the channel for more upcoming book summaries. Look into our channel for previous book summaries. Comment on what you think about the book and the video. Any feedback and honest reviews can really help grow the show!! EXCITING BOOK SUGGESTIONS:  What book are you dying to read and simply don’t have the time to read it but really would love the content coached to you. Let me know and I will do my very best to highlight your suggestion!!  HUGS!! Andrea

On this episode we talk with Douglas Rushkoff, author, teacher, and host of the Team Human podcast. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and each other. His latest book, also called Team Human, calls for the retrieval of human autonomy in a digital age. Rushkoff is also no stranger to the psychedelic scene having collaborated with Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, Ralph Metzner, Mark Pesce, and Erik Davis.    We discuss some of the parallels between digital and psychedelic mainstreaming, the mental health epidemic as an externality of capitalism, and placing our trust in capitalist cures. Will COVID-19 be to psychedelics as 9/11 was to surveillance capitalism? September 11th became the excuse to implement a surveillance state and surrender digital technologies to corporations. Will we see psychedelic medicines become the go-to recovery option for COVID-related mental health fallout? We also explore what a true psychedelic renaissance might look like.  ______ For access to full length podcast videos, support the show by becoming a member on Patreon __ Co-hosts: Brian Normand, Neşe Devenot, David Nickles, Brian Pace. Editor: Matt Payne.

In the last episode, number 23, we heard from visionary ethnobotanist, mystic and writer Terence McKenna, and from Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Science. This episode, number 24, is a continuation on the same topic, the increasing use of consciousness-expanding substances, also called psychedelics or hallucinogens, for health and personal growth. People around the world are using LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a whole range of other psychedelic substances to treat conditions ranging from allergies and anxiety to substance abuse and alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other problems. Some people use these substances in tiny doses to enhance their everyday life, work, and play. Some use them in higher doses for more profound experiences. This topic has been getting more attention these days due in part to Michael Pollan's recent book entitled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Today we'll hear from Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary, Andrew Weil and an anonymous friend "Don" under the influence of a “micro-dose” of LSD. Ralph Metzner, the German-born American psychologist and pioneering LSD researcher at Harvard University, and the author of The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, and Green Psychology, was speaking at the New Living Expo in San Francisco in 2012, and my friend Margie Lewis gave me a ticket to see him there in a panel discussing “the re-birth of psychedelic culture.” Right before the panel started, I asked Ralph for a brief chat as he was waiting to go onstage, to talk about psychedelic drugs as medicine to strengthen the body-mind connection. Then we'll hear a few minutes from Timothy Leary's talk at the University of California, San Diego, in 1976, recorded using the little cassette recorder that I recorded lectures with at the time. Then, Dr. Andrew Weil speaks at a MAPS conference in 2012 in San Jose, CA, about how he used LSD to help cure himself of allergies vis-a-vis the mind-body connection. After that comes my interview with Andy in 2012. [caption id="attachment_2886" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]https://andystreasuretrove.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AWeil-and-AMoorePHOTO-198.jpg () Andy Moore and Andy Weil in San Francisco, 198? (Photo by Jack Walsh)[/caption] Next, hear my interview with a friend who asked to remain anonymous when discussing taking LSD to enhance his life and work. An hour or so before this interview occurred, he had taken what is called a “micro-dose” of LSD. [caption id="attachment_2902" align="alignnone" width="1024"]https://andystreasuretrove.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/IMG_0899.jpeg () Let's call him "Don."[/caption] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is dedicated to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Zinberg (Dr. Norman Zinberg) and Dorothy Zinberg.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Part 1 of a two-part program about the increasing use of consciousness-expanding substances, many of them illegal, for health and personal spiritual growth. People around the world are using these consciousness-expanding substances, also called psychedelics or hallucinogens, to treat conditions ranging from allergies and anxiety to alcoholism and addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many other problems. Some people use these materials regularly in low doses to enhance their everyday life, or they may use them more occasionally in larger doses for a more profound experience. This is a topic that has gotten more attention these days, due in part to Michael Pollan's recent book entitled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which includes accounts of his own personal experiments with LSD, psilocybin and DMT. I thought that now would be a good time to dig into my trove of recordings and play you some that I've made on the topic of psychedelic drugs over the years between 1976 when Timothy Leary came to speak at my college, and just a couple of weeks ago when I recorded an interview with a friend who was under the influence of LSD at the time. In this episode I'm going to start out by playing you part of a recording that I made in 1991 of a talk given by Terence McKenna at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. Terence was a visionary explorer and writer, and a singularly engaging speaker. He wrote books like The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods, and True Hallucinations, all of which I own and recommend. He also happened to have gone to high school with one of my best friends in San Francisco, so I'm lucky to have gotten to know Terry personally a little bit too, and I treasure a letter that he sent me a short while before he died. After Terence McKenna, we're going to hear from Rick Doblin, the President of an organization called MAPS (which stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). Rick will talk about that organization's work to bring currently illegal psychedelic materials into the light of science so that they can be studied properly and used to help people. You'll hear Rick speaking to doctors, therapists, researchers and other members of MAPS at a MAPS conference in San Jose, CA in 2010, and then you'll hear Rick in conversation with me, at MAPS' former headquarters in Ben Lomond, CA, where I met him for the first time. In the next episode, episode 24, which is also available now, we'll continue this psychedelic journey and you'll hear my brief chat with psychologist Ralph Metzner, one of the early LSD research pioneers at Harvard University along with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Das), Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil. Ralph talked with me just before going onstage at the New Living Expo in San Francisco in 2012. After that I'm going to play you a short bit of a recording of Timothy Leary lecturing at my college, UC San Diego, in 1976 or 1977, talking about psychedelic drugs, pleasure, and human destiny. After that we'll hear Dr. Andrew Weil at that same MAPS conference in 2010, talking about how he cured some of his own allergies using LSD, and then we'll listen to a personal conversation I had with Dr. Weil around 2012, about the mind-body connection and how consciousness-expanding substances can play a role in optimizing that connection. Finally, I'll have a chat with a friend here in Tucson Arizona, who, as we talked, was under the influence of LSD. He tells about the subtle ways that it is influencing his perceptions and his engagement with his art-making. Please post your comments and reviews in https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andys-treasure-trove-podcast/id1109564030?ls=1 (iTunes), or on andystreasuretrove.com.

