That article struck a chord with psychotherapist Rachel Harris, who had encountered many clients unresponsive to traditional therapy and antidepressant protocols. Used for more than 8,000 years in the Amazon rainforest, ayahuasca is a powerful — and illegal — psychedelic that has distressing gastrointestinal side effects. Yet Harris found many willing to try it, so deep was their suffering. Harris here shares her original research (the largest study of ayahuasca use in North America) into its effects on depression, anxiety, and PTSD, along with her own personal experiences. By detailing ayahuasca’s risks and benefits, she aims to help those driven to investigate ayahuasca to do so safely and to give their psychological caregivers a template for transformative caring and healing.

    While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

    And once we recognize synchronicities as meaningful, they open us to new information, new possibilities. We suddenly find that we're in the right place at the right time, meet the right people at the right moment, and our lives are changed for the better."--From the IntroductionThere are signs everywhere, pointing the way to a better life, if you know how to read them. Signs are the stuff that synchronicity is made of - harness the power of synchronicity, and you can transform your life. In this groundbreaking book, bestselling authors Trish and Rob MacGregor reveal the seven secrets that allow you to recognize synchronicity when it happens - and make the most of it. You'll learn to interpret the meaning of the signs you encounter every day, and use such tools as the tarot, I-Ching, and astrology to understand your past, inform your present, and guide your future. Synchronicity - your key to making magic in your own life!In The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, you'll see why there really is no such thing as coincidence - and how your life can be the better for it. Synchronicity is the universal language of transformation - and its secrets reveal how you can live a life rich in fulfillment and meaning and wonder. With this enlightening guide, you'll learn to read the signs all around you and transform your world - one amazing synchronicity at a time!

    Ayahuasca in My Blood - 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming concerns his longstanding relationship with the Amazonian visionary medicine. Here's what people have said about it:"Unlike many writing about ayahuasca, Peter Gorman knows this plant and these forests long and well. Explorer, ethnobotanist, writer and raconteur - Gorman is uniquely qualified to tell this incredible tale. A wild mixture of adventure, horror, spirituality, tenderness, and insight, Ayahuasca in My Blood is most highly recommended!" -- Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D, Amazon Conservation Team "Long before ayahuasca tourism became a pastime for rich gringos, Peter Gorman was knocking around Iquitos and the Amazon. He's traveled the rivers and quaffed the brew with the best (and the worst) of them and been way, way beyond the chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night. This is the intensely personal story of an old-school jungle rat for whom ayahuasca is not just a hobby, but a life-long quest." -- Dennis McKenna, Ph.D, noted ethnopharmacologist, "I have known and traveled with Peter for almost a decade and was present for a number of the events he included in this book as well as many others. Don Julio was the most powerful man I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Further, as a trained scientist I believe the plant medicine truly offers a doorway to a rich world that needs to be understood in our postmodern lives. This is destined to become a must read for anyone who is serious about understanding the world of the shaman." -- Lynn Chilson, Chilson Enterprises, Inc.

    First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.

    • Numerous new and rare color photographs complement the completely revised and updated text. • Explores the uses of hallucinogenic plants in shamanic rituals throughout the world. • Cross-referenced by plant, illness, preparation, season of collection, and chemical constituents. Three scientific titans join forces to completely revise the classic text on the ritual uses of psychoactive plants. They provide a fascinating testimony of these "plants of the gods," tracing their uses throughout the world and their significance in shaping culture and history. In the traditions of every culture, plants have been highly valued for their nourishing, healing, and transformative properties. The most powerful of those plants, which are known to transport the human mind into other dimensions of consciousness, have always been regarded as sacred. The authors detail the uses of hallucinogens in sacred shamanic rites while providing lucid explanations of the biochemistry of these plants and the cultural prayers, songs, and dances associated with them. The text is lavishly illustrated with 400 rare photographs of plants, people, ceremonies, and art related to the ritual use of the world's sacred psychoactive flora.

