Ayahuasca

I don't think I would have had the courage to go some places I ended up if Stan hadn't been there first and survived to tell about it. Outside of that, Stan and I became friends and colleagues. He wrote the foreword to Dark Night, Early Dawn and brought me to some of the...

Yes, she was my sitter, holding the fort while I was in LSD sessions, managing them with music and whatnot. She never wanted to do a session herself but completed a three-year, three-month, three-day solo retreat in the Vajrayāna tradition. She's been recognized as a lama in her community and has a rich interior...

Given the synchronicity of the atomic bomb's birth and LSD in the same decade, I don't think it's accidental. I see it as an amplifier and catalyst of consciousness, akin to Psilocybin, Ayahuasca, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT. Each substance has its own characteristics. LSD, relatively new, has little historical background, making it unusually clean compared...

Stan's work is so formidable and his intellectual synthesis of so many traditions is so important that he became my foundation for doing this work. Remember, I was doing this work in Ohio, a long way from San Francisco. I was not part of a psychedelic community or an Ayahuasca group going to Peru...

I don't recommend that protocol, truly. Knowing what I know now, at the end of that journey, I would do it differently if I were starting over again. I would work with lower doses. I would balance periodically, maybe working with high doses of LSD, with intermediate sessions of psilocybin or ayahuasca. I have...

Okay, well, there are several things rolled into your observations, and all good. They're all good observations. So some process comments: First, I think integration is very important. We're finding we have the technology, the chemical technology, to trigger very deep states of consciousness, but these states of consciousness may have very little lasting...

Having experienced the light itself, the diamond is the most natural image that comes to mind. Perhaps I'm influenced by the fact of Vajra, the diamond way you know, that part is in the background. The image of diamond is not uncommon in the terma texts, trying to describe these subtle levels of consciousness....

In 1979, I began what became a 20-year journey working with LSD. LSD was what Stan had done his research with, so I chose to continue with that. If I were doing it today, I would have a more diversified cocktail including Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, and more, but I worked with LSD and chose to...

That's a good question. I'm not sure that I would. I think knowing now what I—if I had known then what I know now, I would have been gentler on myself. I would have used a gentler protocol, balancing high versus low doses, balancing LSD with Psilocybin and Ayahuasca. I still would have taken...

That's a good question. I'm not sure that I would. I think knowing now what I... If I had known then what I know now, I would have been gentler on myself. I would have used a gentler protocol, balancing high versus low doses, balancing LSD with psilocybin and ayahuasca. I still would have...

I would recommend a more balanced regimen. Low-dose sessions balanced with high-dose LSD sessions, balanced with more body-grounded psychedelics like Psilocybin or Ayahuasca. LSD tends to be a high-altitude psychedelic, very different from Psilocybin, which is much more body-emotional. If I had a breakthrough session, I would balance it with Psilocybin sessions to integrate...

I used LSD because that was the substance Stan had worked with in his early years; that's what his research was based on, primarily, and I trusted what I saw in his work. After my sessions, my work always followed the protocols he laid out in his early book, LSD Psychotherapy. The sessions were...

Well, I was just out of graduate school back in 1978, and I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, published in '76. Immediately, I recognized the significance of Stan's work for my discipline, which is philosophy of religion. I'm not a psychologist or a therapist. I've never been particularly interested...

By moving back and forth between non-ordinary and ordinary states of consciousness, we can gather and distill new insights into the structure of reality. Now, of course, this method is not really new, is it? It was present in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece and in the Ayahuasca ceremonies of Brazil that date...

Fewer high-dose sessions, integrating psychedelics like LSD with body-grounded ones like Psilocybin or Ayahuasca, and maintaining daily spiritual practice. Daily practice is vital for managing the energy and insights from psychedelic work. I was driven by the false model of reaching an awakened state, not realizing that depth is infinite and ever-expanding. Now, understanding...

I would vary the dose level. I would work with high doses sometimes, but low doses at other times. I would also balance LSD with other psychedelics like Psilocybin or Ayahuasca. All of them have in common the effect of amplifying the sensitivity of consciousness, but they do so in slightly different ways. They...

Share in the animistic community is the belief that nature is infused with consciousness, fused with mind and soul. And, of course, now we know how vast the physical universe is, and the question becomes, how large is the mind of the universe? How deep is it? So, I was just out of graduate...

Well, I know it's a radical book, and I think we are at a pivot point in history, and I think that psychedelics represent a major transition point, a true historical before-and-after point with respect to philosophy, not just psychology. It generates not only a new therapeutic protocol for healing the personal psyche, but...

I think your description of ego death is spot on. What dies is what is consumed—our self-representation, our sense of identity amassed from our physical experience and our time-space existence. I also want to mention that every medicine has a certain range, a certain signature and power. Psilocybin, for instance, has a depth of...

