How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World: Visionary and Indigenous Voices Speak Out

The chief lesson to be learned from the psychedelic experience is the degree to which unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us the unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions. For it cannot be without reason that wherever in the world hallucinogenic indoles have been utilized, their use has been equated with magical self-h

Clinical psychologist William Richards, the longtime collaborator in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin trials, concludes that ethics and morality are hardwired, “perhaps genetically encoded,” within the human organism.19 Psilocybin appears to unlock that code by tapping directly into what the mystics have been trying to mine over the history of Christia

It became the place where people hoping to bring these molecules back into the culture, whether as an adjunct to therapy or a means of spiritual development,

Matt Johnson believes that psychedelics can be used to change all sorts of behaviors, not just addiction. The key, in his view, is their power to occasion a sufficiently dramatic experience to “dope-slap people out of their story. It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility

Since prehistoric times, humans have elevated mind-altering drugs to sacred categories to be used during religious ceremonies, rites of passage, or as medicines. In this context, only priests, shamans, or other designates who have received special training or have been invested with special authority are allowed to administer these drugs.