a love bomb

This year’s Bicycle Ride promises to be the largest to date, with local participants as well as friends from Europe and as far as the United States. We’ve grown steadily over the last years. Again, we commemorate the original Bicycle Ride of Albert Hofmann on LSD with his loyal lab assistant Susi Ramstein by largely following the same route they took to bring the confused chemist home safely. For this, we are getting together in Basel on Sunday, 19 April 2026. If you wish to participate, please register here.

Onboarding is possible at various times and locations from Saturday onward, but we will all meet up at 5 pm at the former factory gate of Sandoz Laboratories, located at one end of the Novartis Campus. Further details will be provided upon registration. What we can tell you already is that we have a broad variety of events set up that weekend. And on Sunday evening, we’ll all meet on the party boat Gannet, where a series of kaleidoscopic acts will entertain us.

Albert Hoffman would have been 120 years old this year, an age but few people have reached yet. He would have shaken his head and chuckled a little at all the commotion around his person and his invention on this day. We mustn’t forget that he saw LSD as a sacrament and a medicine first, and he only later in life reconciled himself with the fact many more people took it for other reasons. By then he understood that many of these reasons were also spiritual in nature, a matter of attitude. It amazed him how people wrote him to tell him they took their marriage vows or even birthed children on LSD. That Aldous Huxley chose 100 milligrams of LSD to be his companion when he found himself on the threshold of death touched the chemist deeply.

Albert Hofmann was a kind and mild-mannered man who won many hearts in Switzerland with his modest and straightforward ways. It is partly thanks to him that the Swiss government and a growing proportion of the Swiss population have adopted a pragmatic attitude towards psychedelic therapy. Since 1986, thousands of patients in our country have been treated with LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine or ayahuasca, as well as MDMA or ketamine, and it is no longer necessary to be desperate before the Federal Office of Public Health approves such treatment. Every single case is officially reviewed and approved, meaning we haven’t had any unpleasant surprises so far, let alone fatalities.

All of this would have made Dr. Hofmann happy, With love and appreciation for him and Susi Ramstein we are setting off on our little bike tour again this year. If we chose to call our event a Love Bomb, it is to honour the free spirit of LSD and to counteract the negativity around us: the wars, the strife, the inequality, the lack of justice and all the terrible news that haunts us every day. Amor vincit omnia! So do bring a big smile, and feel very welcome to join us in next month’s endeavour.

With love,
Susanne Seiler

P.S. I am travelling until March 12, when the Psychedelic Salon takes place at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich with with a panel on ketamine. Mark the date!

Come and visit us in our library:
WIDE OPEN BOOKS
Library, Sat/Sun 2-6 pm. (next on 14 & 15 March)
Film Talk, Tuesday 6-9 pm
Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich
https://walcheturm.ch/

Is self-optimization the ultimate expression of a post-capitalist society, or is it a neoliberal idea? First and foremost an economic concept destined to push us toward higher achievement, we need to ask ourselves whether we wish to adhere to its tenets.

Historically, and thus religiously, self-optimization was something one attempted on the inside – to sin less, do good, and gain one’s place in heaven. But today, self-optimization refers not only to self-cultivation; we mostly concern ourselves with how we are viewed from the outside. Are we thin, rich, good-looking, well-dressed, smart, efficient, and spiritual enough?

In post-capitalism, self-optimization concerns the development of “human capital”: better health, more output, and better moods to maximize one’s market value. In an optimal post-capitalist society, the shift is from productivity to individual flourishing. Over the last forty years, it has been suggested that in a society like ours, where basic needs are met and labour is not essential to survival, we should strive to better ourselves and reach our highest human potential. Unfortunately, the pressure it creates remains much the same.

In neoliberalism, the individual has internalized the wish to be perfect and carries the risk for his or her success or failure himself or herself. Whereas post-capitalism developed toward prioritizing individual well-being and autonomy over productivity, in a monetarist system everyone is out to get ahead. In both systems, the self is objectified, its achievements quantified. The optimized self is never good enough; there’s always more, better, bigger. Collective problems become individual issues. If you are poor, the causes are never systemic but invariably your own fault; if you burn out at work, it wasn’t the crazy workload – you didn’t manage yourself properly. If you worry about the climate, you are unable to manage your anxieties. If you get shot in the street, it isn’t due to federally sponsored violence but because you ought to stay home!

One way or another, the notion that good might be good enough has been thrown under the bus. We need to alleviate the nagging compulsion to be better and best, and to stop tracking everything we do, from sleep to calories, steps to focus and mood. We want to concentrate on authenticity rather than fantasy. Just say no to compulsiveness.

