The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was a group of 1960s hippie visionaries with a plan. Imagine an America in which LSD is a common source of inspiration and insight for the whole populace, and the pronouncements of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and other academic space cowboys are prized philosophical touchstones. Such, more or less, was the group’s goal as producer-distributors of the famous Orange Sunshine LSD that was a part of campus all over America in the late ’60s.
With care and considerable humor, Don Lattin shows us how the interwoven relationships of four charismatic visionaries contributed to the expansion of mind that changed American culture forever. The way we eat, pray, and love have all been conditioned by their lives and teachings.
In 1960, Timothy Leary set up an infamous institute at Harvard to experiment with psychedelic drugs. An exclusive excerpt from Don Lattin’s new book on how lifestyle guru Andrew Weil and other freshmen started tripping.
In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis' legendary LSD no-hitter.
Manifesting The Mind is a forthcoming documentary about psychedelic drugs. The trailer features such heads as Dennis McKenna, Alex Grey, and Dr. Rick Strassman. When it comes to laying out a comsic rap about the magic of hallucinogens, these guys are pros.
Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world.
Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual," he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the world.
Zeroing in on a group of cells in a high layer of the cortex, a team of researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute may finally have found the cause of the swirling textures, blurry visions and signal-crossing synesthesia brought on by hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, peyote and "'shrooms." The group, which published its findings in this week's issue of Neuron, may have settled a long-simmering debate over how psychedelic drugs distort human perception
These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies and, if you will accept the reasoning, could be classified as hallucinations. Such fantasies, or hallucinations, are inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood. Dreams are really the emotions that we find ourselves reluctant to examine, think about, or meditate upon, while conscious. [ via
mindhacks ]
Feelings of oneness with other people, nature, and the universe. Encounters with extraterrestrials, deities, and demons. Out-of-body experiences and past-life memories. Science casts a skeptical eye. But Dr. Stanislav Grof—the psychiatric researcher who co-founded transpersonal psychology—believes otherwise. When the Impossible Happens presents Dr. Grof ’s mesmerizing firsthand account of over 50 years of inquiry into waters uncharted by classical psychology, one that will leave readers questioning the very fabric of our existence.
