Psychedelic Consciousness

Download or read book Psychedelic Consciousness written by Daniel Grauer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the use of psychedelics for understanding ourselves, connecting with the world around us, and enacting outer change through inner transformation • Explores sacred tools and technologies to help us reestablish a lost ideology of unity, with a specific focus on natural plant/fungi psychedelics • Looks at the history of psychedelics and their role in facilitating natural intelligence’s ability to increase itself through ongoing analysis of its own experience • Provides guidelines for safely using natural plant/fungi psychedelics and integrating them into society to access unified consciousness and restore balance to our world Our ecological, social, and political issues all stem from the ideologies that drive our collective actions. In contrast to our innate humanity, which is rooted in unity, these ideologies have led us to believe that we are separate from each other, separate from nature, and separate from the results of our actions. Such a worldview encourages individuals to maximize self-interest, which then causes fragmentation, conflict, pollution, and the depletion of natural resources. Offering practical steps that we can take to heal ourselves and our fragmented world, author Daniel Grauer explores the use of sacred tools and technologies, such as natural psychedelics, meditation, and yoga, in order to reestablish an ideology of unity, work in symbiotic harmony with the Earth, and restore our world as a sustainable and prosperous whole. Grauer explains how individuals--and by extension societies--benefit from safely accessing transcendent states of consciousness, such as those provided by psychedelics. He explores how psychoactive substances have been used throughout history all over the world for healing, personal growth, spiritual development, and revealing hidden truths, such as in the Eleusinian Mysteries, Soma practices in Vedic India, and rituals in several South American indigenous cultures. Drawing on the plant intelligence work of Paul Stamets and Stephen Buhner, Grauer shows that the growth of individual and collective intelligence is hindered by the prohibition of psychedelics, which naturally foster humanity’s capacity for analysis, innovation, and cooperation. In addition to creating a sense of unity with all things, psychedelics offer the mind a new perspective from which to analyze its experience and heighten its awareness. Drawing on his own experience and research, Grauer provides guidelines for how to safely use natural plant/fungi psychedelics in order to access the unified consciousness of our ancestors and induce the states of awareness we need to restore natural harmony to our world.

Download or read book How to Change Your Mind written by Michael Pollan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now on Netflix as a 4-part documentary series! “Pollan keeps you turning the pages . . . cleareyed and assured.” —New York Times A #1 New York Times Bestseller, New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018, and New York Times Notable Book A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

Download or read book Are You Experienced? written by Ken Johnson and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Looking at art through the lens of psychedelic experience and culture... reveals an unexpected and illuminating dimension of art since the 1960s--not just obvious signs of psychedelic sytle but an underlying psychedelic ethos animating the works." --back cover.

Download or read book Psychedelic Mysticism written by Morgan Shipley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerned with scholarly, popular, and religious backdrops that understand the connection between psychedelics and mystical experiences to be devoid of moral concerns and ethical dimensions—a position supported empirically by the rise of acid fascism and psychedelic cults by the late 1960s—Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America traces the development of sixties psychedelic mysticism from the deconditioned mind and perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, to the sacramental ethics of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, to the altruistic religiosity practiced by Stephen Gaskin and The Farm. Building directly off the pioneering psychedelic writing of Huxley, these psychedelic mystics understood the height of psychedelic consciousness as an existential awareness of unitive oneness, a position that offered worldly alternatives to the maladies associated with the postwar moment (e.g., vapid consumerism and materialism, lifeless conformity, unremitting racism, heightened militarism). In opening a doorway to a common world, Morgan Shipley locates how psychedelics challenged the coherency of Western modernity by fundamentally reorienting postwar society away from neoliberal ideologies and toward a sacred understanding of reality defined by mutual coexistence and responsible interdependence. In 1960s America, psychedelics catalyzed a religious awakening defined by compassion, expressed through altruism, and actualized in projects that sought to ameliorate the conditions of the least advantaged among us. In the exact moments that historians and cultural critics often locate as signaling the death knell of the counterculture, Gaskin and The Farm emerged, not as a response to the perceived failures of the hippies, nor as an alternative to sixties politicos, but in an effort to fulfill the religious obligation to help teach the world how to live more harmoniously. Today, as we continue to confront issues of socioeconomic inequality, entrenched differences, widespread violence, and the limits of religious pluralism, Psychedelic Mysticism serves as a timely reminder of how religion in America can operate as a tool for destabilization and as a means to actively reimagine the very basis of how people relate—such a legacy can aid in our own efforts to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.

