Category: entheogens
Apple founder and tech visionary Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. Jobs was heavily influenced by 1960s counterculture, and once told a reporter that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things” he did in his life. Can LSD really make you more creative?
DMT is chemical produced and used by the human nervous system. It can be found in almost any plant or animal species and is a psychedelic chemical that is used in shamanic healing practices of South America. DMT is also listed as a Schedule 1 substance. According to the US government, not only are nature and shamanism illegal, but so are YOU, of possession AND manufacturing of an “illegal narcotic.”
and 50 other things in less than 2 minutes! 
But really, these quick Jason Silva videos are wonderful. Watch in full screen.
More info on each of the videos (and more rants by Silva) on his vimeo page.
The History Channel is premiering a two-hour documentary on the history of psychoactive/psychedelic drug use tomorrow night (Wednesday) at nine (check local listings).
History.com/schedule/9/21/2011
The Stoned Ages
From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history. Explore the reasons we’ve used drugs through the ages, while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us? Host Dean Norris will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse?
[H/T Clark Heinrich.]
Dear friends,
I urge you to sign this petition. Once more, this is an attack against the cultural and spiritual heritage of non-western people, a continuation of conquest and colonization of the word by people with a very limited worldview.
Best regards,
Luis Eduardo
The United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) has published on their website their annual report about the world situation on drugs in 2010. In this report, the INCB has included the preoccupying recommendation towards governments to outlaw traditional plants such as Ayahuasca (a decoction made with botanicals like Banisteriopsis Caapi and Psychotria Viridis) andTabernanthe Iboga among others, neglecting their important role as traditional medicine, as a sacrament and as therapeutic tool. These are the primary uses of these plants found in societies all over the world.
The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service (ICEERS) is organizing a letter-writing campaign to counter this demonic injustice. Please read more about this issue and add your signature here, and take a moment to browse the beautiful website of ICEERS.org.
Video of Sasha Shulgin giving a talk about psychedelics in 1987 recorded by Sound Photosynthesis. 1 hour talk and 1 hour of questions: the talk is fun, especially taking into account the year it was given, but questions were rather mediocre in my opinion.
parts 2 – 7 can be found here.
Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.
“How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills,” Kerouac wrote Leary, referring to psilocybin. “Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month.”
Read the article: NY Times
This is a TEDx presentation given by my favorite scholar of the rhetoric of biochemistry and post-vital living, Richard Doyle, about the importance of developing our conceptions of the noösphere.
Currently I’m reading his newest scholarly book concerning his ecodelic hypotheses about archaic and contemporary psychedelic media technologies, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere.
