I am creating this thread as a space to explore the part of the structure that involves attempts at technical management of individual consciousness for the purposes of social engineering, “social impact” profit, and the emergence of the AI hive-mind.
Attempts are being made to incorporate shamanic and mystical practice from indigenous and faith traditions around the world into this mechanical super-structure, though as a yogi told my friend @civilianaire in India - let them try, they don’t know what they are truly dealing with.
There is a long history here stretching back to metaphysics, alchemy, esoteric practice, psychical research, the Foundation for Integrated Education / Theosophy, Huxley, Vernadsky, Teilhard de Chardin, MK Ultra / Human Ecology, New Age, Human Potential Movement, Soviet investigations into parapsychology, etc.
I am placing an article about Peter Thiel’s investment in psychedelics. Thiel’s firm Palantir was working on mental health deal verification for social impact finance.
Also the clip from Stamets on Rogan - to me this seems like a set up for Social Impact Bonds in prescribed micro-dosing.
My sense was the drug war and now legalization / regulation was, in part, a long lead up for management of plant medicine at the molecular level - consider also light-based and water-based programming.
If you would like to add to this thread, please do so; but consider that traditional practices that connect us to other sacred realms are a powerful antidote to the machine. This, of course, is why those in power seek to secure it and push it into their controlled simulation apparatus.
Share from a place of investigating the structure so that we can work to disentangle from it.
Here we see problem, reaction solution I mentioned above. Decriminalization then targeting of Black and Brown communities for “communal healing” via altered states of consciousness. Very concerning given ties between incarceration and mental health “treatment.”
" Utilising Unmonopolisable Therapies
This is not a small nor isolated problem. There are thousands of FDA-approved generic drugs, with sometimes over a dozen or more being added to the generic drug armamentarium every year as branded drugs fall off the so-called “patent cliff”. This results in their price dropping close to the marginal cost of production due to competition by generic drug companies. There are also over 50,000 off-patent dietary supplements or Generally Recognised As Safe (GRAS) compounds, also referred to as “nutraceuticals”, with over 1000 introduced annually [3]. Further, plant-based medicines including cannabis & psychedelics, and also recreational drugs such as ketamine and MDMA fall within this category of “unmonopolisable therapies” because they are available for relatively low cost from multiple vendors."
The future of psychedelics is intertwined with cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Each is a powerful technology. What happens when psychedelics and blockchain come together?
Introducing Cryptocurrency and Blockchain
The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it’s not social media. It’s not big data. It’s not robotics. It’s not even AI. You’ll be surprised to learn that it’s the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It’s called the blockchain. Blockchain.
– Don Tapscott in his TED talk, ‘How the blockchain is changing money and business’.
Digital or cryptocurrencies are money redesigned for the internet. Crypto coins or tokens are issued not by any government or institution but by free software that enforces rules, including ones that may limit the supply. An account holder has an address with an associated balance that exists only digitally. Each address is a long combination of numbers and letters operating like an account number, sometimes presented visually like a barcode (a QR code). Each address can send to any other address on the same blockchain almost instantly, with minimal fees.
There is no central authority. Rather than trust, the mathematics of cryptography secures these processes. To conduct a transaction, you need the key to the address, which acts like an internet banking password. If most of your money is in a bank rather than notes under your mattress, it already consists of an electronic representation. Cryptocurrency builds on existing technology and extends it in new directions.
Bitcoin and Beyond
The first and most famous cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, but there are now thousands of others, sometimes called altcoins, each with a team of programmers working to deliver something of value. Each project attempts to differentiate itself via a focus on speed, capacity, privacy, and so on. This innovation has gone beyond the initial intention of representing money to encompass a range of other applications.
A blockchain, at its simplest, is a distributed record or ledger of chronological transactions
These other applications use the underlying technology of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies called blockchain. A blockchain, at its simplest, is a distributed record or ledger of chronological transactions that is publicly available and verifiable. Its distinguishing features are transparency and visibility. It may not be obvious what is so different about such a thing, but I hope to explain some of the excitement around blockchain below.
A Small Example
If Twitter were on a blockchain, President Trump would be unable to delete his tweets (he has deleted 431 tweets at the time of writing). Or, if he tried to delete a tweet, anyone would be able to see both the tweet and the act of deletion. No amount of FBI pressure could force a change of the records because the history of that transaction would already be on thousands of machines across the world rather than, as now, in a single place (Twitter’s database) controlled by a single entity (Twitter, Inc).
Blockchain provides the kind of reliability of record that, like the internet, is designed to survive a nuclear war.
Blockchain provides the kind of reliability of record that, like the internet, is designed to survive a nuclear war. So long as one copy of the dataset survives, it can be verified as an accurate record using an open source computer program based on mathematical principles.
Shipibo-Conibo kené embroideries featuring cryptocurrency symbols for Ethereum and EOS for sale in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo credit: Kent Osborn.
Psychedelics and Crypto
To discover what happens at the intersection of psychedelics and blockchain, we do not have to speculate about the future; 2018 saw significant developments.
The Pineapple Fund donates $5 million to MAPS.
The Pineapple Fund donated $5 million and helped raise $4 million more toward the $26.9 million needed for MAPS’s Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) MDMA Therapy Training Program seeks to train at least 300 therapists before 2021, when we anticipate completing Phase 3 clinical trials investigating MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). – MAPS
The Pineapple Fund is the project of one person who became suddenly wealthy due to their bitcoin holdings from the earliest days. “Pine” said that they decided to donate $55 million to charity “because once you have enough money, money doesn’t matter.” The Pineapple Fund donation illustrates how crypto can shift substantial power toward those interested to further psychedelic research.
The First Ayahuasca Cryptocurrency: AyaCoin
AyaCoin is an initiative from Tim Gulley, the founder of the AyaAdvisors, an established online platform for user reviews of ayahuasca retreats. It recently ran an initial token offering (ITO) designed, like a more traditional initial public offering (IPO), to raise capital by distributing paid-for shares. AyaCoin hopes to raise $4 million via its ITO to fund a retreat center in Ecuador, purchase land to protect the rainforest, provide a token that is exchangeable for ayahuasca retreats, and donate 5% of income to MAPS. As such, AyaCoin, alongside the MAPS example above, demonstrates the fundraising potential of crypto for large-scale psychedelic projects.
Investors have little more than the promises of the project team that they will deliver on their goals.