The concept of optimization is also applied to psychedelics, as in “the betterment of healthy people.” Not only do I find this concept bigoted. Most users take psychedelics to have fun and gain insights as an aside. Why pretend that this could be otherwise, if only we were more serious? As if anyone ever took psychedelics to get worse!

We are looking at three main areas here: psychedelic therapy, psychedelic spirituality, and the use of psychedelics to maximize one’s energy. Therapy takes precedence, also because it is the legal door opener for further liberalization. Spiritual use remains a valuable contribution to our emotional and psychological well-being, but it is not the be-all and end-all, and there is no moral superiority to be gained over often younger, developing minds who feel the need to express their energy in more physical ways. Above all else, the sanctimonious attitude of many older psychonauts toward recreational use looks like envy to me.

Longer days are returning but we still have a way to go toward accepting ourselves the way we are as a first step to a more balanced life.

Yours,
Susanne Seiler

Come and visit our library!
WIDE OPEN BOOKS
Library, Sat/Sun 2-6 pm.
Film Talk, Tuesday 6-9 pm
Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich
https://walcheturm.ch/

a stoic attitude

As many of you know, the Stoics were a group of Greek and Roman philosophers during the Hellenistic Roman period, emerging towards the end of the third century BCE. Famous members included Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Zeno of Citrium (its founder) or Seneca. They were rationalists who believed in reason or logos, hence the mental discipline of logic. The Stoics encouraged focusing on what’s within our control (our judgments and actions) while cultivating “the middle road”, advocating virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, as well as promoting the inner resilience allowing us to find peace amidst life’s challenges.

Some of these ideas have been emphasized here before without tracing them back to their historic origin. To accept what one cannot change but rather focus one’s energy on making those things better that we have some control over is a lesson in endurance and grit. Most of us are at least occasionally tempted to “rage against the machine.” Just that it doesn’t change much, as became patently clear during the pandemic, when all kinds of people found reasons to go against the grain, often creating more of the isolation they lamented. Splitting the world into “us” and “them” remains a facile exercise in avoiding responsibility for the collective as a whole, of which we are all a part, like it or not.

We need to stand together and remember our core values. They haven’t changed. We’re still concerned with peace, with supporting our beautiful blue planet and its ecology, as with finding love in our hearts when dealing with others. We don’t need to be “healed” to make things better in our own little corner of the world. Like Mr. Natural, the R. Crumb character, famously said, “Life is hell, but we live well.”

I don’t mean that as a glib encouragement to turn one’s back on what’s collectively ailing us but rather as a reminder of all that we have to be grateful for. When it comes to our interests, we are all Stoics at least some of the time. They believed that the world makes sense. Their logic invites us to examine our reason(s) at all time. Are we acting rationally or on impulse? Are our motives purely personal or aimed towards a more universal good? What do we want to achieve? How much time do we have to do so?

The logic of the Stoics helps us get a clear view of reality, reason effectively about practical affairs, stand our ground amid confusion, differentiate the certain from the probable, or get an overview of what befalls us.

I wish you a happy and healthy new year!

Yours,
Susanne Seiler

WIDE OPEN BOOKS
Library, Sat/Sun 2-6 pm.
Film Talk, Tuesday 6-9 pm
Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich
https://walcheturm.ch/

We aim to make our library available to as large an audience as possible, having recently moved our books to Zurich, and there to Kunstraum Walcheturm. Our “pop-up books” will stay at this location until the beginning of March 2026. WIDE OPEN BOOKS is open every Saturday and Sunday from 2-6 pm, when treasures are perused at leisure, and questions asked and answered.

WIDE OPEN BOOKS also has an evening program on Tuesdays from 6-9 pm called “Film Talks,” where we take a closer look at some well-known psychedelic movies. We also hold panel discussions twice on Wednesdays from 6 to 9 p.m.

WIDE OPEN BOOKS shows approximately two thirds of the library of the Gaia Media Foundation, the rest remains boxed up until we find a new home in a public a setting. Any ideas? Money to support us? We still haven’t been able to catalogue all we have. It is a huge task we would like to be able to pay someone for.

The subjects contained in WIDE OPEN BOOKS range from Psychedelics to Consciousness, via Shamanism, Mythology, and any other topic in the last 100 years close to the hearts and minds of psychonauts. To illustrate this, we have arranged our books chronologically. They start in 2009. A precise order is on the way. It means that our books do not only stand for themselves but also for a the huge development the psychedelic movement, and youth culture at large, have undergone since Albert Hofmann discovered LSD.