Brigitte Mars is a master herbalist, university professor, author and nutritional consultant of Natural Health with some fifty years of experience. She teaches Herbal Medicine at Naropa University and The School of Health Mastery in Iceland. She has been the faculty advisor for the Psychedelic Club at Naropa University and is the voice for the audio version of The Psychedelic Prayers, based on The Tao Te Ching as translated by Timothy Leary and Dr. Ralph Metzner. She is a longtime member of MAPS and a recent graduate of the Psychedelic Sitter’s School in Boulder, Colorado. Brigitte is the author of many books including The Home Reference to Holistic Health and Healing, The Country Almanac of Home Remedies, The Desktop Guide to Herbal Medicine, Beauty by Nature, Addiction Free Naturally, The Sexual Herbal, Healing Herbal Teas, Rawsome!, and co-author of The HempNut Cookbook. Her DVDs include Sacred Psychoactive, Herbal Wizardry for Kids of all Ages, Natural Remedies for Childhood Ailments, Overcoming Addictions, and Natural Remedies for Emotional Health. Her latest project is a phone app called iPlant that helps budding herbalists to identify plants in the wild. More information about the guest can be found at http://www.brigittemars.com

En estos programas exploramos los misterios de la conciencia, la realidad y la experiencia psicodélica, junto a invitados especiales y reconocidos entrevistados.  Sigue nuestras transmisiones en vivo en Radio 13 Digital (1290 AM) los lunes a las 16 hrs (MX)  Escucha nuestro podcast en Spotify, donde profundizamos en estos mismos temas con un mayor límite de tiempo:  https://open.spotify.com/show/2weoXV5... Visita nuestra web: www.mindsurf.org  Siguenos en facebook: facebook.com/mindsurfers  Conoce el trabajo de Karina Malpica, fundadora de MindSurf en: www.karinamalpica.com  En MindSurf no invitamos a infringir ninguna ley. Si tiene alguna duda con respecto al marco regulatorio de las sustancias de las que aquí hablamos, comuníquese con un profesional del campo legal.

This episode revisits a historic essay written by Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner in regards to programming the psychedelic experience. More recent information and research is incorporated, as well as various ways to program your very own experience on a psychedelic. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thecosmicgiggle/support

Episode 197: Turn On Tune In & Drop Out Dr. Richard Alan Miller is a pioneer in the annals of metaphysical and paranormal exploration. Miller began working in the “X-Files” world of Navy Intel (Seal Corp. and then MRU) in the late 60s. He’s been involved in research and projects – many at the top-secret level – that have formed the basis of several modern-day scientific inventions. Miller’s research in the field of paranormal began as a graduate physicist working 11 years with Navy Intel (Anesthesiology). His past and current writings and presentations reveal a depth of knowledge and practical experience in three major fields; Alternative Agriculture, New Age Physics, and Metaphysics. The Harvard Psilocybin Project was a series of experiments in psychology conducted by Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert. The founding board of the project consisted of Leary, Aldous Huxley, David McClelland (Leary’s superior at Harvard University), Frank Barron, Ralph Metzner, and two graduate students who were working on a project with mescaline. Richard explains what happens at the moment of death.

Episode 197: Turn On Tune In & Drop Out Dr. Richard Alan Miller is a pioneer in the annals of metaphysical and paranormal exploration. Miller began working in the “X-Files” world of Navy Intel (Seal Corp. and then MRU) in the late 60s. He's been involved in research and projects – many at the top-secret level – that have formed the basis of several modern-day scientific inventions. Miller's research in the field of paranormal began as a graduate physicist working 11 years with Navy Intel (Anesthesiology). His past and current writings and presentations reveal a depth of knowledge and practical experience in three major fields; Alternative Agriculture, New Age Physics, and Metaphysics. The Harvard Psilocybin Project was a series of experiments in psychology conducted by Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert. The founding board of the project consisted of Leary, Aldous Huxley, David McClelland (Leary's superior at Harvard University), Frank Barron, Ralph Metzner, and two graduate students who were working on a project with mescaline. Richard explains what happens at the moment of death.