National and international authorities heavily regulate IPOs for good reasons. By comparison, an ITO or ICO (initial coin offering), being new, is subject to relatively little regulation. Investors have little more than the promises of the project team that they will deliver on their goals. As with crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, failures can be significant, and there is little recourse for those affected. One headline warns that a “New Study Says 80 Percent of ICOs Conducted in 2017 Were Scams.” As ever with psychedelics, there is the need to balance vision with practicalities, head with heart, and heaven with earth. Buyer beware.
Criticism of Blockchain
Blockchain is not a magic pill to solve all social and technical problems. Below, I address some common criticisms of blockchain. Enthusiasts accuse such criticisms of spreading FUD (“Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”), so I aim for a balanced perspective.
No one in the crypto community will forget what happened to Mt. Gox, one of the earliest and largest services where you could exchange fiat currencies such as dollars for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. In 2014, hackers stole 850,000 bitcoins, currently worth around $3,300,000,000. Trust me, that’s the right number of zeroes. Now and again, another hack happens. The answer remains simple: Hold any significant cryptocurrency at home, not in online exchanges.
Undoubtedly, some use cryptocurrencies for unlawful purposes, such as money laundering, recreational drugs, child pornography, and terrorism. In that regard, crypto is just like regular money. Pornography has driven the adoption of many past technologies, such as video players and virtual reality headsets. The use of crypto for the above purposes is one of few current areas that involve the exchange of crypto for real-world goods and services. Recreational drugs have been made safer by eBay-style sites like Silk Road that provide a degree of anonymity and extensive customer reviews. If crypto proves useful in these areas, it can expand into other areas just as previous technologies have.
Electricity demands, price volatility, thefts from exchanges, inappropriate application, and illegal activity are all real problems. Still, my plea is that whenever you encounter an entrenched criticism of crypto or psychedelics, reflect on the author and the publisher of that criticism. Whose interests do that author and that article serve? Are these interests compatible with yours and those for whom you care? There are vested interests that do not want psychedelics to succeed, and the same goes for blockchain.
Amara’s Law Applied
psychedelics may dismantle the very idea of mental health by showing more people, through direct experience, that you cannot separate the mental from the body and the soul, and that a health metaphor based on materialism is an inadequate model.
Amara’s law, named after a renowned technologist, proposes that we overestimate the impact of new technology in the short-term and underestimate it in the long-term. I also suggest that the long-term effect of new technology is not linear. For instance, within my field of psychotherapy, some think that psychedelics have the potential to make great leaps forward in the field of mental health. I argue instead that psychedelics may dismantle the very idea of mental health by showing more people, through direct experience, that you cannot separate the mental from the body and the soul, and that a health metaphor based on materialism is an inadequate model.
Another pertinent example is that complaining about the volatility in the conversion rate between a dollar and a bitcoin omits the crucial fact that bitcoins are a new kind of asset, with possibilities far beyond what the dollar, for instance, can do. It is the uniqueness of blockchain tokens and economies that will provide the most significant changes,in ways that are hard to imagine. It will take us, as a society, a while to get our heads around the conceptual differences. This lack of conceptual grasp is the reason we underestimate its long-term effects.
Psychedelic-Informed Development of Cryptocurrencies?
Crypto has already made a significant difference to the landscape of psychedelics. My educated guess is that personal use of psychedelics inspires many of those leading the development of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum.
Treated individually, psychedelics and crypto are each changing the world, and each demonstrates significant potential for the future. The more interesting question remains: What will they do together?
Plant medicines have the power to heal all mankind, and at AyaAdvisors, we firmly believe that the more people on this planet that participate in these life-changing plant medicine ceremonies, the better.
The reason a site like our exists though is because it’s highly irresponsible to take Ayahuasca from just anybody willing to give it to you, and you could find yourself in a rather hellish experience if you accept the wrong person’s invitation.
Even under the guidance of an experienced, respectable shaman, you may still encounter scary or unpleasant things, but in my opinion, any reputable center will have safeguards in place to give you the support you need if you encounter these things.
That aside, scrupulous people claiming to be shamans have taken advantage of women while they’re under the influence, for example, and that’s absolutely the last thing anyone should ever have to worry about when they’re trying to do some soul searching with the aid of a such a powerful plant medicine.
And most of us have probably seen some of the horror stories on YouTube of somebody screaming their head off the entire ceremony, getting violent, or worse.
And I can say with relative certainty that these are not the norm, but it’s important that you know that these are possibilities if you don’t do your research and go to a reputable center. And that’s why we exist!
We are here to simply provide neutral territory for people to speak their truths – both good and bad – about their experiences at various retreat centers, and in doing so, they help people who come after them to decide which center is best for them.
So please – for your own sake – take a look around, take advantage of this free resource, and only go to retreat centers that have an established reputation, either with reviews here or with people you know personally and trust.
If you do that, I have no doubt that you will have a wonderful, beautiful, Earth-shattering experience
Pineapple Fund was an experiment in philanthropy with cryptocurrency wealth. What happens when your ‘play-money’ becomes a treasure chest, and you’re past the satiety point of money?
I decided to donate the majority of my cryptocurrency to charities around the world, with an open application process and funding charities big and small. I focused on causes I believe in, or causes I know will work from my experiences.
Timed with the 2017 crypto bubble, 5104 BTC was turned into $55 million for charities. I’m happy and proud of the impact that will come, mostly thanks to the amazing charities and the dedicated people behind them.
I’m going to remain anonymous, because the point of the Pineapple Fund is not me. I consider this project a success. If you’re ever blessed with crypto fortune, consider supporting what you aspire our world to be
, Pine
5,104 BTCtotal donated
$55,750,000total donated
60charities supported
On a larger scale, the Pineapple Fund created a more mysterious form of cryptocurrency philanthropy.
The organization was started in December by an anonymous donor who goes by the nickname “Pine” and claims to be among the 250 largest holders of Bitcoin in the world. The fund aims to give away $86 million worth of Bitcoin, and has already given $20 million worth of the currency to 13 organizations, including million-dollar donations to the Water Project, which provides clean water to people in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights watchdog.
(These donations can be verified thanks to Bitcoin’s digital ledger system, which records every transaction in a public database.)
Whoever Pine is, he or she seems to have found a way to convert Bitcoin into something actually useful.
From clinical trials of psychedelics for PTSD to teaching kids to read & write, Pineapple Fund is about making bold and smart bets that hopefully impact everyone in our world.
The Pineapple Fund is not affiliated with any supported charity. Listed in order of funding.