The same methodology would apply, but the nature of the journey is different with lower doses or gentler psychedelics like Psilocybin or Ayahuasca. Psychedelics amplify and catalyze consciousness, bringing forward things far beyond usual experience. With lower doses, you might work through various psychodynamic levels, moving slowly into deeper levels. With high doses, there's...

Each psychedelic opens consciousness differently. LSD, a high ceiling psychedelic, pushes cosmic boundaries. Psilocybin is more body-grounded and emotion-focused. Ayahuasca integrates with the body and emotional system but has limited experience on my part. 5-MeO-DMT is profound but short-acting, a different exploration. Short versus long-acting psychedelics is a complex area. Longer sessions allow sustained...

I understand. I really do. Because if your genuine spirituality leads you away from social engagement, then I don't think it's very mature, because mature spirituality leads to that place in the heart where we contact the heart of all living things. When we contact the heart of all living things, naturally, we want...

Okay? Looks like it's just as a winner. Okay. This is my psychedelic lineage. My psychedelic lineage basically grounds in the work of Stanislav Grof. When I was 29 years old, fresh out of graduate school, just beginning my academic career in Ohio, I met Stan Grof's work, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and...

I don't recommend this protocol—I would start differently, with lower doses and only occasionally using high doses. LSD tends to push the cosmological ceiling, so I would balance it with other psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca, which are more body-grounded. They keep you much more connected to your emotional and physical body. Balancing cosmic...

I have used icaros from Ayahuasca ceremonies late in my psychedelic life, mostly after my LSD years. I mean, I did this work between 1979 and 1999, between when I was 30 and 50. I'm 70 now, but in the primary years, I didn't really encounter the Ayahuasca music until much later in this...

Yeah, it is hard to read. I had to really give some careful thought to how much to expose that because I know it's challenging for readers to go into that material. Just to finish that other topic—even once I let go of that personal model, I found that I developed a taste for...

Well, inevitably, my take is based on my own personal experience, and it's always dangerous to generalize from a sample of one. Psychedelics, historically used, have fields associated with them. We've been using mushrooms for thousands of years. There's something about the biochemistry of these substances and the human experience engaging deeper dimensions of...

I think it's both. As my work changed me, certainly my presence in the classroom changed. But the more interesting aspect is working at the subtle level. For example, I found that when I was lecturing and looking for an example to illustrate a concept, I would pause, my mind would go blank, and...

I want to say at the outset that this is not a methodology I would recommend today. If I were doing it over, I'd be gentler on myself. I'd take a slower process of engaging the expanse of the mind of the universe. I'd balance high-dose work with low-dose sessions. I'd also balance working...

Good question. I mean, I don't think I have a pat answer for that. I'd like more dialogue around it. But basically, the things that spring to mind are, first, in your sessions, emphasize clean contact, controlling the variables, controlling the isolation, so that you have clean contact with these realities, not smudgy contact,...

Well, you have to go back to 1978 and think about the landscape then. It was before the era of Ayahuasca, Psilocybin mushrooms were around, and it was really before the era of DMT. More importantly, my work was founded on Stanislav Grof's work, and most of his early work was done with LSD....

I want to add that this is not a protocol I recommend. At the time, I thought I could do this work safely, and I did do it safely, always staying within safety limits. But I found that pushing oneself that hard into the universe generated complications that it took all of my resources...

It's a big one. Personally, I don't have a vested interest in specific definitions of consciousness. I'm happy to go with different understandings as long as they're open to the phenomenology of mind, which is my background. It's important to critically examine the broadest data we have on what mind is and how it...

Yes and yes. Intention is powerful, especially collective, focused intention. It influences our body, circumstances, and people. David Nichols wrote about subtle activism, where global meditations integrate consciousness into prayerful exercises. Spiritual traditions organize students worldwide at certain times for powerful practices. The spiritual universe is highly populated. Sacred medicine traditions encounter life forms...

That's a good description. It is that it's physiological. I mean, you know, people throw up a lot on Ayahuasca. They don't tend to think of LSD as something that causes throwing up. But to me, I was working with such high levels, I threw up a lot on LSD, and that's part of...

His third book, Ultimate Journey, specifically addresses death from various perspectives. Ayahuasca is mentioned in these discussions. In Brazil, it’s used legally. Even in the U.S., groups have won the right to use it as a sacred medicine. If used wisely, these can be agents of deep transformation. My second book is part of...

You should never do this alone; a “sitter” is essential for safety and support. When you reach a breakthrough by losing control, the mind works at enhanced capacity, going through a death process, emerging in a different reality. Some repeat high-dose sessions over a hundred times without undergoing this difficult but transformative process, also...

If I were talking to my younger self, or if I'm talking to my own children, who are young adults now, I would recommend it partly depends on what you're trying to accomplish. When I got into this work, I was seeking enlightenment, like what most of us were seeking—to be a better human...

Yes, yes.