Ethno psychopharmacology

This paper investigates the relationship between psychoactive substances and so-called paranormal phenomena falling within the study of parapsychology. It is primarily concerned with extrasensory perception (ESP)—telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance—as well as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs). Psychokinesis (PK), aura vision, encounter experiences, and sleep paralysis only make a very limited contribution to this review as they are seldom related to psychoactive drugs within the parapsychological literature. The paper borrows widely, but by no means exhaustively, from parapsychology as well as transpersonal studies, anthropology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neurobiology, particularly neurochemistry. It is organized into neurochemical models of paranormal experience (section 1), field reports of intentional and spontaneous phenomena incorporating anthropological, historical and clinical cases, and personal accounts (section 2), surveys of paranormal belief and experience (section 3), experimental research (section 4), and a methodological critique of the experimental research with recommendations for further work (section 5).

... The past is resolving itself, allowing the meditator to live more fully in the present moment. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS I have not intended to suggest that all involuntary tremors and seizures which occur during meditation derive from the birth trauma. ...

Entheogenic Plant Sentience – A private symposium. Tyringham Hall, September 2015. (Curator and compère)

Video trailer for the event: https://vimeo.com/156248371

Anton Bilton, Dr David Luke & Rory Spowers
Introduction from the hosts and curators

Dr Graham St John
The Pineal Enigma: The Dazzling Life and Times of the ‘Spirit Gland’

Dr Dennis J. McKenna
Is DMT a Chemical Messenger from an Extraterrestrial Civilization?

Dr Jeremy Narby
Amazonian Perspectives on Invisible Entities

Peter Meyer
Concerning the Nature of the DMT Entities and their Relation to Us

Dr Erik Davis
How to Think about Weird Beings

Dr Ede Frecska
The Second Foundation of Knowledge, True Visions, and Plant Sentience

Dr Andrew Gallimore
The Neurobiology of Conscious Interaction with Alternate Realities and Their Inhabitants

Dr Rupert Sheldrake
Morphic Resonance, Psychedelic Experiences and Collective Memory

Dr Rick Strassman
The Nature of the DMT Beings: Perspectives and Prospects

Graham Hancock
Psychedelics, Entities, 'Dark Matter' and Parallel Dimensions

Dr Rick Strassman
The Nature of the DMT Beings: Perspectives and Prospects

Dr David Luke
Entheogenic plant sentience and DMT entities: A summary of what we think we know

The purpose of this essay is to review the Grofs' model of spiritual emergencies. The authors ask: Has the model been useful for identifying and treating psycho-spiritual distress? Should it be amended? Spiritual emergency can be defined as a crisis involving religious, transpersonal, and/or spiritual issues that provides opportunities for growth. Spiritual emergence, meanwhile, lends itself to gentler transformation. The research methods include an archival literature review triangulated with an authoritative interview. The findings are that the Grofs' model of spiritual emergencies was ahead of its time and that the medical establishment needs to catch up. Adaptations and revisions that expand and refine it could help bring acceptance and further application of this useful model to people in psycho-spiritual crises.

A novel published in 1933, describes the isolation of a hallucinogenic drug from an ergot-type fungus. It remarkably predates the discovery the hallucinogenic properties of the ergot-derived alkaloid lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) by ten years. It also identifies ergot as the secret psychoactive sacrament of the ancient mysteries forty years before this hypothesis became a matter of academic and scientific investigation. In the novel, a central character plans to use an ergot derived drug as an agent of popular religious renewal, prefiguring the New Age religious revival initiated by the popular use of LSD. The story involves the mass testing of a hallucinogenic drug on the unsuspecting inhabitants of an isolated village almost twenty years before the Pont St Esprit incident of 1951, which has been ascribed to the CIA's plans for experimental dosing of unsuspecting civilians with psychoactive drugs. This article investigates how the author could have managed to foresee these future events in such prophetic detail and reveals the sources that were available. In this article the history of psychoactive drugs is set in the context of the political, scientific, literary, and philosophical culture of the interwar period and shows that the cultural history of psychoactive drugs is enhanced by such context.

Shamans and artists have been perceived as similar across a variety of dimensions. Nonetheless, these similarities have not been systematically explored and are poorly understood. This study was designed to investigate these similarities.

Stanley Krippner (personal communication, January 12, 2010) provided the initial definition of a shaman that, after minor modifications to more fully represent knowledge about shamans, became: A shaman is a socially designated spiritual practitioner who obtains information in ways not available to the shaman’s community through the voluntary regulation of the shaman’s own attention, which is used for the benefit of the shaman’s community and its members.  Defining constructs were operationalized and validated cross-culturally to support multidirectional comparisons between artists and shamans using archival data from psychology, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and creativity studies.