Apply
Applications are closed for the Pineapple Fund. More than 10,000 applications were received.
Please do not submit applications. They will not be considered.
FAQ
Who are you, and why?
Sometime around the early days of bitcoin, I saw the promise of decentralized money and decided to mine/buy/trade some magical internet tokens. The expectation shattering returns of bitcoin over many years has lead to an amount far more than I can spend.
What do you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly spend? Donating most of it to charity is what I’m doing. For reference, The Pineapple Fund is bigger than the entire market cap of bitcoin when I got in, and one of the richest 250 bitcoin addresses today.
How many bitcoins do you have?
The Pineapple Fund represents a majority of my cryptocurrency holdings.
Why are you remaining anonymous?
Publicity has never been the point of this fund.
I’m an individual. Can I get some bitcoins?
The answer is no. Pineapple Fund is charity, but not that kind of charity.
I have a media request…
Feel free to email contact at this domain, and I’ll get back to you!
Why the name, Pineapple Fund?
I really like pineapple. Did you know that pineapples contain high levels of bromelain, which has been shown to be an effective anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxant, and digestive aid?!
"A spiral is a curved pattern that focuses on a center point and a series of circular shapes that revolve around it. Examples of spirals are pine cones, pineapples, hurricanes. The reason for why plants use a spiral form like the leaf picture above is because they are constantly trying to grow but stay secure. A spiral shape causes plants to condense themselves and not take up as much space, causing it to be stronger and more durable against the elements. "
“Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana.”
His research specialties include industrial economics and the economics of technological change, on which he has many much-cited publications, including the books listed below, and the articles in [4][5] His 1971 textbook on Industrial Organization has gone through many editions, and Scherer still participates on the advisory board for the scholarly magazine of the same name. Scherer has also published recently concerning patent policy reform.[6] Upon the death of Thomas McCraw, Scherer may be the scholar with the most expertise concerning the theories of former Harvard professor Joseph Schumpeter, about whom he has made a series of YouTube videos.[7]
More on examples of fractals in nature. Note this reference regarding fractals and trees @leo
“Approximate fractals found in nature display self-similarity over extended, but finite, scale ranges. The connection between fractals and leaves, for instance, is currently being used to determine how much carbon is contained in trees.”
I agree that there has to be something in this processing hypothesis, but still it is weird because I have never experienced ANYTHING like the fractals that I have seen on psilocybin in a sober state. And think about the visuals on DMT. Wow. What is that. Really.
Me and my friends like to think of it by believing that the way the fractals appear are how the molecules and atoms organize themselves and you become more aware of that on psychs. Clouds, water and trees are naturally occurring fractals. This is science.
This I think is correct … i think it has to do with perceiving the universe’s resonance - check the following for a quantitative & geometric explanation (without more than a short allusion to drugs and alcohol). In fact with this explanation and your own derivations and visualisations (math not drugs) I have graphed some of the interactions and they perfectly matched some of my CEVs… you know when some 2-d quadrille plains sort of shift and morph? well… the following explains some… very well indeed. Scientific communication skill on the said document is… not up to western standards… but the math fits, and I’m a scientists huh! sankhyakarika.webstarts.com/uploads/Secret_Sanhya_Part_2.pdf my point being this : “LSD heightens your sensory capabilities and you become more ‘present’ - even if you can be present by flying through the universe. Therefore all you perceive comes from the physical universe. It would be nice if our physics theories could account for the non-manifest that does exist and we do perceive.”
The book linked above — co-authored by Beatriz (Bia) Labate and Clancy Cavnar — was published by Synergetic Press:
From their website:
Synergetic Press is a fiercely independent publisher with offices in Santa Fe and London. We’ve published paradigm-shifting texts for over thirty years.
The founders and staff of Synergetic Press are pioneers in the field of biospheric and environmental sciences, and our enterprise is steeped in a rich tradition of experimental collaboration in the arts and sciences that spans nearly four decades.
Our authors are leading thinkers, visionaries, and cultural creatives that are dedicated to building a sustainable planetary culture.
Deborah has been the co-owner and publisher of Synergetic Press since 1984, publishing cutting-edge books on the environment, ethnobotany, psychedelics, consciousness, and cultural anthropology.
Vice-President of Institute of Ecotechnics (ecotechnics.edu) with ecological demonstration projects in sustainable forestry, grasslands, and and oceans, she has helped host a number of international conferences on global trends. Deborah is part owner and a Trustee of the London based October Gallery, exhibiting transvangard artists from around the world. (www.octobergallery.co.uk). In 1989, she founded and directed the Biosphere Press publishing division for the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona, set-up its educational programs department, and produced over twenty books, video, and educational curriculum titles in the start-up years (1990-1994).
For our first ever Earth Day episode, Joe interviews publisher, ecologist, and planetary steward, Deborah Snyder. Snyder is the co-owner of Synergetic Press and its associated organic farm, orchard, and retreat center, Synergia Ranch.
Snyder worked with the team that designed and built Biosphere 2, and she unpacks the many ways in which understanding the planet as a biosphere – a collection of cooperative living systems – can shift our perspectives and help us to heal our precious home. She discusses how monitoring the earth from space can teach us how best to care for it; the technosphere’s disharmonious relationship with the biosphere; the anthropocene epoch; Synergia Ranch and Synergetic Press; the importance of recognizing ourselves as an integral part of nature; and the ways psychedelic and ecological spaces overlap. While both agree that the environment is in trouble, they have an air of optimism and action that we all desperately need in order to secure the future of the planet and our species.
This episode also features a brief chat between Joe and Kyle, with Joe calling in from Bicycle Day San Francisco. With Vital officially launching the same week we hit 3 million downloads of the podcast (!!!), they felt it was worth doing a rundown of the top 8 most downloaded episodes, as well as highlighting some of their favorites. Thank you to everyone who has been listening and sharing your favorite episodes with friends. To 3 million more!
Notable Quotes
“I would describe the psychedelic world as tools to be able to enhance a person’s ability to explore and to understand what connections and interrelationships are. Many people that have had grand epiphanies that have led to whole new revolutionary technologies attest to this phenomenon. So Biosphere 2 was definitely an example of the creativity that came out of people that were able to do that.”
“We are very much nature and I think that we need to really work on our value of what that brings us and carefully consider before utilizing those resources for something that is perhaps just a one-way street.”
