The peace symbol is recognized around the globe. It has become an enduring cultural icon. For five decades, millions of people worldwide, regardless of race or religious beliefs, have looked to the peace sign to unite them. And the symbol's appeal continues with each succeeding generation. And nothing more eloquently symbolizes the counterculture era than the peace sign. How did this simple sketch become so powerful an image? This book tells the surprising story of the sign in words and pictures, from its origins in the nuclear disarmament efforts of the late 1950s to its adoption by the antiwar movement of the 1960s, through its stint as a mass-marketed commodity and its enduring relevance now.
As the symbol’s popularity blossomed, so did an entire generation, and author Ken Kolsbun’s expertly selected images—from his own collections as well as a variety of historical archives—illustrate both the sign itself and the larger history that it helped to shape. Along the way, the book recounts the controversy inspired by the peace symbol, bringing to light several trials that challenged its very existence. Drawing on exclusive archival interviews with Gerald Holtom, the late creator of the symbol, Peace recounts its birth and goes on to build a historic portrait using both iconic and rarely seen photographs. (zvg)

This book is about the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the evolution of the human sense of self. It describes how all the expressions of our civilization—its miraculous technology as well as the pillage of earth, culture, goodness, and beauty—arise from our identity, our way of being, "the discrete and separate self". The gathering crises of our age demonstrate that this way of being is on the verge of collapse. And this collapse is setting the stage for a revolution in human beingness whose stirrings we already begin to feel.
The Ascent of Humanity is about Separation: its origins, its evolution, its ideology, its effects, its consummation and resolution, and its cosmic purpose. What is the purpose of the grandeur and the ruin we have wrought? If civilization is to collapse, Why? and What for? Will we then go back to the Stone Age, or will we be born into something entirely new? This book draws from mythological sources, as well as natural processes of birth and transformation, to offer a narrative framework for the majesty and madness of human civilization.
More than anything, The Ascent of Humanity is about how to create the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I have long found most prescriptions for "what you can do" to reverse humanity's trajectory of ruin quite empty. Recycle your bottles and turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Write your Congressman. What are these tiny individual actions against the juggernaut of destruction that consumes oceans, trees, soil, and culture? This book offers an entirely different approach that begins with the reconception of our very selves. It invalidates the logic of despair that so many activists have felt, that arises inescapably from the conception of ourselves as discrete and separate subjects in a world of other. This is the ideology of separation. The ideology that has created the human realm we know is the same ideology that has us despair we can ever change it. Wait, did I say "we"? I mean actually "you" and "I". "We" is often disempowering too, because it leads us to wish, "Oh if only everyone would get it, then we would have a better government, better laws, and stop being so greedy." But they don't—how could I make them?—and the despair comes back. Helplessness. Frustration. This may be the only book you have ever read that fully gets the enormity of the crises facing us, yet responds neither with despair nor with fantasy suggestions about what "we" should do about it. (zvg)

Brilliant and original, with great depth of insight and understanding, Eisenstein’s Ascent of Humanity easily ranks with the works of such giants of our age as David Bohm, Julian Jaynes, Jean Gebser, Whitehead. It is a profoundly serious, indeed somber portrait of our times, even as it opens a door of honest hope amidst the dark destiny we have woven about us. Accept the challenge of this major accomplishment and discover the light shining within it.
Joseph Chilton Pearce

Global warming is contentious and difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. Will temperatures rise by 2oC or 8oC over the next hundred years? Will sea levels rise by 2 or 30 feet? The only way that we can accurately answer questions like these is by looking into the distant past, for a comparison with the world long before the rise of mankind.
We may currently believe that atmospheric shifts, like global warming, result from our impact on the planet, but the earth's atmosphere has been dramatically shifting since its creation. This book reveals the crucial role that plants have played in determining atmospheric change - and hence the conditions on the planet we know today. Along the way a number of fascinating puzzles arise: Why did plants evolve leaves? When and how did forests once grow on Antarctica? How did prehistoric insects manage to grow so large? The answers show the extraordinary amount plants can tell us about the history of the planet -- something that has often been overlooked amongst the preoccuputations with dinosaur bones and animal fossils.
David Beerling's surprising conclusions are teased out from various lines of scientific enquiry, with evidence being brought to bear from fossil plants and animals, computer models of the atmosphere, and experimental studies. Intimately bound up with the narrative describing the dynamic evolution of climate and life through Earth's history, we find Victorian fossil hunters, intrepid polar explorers and pioneering chemists, alongside wallowing hippos, belching volcanoes, and restless landmasses. (zvg)