Many explorers are seeking a depth of healing that is more experiential through expanded states of consciousness. Some modalities of this are sweat lodges, vision quests, breath work, and where is it legal, psychedelics in Mexico. Here we explore the experiential therapeutic applications of expanded states of consciousness that lead to healing and transformation. Françoise Bourzat is a consciousness guide and counselor. She has a master’s degree in Somatic Psychology and is a Certified Hakomi Practitioner. After traveling the world, she became an apprentice to an indigenous Mazatec woman leading healing ceremonies with sacred mushrooms in the high mountains of Southern Mexico. Drawing from years of her close apprenticeship with this Mazatec curandera, as well as her training in other indigenous traditions, Françoise has developed a comprehensive approach that bridges Western and indigenous modalities. She trains therapists and facilitators and teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also lectures internationally. Shes the co-author with Kristina Hunter of Consciousness Medicine: Indigenous Wisdom, Entheogens, and Expanded States of Consciousness for Healing and Growth. (North Atlantic Books 2019).Interview Date: 7/6/2019 Tags: Françoise Bourzat, heroin, compassion, mushroom ceremonies, psychedelics, entheogens, hallucinogens, vision quest, sweat lodge, transdance, altered states, Ralph Metzner, MAPS, MDMA, PTSD, Roland Griffith, ibogaine, Julieta Casimiro, personal transformation, Indigenous wisdom, Shamanism, Health & Healing

Many explorers are seeking a depth of healing that is more experiential through expanded states of consciousness. Some modalities of this are sweat lodges, vision quests, breath work, and where is it legal, psychedelics in Mexico. Here we explore the experiential therapeutic applications of expanded states of consciousness that lead to healing and transformation. Françoise Bourzat is a consciousness guide and counselor. She has a master’s degree in Somatic Psychology and is a Certified Hakomi Practitioner. After traveling the world, she became an apprentice to an indigenous Mazatec woman leading healing ceremonies with sacred mushrooms in the high mountains of Southern Mexico. Drawing from years of her close apprenticeship with this Mazatec curandera, as well as her training in other indigenous traditions, Françoise has developed a comprehensive approach that bridges Western and indigenous modalities. She trains therapists and facilitators and teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also lectures internationally. Shes the co-author with Kristina Hunter of Consciousness Medicine: Indigenous Wisdom, Entheogens, and Expanded States of Consciousness for Healing and Growth. (North Atlantic Books 2019).Interview Date: 7/6/2019   Tags: Françoise Bourzat, heroin, compassion, mushroom ceremonies, psychedelics, entheogens, hallucinogens, vision quest, sweat lodge, transdance, altered states, Ralph Metzner, MAPS, MDMA, PTSD, Roland Griffith, ibogaine, Julieta Casimiro, personal transformation, Indigenous wisdom, Shamanism, Health & Healing

This week Chris and Skip say goodbye to Ranking Roger of The English Beat and General Public. Ralph Metzner (of 60’s psychadellic research fame) has gone to that big pink mushroom in the sky, too. We run our mouths about the Google Stadia and Apple news. Thanks for listening! Enjoy. We rate and review: Us Shazam! The Dirt Triple Threat The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley We intro with Mirror in the Bathroom by The English Beat, interlude with Quality not Quantity by The Sneaky Merlins and Tenderness by General Public, and outro with Save it for Later by The English Beat. Follow us on Twitter @adoradio0 or @M_ADOradio or @Skip_ADO_Radio. We're a proud member of the BAT SQUAD network (www.batsquadnetwork.com). Make sure to check out the other great shows! What?