“I have never met anybody that has undergone or gone through any kind of transformative experience for themselves or looking for insight that hasn’t come out with a greater appreciation for the nature of which we are a part.”
In the video linked above, Deborah Snyder highlights the work of John P. Allen (heavily influenced by the work of Vladimir Vernadsky, and is extremely significant context from which to springboard into this most salient topic — the merging of the biosphere and the technosphere into what Allen called the cybersphere, AKA The World Sensorium/Global Brain):
John Polk Allen (born May 6, 1929, Carnegie, Oklahoma)[1] is a systems ecologist, engineer, metallurgist, adventurer, and writer.[2] Allen is a proponent of the science of biospherics and a pioneer in sustainable co-evolutionary development. He is the founder of Synergia Ranch, and is best known as the inventor and director of research of Biosphere 2, the world’s largest vivarium and research facility to study global ecology.[3] Biosphere 2 set multiple records in closed ecological systems work, including degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system (eight people for two years). He is also involved with forestry and reforestation in Puerto Rico where he owns a 1000 acre Mahogany tree farm at Patillas.[4]
Allen was co-producer and dramaturge of Theater of All Possibilities, an internationally touring theater company, and has over two dozen publications to his credit (many under his nom de plume, Johnny Dolphin): half scientific, the remainder in poetry, plays, essays, short stories, novels, and autobiographical fiction. He currently serves as chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, an international project development and management company.
Allen graduated from Pauls Valley High School in Carnegie, Oklahoma, in 1946, where he served as editor of the school newspaper and was named valedictorian of his class. From 1946 to 1952 he studied anthropology and history at Northwestern and Oklahoma universities, writing at Stanford University, and served as a machinist in the US Army Corps of Engineers. He earned a metallurgical-mining engineer degree with honors from the Colorado School of Mines in 1957, where he was president of the student body and received the American Gentleman Award; a master’s degree with distinction in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1962, where he was a Baker Scholar; and a Certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for Engineers from the University of Michigan in 1971.
In 1951, Allen worked as a factory worker in a meat-packing plant in Chicago, becoming involved in various efforts of community and political activism, serving as the secretary of the Anti-Discrimination Committee for the UPWA-CIO District 10 (which represented 20,000 workers), and helping to organize and lead a march to free Willie McGee, whose conviction and death sentence for rape became a cause célèbre in the burgeoning civil rights movement. While organizing for the Meat Packers Union on the South Side of Chicago, Allen worked alongside acclaimed bass-baritone and actor Paul Robeson and sociologist and leading civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois.
After spending the summer of 1956 conducting research on nickel ores for the Battelle Institute, Allen became a senior metallurgist for the Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, where he headed a metals team that developed over thirty alloys to product status. He then became assistant to the vice-president for David Lilienthal’s Development and Resources Corporation, conducting regional projects in Iran, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, where he became proficient in complex regional development.
In 1963, Allen self-financed a two-year sojourn around the globe by land and sea to study the origins of indigenous cultures and their various approaches to living within their ecosystems. His journeys took him to Africa, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines. He mixed with Berbers and the avant-garde literary coterie in Tangiers; set up a painting studio in Fez, Morocco; hitch-hiked across North Africa from Tangiers to the Pyramids and Karnak; lived with tribal chiefs in Sudan; traveled with refugees to the Rann of Kutch in India and Pakistan, consulted for the international medical relief organization Project Concern International in Vietnam; lived on a junkwith Tankas (Hong Kong boat people); and worked as a journalistic stringer to a foreign correspondent on the Ho Chi Minh trail in South East Asia (visiting twenty-three South Vietnamese provinces in a six-month period).[6][7][8]
Allen’s world travels led to his creating a synergistic approach to both science and art. Regarding the confluence of cultures he experienced in Tangiers, he said: “There was the avant-garde art culture with William Burroughs and the people around him, and then the Berber culture which is maybe 6,000 years old and has its roots in the ancient magical traditions, and also the imperial culture of the Spanish, French and British empires. So the combination of the Western imperial culture, the native Berber culture, and the Western avant-garde forced a personal transformation of all values, not just on a mental and emotional level, but on a physiological and social level as well.”[9]
In 1967, Allen co-founded Theater of All Possibilities (TAP) in San Francisco with Kathelin Gray and Marie Harding, a theater company and artistic practice network that toured domestically and internationally from 1968 to 1989. The wandering troupe contributed to multiple agricultural, ecological, and cultural projects, including performances in the Australian Outback, Peruvian Amazon, and the sacred forest in Osogbo, Nigeria. Allen served as co-producer and dramaturge for TAP, founding ten studios while working with collaborators from the sciences, technology, history, and ecology. After the network was formally disbanded in 2010, Allen and Gray created the performance research initiative Theatre for the Reconstitution of Reality (THEATRRR).
Allen began writing poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and autobiographical fiction in earnest in the mid-60s, many of which appeared under the pen name Johnny Dolphin. Highly influenced by the Beat Generation poets and writers of the 1950s and 60s, Allen became a practitioner of the “Tangier School” writing style, a literary movement identified with the fiction of Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, and the “cut-up” techniques of Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Allen’s books include the science-fiction novel Far Out and Far Away: A Novel of Emergent Evolution; poetry collections The Dream and Drink of Freedom, Off the Road, and Wild: Poems, Aphorisms and Short Stories; the short-story collection My Many Kisses; and a trilogy of autobiographical novels: 39 Blows on a Gone Trumpet, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, and Liberated Space. His plays have been performed on seven continents, and he has read his work in Paris at George Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company, in New York City accompanied by Ornette Coleman, in London with West African musicians at the October Gallery, and in Fort Worth, Texas with the Caravan of Dreams.