Previous publications about 24 well-known artists provided archival data for comparisons with shamans. The dimensions explored included familial influence, talent, neurological functions, calling to vocation, social support, personality, training, initiation, inspiration, positive disintegration, transliminality, imaginal realms, altered states, purported psi experiences, mental health issues, soul retrieval, spiritual emergence, transpersonal orientation, intent to benefit, and creativity. Tables, charts, and diagrams organized archival information that, supported by descriptive comparisons, explored the nature and extent of similarities between artists and shamans. The integration of visual art, poetry, and stories provided an emic artist’s perspective and alternate ways of knowing for the reader.

The study found that four artists from traditional cultures fulfilled all defining constructs of shaman, comprising a set of prototypical shamanic artists. In contrast, twenty artists fulfilled some, but not all, constructs defining shaman. These shamanlike artists were noncentral members in a fuzzy set where the shamanlike artists had family resemblances to traditional shamans and shamanic artists.

The study identified and articulated gaps in knowledge as well as establishing a broad, well-grounded theoretical model that can serve as a foundation for future research on relationships between contemporary artists and shamans, and, potentially, contribute towards transformation of art experiences in artists, art audiences, and art institutions.

Gustav Fechner, the German experimental psychologist, coined the term psychophysics in 1860, publishing the first mathematical equation to model human consciousness.  Fechner assumed that any future approaches to consciousness would include mathematical and physical underpinnings. In 1995, the cognitive scientist and philosopher David Chalmers coined the phrase "the hard problem" as being that of connecting consciousness with some physical substrate.  According to Chalmers, "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery."  As Chalmers points out, unfortunately, the modern scientific community has not yet produced a model of consciousness supported by mathematics and physics, thus no progress in Fecher's "psychophysics." 
However there is growing interest among the scientific community in string theory, the only branch of mathematical geometry that has successfully explained recent discoveries in high energy particle physics. The mathematical proof of string theory requires the existence of a ten dimensional universe.  But in trying to map consciousness, science continues to limit its data search within time and the three spatial dimensions, ignoring six of string theory's ten dimensions  Perhaps because mainstream science tacitly limits itself to four of the ten dimensions, progress has come to a dead end. Accordingly, the most widely accepted theory among neurophysiologists is that consciousness is somehow a "byproduct" of the electrical sparking of neurons, an accidental epiphenomenon of the activities of nerve-filled wet meat.
This paper considers data beyond the four dimensional constraints of the scientific establishment. It is my contention that many recorded accounts of philosophers, mystics, and shamans can and should be considered as data. My thesis is that these accounts express experience and observation within one or more of the additional dimensions predicted by string theory. Any advance in understanding consciousness must take into account not only the language and domains of mathematics, particle physics, and neurobiology, but also the experiential domains of philosophers and mystics. It is in regarding data from these multiple domains of inquiry that a new model of consciousness will emerge. In this paper I hypothesize a psychophysics of consciousness, woven of strands from mathematics, mysticism, and physics, as well as contemplative participatory practice, to address and solve "the hard problem."

DMT and other tryptamines. Chaired symposium. Breaking Convention: Multidisciplinary Conference of Psychedelic Consciousness, University of Greenwich, London, 12th-14th July, 2013.

Videos:
https://vimeo.com/76519380
https://vimeo.com/75407868
https://vimeo.com/75296178
https://vimeo.com/74804462

14:30 Nen - NMT: A Spatial Hallucinogen with Therapeutic Applications
15:00 Graham St John - Remixticism: DMT, Psychedelic Electronica & Mystical Experience
15:30 Aleksander Milosz Zielinski - The DMT Experience and Altered (Dual & Non-Dual) States of Consciousness
16:00 Andrew Gallimore - Building Alien Worlds: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Mechanism of Action of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT)

This study uses a model of consciousness derived from LSD-assisted psychotherapy to illumine an enigmatic set of painful experiences that occur on the mystic's path known in Western circles as the "dark night." It argues that the dark night experiences described in John of the Cross's classic workDark Night of the Soul can be conceptualized in terms of Stanislav Grofs category of "perinatal experience." The discussion examines the implications of this reconceptualization in three areas: (1) our understanding and evaluation of mysticism, (2) assessing LSD's potential for fostering genuine spirituality, and (3) reassessing the ancient claim that the capacity to experience transcendental states of being is innate.