Download In this episode, Joe gets on the mic to chat about some current events in the psychedelic space such as the recent passing of psychedelic icon Ralph Metzner, the Psilocybin decriminalization initiatives in Denver and now Oakland, and psychedelic use in the Military. 3 Key Points: Psychedelic Icon, Ralph Metzner passed away on March 14th, 2019. He had a remarkable career and published a ton of books around psychedelics in his time. A recent study found that a single dose of Psilocybin can enhance creative thinking and empathy for up to 7 days after use. Activists are planning an initiative to decriminalize Psilocybin in Oakland. Denver will vote on decriminalization on the May 7th ballot. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on iTunes Share us with your friends – favorite podcast, etc Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Get Educated Navigating Psychedelics or Navigating Psychedelics: 5-Week Live Online Course   Trip Journal                                                Integration Workbook             Show Notes Ralph Metzner Ralph Metzner passed away on March 14th, 2019 He was a part of the Leary, Alpert trio Ralph was a psychologist, writer and researcher who participated in psychedelic research in the 60’s. He had a remarkable career and published a ton of books: The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead Maps of consciousness;: I Ching, tantra, tarot, alchemy, astrology, actualism The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth Sacred Mushroom of Visions: Teonanácatl: A Sourcebook on the Psilocybin Mushroom Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca The Expansion of Consciousness (Ecology of Consciousness) Alchemical Divination: Accessing your spiritual intelligence for healing and guidance (The Ecology of Consciousness) Ecology of Consciousness: The Alchemy of Personal, Collective, and Planetary Transformation Overtones and Undercurrents: Spirituality, Reincarnation, and Ancestor Influence in Entheogenic Psychotherapy Searching for the Philosophers’ Stone: Encounters with Mystics, Scientists, and Healers The Toad and the Jaguar a Field Report of Underground Research on a Visionary Medicine: Bufo Alvarius and 5-Methoxy-Dimethyltryptamine Psilocybin and Creativity A single dose of Psilocybin enhances creative thinking and empathy for up to 7 days after use It was a 55 participant study in the Netherlands Decriminalize Psilocybin in Oakland Activists plan to decriminalize Psilocybin in Oakland Decriminalize Psilocybin in Denver It will be voted on, on May 7th Joe believes all drugs should be decriminalized We need to have a compassionate drug policy Placing people in jail for non-violent offences tears apart families We should not favor one drug over another in terms of decriminalization Use of Psychedelics to do War More Effectively Harm Reduction Joe mentions conversation he had with a friend of the show He mentioned that Ayahuasca sometimes has mold on it Ayahuasca is labor intensive to make, so they make it once and then it grows mold Then people come and drink the mold infested Aya and it can make a person more sick than they need to be “If you have the option to be more safe, should you be?” If we have less harm and less deaths in the drug world over time, in the next 5 or 6 years we are going to see huge benefits with these substances Staying out of jail, not dying, and by being safer with drugs we have more of a chance to influence policy and make these substances and drug checking more available for the future culture About Joe Joe studied philosophy in New Hampshire, where he earned his B.A.. After stumbling upon the work of Stanislav Grof during his undergraduate years, Joe began participating in Holotropic Breathwork workshops in Vermont in 2003. Joe helped facilitate Holotropic and Transpersonal Breathwork workshops while he spent his time in New England. He is now working in the software industry as well as hosting a few podcasts. Joe now coordinates Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork workshops, in Breckenridge, Colorado.

In this segment, longtime psychedelic scholar and researcher Robert Forte discusses his concerns regarding the “psychedelic renaissance” currently underway, in particular as we begin to see a resurgence of public interest (including more positive coverage in the corporate press) of MDMA and other psychedelic compounds in recent years. To understand Robert’s perspective, we touch on the work of Aldous Huxley and his book ‘Brave New World’ and its addendum ‘Brave New World Revisted’ in order to frame our understanding of what is currently taking place within the broader cultural and societal trends regarding the use of psychedelics (and cannabis) for therapeutic, medical, and recreational use. Having a deep respect for psychedelics and their appropriate use, Robert asks that the psychedelic community be aware of and counter the underlying agendas of these forces within our society, in particular when it comes to approaching the subject of the legalization and therapeutic use of these substances in the modern era. Robert Forte is a scholar and researcher of psychedelic drugs. He first studied with Frank Barron, who started the Psilocybin Project at Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963. In 1981 he moved to Esalen to study with Stanislav Grof, and then attended the Divinity School, University of Chicago. During this time Forte conducted an independent investigation of MDMA. He obtained his master’s degree under Mircea Eliade and has collaborated with many of the leaders in the field of psychedelics, including R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others. Robert is the former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and currently is adjunct faculty at CIIS. This is a segment of episode #147 of Last Born In The Wilderness “The Devil Is In The Details: Psychedelics & Our Brave New World w/ Robert Forte.” Listen to the full episode: http://bit.ly/LBWforte WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: http://bit.ly/LBWPATREON DONATE: Paypal: http://bit.ly/LBWPAYPAL Ko-Fi: http://bit.ly/LBWKOFI FOLLOW & LISTEN: SoundCloud: http://bit.ly/LBWSOUNDCLOUD iTunes: http://bit.ly/LBWITUNES Google Play: http://bit.ly/LBWGOOGLE Stitcher: http://bit.ly/LBWSTITCHER RadioPublic: http://bit.ly/LBWRADIOPUB YouTube: http://bit.ly/LBWYOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook: http://bit.ly/LBWFACEBOOK Twitter: http://bit.ly/LBWTWITTER Instagram: http://bit.ly/LBWINSTA