Allen’s autobiography, Me and the Biospheres (Synergetic Press, 2009), which provides a detailed description of the inspiration and experience that informed Biosphere 2, won the Benjamin Franklin Award for best autobiography/memoir of 2010.[10] Allen was called “Borges with a sense of humor!” by Maria Golia of the Cairo Times.[11]
In 1969, Allen co-founded and became general manager of Synergia Ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The ranch was home to the TAP network from 1969-1980, and again from 2000 to 2010. Situated on 130 acres of high altitude grassland, Synergia leased space to architectural enterprises, conducted anti-desertification work, developed special ecologically sustainable agricultural systems, and performed research in solar and wind energy. Over a thousand trees were planted, including 450 fruit trees and organic vegetable gardens. An extensive soil-building program was established, adobe buildings and a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller[12] were constructed, and subsequent artisan enterprises included pottery, wood, iron, clothing, and leather work. In conjunction with a local construction firm, Synergia built over three dozen adobe buildings in Santa Fe, contributing to a local renaissance of traditional adobe architecture. In 2016, Synergia won the Good Earth award at the New Mexico Organic Agriculture conference in recognition of its land care.[13]
In 1973, Allen co-founded and became director of the Institute of Ecotechnics (IE), an educational, training, and research charity dedicated to the synergetic applications of technology and ecology, the environment, conservation, and heritage. With its U.S. base at Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe and U.K. headquarters at October Gallery in central London (an art gallery founded by IE in 1979 dedicated to the promotion of trans-cultural avant-garde art and artists), IE has organized international conferences focusing on emerging research in biospherics and space exploration. Guest speakers have included architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller and adventurer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl.
In the early 1970s, in collaboration with TAP, IE constructed the ecological research vessel Heraclitus in Oakland, California, using a Chinese junk model. In 1978 the ship signed a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to collect weather, wind, cloud, temperature, and rainfall data during its voyages. Heraclitus has since logged over 250,000 nautical miles and undertaken twelve expeditions, including a three-year round-the-world voyage and journey through the tropics exploring the origins of human culture. It has sailed up the Amazon conducting ethno-botanical collections, undertaken oral history documentation in the Mediterranean Sea, and circumnavigated South America with an expedition to Antarctica to study the humpback whale population.[14][15]
In 1983, IE initiated Las Casas de la Selva (Houses of the Forest), a rainforest enrichment project in Puerto Rico, acquiring nearly 1000 acres of land adjacent to the Guavate-Carite Forest with the goal of establishing various methods of forest enrichment and to promote sustainable tropical forestry. With the cooperation of Puerto Rican departments of development and forestry, some 40,000 seedlings of valuable timber species were line-planted to minimize the impact on surrounding forest and conserve biodiversity. In 2017, Las Casas won the Energy Globe award for Puerto Rico.[16] Allen is co-designer of Las Casas and serves as its ecological and business consultant.
In the mid 1980s, along with a team culled from IE that included Margret Augustine, Kathelin Gray, Mark Nelson, Marie Harding, and William F. Dempster, Allen formed the corporation Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV) to invent, construct, and manage Biosphere 2. Project funding came primarily from the joint venture’s financial partner Edward Bass’s Decisions Investment. The $250,000,000 project[17] would conduct scientific, technical, and management research relevant to understanding the biosphere of the Earth, and as a prototype for permanent life habitats on suitable locations in space.
Allen was inventor, engineer, and executive chairman of Biosphere 2, which was designed to achieve a complex life-support system through the integration of seven areas or “biomes” — rainforest, savannah, desert, marsh, ocean, intensive agriculture, and human habitat. Unique bio-regenerative technologies, such as soil bed reactors for air purification, aquatic waste processing systems, real-time analytic systems, and complex computer monitoring and control systems were developed to create an experimental prototype and test-bed for the stable, permanent life systems needed for space colonization.
Between the years 1987-1991, SBV constructed the 7 million cubic foot (3.14 acres) Biosphere 2 in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains in Oracle, Arizona, in the appropriately Mars-like Sonoran Desert. Allen began the first manned Biosphere Test Module experiment in September 1988, residing in the structure for three days, proving that closed ecological systems could work with humans inside and setting a world record at that time.[18]
The first crew (four men and four women) sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2 on September 26, 1991, and began a two-year experiment to study how the ecosystems inside the artificial biosphere developed. As Allen described in a scientific paper published with Mark Nelson in 1997, “The main objective of the experiment was to determine if an artificial biosphere could operate, increasing storages of energy and biomass, preserving a high level of biodiversity and biomes, stabilizing its waters, soils and atmosphere, increasing information and providing a healthy and creative life for humans working as naturalists, ecosystem scientists, and technicians.”[19]
Biosphere 2 captivated the world’s attention and imagination; Discover magazine asserted that Biosphere 2 was “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President John F. Kennedy launched us toward the moon,”[20] and talk-show host Phil Donahue, in a live on-site broadcast, called Biosphere 2 “one of the most ambitious man-made projects ever.”[21]
Biosphere 2 also generated controversy, stemming from a combination of cost overruns, operational challenges, group infighting, and a suspicion, amplified by the media, that Allen’s vision for the project centered on how humans could survive the destruction of the planet in the event of nuclear holocaust. In 1991, the New York Times referenced Allen’s quote from a 1985 publication, The Biosphere Catalogue (Synergetic Press, 1985), where he discussed how “higher forms of life” could survive the destruction of civilization in biospheres: “A hundred Refugia protected by their own energy resources in mountain caverns could release full-scale life after the skies begin to clear.”[22]
The ensuing media scrutiny cast doubt on Allen’s goals and methods, and under increasing pressure he resigned as Executive Chairman. Commenting on his change of status, he said: “I feel that this was an unnecessary tragedy and I offer the hand of friendship to Ed Bass to reverse the ongoing calamity and put Biosphere 2 on sound footing for the future of humanity and science.”[23] Speaking on his treatment by the media, Allen clarified, “I said the Biosphere was a “Refugia.” This word has a technical meaning in biology, it means a place that has a concentration of life diversity… this became, in certain sensationalist hands, interpreted as me being the head of an apocalyptic cult… You can’t live in Biosphere 2 if Biosphere 1 were destroyed—at least on earth. It was a dumb smear job.”[24]
In June 1994, Allen and the board of SBV dissolved their partnership and transformed the joint venture into a corporation with Ed Bass as the majority owner of Biosphere 2. Allen and the SBV team then formed two new companies, Biospheres, LLC, to design and build the next generation of artificial biospheres, and EcoFrontiers LLC, to carry out projects in rainforest, savannah, sustainable agriculture, and urban biomes related to Earth biosphere problems. These two companies ultimately merged to form Global Ecotechnics Corporation (GCE), an international project development firm owning and managing sustainable ecological research projects, including: Las Casas de la Selva in Puerto Rico; Les Marroniers Conference Center and Provencal farm in Aix-en-Provence, France; Silver Hills Properties in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Lundonia House in London, England, and Birdwood Downs in West Kimberley, Australia. Since its inception, Allen has served as Chairman of GCE.