The principal aim of this essay is to explore the influence of chemically-altered, or alchemical consciousness, not only on the founding and ongoing articulation of transpersonal theory, but on the origins of spirituality more generally. I attempt to support and expand Jorge Ferrer's participatory turn toward "a more relaxed spiritual universalism" in the context of Gregg Lahood's notion of psychedelically-induced cosmological hybridization and Robert Bellah's account of religion in terms of "non-ordinary realities." I also draw upon Richard Doyle's thesis that psychedelics have functioned as "rhetorical adjuncts" in the evolution of spiritual discourse, as well as Michael Rinella's study of the interplay between speech (the logistikon) and psychedelics (the pharmakon) in ancient Greek spirituality. Rather than seeking some form of authoritative disambiguation, as Lahood argues the first wave of transpersonalism did by turning to Perennialism, the anomalous, ineffable, and participatory nature of alchemical consciousness is affirmed as a fertile source of open-ended rhetorical strategies for both consciousness transformation and cosmological (re)construction.

Journal of Near Death Studies, 1994: 25-45. ABSTRACT: While endorsing several of Kenneth Ring's conclusions in "Solving the Riddle of Frightening NDEs: Some Testable Hypotheses and a Perspective Based on A Course in Miracles," this study proposes a more comprehensive interpretation of frightening NDEs along perinatal lines. It criticizes Ring's interpretation of meaningless void NDEs as emergence reactions and argues that all three forms of frightening NDEs --inverted, hellish, and meaningless void experiences --are better understood as rooted in the perinatal level of consciousness. Ring's account of resistance to ego-death as the cause of these NDEs is expanded, and the broader implications of a perinatal reading of frightening NDEs are developed. Finally, parallels with the "dark night of the soul" experience are introduced and explored.

This sludy uses a model of consciousness derived from LSD-assisted psychotherapy to illumine an enigmatic set of painful experiences that occur on the mystic's path known in Western circles as the "dark night." It argues that the dark night experiences described in John of the Cross's classic work Dorft Night of the Soul can be conceptualized in terms of Stanislav Grofs category of "perinatal experience." The discussion examines the implications of this reconceptualization in bhree areas: (1) our understanding and evaluation of mysticism, (2) assessing LSD's potential for fostering genuine spirituality, and (3) reassessing the ancient claim that the capacity to experience transcendental states of being is innate.

AaSTRACT: A profourdly disrupive confiontation wirh the timis of trc carrying<a1**ity of tle planer appan inevitable in this century. This crisis, however. nray finction as a kirul ,rf glfut initiation inro a new stage of humanity's g;ychostrial developnrnt. By drawing comparison-s tr: rhe iiysrical ordeal of ttrc &'t night of '\ *ul..this paper suggcsls *rc eco-crliis may constitute what anxunts to a dark night of the spectes-soul. drawing us colhctively into a deelrr crpcriene of our spiritual cornrngn xround.

This study criticizes Grof's description of the perinatal dimension of consciousness as being slanted in the direction of personal psychology and as not providing an adequate explanation for the transpersonal features of perinatal experience. Specifically, it is argued that Grof does not sufficiently explain the therapeutic rationale for the appearance of such extreme collective suffering as regularly occurs when an individual's therapy reaches the perinatal level. I propose that in order to explain the phenomenology of perinatal experience, we must hypothesize that the patient in these instances has expanded beyond the individual subject. Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphic fields is incorporated to suggest that the patient in these sessions might best be conceptualized as the species itself, or the morphic field of the species mind. Possible explanations for Grof's tilt toward personal psychology in his presentation of perinatal dynamics are explored. The implications of this expansion of perinatal theory for understanding frightening NDE's is summarized.

This essay offers a reassessment of Teresa's severe seizures which were such a characteristic feature of her mysticism. The diagnosis of hysteria is no longer viable, at the very least given its abandonment by clinicians. An alternative analysis is developed by phenomenologically comparing Teresa's seizures to parallel experiences of subjects in LSDassisted psychotherapy. Using Stanislav Grof's categories, it is argued that Teresa's seizures are perinatal symptoms. As such, they represent the emergence and reintegration of extremely primitive psychological systems and might be described as the growing pains of transpersonal consciousness. They reflect not degenerative psychopathology but progressive movement toward higher states of consciousness.

ne of the things we scholars of mysticism lack are good, healthy autobiographical descriptions of mystical phenomena. We find ourselves often trying to tease our phenomenological description from a source's very complex interpretations, and it makes our work that much trickier. … Autobiographical reports are stronger "raw material" for the explorations of philosophers, scholars, mysticists (scholars of mysticism), and psychologists. 1

The Grofs' Model of Spiritual Emergency in Retrospect: Has it Stood the Test of Time? The purpose of this essay is to review the Grofs' model of spiritual emergencies. The authors ask: Has the model been useful for identifying and treating psycho-spiritual distress? Should it be amended? Spiritual emergency can be defined as a crisis involving religious, transpersonal, and/or spiritual issues that provides opportunities for growth. Spiritual emergence, meanwhile, lends itself to gentler transformation. The research methods include an archival literature review triangulated with an authoritative interview. The findings are that the Grofs' model of spiritual emergencies was ahead of its time and that the medical establishment needs to catch up. Adaptations and revisions that expand and refine it could help bring acceptance and further application of this useful model to people in psycho-spiritual crises.

