In this feature length documentary, renowned botanist, explorer, and author Wade Davis, follows in the footsteps of his mentor to experience for himself the mind bending discoveries that Professor Richard Evans Schultes brought to the western world. Get an insight into native ceremonies and learn the secrets of shamans and medicine men. Retrace the thrilling exploration that transferred ancient knowledge to the developed world. Finally, visit laboratories in Switzerland to explore the evolution of psychedelic substances from sacred plants to LSD. Legendary writers, musicians, and Beat poets offer insight into the counterculture and mainstream influence of botanical compounds.
On November 13, 1976Howard Pearlstein & Henry Marshall interviewed Dr. Timothy Leary just a few months after his release from prison in 1976. It took place in Houston, Texas for the local Pacifica Station, KPFT. Unlike most radio interviews, instead of just one person asking the questions this one consisted of a panel of men who at times seemed more like a board of inquiry of some kind. However, it doesn't take long for Dr. Leary to be in full command of the situation. And for historians who are interested in whether or not Leary gave evidence against one of his attorneys, you'll be quite pleased when the questions trend in this direction. Tim defends his own sanity but quickly moves on to a preliminary discussion of Leary's 8-Circuit theories, evolution, the future, space migration, life extension & more.
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were dismissed from the university.
Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out ", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE), and he developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America". Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown.
“From my earliest years I wanted to figure out what life was about. I wanted to find out why I was here so that my actions and my desires would have some meaning. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t mainly and centrally a philosopher, because if you aren’t trying to figure that out for yourself you’re borrowing, or begging, or passively taking on someone else’s philosophy, and this may lead to situations that are unsatisfactory.”
“A philosopher never gets in trouble if his ideas are not new.”
"I spent four years in 29 jails and prisons on four continents."
“Looked at it pragmatically, the trick of taking intelligence tests is to get the highest score possible in terms of intelligence as defined by middle class intellectuals who designed the test.”
“It’s the nature of the game that a philosopher who’s proposing radical new ideas will be opposed by 80% of society.”
“My responsibility is to the genetic process and evolutionary process as I see it.”
“We have to be gentle with each other because we are going through a period of mutations.”
“I think, though, that there has never been a cultural change in history that was as profound, as pervasive, and as bloodless as the cultural revolution of the Sixties. By and large it was a smiling revolution.”
“By and large I’m very proud of what happened in the Sixties, every aspect of our culture was reformed and revised and reviewed and improved.”
“Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it’s basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what’s to come.”
“There’s perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn’t. It’s a neurological experience. It’s a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it’s basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.”
“To summarize, I’m an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are ‘leave the planet’, ‘get smarter’, and ‘learn how to live as long as you want’.”
Leary makes a point about President Kennedy attempting to turn the solution to a bad economy away from war and into space.
On June 16, 2011 the New York Public Library announced that it has acquired the Timothy Leary archive for $900,000. The well organized, invaluable collection contains >335 well organized boxes equivalent to 412 linear feet of letters, manuscripts, research documents, notes, legal and financial records, printed materials, photographs, video and audio tapes, CDs and DVDs, posters and flyers, and artifacts, dating from Leary’s youth in the 1920s until his death in 1996.
William Stingone, curator of manuscripts at the library acknowledged Tim as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century and predicts the collection will help researchers get beyond the “myth making” around ’60s figures and “Hopefully we’ll be able to get to some of the truth of it here”. It will no doubt be of great resource for the recent resurgence of psychedelic research by Charlie Grob, Rick Strassman, Roland Griffiths and organizations such as Heffter Research Institute & MAPS.
The complete documentation from Leary’s early psychotropic drug experiments are in tact. Thomas Lannon, the library’s assistant curator for manuscripts and archives explained that much of the archive includes legitimate scientific research performed prior these substances being made illegal. Leary kept meticulous records at many points during his life. There are comprehensive research files, legal briefs, budgets and memos about the many institutes and organizations he founded, but there are also notes and documents from when he was on the run after escaping from a California prison with help from the Weather Underground. A folder labeled as notes from his “C.I.A. kidnapping” in 1973 is full of cryptic jottings recounting the details of his arrest in Afghanistan, at an airport in Kabul, after he fled the United States.