As Gandhi observed, our fork can be a weapon of violence. Will Tuttle, pianist, composer and teacher, embraces this simple truth by keeping violence off his plate and adopting a vegan way of being in the world. He expresses the heart and soul of the animal liberation and compassionate living movement with insights that prove how inextricably linked is the suffering of animals with the war, violence and terrorism we currently face on earth when he says, "If we cause war against animals we will cause war against ourselves." From mythology, religion, and human systems, Tuttle offers a set of universal principles for all people of conscience to show how we as a species can move our consciousness forward - allowing us to become more free, more intelligent, more loving, and happier in the choices we make. (zvg)

Will Tuttle brings a priceless perspective—not only to the planetary crisis confronting us all, but also to powerful ways we each can affect it. This book is radiant with his learning and his compassion.
Joanna Macy

A world at once familiar and unimaginably strange exists all around us–and within us. It is the world of consciousness, a protean mental landscape that each of us knows intimately in bits and pieces yet understands in its totality scarcely at all. Tied to the body and the brain, consciousness is nonetheless beyond our ability to measure or quantify. Despite the attempts of scientists and mystics, poets and dreamers, crackpots and geniuses, to map its contours and explain its secret workings, the mind remains mysterious. And the more we learn about it, the more mysterious it becomes.
But that is not to say that we know nothing about consciousness. In fact, as gonzo science journalist Jeff Warren demonstrates in this provocative, often hilarious, and always fascinating synthesis of cutting-edge research and personal experience, just how much we do know is little short of astonishing. And when Warren fits the pieces together, the implications of that knowledge are, well, mind-blowing.
Warren begins with the insight that consciousness is not a simple on-off proposition, with rigid demarcations separating waking awareness from the murky depths of sleep, but rather a round-the-clock continuum regulated by natural biorhythms. He then sets out to explore, and to experience for himself, the seemingly miraculous, all-but-untapped potential of the human mind.
From the full-immersion virtual realities of lucid dreaming to the esoteric disciplines of Eastern meditative practices that have reached outposts of consciousness far beyond the grasp of Western science, from techniques of hypnosis and neurofeedback to such exotic states of awareness as the Watch and the Pure Conscious Event, Warren takes us on an incredible journey through our own heads–a journey conducted with the adventurous spirit and intellectual curiosity of a Darwin coupled with the sensibility of a stand-up comedian.
Part user’s manual and part travel guide, The Head Trip is an instant classic, a brilliant summation of consciousness studies that is also a practical guide to enhancing creativity, mental health, and the experience of what it means to be human. Many books claim that they will change you. This one gives you the tools to change yourself. (zvg)

This book addresses the role and significance of consciousness expansion in the psychospiritual transformations of the individual, and in the transformations of culture and society associated with the 1960s. Both texts have been written for the international symposium "LSD – Problem Child and Wonder Drug", presented by the Gaia Media Foundation in January 2006.
In the first part, Metzner describes how the holistic transformation teachings of alchemy, originating in the sacred science of ancient Egypt, persecuted by the Church in the Middle Ages, and ridiculed by scientific modernism, were revived in the 20th century by the work of two Swiss scientists: C.G. Jung, who identified alchemical symbolism as the objective language of the psyche; and Albert Hofmann, who, with the discovery of LSD reconnected the broken link between Spirit and Matter, the mysterious link known traditionally as the Philosophers' Stone.
In the second part, he describse how the introduction of consciousness expanding substances into Western culture, synchronous with the invention of the atomic bomb at the height of World War II, was followed by the socio-cultural upheavals of the 1960s. These social transformation movements can be seen as a response of the collective psyche to the unprecedented challenges to civilization posed by nuclear war, environmental destruction and rampant population growth. Though seemingly "counter-cultural" in that they countered the domination agenda of the power-elites, they were really the attempt to articulate an expanded consciousness and a vision of society centered around humane, ecological, creative and spiritual values. (zvg)

First published in 1971, it almost immediately became the must-have philosophy book of its generation. The impact of "The Guide" elevated its author, Thaddeus Golas, from a bit part in the Beat and Psychedelic movements to a lead role. The Guide is not currently in print, but do not despair: a recording of this classic book, read by the author, is now available as a remastered, quality 2-disc CD. In this audio book, Golas updated his original text for a newer audience. He removed drug references that were unnecessary to his philosophy. He also clarified numerous passages on the advice of his many readers. This booklet in this deluxe CD package highlights Golas' own updates and revisions. All told, the recording is a lovely testament, and a rare chance to hear Thaddeus Golas' voice preserved in this new stereo digital mix. Until The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment returns in print, this is your only opportunity to experience this transformative book. And best of all, having the book read to you, by the author, is even lazier. www.evenlazier.com (zvg)

