NEW photos of 1960s San Francisco

Tibetan Book of the Dead on Acid (Dr. Leary)

It helps to first know Vajrayana Buddhism.

We are in the midst of a powerful psychedelic renaissance. After four decades of hibernation, the promise of the psychoactive 1960s -- that deeper self-awareness, achieved through reality-bending substances and practices will lead to greater external harmony -- is again gaining a major following.

The signs are everywhere, from the influence of today's preeminent psychedelic thinker Daniel Pinchbeck, to the renewed interest in the legacy of Terence McKenna, and to the upsurge of collective, inclusive (and overtly tripped-out) cultural phenomena like the spectacle of Burning Man.

What do medicinal (entheogenic) plants know?

The Psychedelic Experience, created in the movement's early years by the prophetic shaman Harvard professors Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. Ralph Metzner, and Dr. Richard Alpert ("Ram Dass," author of Be Here Now), is a foundational text that serves as a model and a guide for all subsequent mind-expanding inquiries.

We were square in the 1950s, but these substances changed us into shamans in the 1960s.

.

In this wholly unique book, the authors provide an interpretation of an ancient sacred Buddhist manuscript, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from a psychedelic perspective.

The Psychedelic Experience describes their discoveries in expanding spiritual consciousness through a combination of Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques and psychotropic substances.

As sacred as the text it reflects, The Psychedelic Experience is a guidebook to the wilderness of mind and an indispensable resource from the founding fathers of psychedelia. More + AUDIO

Hippies on acid: Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg

Our History, Aug. 23, 2022; Ananda (DBM), Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Rare interview with Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg about LSD

(Our History) "The World Tomorrow" was a Granada TV documentary series produced for the ITV network.

Woodstock was a wild trip, Man.

In 1967 it was broadcast in a late slot on Friday nights, but in early February a special edition was produced on the subject of the entheogen LSD ("acid") and screened in an earlier peak timeslot midweek.

The special included interviews with the American psychologist and LSD advocate Dr. Timothy Leary (Harvard) and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. This film was first broadcast: Feb. 8, 1967.

Watch more documentaries at Our Life (bit.ly/3A8xRMJ), Our History (bit.ly/3rUpdhL), Our World (bit.ly/3ftuckM), Our Stories (bit.ly/3ynfFyk), and Our Taste (bit.ly/3OZoDcV). Start a journey of discovery with Our History, as it brings eye-opening documentaries and educational programs about our world history. It guides viewers through awe-inspiring events from our past and help give a deeper understanding of current affairs and global events that have shaped the world we live in today. Content distributed by ITV Studios. Subscribe to Our History: bit.ly/3v5mKBG.

Ram Dass: Break Cycle of Addiction (audio)

Ram Dass; After Skool, May 23, 2023 (YouTube.com); edited by Wisdom Quarterly

Break the Cycle of Addiction: Ram Dass

Neem Karoli Baba reads about himself in Be Here Now

(After Skool) The Love Serve Remember Foundation (LSRF) is dedicated to preserving and continuing the teachings of an Indian guru and his famous American disciple.

[Love and sexually abusive Guru] Neem Karoli Baba [aka Ram or "God"] and Ram Dass ["God's Servant/Slave," formerly Harvard Prof. Richard Alpert].

Ram Dass got older and wiser.

The foundation facilitates the continuation of these teachings through online courses, blog content, films, podcasts, social network channels, and collaborative projects with conscious artists and musicians.

To learn more or support, please visit ramdass.org.

ABOUT: Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert, April 6, 1931–Dec. 22, 2019), also known as Baba Ram Dass, was a psychologist, American academic, spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, entheogen user [most notably LSD], and writer.

Be Here Now

Earliest book cover of Ram Dass' Be Here Now

His bestselling 1971 book Be Here Now, which has been described by multiple reviewers as "seminal" [full of semen carrying seeds that germinate or spawn further generations of influence], helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West.

He authored or co-authored a dozen more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill (1977), How Can I Help? (1985), and Polishing the Mirror (2013).

Ram Dass was personally and professionally associated with Prof. Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s.

Miracle of Love (compiled by Ram Dass)

Then known as Dr. Richard Alpert, he conducted research with Leary on the therapeutic effects of entheogenic/psychedelic drugs.

In addition, Dr. Alpert assisted Harvard Divinity School graduate student Walter Pahnke in his 1962 "Good Friday Experiment" with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of entheogenic drugs and the mystical experience.

While not outlawed at the time, their research was controversial and led to Prof. Leary's and Prof. Alpert's dismissal from Harvard in 1963.

Romantic Western female hippie disciples couldn't get enough of Love Guru Neem Karoli Baba

.

Young Neem Karoli Baba was hot.

In 1967, Alpert traveled to India and became a disciple of Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the spiritual name "Ram Dass," meaning "Slave of Ram," but usually rendered as simply "Servant of God" for Western audiences.