Despite the criticism that led to Allen’s ouster, Biosphere 2 and its initial two-year experiment remains a significant scientific accomplishment, proving the viability of humans living in a man-made, fully recycling ecological system. A wealth of scientific results are available on the findings of the project, including a compendium of research papers published in the journal Ecological Engineering and reprinted in the book Biosphere 2 Research Past and Present.[25]The New Yorker asserted, “Much of what is known about coral reefs and ocean acidification was originally discovered, improbably enough in Arizona, in the self-enclosed, supposedly self-sufficient world known as Biosphere 2.”[26] The Discovery Channel rated Biosphere 2 “third in top ten greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century.”[27]
Allen’s work is influenced by the philosophy of geochemist and mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky, most noted for his book The Biosphere (1926), and Buckminster Fuller, whose theories on whole-systems inter-relatedness was popularized by his two-volume work Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) and Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1979).[28][29] He described Fuller’s influence in an interview with the Italian contemporary art magazine Mousse: “Bucky was a science philosopher and I was an engineering philosopher, so I took it as an engineering problem. An act of putting together a beaucoup d’argent and a beaucoup d’intelligentsia. Or in other words, synergies. Bucky’s the one who came up with and really developed the concept of synergy. But I had also developed that, independently, being a metallurgical engineer.”[30]
Allen has spoken at a variety of international forums on the emerging science of biospherics; the implications of Biosphere 2 for health, environment, science, and culture; the key role of space biospheres to create data needed to understand Earth’s biosphere; and on the necessity for humans to create harmony between ecological systems, world markets, and military technics. He has written or collaborated on over forty scientific publications, papers and presentations, many on biospheric and ecotechnic science and applications of systems ecology that informed Biosphere 2. Notable papers include “Ethnospherics: Origin of Human Cultures, Their Subjugation by the Technosphere, The Beginning of an Ethnosphere, and Steps Needed to Complete the Ethnosphere” (2003), which proposes the need for a cybersphere that gives immediate feedback on technological impacts to the biosphere;[[31]](John P. Allen - Wikipedia) and “The Evolution of Humanity: Past, Present, and Possible Future” (2000),[32] which posits that humanity requires a stand-alone taxonomic classification, separate from the primate order of the animal kingdom.
In 1996, Allen delivered a speech at Buckminster Fuller’s memorial where he offered insight into the exploratory spirit and synergistic philosophy the two men shared: “I think adventure is where human beings can find the best route to the answer of the question, “Who am I?” You don’t have to justify climbing Mount Everest, you don’t have to justify diving deeper into the oceans than anyone before, and you don’t have to justify going into space. It’s an end in itself because it leads to contemplation… It takes you out of superstition and fanaticism. That may be its greatest benefit.”[33]
The Institute of Ecotechnics thinks and acts on a planetary scale. What drives our work is the realization that our current ecological crisis is the growing imbalance between “technosphere” and “biosphere.” This was why we at Ecotechnics set our goal to develop systems that harmonize eco and techno.
For nearly fifty years, The Institute of Ecotechnics has established ecology and arts projects throughout the globe. Since 1973, Institute of Ecotechnics (I.E.) develops and applies innovative approaches to harmonizing technology and the global biosphere. Ecotechnics integrates two complementary fields of study: the ‘ecology of technics’ and the ‘technics of ecology’. The Institute of Ecotechnics convenes international conferences and workshops that bring together leading thinkers, scientists, explorers, artists and managers.
Producer of the film – Spaceship Earth (trailer above) – was Impact Partners Film:
At Impact Partners, we have introduced a unique model of equity investing into the documentary film community - pioneering a system where filmmakers and investors work together to achieve mutually beneficial goals of telling powerful stories, raising awareness about critical issues facing our world today, reaching mass audiences on a global scale, and creating revenue for our films. By bringing together filmmakers and investors who are passionate about their work, Impact Partners has forged a sustainable fund that is committed to supporting documentary filmmakers in particular and the documentary industry at large.
Ralph Metzner, PhD, (1936-2019) was a world-renown pioneer in the study of consciousness and transformative experience. His work stretched the boundaries of traditional psychology by incorporating shamanic methods that transform consciousness and expand understanding of the human psyche.
Metzner was involved in the study of transformations of consciousness since his time as a graduate student at Harvard University, where he worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) on the Harvard Psilocybin Projects. Metzner co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience in the 1960s and was editor of The Psychedelic Review . Metzner earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and psychology from Oxford University and a PhD in clinical psychology from Harvard University.
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. In the early 1970s he wrote Maps of Consciousness, one of the earliest attempts at a comparative cartography of consciousness; and Know Your Type: Maps of Identity , a comparative survey of personality typologies, ancient and modern. In the 1980s and for a 10-year period, Metzner served as Academic Dean at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he taught courses on “Altered States of Consciousness” and “Developing Ecological Consciousness.” He later became a Professor Emeritus at CIIS.
Metzner’s books include The Well of Remembrance,Green Psychology , Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, and two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of ayahuasca and teonanácatl. He also wrote The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience, first published in the 1990s. A new printing of The Unfolding Self was published by Synergetic Press in 2022.
The work on leadership and management helped to create a behavioral level of a person’s capability, which McClelland called “competencies.'[13][14] He also led efforts to show how important competencies were relative to knowledge and traditional personality traits in the desired outcomes of higher education (Winter, McClelland and Stewart, 1981). His work on power extended into research on the body’s natural healing process.[15]
In an exception from the typical focus of a psychologist, McClelland also examined cultural and country-wide effects of motives and related them to large-scale trends in society, such as economic development, job creation, the provocation of wars and health. McClelland’s work on motivation was cited as the most useful approach to motivation in a study by the former accounting firm Touche Ross & Company (Miller, 1981).
Sylvia Benito is portfolio manager with 20 years of experience in managing family office investments. She began her career as an entrepreneur, co founding a start up in South America, The Oasis Institute, which she successfully exited before becoming a professional investor. She has worked in various capacities in wealth management, from hedge fund analyst to investment strategist for ultra high net worth individuals, managing $1B in assets. Sylvia connects consciousness to capital by bridging the traditional world of investing to her proprietary innovations in quantifying the alignment, awareness, and transformative purpose of any company. Sylvia works with families, founders, and boards to adjust alignment to their highest and truest purpose, and in doing so, create chains of abundance that benefit the common good. Sylvia holds her CFA charter and is trained in family governance and systems. She is a trained shaman and actively investigating the utilization of ethneogens in investing.