Download or read book Waking Up written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirituality.The search for happiness --Religion, East and West --Mindfulness --The truth of suffering --Enlightenment --The mystery of consciousness.The mind divided --Structure and function --Are our minds already split? --Conscious and unconscious processing in the brain --Consciousness is what matters --The riddle of the self.What are we calling "I"? --Consciousness without self --Lost in thought --The challenge of studying the self --Penetrating the illusion --Meditation.Gradual versus sudden realization --Dzogchen: taking the goal as the path --Having no head --The paradox of acceptance --Gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles.Mind on the brink of death --The spiritual uses of pharmacology.

Download or read book Animals and Psychedelics written by Giorgio Samorini and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-08-01 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Italian ethnobotanist explores the remarkable propensity of wild animals to seek out and use psychoactive substances. • Throws out behaviorist theories that claim animals have no consciousness. • Offers a completely new understanding of the role psychedelics play in the development of consciousness in all species. • Reveals drug use to be a natural instinct. From caffeine-dependent goats to nectar addicted ants, the animal kingdom offers amazing examples of wild animals and insects seeking out and consuming the psychoactive substances in their environments. Author Giorgio Samorini explores this little-known phenomenon and suggests that, far from being confined to humans, the desire to experience altered states of consciousness is a natural drive shared by all living beings and that animals engage in these behaviors deliberately. Rejecting the Western cultural assumption that using drugs is a negative action or the result of an illness, Samorini opens our eyes to the possibility that beings who consume psychedelics--whether humans or animals--contribute to the evolution of their species by creating entirely new patterns of behavior that eventually will be adopted by other members of that species. The author's fascinating accounts of mushroom-loving reindeer, intoxicated birds, and drunken elephants ensure that readers will never view the animal world in quite the same way again.

Download or read book Frontiers of Psychedelic Consciousness written by David Jay Brown and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In-depth and well-researched interviews with the leading minds in psychedelic science and culture • A curated collection of interviews with 15 accomplished scientists, artists, and thinkers, including Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Rick Strassman, and Charles Tart • Explores their profound reflections on the intersections between psychedelics and a wide range of topics, including psychology, creativity, music, the near-death experience, DNA, and the future of psychedelic drug medical research After many dark years of zealous repression, there are now more than a dozen government-approved clinical studies with psychedelics taking place around the globe. But what does the future hold for psychedelic research and the expansion of consciousness? In this curated collection of interviews with pioneers in psychedelic thought, David Jay Brown explores the future of mind-altering drugs, hallucinogenic plants, and the evolution of human consciousness. The accomplished scientists, artists, and thinkers interviewed in the book include LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, psychologist Stanislav Grof, DMT researcher Rick Strassman, anthropologist Jeremy Narby, MAPS founder Rick Doblin, ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna, psychologist Charles Tart, and musician Simon Posford from Shpongle, as well as many others. Demonstrating deep knowledge of his interviewees’ work, Brown elicits profound reflections from them as well as their considered opinions on the future of psychedelic drug medical research, God and the afterlife, LSD and mysticism, DMT research and non-human entity contact, problem-solving and psychedelics, ayahuasca and DNA, psilocybin and the religious experience, MDMA and PTSD, releasing the fear of death, the tryptamine dimension, the therapeutic potential of salvia, and the intersections between psychedelics and creativity, ecology, paranormal phenomena, and alternate realities. In each interview we discover how these influential minds were inspired by their use of entheogens. We see how psychedelics have the potential to help us survive as a species, not only by their therapeutic benefits but also by revealing our sacred connection to the biosphere and by prompting people to begin on the path of spiritual evolution.