 | Wikipedia page, Facebook Terence McKenna was an ethnobotanist, mystic, author, psychonaut and lecturer. He was born and raised in Colorado but managed to extricate himself to Los Altos, California while still in his teens and so was on hand during the Haight-Ashbury heyday. And yet he never seemed to join it directly and in 1969, Terence headed first to Nepal and then to the Amazon in 1971, where he encountered the psilocybin experiences that would shape him into the psychedelic bard he became. “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.” --Terence McKennaWhat's been helpful: I suspect anyone drawn into the world of psychedelic experiences is eventually going to come across Terence and Dennis McKenna. After hearing Terence's name mentioned in passing by several others, I finally got around to looking into the matter - and instantly became a fan. If you also appreciate hearing the English language expertly managed, then Terence is one of those people you'd listen to describe the cover of the phone book for an hour. And then to marry his language skills and the world of the psychedelic!? Well, that's just a match made in Magic Mushroom Heaven, is what that is. Terence often drew upon an extensive knowledge of art and human history as a backdrop, making his stories especially interesting and informative. In fact, that's often what I've enjoyed most about his lectures, the historical insights that come from his being so well read on the subject. Terence gained and revealed a number of insights from his many psychedelic experiences, a few of which resonate deeply with my newfound take on reality. One is his 'novelty theory' - in general, the idea that the increasing complexity emerging throughout the universe signals the evolution of the collective consciousness, a process which will culminate in the birth of our next stage of consciousness. He connected a number of theories about time to this idea, all of which did not click for me after having experienced 'no time' as part of awakening. But this idea of novelty continuing to increase towards something - this is an idea that comes up in a number of guises from various teachers, and this idea definitely resonates. By which I mean it sounds like a truth I don't understand but do recognize. His other insight that I found 'familiar' was about the existence of what Terence called 'the Great Eschaton' or the 'Transcendental Object At The End Of Time'. Terence spoke often over the years of the one large event/change/shift in the future that is sending 'shockwaves' of a sort back through time, prompting awakenings and intuitions that are quickly heralding changes to the millions of minds looking for a different way. As it happens, this concept actually aligns with new data coming from lab experiments which demonstrate an ability in humans to sense events, especially painful or negative ones, in the immediate future, which prompts the body to start reacting to the stimulus even before exposed. This is, of course, something we've all experienced as a sense of intuition or 'gut feeling'. The Transcendental Object At The End Of Time - besides his books, the main reservoir holding Terence's teachings appears to be hundreds of YouTube videos from various lectures, retreats and the like. I'll be posting several of these links over time but to start, here's a compilation video (three and one half fabulous hours!) that offers a nice variety of video snippets from throughout Terence's career. An excellent segment on DMT starts @ 1:12:50 (no one describes these events like Terence) and another on the psychedelic experience here @ 1:45:25 |
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Articles by lmdietzel
Elisabet Sahtouris
 | Lifeweb site, Personal website Elisabet is an evolution biologist, furturist, and author and is involved with a number of national and international efforts aimed at bringing about the changes needed for our more balanced existence within Earth's ecosystems. You can find a brief bio here. "The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization-its economy-is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization" --Elisabet Sahtouris, 'The Biology of Globalization'What's been helpful: Though I haven't spent much time in her area of expertise, I very much enjoy Elisabet's presentations every time I catch them, usually as part of SAND events. Her deep evolutionary knowledge is also informed by her non-dual spiritual approach and the way she intertwines the philosophies is intriguing. She's incredibly smart and well-spoken and always animated and clear when presenting even the most complex biological models. What makes her so effective is how she is able to frame the events she discusses in the grand sweep of earth's history and animal evolution. And you can also find in her work some engaging ideas about what a successful human culture should look like. (I'm also diggin' the short video METAPHORmosis I found on her homepage.) |
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Rupert Spira
 | Website, YouTube Rupert Spira began his spiritual journey early in life, reading Rumi's poetry at the age of 15. His studies went on to include teachings from Dr. Francis Roles, Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, Krishnamurti and a number of others (I'd never heard of); his website has a nice bio. Rupert's teachings are also heavily influenced by Francis Lucille (SAND videos). “Only that which is always with you can be said to be your self and if you look closely and simply at experience, only awareness is always ‘with you’.” --Rupert SpiraWhat's been helpful: I may always have a 'complicated' relationship with Rupert's teachings. My ego thinks of them as 'relentless' because they are very clear, very inescapable and very persuasive rationales on the illusion of ego. It was while meditating in a hypnogogic state to Rupert's series The Light of Pure Knowing, (track #6, if you must know) that the message suddenly sank all the way into my awareness: I needed to experience the 'death' of my ego identity, Laura. Needless to say, it was a challenging next few days. Rupert's new book, The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter, felt to me like a similar exercise in ego disassembly. Reading the book felt like a practice in accepting that I am not this egoic identity ... whether I wanted to hear it or not! Fortunately, being 'no self' also means I can be 'any self', which brings a wonderful freedom and yet still, the egoic self is hard to let go of. If I feel myself sinking back into old conditioning, this will be a wonderfully effective book for scrubbing away the illusion of the egoic self. Which brings me to what I will always hold dear about Rupert's teachings; it was while practicing his 'fill-the-body-with-awareness' meditation instruction that I experienced a second profound shift in consciousness, which I wrote about in the post: Re-awakening To The Grateful Dead. Rupert's teachings helped open the door to that experience and for that I am eternally grateful. |