Partial list of items in the archive purchased from the Leary Estate include:
Thousands of letters to Leary, many from luminaries of the 1960s era, including Aldous and Laura Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Charles Olson, Arthur Koestler, Huston Smith, Walter Houston Clark, Walter Pahnke, Humphry Osmond, Al Hubbard, Oscar Janiger, Cary Grant, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Michael Hollingshead , Robert Anton Wilson, Gordon Wasson, Ken Kesey and Augustus Owsley Stanley. Other correspondence is with his family – including letters to and from his mother, his wives and his children – as well as publishers, attorneys, politicians and his numerous adversaries, including G. Gordon Liddy and law enforcement figures from local sheriffs to Drug Enforcement Agency and Central Intelligence Agency operatives.
Professional and research papers, which will provide scholars a unique opportunity to study Leary’s clinical work from graduate school through his years at Millbrook, including hundreds of reports documenting the psilocybin-induced experiences Harvard graduate students and faculty, creative artists, prisoners at the Massachusetts State Prison at Concord, and theology students.
Files and correspondence detailing Leary’s experience at Harvard University, including his initial acceptance, the university’s eventual resistance to his research, his controversial research methods and his eventual dismissal. These files depict the evolution of Leary’s studies from rigorous, empirical research into more free-flowing, scientifically problematic exploration, as well as the promotion of psychedelics.
The complete records of the organizations Leary formed to continue his research after leaving Harvard, including the International Federation for Internal Freedom, Castalia Foundation and the League For Spiritual Discovery. These files, like those from Leary’s research at Harvard, include session reports, completed questionnaires, and letters describing the mushroom and LSD induced experiences of many notable cultural figures and Leary’s associates, such as Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner. Letters among Leary and his research partners also document their turbulent and intense personal and professional relationships.
Extensive correspondence, legal briefs, prison writings, letters of support and petitions sent to and produced by the four Leary defense funds during his time in prison after his arrest in 1973. There are also materials connected to his exile period in Algeria and Switzerland, including correspondence, notebooks, statements, letters and manuscript material.
Copies of government documents, released to Leary under the Freedom of Information Act, pertaining to various agencies’ surveillance of Leary, as well as his arrest. Leary’s cooperation with the authorities, still considered by many as a betrayal of the counterculture, is also well documented.
Computer generated text, correspondence and material relating to the computer revolution, the Biosphere project, space colonies, cryogenics and more from his time in Los Angeles.
More than 300 videotapes and 300 audiotapes featuring Leary, including about 50 early lectures. A large portion of these tapes are noncommercial and probably represent the only copies in existence.
Manuscripts of published books and articles, as well as a substantial number of unpublished works, some book length. Scores of unpublished essays on a variety of subjects, unproduced movie scripts, fiction and poetry are also included.
The archive is currently sitting in a storage complex in Long Island, waiting to be sorted and processed over the next 18 - 24. It is my hope that it will soon be digitized for the world to access online similar to Hofmann.org. A portion of the sale is being donated back to finance the processing of the material. When Tim announced his illness, he attempted to comfort us by saying something to the effect of “I will live forever, spreading through the WWW like a virus corrupting the minds of young people.” It has been heart breaking to see his website dead all these years and will be awesome to see Leary’s wish come full circle. I believe letters of support to the New York Public Library are appropriate, they may be contacted HERE. A big thank you to all who helped make this happen!
Date: January 28, 1985 Location: Santa Barbara, CA Speaker: Timothy Leary
“More changes have taken place in the last twenty five years, unquestionably, than in any period of human history. Just as I said an hour on the Greenwich map is a century, a decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?”