In the coming years, he founded the charitable organizations Seva ["Selfless Service"] Foundation and Hanuman [the monkey headed deity] Foundation. He traveled extensively giving talks and retreats and holding fundraisers for charitable causes in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

In 1997, he had a massive stroke, which left him with paralysis and expressive aphasia, which made it very difficult for him to talk.

It's not how you look. It's how you love others.

He eventually grew to interpret this event as an act of grace, learning to speak again and continuing to teach and write books.

After becoming seriously ill during a trip to India in 2004, he gave up traveling and moved to the island of Maui in Hawaii, where he hosted annual retreats with other spiritual teachers [like awakened Buddhist teachers Trudy Goodman and Jack Kornfield, whom he married] until his death in 2019.

Be Here Now: Psychedelics to Service

From Psychedelics to Service with Ram Dass | Here and Now Podcast, Ep. 216

(Be Here Now Network) Premiered Dec. 27, 2022. Ram Dass Here and Now: Ram Dass (Harvard's Dr. Richard Alpert) explores how his psychedelic "awakening" and quest to always stay "high" on a path to take the curriculum of being human and use service as a means to get free.

[The Ram ("God") Ram Dass was a dass ("slave" or "servant") to was defamed sex scandal Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba.]

To be part of the discussion about this episode of Here and Now, join the Ram Dass Fellowship virtual meetup on January 3rd at 8:00 pm EST. Sign up for the General Fellowship group to receive more information.

• 00:00 - A Psychedelic Awakening
• 15:00 - Take the Curriculum
• 27:00 - A Path to Service

“That’s the major issue of awakening: You take what was absolutely real and flip it so you see it’s relatively real. And that there are other places you can go that are just as real.” – Ram Dass

• From Psychedelics to Service with Ram Dass – Here and Now Podcast Ep. 216 – beherenownetwork.com/ram-dass...

Make sure to catch every single video podcast from the Be Here Now Network. Click to Subscribe: @beherenownetwork. Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Be Here Now Network podcasts, courses, and articles to help everyone live a life in balance. Heart-centered wisdom from Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Krishna Das, and many more! Get a free guided meditation from Sharon Salzberg when first signing up: beherenownetwork.com.

Immortality via the "New Transhumanism"

Joi Ito (WIRED); Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, A. Larson, S. Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

H+: Blended, biohacked, melded "Transhuman Biologist" (Melell/deviantart.com)

What is we hardwire the soft mushy brain with some hardware (WIRED/Getty Images).

.

The Responsibility of Immortality: Welcome to the New Transhumanism

Give us peace, love, understanding, and LSD!

In the summer of 1990, I was running a pretty weird nightclub in the Roppongi neighborhood of Buddhist Tokyo, Japan.

I was deeply immersed in the global cyberpunk scene and working to bring the Tokyo node of this fast-expanding, posthuman, science-fiction-and-psychedelic-drug-fueled movement online.

• Stephen Quayle warns about "transhumanism"

The Japanese scene was more centered around videogames and multimedia than around acid and other psychedelics.

And Harvard professor and psychedelics researcher Timothy Leary, a dean of 1960s’ counterculture and proponent of psychedelia, who was always fascinated with anything mind-expanding, was interested in learning more about it.

Fired Harvard Prof. Timothy Leary, LSD researcher, with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

.

AI is advancing, so transhumanists biohack.

Prof. Leary anointed the Japanese youth, including the 24-year-old me [Joi Ito], “The New Breed.”

He adopted me as a godson, and we started writing a book together about The New Breed, starting with “tune in, turn on, take over,” as a riff off his original and very famous “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

We never finished the book, but we did end up spending a lot of time together. (I should dig out my old notes and finish the book.)

 

Leary introduced me to his friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They were a living menagerie of the counterculture in the United States since the ’60s.

There were the traditional New Age types: hippies, cyberpunks, and transhumanists, too.

In my early twenties, I was an eager and budding techno-utopian, dreaming of the day when I would become immortal and ascend to the stars into cryogenic slumber to awake on a distant planet.

Or perhaps I would have my brain uploaded into a computer network, to become part of some intergalactic superbrain.

"Immortality"? No.