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Graham Hancock
 | Website, Facebook, Twitter Graham Hancock's teachings seem to center around two broad topics: exploration of consciousness and the interpretation of spiritual wisdoms left behind by ancient cultures. The two areas overlap in Graham's books, lectures and films in which he presents his entertaining and well-reasoned case that early civilizations in Egypt, South America and other areas routinely used psychotropic plants to explore consciousness and these practices played a significant role in the development of their arts, culture and sciences. "Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight-- and with no apparent antecedents whatever." --Graham Hancock, 'Fingerprint of the Gods'What's been helpful: The first video from Graham I encountered was The War on Consciousness BANNED TED TALK ... You can see why it caught my attention. What hooked me in his presentation was learning that the use of psychotropic plants to explore the nature of consciousness has a long and rich history. I was immediately intrigued and ended up side-tracking into the wisdoms of ancient Egypt at his behest, largely because I thought I might have to go back that far to get clear of the influences organized religion has had on current spiritual teachings. In the last several years, Graham's included in his lectures theories about a meteor strike that ended the last ice age and generated the massive floods spoken of in many spiritual texts, including the Bible. For several years, Graham's been working with geologists, archeologists and others to coalesce the physical evidence behind this theory, which he writes about it in this post: Why Science Should Cherish Its Rebels. That I've driven many times through the eastern Washington scab lands that bear some of the scars of this massive flood brought the discussion interestingly close to home. This summer, Graham suffered a severe acute illness but has fortunately bounced back and is writing a new book. From his 8/22/17 blog post, it sounds like he's ready to dive back into the fray: ..."My journey to the gates of death in the past week appears, however, to have cleared the energetic miasma by which I was briefly entrapped and has renewed my strength for the struggle ahead. We have been grievously misled about our past as a species and plunged into a state of sleepy amnesia. It is desperately important that we awaken if the human family is to survive on this beautiful garden of a planet, and if we are to honour as we should the gifts of life, consciousness, joy and the opportunity to learn and to love, to grow and to develop, that the universe so generously and unhesitatingly bestows upon us." |
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Psilocybin Basics
An Introduction to Magic Mushrooms
I am no mushroom expert so I thought I’d start the topic off with some pretty and accurate(ish) images of psilocybin mushrooms. Fortunately for newbies like myself, the net is full of experts who can speak to the spiritual, archeological, ethnobotanical and recreational aspects of this special fungus. Here a few of the sites I’ve used to get up-to-speed on the basics – and then some.
- Wikipedia – Psilocybin – this site has a surprising amount of content on this compound, though some of the research content looks a bit dated. Wikipedia page for psilocybin mushrooms.
- PsychonautWiki – a LOT of information on a LOT of psychoactive substances, natural and synthetic.
- MAPS – Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – a rich resource of new research on a variety of psychedelics; this link to their ‘psilocybin’ search results delivers about 100 studies, articles, interviews, and newsletters.
- The Third Wave – a website run by a group supporting informed discourse and advocating for integration of psychedelics back into the culture. They’ve pulled together a lot of basic and referenced material on all the usual psychedelics – LSD, DMT, ibogain, the lot. They’re big into microdosing and offer a number of guides on this and general usage.
- Erowid – a member-supported organization that offers a straight-forward database of information about psychoactive plants and chemicals; over 360 herbs, plants, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. And a toad. This link to their psilocybin mushroom page is a great technical resource.
Cannabis Basics
Links To Lots Of Good Marijuana Content
The legalization of recreational cannabis in some US states has finally brought to this country the transparency needed to fuel an enormous wave of creativity in all-things marijuana. For those of you interested in deep-diving into the new wealth of public information on cannabis, here are the sites that keep me up-to-date on all the serious and silly goings on in the industry.- The Cannabist – a longstanding resource with a large group of writers able to bring in news and information from a broad range of topics that includes clothing, parenting and sports.
- High Times – maybe the longest-standing cannabis magazine, this website focuses on the latest news and trends across culture, growing, edibles and more.
- Leafly – This website has emerged as the go-to spot to quickly find dispensaries and bud info. They’ve done an excellent job, since their start just a few years ago, of maintaining a clean, user-friendly site and mobile app while quickly expanding their content to include deeper threads: terpene definitions, a nice collection of ‘cannabis 101‘ resources, and several news lines.
