Traces the history of the use of hallucinogenic drugs and discusses the psychological and physical effects of LSD, marijuana, mescaline, and other drugs.

    Inner Paths to Outer Space presents an innovative examination of how we can reach these other dimensions of existence and contact otherworldly beings. Based on their more than 60 combined years of research into the function of the brain, the authors reveal how psychoactive substances such as DMT allow the brain to bypass our five basic senses to unlock a multidimensional realm of existence where otherworldly communication occurs. They contend that our centuries-old search for alien life-forms has been misdirected and that the alien worlds reflected in visionary science fiction actually mirror the inner space world of our minds. The authors show that these “alien” worlds encountered through altered states of human awareness, either through the use of psychedelics or other methods, possess a sense of reality as great as, or greater than, those of the ordinary awareness perceived by our five senses.

    Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?

    • 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.

    This book takes a serious look at the use of psychedelic drugs as a means to achieve mystical union with the divine.

    It explores what the experience of this psychedelic medicine exposes to us about the nature of mind, emotion, society, psychospiritual maturity, and reality itself. This book is about facing the darkness within each of us, developing the courage of emotional honesty, and investigating how the unacknowledged aspects of self, the shadow, can make the grounds of personal growth fertile again. The psilocybin mushroom offers us the opportunity to experience life from a point of amplified emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance. It unlocks a perspective of self and other that is naturally occurring within us, but culturally suppressed to the point of nearly complete omission. When we begin to navigate the vastly novel experiences this substance can provide us, we further enable its potential for not only exposing, but healing the unconscious narratives that hold us back from being our fullest, most courageous, most honest self.

    Prepare. Trip. Transform!With so much misinformation surrounding magic mushrooms out there, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. This is where Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion comes in to help. In this book, you’ll find a comprehensive yet friendly guide to everything there is to know about magic mushrooms.Learn how to plan safe, effective trips with easy-to-follow step-by-step advice. Discover how to train a guide to take care of those on psychedelic voyages, as well as how to access the transformative nature of these experiences. Even learn how microdosing can improve your mood, cognitive functioning, creativity, physical stamina, and more.With the most up-to-date research, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion will put magic mushrooms into perspective, dispel myths and urban legends, and open your mind to the benefits of psychedelic tripping.

    Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet—as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest.For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin has raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment—and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world; and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he proves that he shares both their endurance and their reverence for the rain forest. Mark Plotkin combines the Darwinian spirit of the great writer-explorers of the nineteenth century—curious, discursive, and rigorously scientific—with a very modern concern for the erosion of our environment and the vanishing culture of native peoples.

    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.

    Gordon Wasson, Jack Kornfield, Terence McKenna, the Shulgins, Rick Strassman, and others • Explores the importance of academic and religious freedom in the study of psychedelics and the mind • Exposes the need for an organized spiritual context for entheogen use in order to fully realize their transformative and sacred value We live in a time when a great many voices are calling for a spiritual renewal to address the problems that face humanity, yet the way of entheogens--one of the oldest and most widespread means of attaining a religious experience--is forbidden, surrounded by controversy and misunderstanding. Widely employed in traditional shamanic societies, entheogens figure prominently in the origins of religion and their use continues today throughout the world. They alter consciousness in such a profound way that, depending on the set and setting, they can produce the ultimate human experiences: union with God or revelation of other mystical realities. With contributions by Albert Hofmann, Terence McKenna, Ann and Alexander Shulgin, Thomas Riedlinger, Dale Pendell, and Rick Strassman as well as interviews with R. Gordon Wasson and Jack Kornfield, this book explores ancient and modern uses of psychedelic drugs, emphasizing the complementary relationship between science and mystical experience and the importance of psychedelics to the future of religion and society. Revealing the mystical-religious possibilities of substances such as psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD, this book exposes the vital need for developing an organized spiritual context for their use in order to fully realize their transformative and sacred value. Stressing the importance of academic and religious freedom, the authors call for a revival of scientific and religious inquiry into entheogens so they may be used safely and legally by those seeking to cultivate their spiritual awareness.

