Letter from the Editor – Spring 2009 – Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – MAPS

Richards emerged from those first psychedelic explorations in possession of three unshakable convictions. The first is that the experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—that is, not just a figment of the imagination. “You go deep enough or far ou

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Years later Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, captured the ethos nicely in a book he wrote with James Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered: “Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental territories previously explored only by small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers, mainly religious mystics.” As well as visionary

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There is no solution to the “drug problem,” or to the problem of environmental destruction or the problem of nuclear weapons stockpiles, until and unless our self-image as a species is reconnected to the earth. This begins with an analysis of the unique confluence of conditions that must have been necessary for animal organization to make the leap

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Who among the first generation of psychedelic researchers would dispute a word of this classic gust of Leary exuberance, circa 1963: “Make no mistake: the effect of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, of human potentialities, of existence. The game is about to be changed, ladies and gentlemen. Man is abo

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Stanislav Grof believes that psychedelics loosed “the Dionysian element” on 1960s America, posing a threat to the country’s puritan values that was bound to be repulsed. (He told me he also thinks the same thing could happen again.) Roland Griffiths points out that ours is not the first culture to feel threatened by psychedelics: the reason R. Gord

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Cannabis can be a potent psychedelic for journeying, a trusted ambassador in transcendent spaces, a versatile master plant that elevates, enlivens, and enlightens. Peyote (“the sacrament”) is alert, attentive, and immediate, surrounding me with twinkling, kaleidoscopic aha! messages and curious, exuberant life spirits that illuminate the way of hea

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