We see WIDE OPEN BOOKS first and foremost as an art project, an integral work with ramifications and synergies to be explored.

Do come and see us, and if you wish to support us physically, morally or financially, let us know. More than two thousand WIDE OPEN BOOKS are waiting for you.

Yours,
Susanne Seiler

Library, Sat/Sun 2-6 pm.
Film Talk, Tuesday 6-9 pm
Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich
https://walcheturm.ch/

During the Summer of Love, first in San Francisco (1967)and then in other cities, such as Toronto (1968), where I lived at the time, it was common to take LSD offered by friends out on the street, to swallow it there and then and see what would happen.

Other than to Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and their colleagues, who let psychedelics escape from the ivory tower of Harvard, we ironically owe this turn towards youthful mass intoxication to the incompetence of the American and British secret services. They let the magic pills they administered to their test subjects, often without their knowledge and consent, escape the lab and cabinet to find their way onto the streets.

Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was one of those subjects, albeit consenting. His chaotic Merry Pranksters, a boisterous group of Korea veterans and other tough guys, were soon throwing acid parties to the tunes of the Grateful Dead, while on the East Coast Timothy Leary was busy becoming more and more of his messianic self. In 1969, he ran for Governor of California, where he had lived and worked as a clinical psychologist, and a co-founder of the Psychology Department at Kayser Berkeley Hospital. He was soon arrested and jailed. His slogan “Come Together Join the Party,” out of which John Lennon created his song “Come Together.” describes a time when freedom was claimed and liberations pursued to an unknown extent by virtue of the sheer masses of kids and others hitting the streets.

In total, from the American West Coast to India and on to Oceania, half a billion doses of LSD alone are said to have initiated an expansion of consciousness, which still echoes loud and clear today. Last year 27 million Americans over the ages of 12 (!) said they’d taken LSD in the past year. Approximately one in 50’000 need help while or as a result of tripping.

In order not to incriminate people who are hedonists at worse, the possession of small amounts of LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA needs to be regulated, as these substances are relatively safe when used responsibly.

Something else:

Starting November 25, we will be exhibiting a selection of our books and other treasures at the Walcheturm art space in Zurich. Similar to the monthly Psychedelic Salon, which has found a home in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, we will offer readings, and discussions with well-known local personalities, as well as a film program, in a colourful location at Walcheturm.

The library is open Wednesday through Saturday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.; the evening program takes place from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.,. by announcement. If you would like to get involved and support us, please let us know.

We will celebrate on November 18 from 6 p.m onward.

Welcome!

Susanne Seiler

Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich

https://walcheturm.ch/

 

Is it the countless lies, the corruption, war, destruction, hunger, inequality, injustice? It makes me sad to think about these things, and I think about them every day, whether I want to or not. If I were to seriously engage with the tragedies unfolding before my eyes, I would probably go mad. Am I even aware of what is going on? Isn’t everything much worse? The lies, the deception, the murders and executions, not only in Gaza, but all over the world?

It doesn’t help to dwell on events that are beyond our control. We empathise, we are angry, we feel helpless, broken – and we are glad to be far away. We feel we are entitled to be relieved and privileged, and while relief is human, privilege remains relative. People are generally fed up with our chaotic times. Their lives are less affordable, their jobs are often a drudgery they drag themselves to five days a week. Even people with good middle-class jobs and decent pay want out. At art openings and during our psychedelic salons at Cabaret Voltaire, I sometimes meet people who tend to feign a certain sense of professional optimism. Behind their masks lurks pure despair: What will become of my job? What about AI? What will become of my money, my family, my life? People on the next rung up the social ladder worry about their reputation. How do I look in the eyes of “the world”? Will I be publicly defamed and destroyed, my ego in shambles, my pride in the dust? Does anyone love me at all?

What should we all do? It seems clear that those who have enough should share with those who have less, and many people do. It is too easy to blame those who could but do not because they are so greedy and needy. For them, as for us, the question is how to make the world a better place without sacrificing ourselves. After all, any kind of commitment, from love to business, not to mention politics, requires an investment of time, money and effort that we may not have the energy or the means to make.

When it comes to difficult times, there are two tricks: if you consume less, you save money, and if you save money, you feel more secure. Give away some of that money and you’ll not only feel rich, but also good!

Nature is free and accessible to all. We call her our mother; she is the gift that keeps on giving. By spending time in the forest or the mountains, by the sea or in the desert, we show our affection and admiration for her. It responds to this love by bringing us closer to ourselves and, step by step, liberating us from everything that weighs us down. Until we feel free to dive into ourselves and recognise who we were when that was still enough.