“If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques in the daily, moment to moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university, you’ve changed that culture.“
“The average post-1946 kid by the age of five had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography, more hype, more propaganda, you name it, than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings of the past.”
“To a ‘factory philosopher’ a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks.”
“Information, information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the future.”
Speaker: Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D. MAPS: Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century The Future of Psychedelic & Medical Marijuana Research April 16, 2010 - San Jose, California CME Track 01 Disk 01-306. Runtime: 59:14 Thank Jan @ gnosticmedia: FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD right click, save as.
This is a great talk by Andy Weil featuring his unique perspective on the current state of Psychedelic Medicine & Medicinal Marijuana. The successes and the challenges that lay ahead. As leader in the field of integrative and alternative medicine he shares his valuable insights into clinical trials on mind-body medicine and tells how even after publishing solid findings from medical pioneers, most doctors will not change their practice.
Forty years ago the U.S.led backlash against the possibility of researching the potential beneficial effects of psychedelics and marijuana. Many studies had shown psychedelics to be useful for managing anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients, for treating alcoholism and opiate addiction and for catalyzing spiritual/mystical experience. At the same time, marijuana was found to be effective for relieving nausea and vomiting often associated with cancer and chemotherapy. Now that restrictions on research with these agents are easing, a new generation of investigators is continuing these studies, as well as looking at MDMA for PTSD, psilocybin for OCD, and marijuana for MS, chronic pain, PTSD, and other conditions. Many other possible therapeutic applications of psychedelics and marijuana needs to be carefully designed and conducted to avoid another backlash from anti-drug zealots. Along with some great personal stories. He is always a pleasure to hear. I think you will enjoy it.
This episode of the Gnostic media podcast features a rare lecture Dr. Richard Evans Schultes on the topic of: Hallucinogenic Plants. I have an original BPC [Botanical Preservation Corps] cassette of this talk but there in no info on it other the #028. For those not familiar with Professor Schultes, he is widely considered The Father of Modern Ethnobotany and the real life Indiana Jones. Some of his students include Tim Plowman, Andrew Weil and Wade Davis. He coauthored Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers with Albert Hofmann and Christian Rätsch.
Richard Evans Schultes was a Boston-born and Harvard-educated botanical explorer, ethnobotanist and conservationist. To research his undergraduate thesis at Harvard, he travelled to Oklahoma with Weston LaBarre in 1936 to study the use of peyote among the Kiowa. In 1938 he travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico with Pablo Reko to seek the identity of teonanacatl. He and Reko were successful at identifying the species of mushrooms used by the Mazatec Indians and were the first to record the species used for their psychoactive properties.
In 1939 Schultes again travelled to Mexico in a successful attempt to verify the identity of Ololiúqui. He travelled throughout Mexico for a few years researching and collecting botanical medicines, hallucinogens, and poisons, before earning his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941. He soon became caught up in World War II when he was recruited by the United States to find an Amazonian source for rubber. He spent the next ten years working on this project.
In 1953 Schultes became the curator of the Orchid Herbarium at Harvard. He served as Curator of Ethnobotany for the Harvard Botanical Museum from 1958 to 1967 and as Executive Director from 1967-1970. In 1970 he was named Professor of Biology and Director of the Botanical Museum, positions he held until his retirement in 1985.
Schultes was a prolific writer, published over 450 technical papers and nine books on Ethnobotany, and was widely recognized as one of the most distinguished figures in the field. He received many awards for his work including the Cross of Boyaca (Colombia's highest honor), the annual Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Linnean Gold Medal (the highest award in the field of botany).
Schultes left our world and became one with the ancestor spirits in 2001.
At some point, these panelists suggest, the issue of defining consciousness may just disappear. Suggests Christof Koch: “Let’s treat consciousness as an empirical problem to be tackled by the biological sciences.”