This final volume of the highly acclaimed Pharmako trilogy covers the visionary plants: the contemporary uses of plant poisons, historic cultural lore, and shamanic rites. It presents the author's poetic study of botany, chemistry, spirituality, psychology and history, covering the composition and uses of visionary plants. This work contains chapters, including Phantastica, Hypnotica and Telephorica that explore the hallucinogenic plants, the bringers of sleep and the bearers of distance. (zvg)

"Pendell's ongoing subjects are the botanical 'allies' humans have always associated with, and the 'pharmakon,' the drug that is both poison and cure. A poet, ethnobotanist, and amateur chemist, he's the best writer on drugs to come along since the late Terence McKenna."
The Village Voice

Here a leading neurobiologist investigates the phenomenon of mindfulness—the paying attention to life in the present moment—as it impacts our daily lives, offering readers insight into personal relationships, emotional behaviour, parenting and work. (zvg)

A brilliant and visionary wedding of mindfulness and neurobiology. Siegel's book stands out for its skillful weaving together of the interpersonal, the inner world, the latest science, and practical applications, all envisioned as a whole.
Jack Kornfield

This book marks a major landmark in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience. Daniel Siegel offers a provocative, highly original and brilliant theory integrating mindfulness meditation with brain research, one that will shape thinking in the field for years to come. A must-read for anyone interested in the science of mind and mindfulness.
Daniel Goleman

This original research monograph investigates and re examines the ideas generated by the Hermetic tradition. The work discusses the effects of the tradition on modern philosophy and science and assays the influence of hermetic imaginary on areas such as AI, Cybernetics, Cyberspace as well as Leibnitz and Fludd that have been influential in modern philosophy and science. (zvg)

The book is rated higher than it deserves, there are many errors in the story, but since it is about the only history of the subject. Now again available as a reprint it remains popular and by default, "authoritative". (dah)

This title does not only sound like a whole program. There's enough material to fill three books, and very convincing material it is indeed.
What we were taught in school is wrong, or at least incomplete: Dionysos and his maenads were inebriated by something stronger than wine alone! Everywhere in Arcadia we find fungal and herbal ecstasy, as a plethora of artifacts shown by the author demonstrates.
It is because the classical Greeks are not given much attention in an ordinary curriculum anymore that these obviously facts were not disclosed before – or only very disparately, for scholars only? Carl Ruck is precisely such a scholar, and he has devoted the research of a lifetime to this astonishing little book that certainly deserves more space in future editions.
In his preface, the eminent religious philosopher Huston Smith points to the universal grammar of revelatory plants, while the evidence gathered by thoroughly conscientious Ruck bridges an important gap on the entheogenic map.
Starting with a discussion of mystery cults in general, we are taken on a botanical journey through the ancient world, revealing hitherto largely ignored plants with a great variety of psychoactive properties. Thus the potion given Achilles may have contained mind altering drugs leading him to fear nothing and no one at the moment of battle, High Priestess Medea held her spell over Jason by many a magic concoction, and the Goddess Demeter lost her daughter Persephone to Hades due to a poppy seed, keeping the Kore spellbound in the underworld during the dark months of the year.
Thus, as has been the case with fly agaric in the Middle East and throughout the European continent, many Greek myths find a new reading.
Susanne Seiler

Only a new Eleusis could help mankind to survive the threatening catastrophe in Nature and human society and bring a new period of happiness.
Albert Hofmann

True Visions is an anthology dedicated to contemporary visionary art. The term Visionary Art includes a great variety of styles, kinds, periods, and degrees of abstraction. But they all resonate with the visionary experience -- the divine, the magical, the spiritual, and the experience of multidimensional perception. Psychedelic, man! Rich with rare -- and rarely published -- Klarwein & Fuchs art. Includes text in English and in Italian, and interviews (in English) with all the artists. (lastgap)
Betty Books