Let’s escape from the cities as often as possible. To build a more natural and largely autonomous life together wherever possible. To love nature, our lives and each other.

Have a colourful autumn, everyone!
Susanne Seiler

Cogito ergo sum. Most of us encountered this dictum by scientist and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), the father of modern philosophy, as schoolchildren. Already back then I disagreed: how could I think at all without a brain? Or without a body?

This leads us to the much more difficult question of what consciousness actually is. I won’t pretend to have the answer. However, neuroscience increasingly assumes that consciousness is not a prerequisite for perception, but rather a consequence of it. Before we form a thought, we must become aware of our surroundings and engage with reality through our senses. We share this with all sentient beings. Animals and other life forms may not think like us, but they are conscious enough to survive in an often hostile environment, and they are often better adapted to life than we are, having become largely alienated from nature – including our own.

While thinking is linked to neural activity in the brain, consciousness can also occur without understanding, as in meditation or in babies before they learn to speak. The same applies to patients in a coma or on the operating table, who perceive what is being said and done around them without reflecting it. It applies to the cat enjoying a ray of sunshine, or the mouse perceiving the rustling of the grass around it, to the bird dancing in the wind, and the puma prowling through the jungle.

Could it be that we have misunderstood Descartes? Perhaps he simply wanted to tell us that thinking was his raison d’être and that without intellectual engagement with the world, he felt like a fish out of water. Does our human dignity really depend on our ability to analyse and produce, rather than springing from our being, the feeling of ‘I am’? Our perception arises from our lived experience of the world. We should use both our hearts and our minds to engage with it. Consciousness is more than thinking!

Thoughtfully Yours,
Susanne G. Seiler

 

“Utterly brilliant and inspired in every direction – writing, ethnobotany, chemistry, psychonautics, pharmacology, drug history, gardening, house building, hydroelectrics (he powered his house and village at one point with a hydroelectric system he installed), teaching, editing, and pretty much everything else you could ever find interest in. Jonathan had a gargantuan knowledge bank, skill set and even bigger heart. He will be so missed by so many.”
Hattie Wells, Psychedelic practitioner and co-director Breaking Convention

Jonathan Ott was born on 2 June 1949 in Hartford, Connecticut, where he spent his childhood with his three sisters. According to Claudia Müller-Ebeling, who knew him well, he had to overcome «familial, political, and academic boundaries and mostly limited spheres of awareness,” before studying organic chemistry at the Evergreen State College in Olympia (Washington), and later in Mexico, where he made his home.

In 1973, a fateful encounter brought him together with Richard Evans Schultes. He, Albert Hofmann and R. Gordon Wasson remained Jonathan’s most important mentors. He also collaborated with other passionate ethnobotanical researchers such as Pablo Blas Reko, Christian Rätsch and Jochen Gartz. Along with Alexander Shulgin and Antonio Escohotado, who also left us recently, he has now joined them in the land beyond the rainbow, where I hope they are having a good time together.

Among many other things, Jonathan Ott is famous for having been the English translator of Albert Hofmann’s book LSD My Problem Child, and for having co-coined the term «entheogen.» Not only was his Engish most elegant, and a pleasure to hear and read: his German was also remarkable, spoken with only the slightest accent. Other than Spanish, he was a scholar on Indigenous languages. He authored and co-authored a large number of books and articles, the most famous being his Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History (1993), Ayahuasca Analogues. Pangean Enthogens (1984) and Hallucinogenic Plants of North America (1976). You’ll find a selection of his available writings here.

Ott was an experienced field collector in Mexico, where managed a small natural-products laboratory and botanical garden of medicinal herbs. In March 2010, his home was destroyed by arson. In a vindictive act, the books given to him by Albert Hofmann were reportedly used as fuel, meaning the arsonist must have acted with premeditated intent. Fortunately Jonathan Ott was not home when it happened.

From 1976 onward, Jonathan initiated several psychedelic conferences along with various partners, The psychedelic movements owes him more than we’ll ever know or be able to express.