    The most powerful plants--those known to transport the human mind into other dimensions of consciousness--have traditionally been regarded as sacred. In The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants Christian Rätsch details the botany, history, distribution, cultivation, and preparation and dosage of more than 400 psychoactive plants. He discusses their ritual and medicinal usage, cultural artifacts made from these plants, and works of art that either represent or have been inspired by them. The author begins with 168 of the most well-known psychoactives--such as cannabis, datura, and papaver--then presents 133 lesser known substances as well as additional plants known as “legal highs,” plants known only from mythological contexts and literature, and plant products that include substances such as ayahuasca, incense, and soma. The text is lavishly illustrated with 797 color photographs--many of which are from the author’s extensive fieldwork around the world--showing the people, ceremonies, and art related to the ritual use of the world’s sacred psychoactives.

    Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: the earliest Andean cultures depicted mescaline-containing cacti in their temples.   Mescaline was isolated in 1897 from the peyote cactus, first encountered by Europeans during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. During the twentieth century it was used by psychologists investigating the secrets of consciousness, spiritual seekers from Aleister Crowley to the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, artists exploring the creative process, and psychiatrists looking to cure schizophrenia. Meanwhile peyote played a vital role in preserving and shaping Native American identity. Drawing on botany, pharmacology, ethnography, and the mind sciences and examining the mescaline experiences of figures from William James to Walter Benjamin to Hunter S. Thompson, this is an enthralling narrative of mescaline’s many lives.

    Regarded simply as a history of flowers, it adds to the joys of the country." — B. E. Todd, Spectator.If you want to know how pleurisy root, lungwort, and abscess root got their names, how poison ivy used to treat rheumatism, or how garlic guarded against the Bubonic Plague, consult A Modern Herbal. This 20th-century version of the medieval Herbal is as rich in scientific fact and folklore as its predecessors and is equally encyclopedic in coverage. From aconite to zedoary, not an herb, grass, fungus, shrub or tree is overlooked; and strange and wonderful discoveries about even the most common of plants await the reader.Traditionally, an herbal combined the folk beliefs and tales about plants, the medicinal properties (and parts used) of the herbs, and their botanical classification. But Mrs. Grieve has extended and enlarged the tradition; her coverage of asafetida, bearberry, broom, chamomile, chickweed, dandelion, dock, elecampane, almond, eyebright, fenugreek, moss, fern, figwort, gentian, Hart's tongue, indigo, acacia, jaborandi, kava kava, lavender, pimpernel, rhubarb, squill, sage, thyme, sarsaparilla, unicorn root, valerian, woundwort, yew, etc. — more than 800 varieties in all — includes in addition methods of cultivation; the chemical constituents, dosages, and preparations of extracts and tinctures, unknown to earlier herbalists; possible economic and cosmetic properties, and detailed illustrations, from root to bud, of 161 plants.Of the many exceptional plants covered in Herbal, perhaps the most fascinating are the poisonous varieties — hemlock, poison oak, aconite, etc. — whose poisons, in certain cases, serve medical purposes and whose antidotes (if known) are given in detail. And of the many unique features, perhaps the most interesting are the hundreds of recipes and instructions for making ointments, lotions, sauces, wines, and fruit brandies like bilberry and carrot jam, elderberry and mint vinegar, sagina sauce, and cucumber lotion for sunburn; and the hundreds of prescriptions for tonics and liniments for bronchitis, arthritis, dropsy, jaundice, nervous tension, skin disease, and other ailments. 96 plates, 161 illustrations.

    Illustrated.

    That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how. The basic science goes like this: Microscopic cells called “mycelium”--the fruit of which are mushrooms--recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What Stamets has discovered is that we can capitalize on mycelium’s digestive power and target it to decompose toxic wastes and pollutants (mycoremediation), catch and reduce silt from streambeds and pathogens from agricultural watersheds (mycofiltration), control insect populations (mycopesticides), and generally enhance the health of our forests and gardens (mycoforestry and myco-gardening).  In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find chapters detailing each of these four exciting branches of what Stamets has coined “mycorestoration,” as well as chapters on the medicinal and nutritional properties of mushrooms, inoculation methods, log and stump culture, and species selection for various environmental purposes. Heavily referenced and beautifully illustrated, this book is destined to be a classic reference for bemushroomed generations to come.