In this episode, I speak with psychedelic scholar, editor, publisher, and researcher Robert Forte. For over three decades, Robert has collaborated with some of the most influential and well-known figures within the psychedelic movement, including R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, and Alexander Shulgin, to name a few. James Fadiman, psychedelic researcher and writer, has described Robert as “a major but not well-known hero of the psychedelic movement.”✧ In this discussion, we discuss Robert’s skeptical, but well-grounded, concerns regarding the “psychedelic renaissance” currently underway, in particular as we begin to see a resurgence of public interest (including more positive coverage in the corporate press) of MDMA and other psychedelic compounds, as well as the ongoing legalization (or as Robert states it: the commodification) of cannabis through out the United States in recent years. Robert is fundamentally concerned with the various forces that aim to control the ways psychedelics and cannabis are perceived and received by the general public — pointing to the reality that we exist within a capitalist consumer culture, and as such corporations, government institutions, and policy-makers have their own agendas when it comes to the decriminalization and legalization of these substances for broader public use. To understand Robert’s perspective, we touch on the work of Aldous Huxley and his book ‘Brave New World’ and its addendum ‘Brave New World Revisited’ in order to frame our understanding of what is currently taking place within the broader cultural and societal trends regarding the use of psychedelics and cannabis for therapeutic, medical, and recreational use. Having a deep respect for psychedelics and their appropriate use, Robert asks that the psychedelic community be aware of and counter the underlying agendas of these forces within our society, in particular when it comes to approaching the subject of the legalization and therapeutic use of these substances in the modern era. Robert Forte is a scholar and researcher of psychedelic drugs. He first studied with Frank Barron, who started the Psilocybin Project at Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963. In 1981 he moved to Esalen to study with Stanislav Grof, and then attended the Divinity School, University of Chicago. During this time Forte conducted an independent investigation of MDMA. He obtained his master’s degree under Mircea Eliade and has collaborated with many of the leaders in the field of psychedelics, including R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others. Robert is the former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and currently is adjunct faculty at CIIS.♀︎ ✧ Source: http://bit.ly/DarkHistory ♀︎Source: http://bit.ly/ForteBio Episode Notes: - Learn more and purchase Robert’s book ‘Entheogens and the Future of Religion’: https://amzn.to/2IasXVI - Learn more and purchase Robert’s book ‘Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In’: https://amzn.to/2IcxGGw - Listen to the episode of Psychedelics Today that sparked my interest in Robert’s work: http://bit.ly/DarkHistory - The song featured in this episode is “Rap” by Actress from the album Ghettoville. - WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com - PATREON: http://bit.ly/LBWPATREON - DONATE: Paypal: http://bit.ly/LBWPAYPAL Ko-Fi: http://bit.ly/LBWKOFI - FOLLOW & LISTEN: SoundCloud: http://bit.ly/LBWSOUNDCLOUD iTunes: http://bit.ly/LBWITUNES Google Play: http://bit.ly/LBWGOOGLE Stitcher: http://bit.ly/LBWSTITCHER RadioPublic: http://bit.ly/LBWRADIOPUB YouTube: http://bit.ly/LBWYOUTUBE - SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook: http://bit.ly/LBWFACEBOOK Twitter: http://bit.ly/LBWTWITTER Instagram: http://bit.ly/LBWINSTA

Download Kyle and Joe interview Robert Forte who has been around the psychedelic world for decades as a writer, facilitator and researcher. He has known or has worked with most of the biggest names in psychedelic history including Dr. Stanislav Grof and Timothy Leary among others. The interview covers a lot of ground and will likely ruffle some feathers. Robert has extensively studied the history of psychedelics and has drawn some conclusions about the origins of the field. Psychedelics as Weapons From the early days, scientists have been working with psychedelics to weaponize them. From project artichoke to MK Ultra, the US government and many foreign governments have spent a tremendous amount of effort researching these powerful compounds and likely still are. Robert states that various governments particularly the United States government have groups that are using drugs to derange the public to make it easier for these groups to meet their desired outcomes - less democracy, increased plutocratic power, etc. Think Brave New World and Brave New World Revisitied. Deranged from Miriam Webster: 1: mentally unsound : crazy2: disturbed or disordered in function, structure, or condition My leg was propped up on a library chair at the time, as it was too deranged to bend.3: wildly odd or eccentric He makes a compelling argument, but we want you the listener and reader to "Think for Yourself and Question Authority". That was a Leary line that we think is valuablein situations like this. Read books on the subject, question the purpose behind them, think critically and see where you want to go with it. After recording this interview Joe Moore read the amazing and comprehensive 2016 history The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. The book filled in some gaps for me (Joe) but didn't really change my mind much on the topic of psychedelics specifically. Please enjoy the episode and if you want to discuss it, please join us at our facebook group here. Links & Show Notes    Colin Ross - Researcher Psychiatrist John Potash | Drugs as Weapons Against Us MK Ultra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra Acid Hype -American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience (History of Communication)   Henry Luce Theodore Shackley - CIA Officer Reinhard Galen Samuel Russell - Russell Trust opium skull and bones Brave new world revisited - https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ Entheogens and the Future of Religion The Devil's Chessboard Allen Dulles 10 Global Businesses That Worked with the Nazis http://www.businesspundit.com/10-global-businesses-that-worked-with-the-nazis/2/ JP Morgan Bank complicit in financial crimes in WWII The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Mossad Israeli Mafia One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church  J. Tony Serra (born December 30, 1934) is an American civil rights lawyer, activist and tax resister from San Francisco - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Serra  About Robert Forte James Fadiman calls Robert Forte, “a major but not well known hero of the psychedelic movement.”  A scholar, editor, publisher, professor, researcher of the subject for over 3 decades, Forte has come to some disturbing realizations about the psychedelic renaissance that he helped to start.  Huston Smith called his first book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion, “the best single inquiry into the religious significance of chemically occasioned mystical experience that has yet appeared.” Forte was introduced to psychedelics in 1980 by Frank Barron, who initiated Timothy Leary and started the Harvard Psilocybin Project with him. From the University of California Forte was invited to Esalen to study with Stanislav Grof, before going to the University of Chicago to study the history and psychology of religion under Mircea Eliade. Over the years Forte has worked closely with many of the most prominent leaders of the psychedelic movement, including R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others. His early MDMA research in 1981-85 turned on 100s of people to this new medicine. Though this project led to the creation of MAPS, Forte is a vocal critic of MAPS government collusion and deceptive policies. His second book is a rounded view of Timothy Leary, Outside Looking In:  Appreciations, Castigations, Reminiscences.  He first experienced ayahuasca in 1988, and conducted ayahuasca research with cancer patients in Peru, yet he is now suspicious of the globalizing of ayahuasca as an form of “spiritual colonialism.”   He is a enthusiastic supporter of conscious, independent psychedelic healing and recreation, and an equally fierce opponent of  psychedelics for mind control, profiteering, and social engineering by political and economic elites.

About Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the SixtiesNo understanding of the history of the sixties could be complete without a grasp of the work of Leary, Alpert, and Metzner, the cultural resistance to their experiments, and the way in which psychoactive drug use became a part of contemporary society. Next Generation Independent Book Awards Finalist, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture explores these experiments and their cultural milieu through never before seen photographs, personal accounts of authors Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass, and conversations with luminaries such as Aldous Huxley, Charles Mingus, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others that appeared on the scene. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit healthmatters.substack.com

Herbalism has always been the medicine of the people, but most of us in the West have been cut off from our earthbound roots and encouraged to forget our innate, ancestral ability to work and heal with plant medicines. Both despite and because of this, an herbal resurgence is slowly uprooting the dominant paradigm as ever more people heed the calling in their hearts to return to the old ways. No one has done more to share knowledge, encourage people of all skill levels, and bring folks together than Jesse Wolf Hardin (and his partner Kiva Rose). Wolf is an acclaimed ecosopher, author, ecological and social activist, artist, musician, and historian– a champion of both human and bio diversity, as well as of nature’s medicine.  He has been a leading voice of and for the natural world for over four decades, coining the term "ReWilding" in the 1970's. He has been a featured presenter at hundreds of conferences and universities, and is the author of over 600 published articles in over 200 different publications and over 20 books, his work earning the praises of luminaries such as Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, Joanna Macy, Ralph Metzner, and Starhawk. IN THE INTRO: -How I met Wolf & Kiva -Story medicine, psychedelic healing, witches & wise ones IN THE INTERVIEW: -The Plant Healer vision and how it’s evolved -A child’s life changing epiphany in an avocado tree at military school -What re-wilding means, from the man who coined the now-ubiquitous word -Folk herbalism and the infinite ways to walk the plant path -The three books Wolf had with him when he came into the land he would go on to steward for the next four decades in New Mexico -The recent planned unassisted home birth of Wolf and Kiva’s son of Ælfyn Wolfson Thorn Hardin -The fabulous Good Medicine Confluence- “Any pretense of pretending it’s a conference is over” -Helping plant people reclaim their own traditions -Regulation and the assault on herbalism (and women) from the 1700’s to now -Standing up for who we are as wild-hearted healers in a sterile society  -How Wolf & Kiva met and why their partnership works and is so creatively productive -The sense of enchantment that feeds those who follow their calling -Balancing a rational and magical approach to herbalism LINKS: -Find Plant Healer Magazine, Herbaria newsletter, the Good Medicine Confluence, Wolf's books, and more at PlantHealer.org -The Mythic Medicinals shop -Medicine Stories Patreon  -Medicine Stories Facebook Group -Take my fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz -Music by Mariee Sioux (from the song Wild Eyes)

This episode of the MAPS podcast takes us on a journey way back into the archives of psychedelic lore by pulling some classic audio from a historic event in 1990. Tucked in the cozy enclave of Maryland many of the worlds great psychedelic luminaries gathered to reflect on the state of psychedelic research, culture and policy. Rick Doblin moderates a panel from this gathering entitled "Psychedelics and The Future" that features on one stage; Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Terence McKenna, Ralph Metzner, Andy Weil, Emerson Jackson and Robert Zanger. Rick sets the tone by putting forth the question "Where do you see us in the year 2000? What will psychedelics look like in the 90's and where will it take us?" Listen for yourself to hear what these legendary thinkers had to say. Look out for a part two from this gathering because it's OH so good!