Microdose is your guide to the business of psychedelics. We distribute and create the most compelling content, financial analysis, engaging events, and groundbreaking education to drive the psychedelics industry into the forefront of modern medicine.
Med Plant Science is raising funds to leverage its research and development license to develop rapid onset psychedelic medications using patented nano-encapsulation technology
Med Plant Science is licensed to grow, process, extract, and export psychedelic compounds from plants and mushrooms on the Caribbean island of St Vincent and the Grenadines. With our license, Med Plant Science will engage in two activities: 1) medical research ingredient supplier, and 2) psychedelic drug delivery technology/medicine developer. We are offering investors the opportunity to participate at the ground level through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) note. Participants in this SAFE can use their “present-day” investment to convert into future equity at a 20% discount in our next finance round, which is planned for Q4 2022. We anticipate our next round will advance at a significantly higher valuation, dependent on our ability to hit the milestones outlined in our investor deck.
Sophia Rokhlin is an author, speaker and nonprofit organizer from New York City. Through engaged botany and ecology, she bridges the worlds of indigenous ecological knowledge and Western science. She holds a BA in anthropology and religious studies from The New School and a M.Sc. in Ecological Economics from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
She is a Program Coordinator at the Chaikuni Institute and currently directs the sustainable ayahuasca cultivation program at the Temple of the Way of Light, a traditional plant medicine retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon. She is a co-author of When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance (Watkins, 2019) on the global spread of ayahuasca.
The Institute of Science and Environmental Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) will accept candidates Ramon y Cajal in these four research lines: 1. Industrial Ecology, Life Cycle Analysis, material and energy flow accounting in private companies, industrial parks, and
The Institute of Science and Environmental Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) will accept candidates Ramon y Cajal in these four research lines: 1. Industrial Ecology, Life Cycle Analysis, material and energy flow accounting in private companies, industrial parks, and the whole economy. 2. Ecological Economics, Energy and Society, Environmental Policy. Economic instruments and new institutions. European and international environmental policies on climatic change, biodiversity. 3. Processes and impacts of global and climate change. 4. Conservation Biology, Ethnoecology, Agroecology.
The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) is a multidisciplinary centre that promotes academic research and postgraduate education in the environmental sciences. It aims to improve our understanding of global environmental change, and the nature and causes of environmental problems. In addition, it studies policies, strategies and technologies to foster a transition to a sustainable economy.
Research
ICTA-UAB undertakes advanced research in 21 specific lines of environmental sciences, covering natural, social and engineering aspects. Our aim is to promote a better understanding of environmental dynamics, problems and their causes, as well as of policies and strategies to stimulate a socio-technical transition to a sustainable economy.
The category of ‘socio-technical transition’ is increasingly central to how I define my research agenda. What I used to call digitalisation or platformisation (loosely, the insert of platform intermediaries into existing social interactions) can be better described as a socio-technical transition in which the diffusion of new technologies through the lifeworld are driving a fundamental shift in the nature of social life. This is how Nesari et al define it:
Socio-technical transitions are technological changes that transform the way society functions such as transportation, communications, and housing are realized. Tangible historical examples of socio-technical transitions that have also been considered in the literature, such as the shift in the transportation industry from horse and animal-based transport to car transport or the transition from sailing ships to steamships, which have been accompanied by extensive changes in various infrastructural, social, regulatory, and other dimensions, clearly evoke the broad and multidimensional concept of transitions
I explore this through two parallel strands of research. Firstly, I analyse these changes at the level of social ontology with a focus on the how this socio-technical transition establishes new parameters for individual and collective agency. Secondly, I analyse how this transition is playing out within education, with a view to developing interventions at the level of policy and practice. My interest is in how we steer this transition in a way that reinforces agency. In the longer term I would like to develop an approach to understanding the multilevel character of socio-technical transitions, building on critical realism and Emmanuel Lazega’s neo-structuralism:
The multilevel perspective approach is a framework for perception sustainability transitions, rooted in evolutionary economics, innovation systems, and co-evolutionary research. This approach is fruitful when we need a framework for understanding stakeholder representation in historical transitions and relationships between newcomers
From above . . . The Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP) is an entity funded by the Pineapple Fund:
@AMcDAdditional Quaker involvement (see both links below with reference to Bob Jesse, who also worked for Bell Labs) . . .
Alexander and Ann Shulgin
Lafayette, California
28 February 2007
Dear Friends (Old and New) of the Council on Spiritual Practices,
I assume you’ve heard about CSP’s spectacular triumph (that’s the way I feel about it) — the study at Johns Hopkins, published last July, reporting the psychological and spiritual effects of psilocybin in healthy volunteers, and the surprisingly good press it received around the world.
I remember the day in 1993, down at Esalen, when I first met Bob Jesse and heard him tell me how — and why — he planned to leave Oracle and put his heart and mind to work to accomplish pretty much what he actually accomplished. I believed then, and have believed ever since, that Bob and the group he assembled, CSP, would succeed where everybody else involved in this effort might very well fail or, at least, lose heart and hope.
What makes CSP’s focus stand out is that it’s not about Western physicians getting to use FDA-approved drugs to treat Western illnesses. I believed then, and still believe, that visionary plants and chemical compounds are spiritual tools whose highest and best use is in opening one’s psyche and increasing insight, and that they always have been and always will be treasured most deeply by people who are compelled to look spiritual reality in the face, to learn what the human Shadow is, and how to communicate with it and transform it. That’s where CSP has broken new ground.
It all comes down to my belief in Bob Jesse, the person, whom I love dearly and very, very much respect. Over the years, he has made friends of potential foes. Bob has the integrity that comes from what the Quakers call simplicity: unlike most of us, he seems not even tempted to speak other than the truth. How else could he have convinced one of Bill Bennett’s deputies to write a paper in support of entheogen research?
Bob has kept CSP alive and working (usually out of the limelight),slowly but surely making changes in the perceptions of intelligent people in the scientific, religious, and legal communities — changes in what has long been conventional wisdom regarding substances that can open the human psyche to the beginnings of enlightenment.
As if one stunning result in 2006 were not enough, I’m sure you’ve also heard about the unanimous Supreme Court decision in favor of an ayahuasca-using church.CSP helped with that case from its early days and, in time, submitted a brief to the Supreme Court. The Court’s opinion affirmed reasoning that CSP set out in public testimony a decade ago. You can find links to those materials at www.csp.org/about
My husband Sasha and I extend our deepest thanks to everyone who has helped Bob and his colleagues accomplish so much! Your support of CSP has been transformed into real results which stand to benefit everyone (healthy people, not only those under medical care). We are asking friends, old and new, to consider giving whatever you can for the work ahead. Please help them keep this beautiful ship sailing, as there’s a great deal yet to be done.