This remarkable book introduces a Gnostic approach to Sophia-Gaia, the feminine wisdom principle embodied by the earth, vividly soliciting us to embrace Her revival for our survival.
When the human race revered the fertility of the earth, the perennial philosophy of human kindness and good sense, as embodied in the common laws of indigenous people the world over, was equally prominent in ancient Europe. Gyncentric societies did not know the taint of sexual apartheid; mystery cults were participatory, experiential and peaceful.
The erudition and mindfulness of the Pagan world have been hugely underestimated, since the onslaught of patriarchy, symbolized by the flood, destroyed a much larger civilization than we have been lead to believe. Initiated in antediluvian times with the arrival of misogynic sky gods, it took the three monotheistic religions to achieve the undoing of the sophisticated way of life of our forebears.
In Gnostic terms, evil came from outside of the matrix of the earth, from another dimension or parallel universe. Entities of this parallel dimension managed to insinuate themselves into our world. It may come as a shock to many, that the Gnostics held Yahweh to be such an entity, facilitating the promotion of the perpetrator-victim ethos of Salvationism, held to be an abomination and a fateful error.
John Lash presents the stark contrast between the tenets of retribution and exploitation - of the feminine –, and the ethos of illuminism, with its emphasis on personal experience and communion with nature, within the framework of a vast body of knowledge, reaching from the classic authors of antiquity to present-day proponents of eco-science and eco-spirituality. A fascinating read.
Susanne G. Seiler

John Lash's heretical book is a precious act of spiritual disobedience that seeks to save the world from Salvationism.
Jeremy Narby

Journeying into the invisible world revealed by his use of the dissociative psychedelic DXM (dextromethorphan), Dan Carpenter found that what he experienced was not simply subjective sensations and psychological states but an objective world of familiar, if inordinately odd, landmarks and characters. The running diary he kept of these voyages recounts impressions of a landscape charted by other travelers into this Inner Space and includes descriptions of many of the same phenomena recorded by such mind travelers as Terence and Dennis McKenna, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, and others who have experienced the hive mind--the pool of all consciousness. Into this territory where expression is like chaos theory, where oddly symmetrical order manifests out of the seemingly anarchic swirl of images and events, the author ventures with the mind-set of a naturalist, accepting whatever might be rather than what he hopes he might find. What emerges is not a location crafted by subjective experience, but a landscape that embodies the Other and that represents a conscious state in which the barriers between the self and the not-self dissolve. (zvg)

Dan Carpenter's forays into the fractal hyperspace and hive minds of the DXM realms offer a serious contribution to contemporary psychedelic thought. His work follows in the tradition of inner-space investigators such as Coleridge, Antonin Artaud, Aldous Huxley, and Terence McKenna. This is a ‘must-read' for every serious psychonaut.
Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck unifies the inquiry into cosmological phenomena — including crop circles, quantum physics, and the worldwide resurgence of shamanism — in support of the Mayan prophecy that the year 2012 will bring an unprecedented global shift in human consciousness. Appearing forty years after the pivotal heyday of the 1960s, 2012 also argues forthe legitimacy of the 1960s-era spiritual and intellectual legacy, embracing the works of writers such as Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and Carlos Castaneda.
A generation ago, pursuing "mind expansion" through altered states of consciousness was hip as well as culturally relevant. By the end of the 1960s, not only were psychedelic drugs outlawed but our society had rejected the idea that it was valuable to open the "doors of perception" at all. For more than three decades, the mainstream has not allowed any serious inquiry into these areas, which once seemed to point toward a new consciousness.
Author Daniel Pinchbeck has deep personal roots in the New York
counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. His father was an abstract
painter, and his mother, Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation and dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in Johnson's bestselling book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir). Pinchbeck was a founder of the 1990s literary magazine Open City with fellow writers Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. He has written for many publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. In 1994, he was chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of "Thirty Under Thirty" destined to change our culture.
A profound spiritual crisis in his late twenties led Pinchbeck to the study of shamanism. His first book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, recounted his personal initiation into several tribal cultures that continue to use "magic mushrooms" and other hallucinogens in their rituals. Pinchbeck became convinced of the legitimacy of the shamanic and mystical worldview held by indigenous peoples around the world.
This brought up troubling questions: If the modern West, in its pursuit of rational science and materialism, had rejected crucially important aspects of reality, what did this say about our society, and its immediate future?
2012 chronicles the writer's journey to answer these questions, beginning with an exploration of prophecy, especially the vision of the Classical Mayan culture (also the subject of a new Mel Gibson movie, Apocalypto, filmed entirely in the Mayan language). The Mayans were obsessed with time, and according to their Sacred Calendar, the year 2012 marks the end of a "Great Cycle" of more than 5,000 years, and the climax of larger patterns that appear to go back 16 billion years. Pinchbeck discovered that a number of theorists, working outside the mainstream of archaeology, make a compelling argument that 2012 could represent a transformation in the nature of human consciousness as well as, potentially, a unified and harmonic global civilization.
In 2012, Pinchbeck recounts his own personal experiences as he follows the traces of prophetic and occult knowledge, including a visit to southern England to investigate the crop circles, and a journey to the Brazilian Amazon to study Santo Daime, a religion that uses the psychedelic drink ayahuasca as its sacrament. He unifies the ideas of a large number of writers, philosophers, and physicists to create a new cultural context for understanding the many aspects of being that to date have been ignored and suppressed by mainstream culture and the academy.
2012 is an unusually elegant, serious, critical and adventurous exposition of ideas often regarded as beyond the purview of intellectual inquiry. Readers may share or reject its conclusions, but they are certain to find the journey unforgettable. Pinchbeck lives in New York's East Village, where he is currently launching Evolver (www.evolverproject.com), a new media and membership organization, with offices in Manhattan and on the West Coast. (zvg)