RALPH METZNER knows more about divination than most people. Look him up. This musical divination gets to the very heart of it. Recorded on September 6, 2007 on Alternative Talk 1150AM in Bellevue, WA. CREDITS: Hosted by ANDRAS JONES Musical Guest; RALPH METZNER R8B Theme performed by The Hard Way at Obsidian in Olympia, WA The Hard Way are… Scott Taylor - Vocals & Guitar Skyler Blake - Guitar & Vocals Luke Ogden - Bass & Vocals David Hyatt - Drums & Vocals LINKS: RADIO8BLOG - http://www.radio8ball.com/2017/09/19/ralph-metzner-with-andras-jones/ RALPH METZNER - https://ralphmetznerblog.com/ RADIO8BALL Website - http://www.radio8ball.com/ RADIO8BALL PATREON - https://www.patreon.com/radio8ball RADIO8BALL FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/radio8ball/ RADIO8BALL TWITTER - @radio8ball RADIO8BALL INSTAGRAM - @theradio8ballshow R8B APP - http://www.radio8ball.com/the-r8b-app/ Support the show. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/radio8ball See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The second experimental film by Enlightened Society. Its a guide for how to live in the world, the mission tasked to humanity by Joseph Campbell. The title "Archaic Revival" is an homage to Terence McKenna, which was his central theme and goal for humanity. The subtitle Paradise Regained is a reference to John Milton's sequel to "Paradise Lost." Its also about the journey of mankind, and the awakening of a deeper consciousness. We are in the process of shedding our historical baggage, on the way to creating an enlightened society. List of speakers in order: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joseph Campbell, Terence McKenna, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Echkart Tolle, Ralph Metzner, Paul Stamets, Ajahn Brahm, Terence Mckenna, Wayne Dyer, Ram Dass, Terence Mckenna, Joe Rogan, Joseph Campbell, Sadguru, Steve Jobs, Joseph Campbell, Psyched Substance, Charles Burkowski Poem, Joseph Campbell. Find more at NewMediaProductions.org

Aired Wednesday, 21 June 2017, 8:00 PM ET Byron Belitsos - Your Evolving Soul Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? Can there be a future in a world that at the present appears so divided and conflicted. Is there a glimmer of hope that the human spirit or soul can evolve and connect with the spirit found in all religions and faith—love? If you think about it, these questions that seem to describe the here and now could have been asked any time in the last 3000 or more years. My guest this evening on Destination Unlimited, Byron Belitsos, says the answer to these questions and more are found within what is known as the Urantia Revelation and that yes, there is hope! Byron is a multiple award-winning author and book publisher, and also an editor and educator. After founding Origin Press (OriginPress.org) in 1996, he has worked with numerous leading authors including Peter Russell, Ralph Metzner, Jim Marrs, Charles Tart, James O’Dea, Timothy Wyllie, Anodea Judith, and Barbara Marx Hubbard. Byron is also known as a leading expert on The Urantia Book, and has written, spoken, and given workshops widely on its teachings, including appearances on Gaiam TV and Coast-to-Coast AM Radio with George Noory. He has coauthored or edited five books about the Urantia Revelation, including The Adventure of Being Human II (2013), Healing a Broken World, and The Adventure of Being Human (2011). He joins me to discuss his new book, Your Evolving Soul: The Cosmic Spirituality of the Urantia Revelation.

Ralph and myself (Zach Leary) sat down at the MAPS Psychedelic Science '17 conference in Oakland, CA on April 23rd to embark on a wide reaching conversation that focussed on the early days of his research at Harvard, the culture of the 60's and how much has changed in the last 50 years. Of course, we also talked about the time he spent with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, the nature of consciousness itself and a new way of thinking about "ecology" as a concept. His new book "Ecology of Consciousness: The Alchemy of Personal, Collective, and Planetary Transformation" is out now wherever books are sold. Ralph is truly one of the great inspirational elder statements of the modern psychedelic movement and I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. Ralph Metzner PhD (born May 18, 1936, in Germany) is an American psychologist, writer and researcher, born in Germany, who participated in psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later named Ram Dass). Metzner is a psychotherapist and Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he was formerly the Academic Dean and Academic Vice-president. Metzner has been involved in consciousness research, including psychedelics, yoga, meditation and shamanism for over 45 years. He is a co-founder and President of the Green Earth Foundation, a non-profit educational organization devoted to healing and harmonizing the relationship between humans and the Earth, and a signatory to the 9/11 Truth Statement. Metzner was featured in the 2006 film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a documentary about rediscovering an enchanted cosmos in the modern world.

It's a rare thing that I feel compelled to do a podcast around the subject of my dear paternal star guide, good ol' TL. I love and miss him a lot but can't spend too much time being too close in terms of my own work. Of course there are exceptions and this was one of them. James Penner wrote the most amazing book, Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years - Early Writings on LSD and Psilocybin with Richard Alpert, Huston Smith and Ralph Metzner. James stopped by the kitchen table to dissect not just the book but the entire history and context which is what makes the work TL and RD did at Harvard so monumental. Really, if you don't know much about the Harvard era one thing to know is that it was one of the key ingredients in the start of the 1960's. James is funny, smart and so well researched. This was a pleasure do and a worthy exception to the TL podcast rule! INTRO RANT: moving through our collective relationship with the inauguration James Penner is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Southern California, James divides his time between San Juan and Los Angeles.