The Gaia Media Foundation hosted or co-hosted him on several occasions. You’ll find his talks «The Hermit of a Latter-Day St-Anthony Entertains St Albert» (LSD80, Basel 2023), «Albert Hofmann’s Contributions to Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research» (2014) as well as an «Interview with Faustin Bray» (World Psychedelic Forum 2008) and «Albert Hofmann & Jonathan Ott on Consciousness & Mystical Experience” (Outside Dr. Hofmann’s home on the Rittimatte 2002) on our YouTube Channel. I also found him here. Keep on scrollling…

Jonathan Ott and I were about the same age. He was a warm-hearted man, and I am very sorry he’s no longer with us. He passed on 5 July; the cause of his death remains to be revealed,

In fond memory,
Susanne G. Seiler

50 years of ecotopia

In the late Seventies, I first read Ernest Callenbach’s utopian novel, published in 1975, about a time in the not-too-distant future (1999) when the northern part of California, as well as Oregon, and Washington secede from the rest of the United States to form their own state, Ecotopia, which is also the title of the book. It concerns a skeptical reporter named William Wesson who is sent by the president of the remaining States to see how this lost land might be recaptured.

I picked it up again disgusted by the political events surrounding Trump’s rogue state, in which anonymous agents of the Department of Homeland Security invade homes, schools, and supermarkets to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, on whose starvation wages much of the American economy depends. This book inspires courage and anticipates many things that we could hardly imagine back then, but which are part of our everyday life today: recycling stations, remote viewing, the legalization of cannabis, fitness as a cult, a helicopter war in no way inferior to today’s drone wars, war games with real victims. I don’t want to give too much away, I’d like you to read it, available from Banyan Tree Books as The Complete Ecotopia, including the sequel Ecotopia Emerging, which describes how the secession came about and what made it possible.

Even though most of us in Europe are better off than many US citizens, we are still a long way from where we need to be in order to cope with, let alone avert what is rapidly approaching. This summer is already beating all records and making  reality what climate scientists are urgently warning us about: earlier and earlier, hotter and hotter!

When Wesson arrives in Ecotopia, he is suspicious and fears for his life, recording his observations and experiences in official reports and private notes. Over time, however, he learns to understand the country that hosts him. And he falls in love.

Perhaps you’ll find some ideas in this exciting book that you can apply to your everyday life and will lead you to defend our threatened planet at the ballot box. Denial is futile. Ernest Callenbach, author, filmmaker, and advocate of a simple life, showed fifty years ago that there is another way.

Thoughtfully yours,
Susanne G. Seiler

P.S. If you are a European citizen, please consider signing the following:

P.S.S. We are only able to staff our lounge and library at Hochstrasse 70  by appointment. Please contact the editorial team if you’d like to make an appointment

but what does it all mean?

Last Sunday, towards morning, I had the most lovely dream about Ram Dass, who I met at Timothy Leary’s on Wonderland Drive in L.A. many years ago. I’ve written about it in my book In the Jungle of the Mind.

In the dream, he was young, lean, and tanned, wearing jeans, a dark turtleneck sweater, and a stylish leather jacket reaching down to his thighs. He had swept his longish brown hair out of his face. and didn’t look like Ram Dass but more like “a handsome tall stranger”, as in a prediction by a fortune teller. We talked about life, as he morphed into an older version of himself, looking more like the Ram Dass we all know and admire. I asked him if he was looking forward to passing on. He answered: I like it here. And me: Don’t we all – at the end of the day. We laughed like mischievous children about this ambiguous answer.

He hugged me and pulled me to his side. I said: It has been one of the great honours of my life to have met you. And he: I think about you all the time! Really? He claimed he had been born in 1910. That would have made him 115 years old!

I’m not sure what it all means and asked CHatGTP. AIs are good at interpreting dreams and giving psychological advice, even though they tend to hallucinate when dealing with unknown facts. Don’t we all?

It called my dream tender and luminous, like two souls meeting and not just a random encounter or a jumble of impressions. It’s true that the dream seems meaningful, playful, and somehow mysterious. Ram Dass appearing young, tanned, and unfamiliar but fully present in spirit is in keeping with his teachings on identity, form, and the eternal soul behind the mask, ChatGTP said..

That he said ‘I like it here’ impressed my artificial friend as simple, human and unpretentious. My retort: ‘Don’t we all – at the end of the day,’ seemed paradox, but also full of humour. That Ram Dass and I should have laughed about it, embraced and recognized each other carried an emotional truth, rather than an accurate chronology or names.

The year of birth also had an emotional meaning rather than referring to facts, not uncommon, when dealng with matters of the heart.

Such an insightful interpretation! I felt good all day. What do you think? Do our dreams have meaning or is it just mental diarrhoea, a way of digesting what happened to us during the day? I obviously believe our dreams lend themselves to interpretation and would like to think that it wanted to tell me that my spirit is eternal too! Why is it sometimes so hard to believe?

Happily Yours,
Susanne G. Seiler

P.S. We are only able to staff our lounge and library at Hochstrasse 70  by appointment. Please contact the editorial team if you’d like to make an appointment