Buddhism and the Psychedelic Society: An Interview with Terence McKenna
Allan Badiner conducted this following interview with Terence McKenna at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute in the Spring of 2001.
The Original Captain Trips
Before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…before Timothy Leary…before Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests…before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.
The Second Psychedelic Revolution, Part Six: A New Earth?
The most practical application of psychedelics is as a tool for examining differentiated states of consciousness, and ultimately for investigating the basis of consciousness itself. This was the promise of psychedelics that first created such tremendous interest within the scientific community before research was effectively banned in the early 1970’s.
Pantheistic Insights: Vegetarianism in Psychedelic Culture
From the historical perspective, vegetarianism has been a persistent theme in psychedelic culture related to the ethical and spiritual insights that the psychedelic experience may lead to.
Who’s Tripping Who?
Psychedelic plants, fungi and animals can provide extremely valuable insights relating to life on this planet. Our species would be foolish to disregard these transformative agents that can be of benefit to ourselves, all life, and our long term future on this planet.
Stanislav Grof and Richard Tarnas: The Birth of a New Worldview
In the mid-1960s, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof’s research in LSD psychotherapy challenged the orthodox Freudian model of mind. For years, Grof and his colleagues looked unsuccessfully for some kind of diagnostic system to predict the experiences of their clients in deep self-exploration. When Richard Tarnas applied archetypal astrology to this problem, Grof had to ironically concede that the one successful technique was even more controversial than his research in psychedelic therapy.
Psychedelics, Parapsychology and Exceptional Human Experiences
At the beginning of the 1950s the developed world began in earnest its psychedelic research era. Since then these profoundly mind-altering substances have been inextricably associated with paranormal experiences—such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and out-of-body experiences—by many of the researchers who have studied their effects. Currently however, virtually no research is being conducted in this area.
William Irwin Thompson on the Horizons of Planetary Culture
My second rap with poet-philosopher William Irwin Thompson, on the transformations of self and society in an age of collapse and emergence – of cyborgs, surveillance, and psychedelics, paranoid apocalypticism and inspired new visions for our species…
Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan, turned on and tuned in
Michael Horowitz and Lisa Rein tell the fascinating tale of McLuhan and Leary’s friendship, and present an unpublished letter from the Leary Archives.
The Second Psychedelic Revolution Part Two: Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, The Psychedelic Godfather
In a Psychedelic Hall of Fame, the section on chemists would be small; there have only really been two giants in this field — Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD-25 and psilocybin, and Alexander Shulgin, who seems to have invented nearly everything else.