Javier Prato's brewing up something very special. Our third guest on the Psychedelic Times podcast series, Javier is in the later stages of shooting and directing a documentary about psychedelic plants called Spirit Medicine. The feature-length documentary is complete with forays around the world into the lands of indigenous cultures and their psychedelic healing traditions with Ayahuasca, Peyote, Psilocybin Mushrooms and Iboga as well as exclusive interviews with some of the leading figures in the psychedelic movement.   Some of those figures are Dennis McKenna (ethnobotanist), Gabor Mate (clinical psychologist and addiction expert), Claudio Naranjo (psychiatrist and author), Ralph Metzner(psychologist and consciousness researcher), Jordi Riba (pharmacologist), Rick Doblin (founder & executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies—MAPS), David Jay Brown (science writer and consciousness researcher), Daniel Pinchbeck, (author & Journalist), as well as several neuroscientists, shamans and plant medicine practitioners.   Show Notes Javier’s introduction to plant medicines [3:00] Javier's introduction to ayahuasca and first ayahuasca experience in Peru [4:00] Taking ayahuasca with psychologists and shamans [8:18] Javier's history with film [10:02] Filming, learning, and making connections at the ibogaine conference [11:50] The openness of the psychedelic community and benefits of interviewing people [15:15] The primacy of content creation in media [18:50] Integrating a psychedelic experience [21:18] Traveling to Africa for a traditional Bwiti ibogaine ceremony [24:30] Development of Spirit Medicine [31:54] Interviewing leaders of the psychedelic community like Dennis McKenna [33:10] Dr. Eduardo Jovel, ibogaine conservation, and the Ibogaine Conference [34:00] Use of ibogaine therapy for addiction treatment [35:55] Production of Spirit Medicine and Kickstarter campaign [36:50] Attending traditional peyote ceremonies with the Huichol in northern Mexico [38:15] Indigenous use of psilocybin and peyote in Mexico [39:05]

For this episode, Ralph Metzner discusses his new book, The Toad and the Jaguar, which is about the crown jewel of all entheogenic medicines, 5-MeO-DMT. Give it a listen and find out why Ralph feels that in comparison to 5-MeO-DMT, "DMT is overrated." We discuss 5-MeO and mystical experience, healing, therapeutic uses, and much more. For more info, visit www.greenearthfound.org

On Thursday September 12th, 2013 the Hermetic Hour's host Poke Runyon will introduce distinguished guest Dr. Ralph Metzner who will discuss his latest book "Worlds Within and Worlds Beyond," the seventh in his series of books on "The Ecology of Consciousness." All of Dr. Metzner's works are of special interest to students of the Western Esoteric Tradition. Check out his web site at www.greenearthfound.org. He was one of the original psychedelic experimenters and facilitators of that tempestuous era, an Oxford graduate, psychotherapist and a philosopher. His latest book will be of particular interest to students of Magick who may wish to compare his system of therapeutic soul travel to the Buddhist Six Worlds of the Wheel of Existance, the nine realms of the Nordic Yggdrasill World Tree, and the Octaves of Pythagoras with our own Pathworkings on the Qabbalistic Tree of Life. Many of his insights are applicable to our venue regardless of technique. He refers to his method as Alchemical Divination. Although we may use different techniques, and different mythologies we can always learn from the insights and the visions of a master -- so turn us on, tune us in, and don't drop out.

Do you wonder what your true path in life is? We each have a purpose and a mission. However, uncovering this purpose can be challenging, and often daunting. If you are like most, you have probably asked yourself, “Why am I here?” But where do you turn for answers? Religion? Psychology? Spirituality? Written by psychologist and bestselling author Matthew McKay, charismatic Silicon Valley spiritual leader Seán ÓLaoire, and bestselling author Ralph Metzner, Why? will help you see what your past and present experiences are telling you about the spiritual theme in your life; one that is visible when you know how to read the signs. Your experiences may be that of a Healer/Peacemaker, an Explorer/Scientist, a Warrior/Guardian, an Artist/Designer, a Teacher/Communicator, or a Builder/Organizer. By showing you how to uncover your unique path, this book will help you discover your life’s true meaning. This book will help you dismantle tired, old traditions that tell us that we should avoid pain and seek pleasure or pursue power, and shows us that even pain can play an important part in how we choose to live. The book also helps you to create your own cosmology that unites your beliefs with your life’s mission, helps you recognize that individual mission, and outline exercises to bring you into alignment with this mission via personal practices. Despite these heady topics, the book is written in an accessible, inspiring, and entertaining tone. We are here to see, to know, to gather whatever wisdom our life offers, and to make use of that wisdom as our soul matures. A seamless blending of deep spirituality, good psychology and practical living, Why? offers the tools that you need to gain knowledge and awareness of yourself at the deepest level. So get ready to reveal your personal path in life, and begin living life to its fullest. About the author: Matthew McKay, PhD, is a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA. He has authored and coauthored numerous books, including The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, Self-Esteem, Thoughts and Feelings, When Anger Hurts, and ACT on Life Not on Anger. He has also penned two fiction novels, Us and The Wawona Hotel. McKay received his PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, and specializes in the cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety and depression. He lives and works in the Bay Area.