Koch makes distinctions between different kinds of consciousness: sleep and its varied stages; awareness of sounds, sights and smells; levels of arousal. All these different states are properties “of complex adaptive networks with massive feedback shaped by natural selection.” And there are many behaviors that occur without consciousness. “When we talk, we don’t know what we’re going to say,” says Koch. His research has focused on finding “neural correlates of consciousness.” In one experiment with patients whose brains were implanted with 100 electrodes, he flashed pictures of Jennifer Aniston and the Sydney Opera House. While the patients could not remember what they’d seen, neurons responded selectively to these images. Studies like this, with even more sensitive tools, may some day help develop an information-based theory of consciousness, Koch says.
Mental phenomena are nothing but phenomena of the physical brain, says Patricia Churchland. It’s “an illusion of the brain” to think that we have a “nonphysical soul that does our feeling.” But how the brain creates constructs of itself and things in the world remains a major puzzle. For instance, how does a brain “habitually represent goals, plans and projects -- things that don’t yet exist?” And what about the huge amount of spontaneous activity in the brain that occurs while we’re resting? We don’t understand how the “organization of a motor response is achieved,” nor how these responses are integrated across sensory systems together with memory. Churchland anticipates a fundamental shift in looking at the brain that will merge philosophical and neurobiological issues.
In his day, Alexander Shulgin explored consciousness through “the art of chemistry.” He synthesized a version of mescaline and invented other psychedelic drugs, experimenting on himself, before the era of government and university regulations. “Each material had to be learned, as a new meeting…. The beauty of the final results, finding out what the effects were, was that you couldn’t be wrong.” If he reported visual enhancements, and recall of memories, his data was “always a winner,” because it was mostly a matter of subjective experience. Shulgin rues the laws and propaganda against psychedelic drugs, because he believes these drugs would serve as a useful “probe to look at the function of mind.”
Harvard economist: Prohibition creates violence, legalize all drugs! Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster From: The Raw Story
Because of his title as a Harvard economist, people tend to listen to Jeffrey Miron. And, if the old principle holds true and controversy always creates interest, expect a lot of people to be talking about Miron's latest volley into the mainstream media.
"Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground," he wrote in an essay published by CNN on Tuesday. "This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.
"Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after."
Miron's proposed solution to ending the cartel war along the US-Mexico border is both simple and enormously complex.
"Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it's permitted," he wrote. "Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question.
"The only way to reduce violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs."
Miron's report found that "marijuana legalization would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods."
He also discovered a potential for $6.2 billion or more, were marijuana taxed similarly to alcohol and tobacco.
However, during a CNN appearance on Tuesday, he took the anti-prohibition sentiment of his prior study on marijuana and applied it universally, telling anchor Kiran Chetry, "A lot of the violence we're seeing and a lot of the underground market is not related to marijuana but related to the other drugs.
"If we only did marijuana we would only have a small impact on the violence and corruption and disruption of other countries that is caused by U.S. prohibition of drugs and the U.S. forcing prohibition of drugs on other countries."
This video is from CNN's American Morning, broadcast Mar. 24, 2009.
"The first very dangerous side effect of psychedelic drugs is long term memory gain. And the second is short term memory loss. And I forget the third."
"The time has come for us as a species, and for you all as individuals, to move into the post industrial society."
"We all create our own reality."
[Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre] "You can make up all the abstract gods or leaders that you want, and theories and so forth, but you’re just whistling in the dark. The existential facts of the matter are that you are in the nose cone of your own time ship, hurtling at the speed of light into a dark future, and you don’t have a clue or navigational map. And if you’re scared, well, grow up."
"The sillier a religion is the more passionately fanatic people will defend it, if you know what I mean. So you’d better be careful when you buy a god, because it can get you in a lot of shit."
"Quantum physics is all about loosening up your tight structure."
"Now think about jazz. What’s jazz about? Jazz is about singularity, about creating your own rhythm, improvising, doing your own riffs, innovating. Hey, that’s exactly what quantum physics is all about."