    Courageous Dreaming tells us how to dream our world with power and grace. The ancient shamans of the Americas understood that we’re not only creating our experience of the world, but are dreaming up the very nature of reality itself—that is, “life is but a dream.” When you don’t dream your life, you have to settle for the nightmare being dreamed by others. This book shows how to wake up from the collective nightmare and begin to dream a life of courage and grace, a sacred dream that shamans throughout time have known and served.Alberto Villoldo reveals ancient wisdom teachings that explain how to birth reality from the invisible matrix of creation; and reveals how we can interact with this matrix to dream a life of peace, health, and abundance. He shows us that courage is all that is required to create the joy we desire!

    A poet, ethno-botanist and amateur chemist, he’s the best writer on drugs to come along since the late Terence McKenna.”—Richard Gehr, The Village Voice“There is genius to Pendell’s approach, an erudite playfulness and poetic virtuosity unmatched by anyone writing about plants and drugs today. Pendell’s books present a Pandora’s box, and once opened, the steadfast and curious reader will soon find herself on the path.”—Sarah Fox, Rain TaxiContemporary alchemist Dale Pendell completes his poetic study of botany, chemistry, spirituality, psychology and history in a volume covering the composition and uses of visionary plants. Chapters including “Phantastica,” “Hypnotica” and “Telephorica” explore the hallucinogenic plants, the bringers of sleep and the bearers of distance. Pharmacognosis is the branch of pharmacology that deals with herbs and unprepared medicines in their natural state, those whose cure is held in a deeper wisdom. Pharmako/Gnosis weaves together ancient shamanic rites, historic cultural lore and the contemporary use of plant poisons.Dale Pendell is a poet, software engineer and longtime student of ethnobotany. His poetry has appeared in many journals, and he was the founding editor of KUKSU: Journal of Backcountry Writing . In addition, his work appeared in Entheogens and the Future of Religion , edited by Robert Forte. He has led workshops on ethnobotany and ethnopoetics for the Naropa Institute and the Botanical Preservation Corps. He lives in the Sierra foothills in California.

    Illustrated.The book is divided into four sections:Journey: The Transformation: Dr Richard Alpert, PhD into Baba Ram DassFrom Bindu to Ojas: The Core BookCookbook for a Sacred Life: A Manual for Conscious BeingPainted Cakes (Do Not Satisfy Hunger): Books

    In fact, as this illuminating study demonstrates, psychedelics have been used by human societies in every part of the world for ritual and spiritual purposes for millennia. As Paul Devereux points out, our modern culture is eccentric in its refusal to integrate the profound experiences offered by these natural substances into our own spiritual life and traditions. Modern Western culture's recent experimentation with psychedelic drugs raised the awareness of archaeologists and anthropologists, leading them to recognize the use of hallucinogens in surviving traditional societies and in the archaeological record. Devereux reveals dramatic new evidence - from linguistics, ethnobotany, biology, and other fields - for the psychedelic experiences of various prehistoric cultures, and ponders the implications and effects of psychedelic revelations on our contemporary worldview, linking them to out-of-body and near death experiencs, shamanic trances, even memory and dreaming.

    This concise guide offers a modern interpretation of the doctrine, distilling its teachings with seven compelling principles that can be applied to self-development in daily life.

    Once introduced by famed psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary as "one of the most important people on the planet," radical philosopher Terence McKenna was an iconic legend in the psychedelic community. He died in 2000, but his ideas live on in the writings of author Dennis McKenna. On their Amazonian journey together, the brothers explored the outer limits of psychedelic experience and were haunted ever since by the curious events that overtook them in that primeval rainforest.

    This book gives details of their research and investigations into the use of psychedelic drugs for the study of the human mind, and is also a love story. The second half of the book describes in detail a wealth of phenethlyamines, their physical properties, dosages used, duration of effects observed, and commentary on effects.

    In this amazing book, he offers an account of his own incredible flights of "soul travel"--and shows us how we too can develop this life-changing ability.

    Huston Smith, tirelessly working to promote cross-cultural religious and spiritual tolerance. Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass, inspiring generations with his mantra, “be here now.” Andrew Weil, undisputed leader of the holistic medicine revolution. And, of course, Timothy Leary, the charismatic, rebellious counter-culture icon and LSD guru. Journalist Don Lattin provides the funny, moving inside story of the “Cambridge Quartet,” who crossed paths with the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 60’s, and went on to pioneer the Mind/Body/Spirit movement that would popularize yoga, vegetarianism, and Eastern mysticism in the Western world.