• ["Intergalactic superbrain"? Sounds like Brahman (godhead, "GOD"), the Hindu/Mahayana Buddhist conception of the "higher self" or "luminous mind" they identify as our eternal "soul," atman, undying consciousness. Consciousness is dying all the time by it very nature, by virtue of how it works, which is segmented into three sub-phases of arising, turning, and passing away. In this way -- which can be observed directly in vipassana or insight-meditation -- all the contents of "mind" in the process of consciousness are impermanent, IMPERSONAL, and unsatisfactory. But never mind about that, call it a "self," worship it, strive for it, and call yourself "immortal." You shall be as Gods (devas, brahmas), right? Taking Molly/E/MDMA, Ecstasy, and going to raves talking about how desperate you are not to die because you don't understand what death is and isn't. Religion, not being good enough, forces you to worship Science as the new religion, the new thing that extends the promise of immortality, which in Buddhism is a mental defilement or asava called "craving for eternal existence." It is flawed and full of suffering, but we don't see that because we are driven by fear of dying and desperate attachment to things we don't understand are causing this suffering. It would be far better to wake up than to cling to notions of immortality, but trying telling that to the dying. Living beings (us and the gods) are the dying. We have no idea there is liberation, the deathless, through enlightenment and nirvana.]

Good times. Those were the days and, for some, still are.

Sumerian god driving out the evil spirit, the "Chaos Monster." Figures are repeated on opposite side of temple doorway. These bas-reliefs now in the British Museum. More

 

Sumerian kings of ancient Mesopotamia

Humans have been yearning for immortality at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Greek mythology, Zeus grants the Goddess Eos’s mortal lover Tithonus immortality -- but the goddess forgets to ask for eternal youth as well. Tithonus grows old and decrepit, begging for death.

Goddess Eos (Evelyn de Morgan)

When I hear about life extension today, I am often perplexed, even frustrated. Are we are talking about eternal youth, eternal old age, or having our cryogenically frozen brains thawed out 2,000 years from now to perform tricks in a future alien zoo?

 

The latest enthusiasm for eternal life largely stems not from any acid-soaked, tie-dyed counterculture but from the belief that technology will enhance humans and make them immortal.

Today’s transhumanist movement, sometimes called H+, encompasses a broad range of issues and diversity of belief.

But the notion of immortality -- or, more correctly, amortality [non-mortality] -- is the central tenet.

Transhumanists believe that technology will inevitably eliminate aging or disease as causes of death and instead turn death into the result of an accidental or voluntary [aka suicide and euthanasia] physical intervention. More

• AUTHOR: Joi Ito is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, and his association with the magazine goes back to its inception. He is coauthor with Jeff Howe of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future and director of the MIT Media Lab.

Grateful Dead: "Long Strange Trip" (video)

Seth Auberon, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Movieclips Film Festivals & Indie Films, May 17, 2017

Long Strange Trip
Amazon; Trailer #1 (2017)

The tale of the Grateful Dead is inspiring, complicated, and downright messy. A tribe of contrarians, they made art out of open-ended chaos and inadvertently achieved success on their own terms. Never-before-seen footage and interviews offer this unprecedented and unvarnished look at the life of The Dead. This is the new trailer directed by Amir Bar-Lev.

• Tickets to Long Strange Trip
• New documentary trailers playlist

Retro Report: LSD's Long, Strange Trip
(The New York Times, May 16, 2016)

 

In the 60s, mind-altering drugs like LSD ("acid") helped fuel the counter-culture. Today, psychedelics are turning on a new generation--of scientists. Story: nyti.ms/1R4s2RI.

(PsychedSubstance) Autism and Acid: Aspbergers Syndrome and LSD trip

(Jan. 16, 2016) A man with Aspergers undergoes a 700ug acid trip. Do psychedelics affect an autistic people differently? This short documentary may hold some answers. Extra video footage. To get a Test Kit. Support PS on Patreon. Like on Facebook: tinyurl.com/pg9lrat.

Timothy Leary's "Dying to Know" (trailer)

Eds., Wisdom Quarterly; Dyingtoknowmovie.com; Giphy.com

Alive Mind: alternative film releases

• Alive Mind: alivemindmedia.com

More DVD Releases

Hair: Let the Sun Shine In
Since its overwhelming success on Broadway forty years ago, HAIR: Let the Sun Shine In has inspired generations with its messages of love, non-violence, and liberation. This definitive... More

Through the Eastern Gate
What moves young, educated people to give up lives of material security for a spiritual quest that confronts uncertainty? Filmed in the gorgeous countryside and ancient cities... More

Atheism Tapes
As part of the making of the ground-breaking series “A Brief History of Disbelief,” Jonathan Miller filmed conversations with some very distinguished minds. Jonathan,... More

Hofmann’s Potion
Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to “tune in, turn on and drop out,” lysergic acid diethylamide (or LSD) was being used by researchers committed to understanding... More

Fierce Light
In these times of crisis, there is an electric charge in the air, a burgeoning renewal amongst both people who have focused their lives on the spiritual, and those whose lives... More

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman
Never before in our collective human history have so many women had such autonomy to construct a life of their own creation. Yet, the terrain is still rocky and "choice"... More

Meditate & Destroy
Meditate and Destroy profiles the persona who quite possibly represents America’s most unexpected Buddhist: former punk and juvenile delinquent Noah Levine, bestselling... More