Seminární práce pro předmět Dejiny psychologie na FF MU v Brně. Jedná se o můj první ucelený písemný projev na univerzitě, což je znát z nekritické zaujatosti, značného překročení délky textu, roztříštěnosti poznatků a adolescentní potřebě vymezení se vůči "systému".

To what extent does the quality of the intra-uterine period of a man's life affect his mental health, shape up his consciousness and form his personality? The present study, refers to the clinical research and theoretical interpretations in the field of prenatal and perinatal life by the psychiatrists Stanislav Grof, Frank Lake (1914-1982) and Athanassios Kafkalides (1919-1987). The above researchers in almost the same period of time (second half of the 20 th century) though in different countries, using psychedelic drugs as an adju vant psychotherapeutic means, arrived at approximately the same theoretical conclusions based on the experiences and realizations of a great number of cases who relived their intrauterine life and expulsion/birth. Zusammenfassung: Priinatale Bedingungen und postnatales Leben im wissenschaftlichen We rk von Grof, Lake und Kafka/ides. In welchem AusmaB beeinfluBt die Qualitiit der in trauterinen Lebensphase die seelische Gesundheit eines Menschen, in welchem AusmaB priigt sie sein Erleben und seinen Personlichkeitsstil? Diese Untersuchung beschiiftigt sich mit der klinischen Forschung und der theoretischen Interpretation im Bereich der priinatalen und perinatalen Lebensphase durch die Psychiater Stanislav Grof, Frank Lake (1914-1982) und Athannassios Kafkalides (1919-1987). Diese Forscher, die im gleichen Zeitraum (der 2. Hiilfte des 20. Jahrhunderts) in verschiedenen Liindern psychedelische Drogen als therapeutisches Hilfsmittel verwandten, kamen zu fast den gleichen theoretis chen Schliissen. Sie gingen dabei von den Erfahrungen und dem inneren Erleben einer groBen Zahl von Klienten aus, die ihr intrauterines Leben und die Austreibung vor der Geburt wieder erlebten.

Hypericum species have been used as herbal remedies for the therapy of various neurological disorders. In the present study, the efTects of Hypericum culycinum on the central nervous system were investigated using various behavioural models including swimming time, locomotor activity, tail-flick and hole-board experiments. According to the results obtained, it was found that the extract prepared from H. culycinum is as effective as the antidepressant drugs, desipramine and trimipramine, which were used for comparison with this plant extract in animal models.

Herein, I review the moment in my life when I awoke from the dream of self to find being as part of the living world. It was a sudden, momentous event that is difficult to explain since transcending the self ultimately requires transcending the language structures of which the self consists. Since awakening to the world took place beyond the enclosure of self-speech, it also took place outside our symbolic construction of time. It is strange to place this event and its aftermath as happening long ago in my lifetime, for it is forever present; it surrounds me all the time just as the world seems to do. This fact puts into question the reality of my daily journey from dawn to dusk with all the mundane tasks I must complete (like writing of that which cannot be captured in writing). My linear march to aging and death inexorably continues, yet it seems somehow unreal, the biggest joke of all. Still, I here review the events leading up to my time out of mind and then review the serious repercussions when I was drawn back into the ego-self only to find I did not have the conceptual tools or the maturity to understand what had happened.

... Page 65. 48 Timothy Lambert and Trevor R. Norman Chiu et al., 1992; Lin &amp;amp;amp; Finder, 1983; Lin et al., 1988b; Potkin et al., 1984; Lin etal., 1989; Ruiz et al., 1996; Jann etal., 1989; Jann et al., 1992; Zhang-Wong etal., 1998). The ...

À partir du début des années 1950, le développement de la psychopharmacologie a provoqué un grand élan d’optimisme en psychiatrie clinique. De nouvelles molécules permettaient d’envisager le traitement psychiatrique à l’extérieur de l’asile, au moment même où les effectifs sans cesse grandissants de psychiatres et de médecins généralistes parvenaient à offrir des soins à une clientèle de plus en plus vaste. Or, ces barbituriques et antipsychotiques, prescrits à des gens de tous acabits sociaux pour alléger des troubles psychotiques ou anxieux, étaient laissés entre les mains de ces individus, désormais jugés capables et responsables de leur auto-administration.