Culture and Consciousness

Stages of Consciousness
This is the basis for the lecture given by Charles Bush to the student body the first week of the quarter. It describes the seven stages of consciousness that a person goes through as they grow and develop.

Ram Dass: From LSD to Spirituality

The Psychedelic Library

The following books are a small part of the Psychedelic Library. Take some time and look through the literature of the past hunfred years about the use of mind altering substances.

Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's classic from 1954, which sparked the rediscovery of psychedelics by a wide and varied audience. "There is nothing the pen of Huxley touches which it does not illuminate, and as the record of a highly civilised, brilliantly articulate man under the influence of an astonishing drug, The Doors of Perception is a tour de force." Ð The Daily Telegraph, London. ©Mrs. Laura Huxley

The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts
One of the world's leading investigators of the psychology of religion evaluates the psychedelic experience both objectively and from the vantage of the author's own personal experiments. Foreword by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. HTML edition, table of contents and complete text, copyright 1962, 1970 by Pantheon Books.

LSD-My Problem Child by Albert Hoffmann
Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD and discoverer of psilocybin, the active principle of the "magic mushroom," recounts the history of his discoveries. HTML edition, table of contents and complete text, copyright 1980 McGraw-Hill Book Company. Translated by Jonathan Ott from the German, LSDÐMein Sorgenkind, 1979

On Being Stoned:A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication by Charles Tart, PHD.
"A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication" was published in 1971 and remains a most important source of information for both professionals and the general public. With the recently escalating debate concerning government intransigence on the medical marijuana issue, On Being Stoned appears in The Psychedelic Library as a valuable antidote to misinformation and hysteria. The complete text is available here by permission of the author. ©1971 by Science and Behavior Books.

Religion, Values and Peak Experiences
"Traditionally, religion has been of the spirit; science, of the body; and there has been a wide philosophic gulf between the knowlege of the body and the knowledge of the spirit. The natural sciences and religion have generally been considered as natural and eternal opponents. Abraham H. Maslow here articulates one of his prominent theses: the "religious" experience is a rightful subject for scientific investigation and speculation and, conversely, the "scientific community" will see its work enhanced by acknowledging and studying the species-wide need for spiritual expression which, in so many forms, is at the heart of "peak-experiences" reached by healthy, fully functioning persons."

The Forbidden Game
"A Social History of Drugs" by Brian Inglis. One of the book's recurring themes is that Prohibition has always led to an increase of drug consmption, coupled with an increase in corruption and crime. A classic of the Anti-Prohibition Literature, the author also wrote one of the best accounts of The Opium War.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
by John Marks, published by Times Books in 1979. The extraordinary story, compiled from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, of how the CIA conducted a series of secret programs to find ways to control human behavior. Marks' investigation reveals that the Agency was deeply involved in research with psychoactive drugs, psycho-surgery, electroshock, hypnosis and other methods on Agency operatives, students, mental patients, defectors, prisoners and prostitutes; many of these subjects were unwitting or involuntary collaborators.

Psychedelic Drugs and the Awakening of the Kundalini
The purpose of this web site is to compare the effects of psychedelic drugs to the effects of what is called in the Tantric and Occult literature "awakening of the kundalini". The comparison will be carried out in two ways. First, an abbreviated review of the literature on both psychedelic drugs and kundalini awakening will be presented. When these two literatures are placed side by side, it becomes much more apparent that there is a significant overlap between the effects of psychedelic drugs and the effects of awakened kundalini.

Timothy Leary

War on Drugs is a War on Consciousness

Out of Body Experiences

Terrence McKenna

Enlightenment

This is a long list of sites dedicated to consciousness, too long to list here. This is an excellent source for resources of spirituality on the web.

Transpersonal Psychology