From the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Findings to the Reconstruction of Religion
Psychedelic Science Talk [2013]
“Walter Houston Clark has defined “religion” as an individual’s inner experience of a Beyond, especially as evidenced by active attempts to harmonize his or her life with that Beyond. The Johns Hopkins experiments suggest that a large fraction of mentally healthy people with spiritual interests can have a profound experience of a Beyond—a mystical-type experience—with the aid of several hours’ preparation and a supervised psilocybin session. Furthermore, most of the study volunteers report that encounter as among the most spiritually significant of their lives and as bringing sustained benefits. How do we get from such experiences (however occasioned) to “religion” in Clark’s sense, and in the sense of a group pursuing spiritual ends? Perhaps that transition is, as Brother David Steindl-Rast claims, inevitable. The talk will address that process, and will argue that some social organizations have strong but unacknowledged religious aspects. It will also ask how nascent religious groups can form in ways that minimize the pathologies that so often have given the “r-word” a bad name, while channeling sociality to cultivate individual and collective well-being.
Robert Jesse is Convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP; csp.org). CSP’s interest in non-ordinary states focuses on the betterment of well people, in contrast to the medical-model treatment of patients with psychiatric diagnoses. Through CSP, Bob was instrumental in forming the psilocybin research team at Johns Hopkins University, and he has co-authored three of its scientific papers. He also lead the writing of an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the União do Vegetal’s use of a sacramental tea containing DMT, a controlled substance. A unanimous Court upheld the UDV’s right to its practice. Bob has long participated in the development of the Bay Area spiritual community that draws liberally from the non-creedal, non-hierarchical ways of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends). His formal training is in electrical engineering and computer science.”
Robert Jesse was instrumental in forming the psilocybin research team at Johns Hopkins and has co-authored several of its papers, including “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance” (2006). In 2017, Bob led the drafting of a public statement, now signed by numerous leaders in the field, raising Open Science as a psychedelic ideal (csp.org/open). In 2005, he led the writing of an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court in the União do Vegetal religious liberty case, decided 8-0 favoring the church. In 1995, he led the development of a Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides (Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides). Earlier in life, Bob trained at Hopkins in electrical engineering and computer science, consulted for AT&T Bell Labs, and worked at Oracle, lastly as a VP of business development.
The CSP Entheogen Project Series includes several books and the Entheogen Chrestomathy. As part of the series, Huston Smith gathered his essays on the enthogens into a single volume, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, which CSP published in a special edition mirroring Gordon Wasson’s landmark works.
Occasionally, CSP has been asked to enter its network’s expertise into civic matters. This has included an amicus brief (2005) for the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court’s unanimous (8-0) decision in that case affirmed a position CSP presented a decade earlier in invited testimony (1995) before the New York City Bar Association.
CSP has granted 14 CSP William James Awards to support graduate students conducting master’s- and doctoral-level research into primary religious experience at universities across the U.S. and abroad.
In 2004, CSP and the UCLA Working Group on Awe-Inspiring Experiences produced a public conference and a concurrent research retreat titled Awe to Action, with support from the Metanexus Institute and the Templeton Foundation. At the research retreat, scientists from several universities met to develop new empirical research into primary religious experience (awe), spiritual transformation, and the development of prosocial values and behaviors, such as forgiveness, generosity, and altruism.
Returning to Ann Shulgin(relevant to Snyder’s Synergetic Press):
Ann Shulgin
Ann Shulgin (1931-2022) co-founded Transform Press in 1991 with her husband, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, out of their shared passion and commitment to an uncensored examination of psychoactive compounds. Through the Press they co-authored and published PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (1991) and TiHKAL: The Continuation (1997), the two cult classics based on their psychedelic experiences. The publications generated regular discussion groups on psychedelics and psychopharmacology which the Shulgins led together for many years. They also contributed jointly to several other publications including, The Secret Chief , The Secret Chief Revealed, Entheogens and the Future of Religion , and Ecstasy: The Complete Guide .
Ann served as a lay therapist facilitating the use of MDMA and 2CB in therapeutic settings while those substances were legal. She brought a Jungian orientation to her examination of psychedelic experiences, and she placed particular emphasis Shadow integration while encompassing an overarching theme of spirituality and unification with the divine in all things.
@AMcDContinuing from above (RE: Bob Jesse) — was VP of Oracle . . .
Bob Jesse
Robert ‘Bob’ Jesse is one of the hidden movers and shakers in the psychedelics renaissance. He founded the Council on Spiritual Practices. Together with Roland Griffiths (and many others), he led the new research into psychedelics, also with a focus beyond the ill, but too for people for spiritual and psychological benefits.
Blossom makes information about the potential of psychedelics available to all stakeholders
to help speed up the psychedelic transition from trials to practice
We are perpetually answering the question: How do psychedelics become medicines?
Who is Blossom
Our mission is to speed up the adoption of psychedelics as a tool in therapy and self-development. We do this by providing these resources, since 2019, that bring together different perspectives about psychedelics. We aim to be a critical, grounded in a rational and scientific worldview, yet enthusiastic voice for psychedelics.
Floris Wolswijk – Founder
Floris started Blossom to scratch his own itch, he couldn’t find a place that explained the science of psychedelics in a way that most people could understand. He was missing a place that went beyond Google Scholar searches but was not as dense as an academic book. After not finding such a resource for psychedelics (as medicine), he founded Blossom in September 2019.
Floris has a master’s degree (MSc) in Psychology (2008-2012) from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. After university, he co-founded a start-up in a different field. Through first personal experiences with psychedelics and subsequently an encounter with the scientific literature, he fell in love with the psychedelics field. He hopes to play a small part in making psychedelics more widely available and used both in medicine and for self-development.
Iain is the lead researcher at Blossom. He studied Global Health (MSc) and Physiology (BSc) and has researched the various scientific, societal, cultural and political dynamics that have shaped our understanding of psychedelics throughout history.
If psychedelics are to become medicines at scale, the economics of the treatments do need to work. By work, I mean they will need to be cost-effective to a point that insurers are willing to provide the funds for them. Private (non-medical or non-insured) use will certainly have a place, but the real impact will be realised when psychedelics become part of mainstream healthcare.
, Pine