"The fact that you become an individual, and think singular thoughts, doesn’t mean you can’t be understood."
"The function of the government is simply to protect us, not from ourselves, but protect us from bad [impure] products."
"No matter how crazy, fucked-up an individual can be, he can’t be as fucked up as the Catholic Church."
"You know that collectivity lowers intelligence. No matter how dumb the individual is, there’s no dumb individual that could have caused World War II."
"Colleges, universities, are tax supported, state supported, or financed by wealthy individuals and trusts to prepare you to find your niche, your spot, your cog in the great industrial machine. This is a factory."
"Don’t decide to major until after you graduate. When you get 50 years old, select your major."
"We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have."
"The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow."
"American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently."
"He [William James] later wrote the book "Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide."
"The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden."
"The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly."
"As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some more information on exactly how evolution got started."
"All of you in this room have experienced more realities, more crisis, more of life, you’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers in the past."
"The generation you belong to is of key importance."
"Nobody died for my sins, man. I did my time for ‘em."
"Let me give you an example of set and setting. If you take LSD under the following conditions: you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber, and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention, that is bad set and bad setting."
"The evolution of intelligence: Now this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter.
"I think it’s time to dust off the word pagan again. The word pagan seems to mean one who loves life. A pagan is someone who loves humanity and would never dream of oppressing humanity with Original Sins and other life sentences, which distract from self-esteem and courage and self-confidence."
"We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes, we are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes that didn’t grow up and develop tails and swing around in trees. . . . In many aspects, the human species is an immature species. We haven’t committed ourselves to a final form, and therein, perhaps, lies our great usefulness to the DNA code and the biological wisdom."
"If you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve, and grow, and go through the changes, the many changes that are possible, at all costs avoid terminal adulthood."
"If you stay in the same place, you tend, obviously, to not be exposed to new challenges, and you’re not going to be under pressure to grow. Although, it is well known though, that if you migrate, if you want to change, if you want to grow, if you want to develop, if you want to reach a higher level, a standard genetic tactic, and a standard human tactic, is to migrate to a new frontier where you have a chance to develop and grow."
"People born in the same generation share an unspoken sense of reality throughout the world."
"DNA uses juvenilization, mutation and change in the young, only when there’s a challenge that the old way can’t face."
"The last fifty years of the twentieth century in this country are simply the history of the baby boom moving like a pig through a python through American culture."
"If you find yourself in a generation that is pretty stuffy, migrate! A generation is an island in time. … You’re as old as the people you hang out with."
"The intelligent evolutionary tradition has always been intelligent skepticism of authority."
"Throughout human history, those in power have been wrong 99% of the time."
An interesting letter [Circa 1961] from Dr. Timothy Leary describing his new found enthusiasm for psychedelics.
Dear Arthur,
Things are happening here which I think will interest you. The big, new, hot issue these days in many American circles is DRUGS. Have you been tuned in on the noise?
I stumbled on the scene in a most holy manner. Spent last summer in Mexico. Anthropologist friend arrived one weekend with a bag of mushrooms. Magic mushrooms. I had never heard of them, but being a good host joined the crowd who ate them. Wow! Learned more in six hours than in the past sixteen years. Visual transformations. Gone the perceptual machinery which clutters up our view of reality. Intuitive transformations. Gone the mental machinery which slices the world up into abstractions and concepts. Emotional transformations. Gone the emotional machinery that causes us to load life with our own role-ambitions and petty desires.
Came back to the USA and have spent last six months pursuing these matters. Working with Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg the poet. We believe that the synthetics of peyote (mescalin) and the mushrooms (psilocybin) offer possibilities for expanding consciousness, changing perceptions, removing abstractions.
For the person who is prepared, they provide a soul-wrenching mystical experience. Remember your enlightenments in the Franco prison? Very similar to what we are producing. We have had cases of housewives understanding, experiencing satori describing it --who have never heard of Zen.