A dazzling kaleidoscopic journey through the quixotic hinterlands of consciousness, crop circles, and ancient prophecy, as well as an intriguing and deeply personal odyssey of transformation. 2012 presents a compelling and complex teleological argument, weaving together the twilit realms of the human imagination and the harsh realities of accelerated global catastrophe. Its conclusions are surprisingly robust, original, and thankfully optimistic.
Sting

This fascinating book by Tom Roberts takes a close look at multi-mind states, entheogenic healing, and more.
Dr. Tom Roberts' interest in psychedelics is best reflected in his recent book "Psychedelic Horizons". His fascination with, and appreciation of the untapped potential of these substances is best summed up in his words, "As an educational psychologist, I am grateful to psychedelics for teaching me that our minds function in many mindbody states... psychedelics challenged me to explore our minds, and I am thankful that they invited me when they did." The exploration of the concept of different mind-body states is one of the more intriguing theories in Dr. Roberts' book. Roberts feels that attachment to our ordinary, normal, "awake" state (single state) is limiting. What is needed, he says, is the recognition that "our minds do useful work in mindbody states in addition to our ordinary awake state". This is the idea of the multistate mind. He likens the concept to a person who has bought a powerful computer, but will only use it to play chess, thus underutilizing a powerful information-processing resource.
Dr. Roberts feels that psychedelics, along with other psychotechnologies (e.g. yoga, meditation, martial arts, dream work, etc.) have helped to expand our assumptions about our minds. He proposes a "Multistate Studies Center" to "explore how current abilities vary across mindbody states, to reask educational questions from a multistate perspective, to explore leads from other cultures on our own, and develop the possibilities of designing new mindbody states and housing them".
The second, rather revolutionary theory, is related to the "placebo effect"... Dr. Roberts posits that the placebo effect is a mindbody skill our minds and our bodies have. He calls this "placebo ability". He feels that psychedelically enhanced mystical experiences could produce an overwhelming sense of well being and might offer clues to spontaneous, unaccountable healing (i.e. placebo effect). He questions and hypothesizes: "do entheogen-induced mystical experiences boost the immune system?" Dr. Roberts calls this the EMXIS hypotheses, short for Entheogen, induced Mystical Experiences Influence the Immune System. This theory differentiates between psychedelics and their transformation to "entheogens" (generating the experience of god within) when a sense of sacredness accompanies the emotional peaks.
I found Dr. Roberts book to be very thought provoking, informative and entertaining. His chapter on "Snow-White-Grof's Landmarks in Disney's Land", for example, is a whimsical, psychedelic interpretation of Snow White that will change the way you read this fairy tale.
The last part of Dr. Roberts' book "Enlarging Education" expands the meaning of what it means to be a well educated (i.e., one with multistate capacities) person: "A well educated person can select from a large number of mindbody states, enter them, and use their resident abilities". Dr. Roberts acknowledges this multi-state education when he expresses his gratefulness in discovering through psychedelics "that religion is about something, and that something is unitive consciousness". He feels that psychedelics democratizes primary religious experience: "for spiritual guidance, verbalists consult the word of God, mystics consult their experience of God" Part of the entheogenic experience, by definition is the direct experience of the divine. These mystical experiences, drug induced or otherwise, often cause major paradigm shifts -which make it easier to experience mystical states more often and/or to a stronger degree. This could potentially increase our spiritual intelligence. This increase in spiritual intelligence generated by the use of entheogens could have far reaching affects in society and planetary survival.
The final chapters in the book speculate about the future of multistate education and where it may take us. It is fascinating reading both for the uninformed and those of us, who in the seventies sense, "are experienced".
Bruce Sewick, LCPC
http://www.lightworks.com

Tom Roberts has written an easy going, laid-back, even light-hearted yet extremely profound book. He proposes essential and radical reformulations of ideas in medicine, psychology, and education. They're spot on. Some of my previously favorite