- NCBI – and if you really want to geek out on the data, I refer you to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, operated by the US National Library of Medicine, a website that presents a no-nonsense library of biomedical and genomic information.
- NORML – Founded in 1970, this group works to reform marijuana laws. While their focus is legislative, because they’re one of the oldest such organizations they’ve had time to build up a lot of good “pot 101” content like FAQs, policy fact sheets, a nice primer article and, my personal favorite, nice summaries on recent medical research; a great site for getting your hands on cannabis data.
- The Weed Blog – a nice running collection of headlines in a range of areas like culture, cooking, and growing. Their mission: “facilitating a constructive conversation about marijuana in America”.
The Power of Now
 | The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (2004) Eckhart Tolle Eckhart begins this book with the story of how he came to be a spiritual teacher before going on to write that this book represents the essence of his work. Since it was written in 1999, some may wonder if this statement still holds true. Having listened now to many an hour of his recent meditations and lectures, I'd agree that this book captures the essence of the wisdom Eckhart Tolle is still sharing today with audiences around the world. He uses a Q&A format, the content coming from lectures, counseling sessions, and seminars. I found this format to be a penetrating way of shining a light on the illusory nature of ego and the nature of the true self. The book also provides numerous practical teachings on how access and stay connected to our true nature. “Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” --Eckhart Tolle, 'The Power of Now:'What I especially appreciated about this book is the straight-forward, eye-to-eye nature of the writing, perhaps because the message is not always easy to take. Accepting the 'death' of the ego identity is experienced as a substantial challenge by most people; this book provides the mental concepts - the pointers - to more clearly perceive the egoic self and awaken from its illusion. |
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The Secret Teachings Of All Ages
 | The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) Manly P. Hall I came upon this book early in my digging - loved it, couldn't get enough, wanted volume two immediately. Or a nice long chat with the author. After an informative summary of philosophical history laid out in the 22-page introduction, the author uses the meat of the book to make another mad dash through history, this time summarizing the many wisdom traditions he finds along the way. The book did a marvelous job of tying together so many of the little trinkets of information about religions, human history and philosophy that I'd picked up along my lifetime. There were lots of 'oh! so that's where that came from' moments waiting for me in this book. "(This book)… is dedicated to the proposition that concealed within the emblematic figures, allegories, and rituals of the ancients is a secret doctrine concerning the inner mysteries of life, which doctrine has been preserved in toto among a small band of initiated minds since the beginning of the world." --from the introduction to 'The Secret Teachings of All Ages'Details on symbols and teachings from the Druids, Hermes, the Gnostics, the Jewish and Christian traditions, ancient Egypt - the variety of spiritual teachings covered is impressive. This book reaches far (back in time) and wide (across many traditions) and so makes a persuasive case, to my mind, that a single core doctrine runs through the spiritual stories we've created over time to tell us who we are, where we come from, and why we're here. |
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Childhood’s End
 | Childhood's End (1953) Arthur C. Clarke As a fan of all things sci-fi, this book had long been on my radar but it never got read until I heard two speakers mention it within a few days of each other; even I can get that hint. “No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.” --Childhood's EndI'm so glad I waited to experience this story as I have a much different take on the ending now than I would have earlier. It's just the perfect sci-fi book for the newly awakened, in my opinion, and I don't think there's much more to say about it than that. |
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Infinite Potential
 | Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live (2013) Lothar Schafer Dr. Schafer gets right down to business with his title for - Chapter 1: Materialism is Wrong: The Basis of the Material World is Nonmaterial. "Behind the visible surface of things is the infinite ocean of possibility. Its waves are so beautiful and inviting. "What a wonderful world," Louis Armstrong sings. What a wonderful life, in which the playful waves in the cosmic ocean dare you, tease you, and play a game of hide-and-seek with you, all the time hoping that you will catch one and turn it into a beautiful poem, a painting, a song, or a wonderful act of human kindness." --Lothar Schafer, 'Infinite Potential'This book is an excellent explanation of the key concepts in quantum physics which are leading many in the sciences to consider a new non-materialist model of the universe and of life itself. Instead of seeing all forms and things as made of hard, dead matter, Dr. Schafer uses the recent developments in his field to demonstrate how all form is arising out of a field of interconnected and infinite potential. He goes on to describe how this field, which can arise to become anything, transforms into the 'material' forms we perceive all around us. (There's a good interview with Dr. Schafer available to subscribers of E. Tolle's website - a snippet is posted on youtube) So, a field that can be anything … exists around and in all things … It may sound like we're talking about The Force but those who've altered their consciousness to encounter the vast presence of Source consciousness (the God Mind, the Over-soul, The One Mind ...) will quickly recognize the similarities. |