There are inevitable political-sociological complications. The expected groups are competing to see who should control the new drugs. Medicine and psychiatry are in the forefront. Psychiatric investigators (hung up as they are on their own abstractions) interpret the experience as PSYCHOTIC- and think they are producing model-psychosis. Then too, the cops and robbers game has started. Organized bohemia (and don't tell me it ain't organized, with rituals as rigid as those of the Masoic order) is moving in. There is the danger that mescalin and psilocybin will go the way of marijuana ( a perfectly mild, harmless, slightly mind-opening substance, as you know). And of course the narcotics bureau hopes that it will go the same way--so they can play out their side of the control game.
We are working to keep these drugs free and uncontrolled. Two tactics. We are offering the experience to distinguished creative people. Artists, poets, writers, scholars. We've learned a tremendous amount by listening to them tell us what they have learned from the experience.
We are also trying to build these experiences in a holy and serious way into university curricula. I've got approval to run a seminar here--graduate students will take the mushrooms regularly and spend a semester working through, organizing and systematizing the results. Its hard for me to see how anyone can consider himself a theologian, psychologist, behavioral scientist if he had not had this experience.
So how does it sound? If you are interested I'll send some mushrooms over to you. Or if you've already been involved I'd like to hear about your reaction. I'll be in London around June 8th and would like to tell you more about the cosmic crusade.
The memory of our weekend last winter remains as an intellectual and emotional highspot.
Wade Davis Ph.D. is a Harvard graduate and former student of Professor Richard Evans Shultes. He holds degrees in Anthropology, Biology and Ethnobotany and is also a professional writer, photographer, and filmmaker currently working with National Geographic. The feature film "Serpent and the Rainbow" was based on Davis's doctoral thesis on Haitian Voodoo Witchdoctors and the science behind zombification. He has done extensive fieldwork with Ayahuasca, Magic Mushrooms, DMT containing snuffs and other entheogens / psychotropic plant medicines. Last but not least he is dedicated conservationist who believes humanity's greatest legacy is the "ethnosphere," the cultural counterpart to the biosphere, and "the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness." He beautifully articulates the intellectual, emotional and moral reasons why it's in everyone's best interest to preserve the world's cultures.. I'm certain you will enjoy these TED talks, they are well worth your time to watch or listen to.
Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world with stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.
You can learn more about the Kogi HERE. Also in the National Geographic story entitled "Keepers of the World"
Wade Davis serves on the councils of Ecotrust and other NGOs working to protect diversity. He also co-founded Cultures on the Edge, a quarterly online magazine designed to raise awareness of threatened communities.
Gaialogues with Joanna Harcourt-Smith Dr. Ralph Metzner Recorded: Dec 3, 2007 Download the podcast: HERE
Ralph Metzner, Ph.D. who has a B.A. in philosophy and psychology from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Harvard University, has been involved in the study of transformations of consciousness ever since, as a graduate student, he worked with Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Dass formerly known as Richard Alpert on the Harvard Psilocybin Projects. He co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience, and was editor of The Psychedelic Review.
During the 1970s, Ralph spent 10 years in the intensive study and practice of Agni Yoga, a meditative system of working with light-fire life-energies. He wrote Maps of Consciousness, one of the earliest attempts at a comparative cartography of consciousness; and Know Your Type, a comparative survey of personality typologies, ancient and modern.
He was the Academic Dean for ten years, during the 1980s, at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he taught courses there on “Altered States of Consciousness” and “Developing Ecological Consciousness.” He is now Professor Emeritus. He maintains a part-time psychotherapy practice, and conducts numerous workshops on consciousness transformation, both nationally and internationally. His books include The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, Green Psychology, and two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of Ayahuasca and Teonanácatl.
He is the co-founder and president of the Green Earth Foundation, an educational and research organization dedicated to the healing and harmonizing of the relationships between humanity and the Earth.
In this interview Dr. Metzner shares his amazing philosophies, insight and history with the listener.
