Call it trickle-down transcendence… in parsing the history of psychedelia, there is one distinction that proves, if not hard-and-fast, then certainly very useful. It’s the split between elitism and egalitarianism. And historically, this tension has long compromised our ability to reckon with the broader import of the psychedelic gestalt… champions of the traditional psychedelic trip…
…the use of psychedelics… [are historically] prevalent outside of clinical trials. The trajectory of cannabis looked pretty similar. After years of the plant being buried under a [unconstitutional and unjust] reputation, legal restrictions began to loosen after new research showed promising medical applications. What followed was an explosion of highly branded, startup-lingo-laden cannabis companies, which…
As long as he worked in the company [Sandoz], he was quite a conservative man, keeping his distance from the [so-called] counterculture, but the older he became, the more open he was to LSD use that went beyond therapy. …one of the most important things about LSD is that it can reconnect people with the living…
The San Pedro cactus evolved thirty or forty million years ago… Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus converts amino acids into compounds known as alkaloids … [psychologist] Heinrich Klüver determined that most mescaline [visions] followed a sequence of visual stages and featured groups of repeating motifs: a latticework or filigree that Jay calls ‘the…
How unusual it is for us to do nothing. In the Amazon, intentional isolation continues today in an ascetic practice known as a diet, or dieta in Spanish. This practice is grounded in the animist perspective that plants, animals, and even landscapes possess a spirit. The dieta is a means of entering into an experiential relationship with non-human beings. In…
Although MAPS is doing everything by the book in seeking approval of MDMA as a prescription drug, Doblin’s vision goes beyond such doctor-approved uses. He aspires to a world in which people can use psychedelics responsibly without permission from physicians or priests. “Psychedelics are tools,” Doblin says. “They’re not good or bad in and of…
To this day, many individuals who use psychedelic [entheogens/ethnobotanicals] feel they grant a certain kind of perspicacity, and the number of people who are using psychedelics appears to be growing. While under the influence… users typically experience changes in mood and perception, a sense of oceanic boundlessness, radically altered reasoning and thinking, and auditory and…
Currently, Earth is activating her defense mechanisms and — like a stern mother — putting [us] in time out, so we may come face to face with the very thing we have been avoiding for so long: Our mortality. This is also known as “being grounded.” I see trauma as a zip file of information,…
As a person raised under capitalism, I was conditioned to care a lot about obtaining a yield, so I encourage you to be intentional about what yields you try to obtain and the means to get them – especially in a time of climate and humanitarian crisis … While it can be tempting to construct a massive overhaul to…
Nature has often provided us with the means to cure disease and improve our lives; it seems absolutely insane to block our own progress… even in a psychedelic community that thinks it is more steeped in love and compassion than ever before… Although we’d like to think of this new renaissance as being led by…
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