Roland Griffiths
The Most Important Research You Have Never Heard Of: Grof's Psychedelic Investigations
In November 1956, a young psychiatric resident at Charles University in Prague volunteered for an experiment that would redirect the course of his life and, arguably, the trajectory of Western psychiatry. The Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland -- the same company where Albert...
Psychedelic-Assisted End-of-Life Care: Psilocybin, Mystical Experience, and the Dissolution of Death Anxiety
In 2016, two landmark studies — one from Johns Hopkins University, one from New York University — reported results that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier: a single dose of psilocybin, administered in a controlled clinical setting with psychological support, produced rapid,...
R. Gordon Wasson: The Banker Who Rediscovered Psychedelic Mushrooms and Launched a Revolution
On the night of June 29, 1955, in a small Mazatec village in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, a 57-year-old vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co.
The Eleusinian Mysteries: How Western Civilization May Have Been Founded on Psychedelic Initiation
For nearly two thousand years — from approximately 1500 BCE to 392 CE — the most important religious ceremony in the ancient Western world took place every September at a small town called Eleusis, thirteen miles northwest of Athens. The Eleusinian Mysteries, as they were called, initiated an...
The Marsh Chapel Experiment: When Science Proved That Psilocybin Produces Genuine Mystical Experience
On the morning of Friday, April 20, 1962 — Good Friday — twenty theology students from Andover Newton Theological School gathered in the basement chapel of Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Upstairs, a full congregation was assembling for the three-hour Good Friday service, with sermons, hymns,...
Spiritual Perspectives on Death
Every wisdom tradition humanity has produced has placed the question of death at its center. Not as a problem to be solved but as a mystery to be encountered — the threshold experience that defines the boundary of ordinary consciousness and, according to virtually every spiritual tradition,...
The Mycobiome and Fungal Consciousness: The Hidden Kingdom Within and the Wood Wide Web of the Body
When researchers map the gut microbiome, they almost always mean the bacteriome — the bacterial communities inhabiting the gastrointestinal tract. Bacteria dominate the conversation, the funding, and the headlines.
The Neurochemistry of Peak Experience: Mapping Maslow's Highest Moments to Molecular Biology
Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who gave us the hierarchy of needs, spent the last two decades of his career (1950s-1970s) studying something that psychology had systematically ignored: the best moments of human life. Not pathology.
5-MeO-DMT: The God Molecule and the Toad
5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic known to science. A single inhaled dose of 5-15 mg produces, within seconds, a complete dissolution of ordinary consciousness — the total annihilation of the self, the boundary between observer and...
Psilocybin Clinical Research
Psilocybin — the prodrug converted in vivo to the active compound psilocin — has emerged as the most extensively studied classic psychedelic in modern clinical trials, with an evidence base that now spans treatment-resistant depression, cancer-related existential distress, addiction (tobacco,...
The Psychedelic Renaissance in 2025: A Complete Map of the Field
The psychedelic renaissance — the resurgence of scientific and clinical interest in psychedelic compounds after decades of prohibition — has by 2025 matured from a fringe movement into a legitimate biomedical field with billion-dollar valuations, FDA breakthrough therapy designations, published...
Modern Sacred Spaces: Designing Environments That Elevate Consciousness
Every culture in human history built spaces specifically designed to alter consciousness. The pyramid, the cathedral, the temple, the kiva, the longhouse, the sweat lodge — these are not merely buildings where spiritual practices happen to take place.
Psychedelic Sexuality and Boundary Dissolution: When the Self-Other Divide Melts
There are two experiences in human life that reliably dissolve the boundary between self and other: sexual ecstasy and psychedelic states. Both produce what researchers call "boundary dissolution" — a softening or complete collapse of the felt sense of where "I" end and the world begins.
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: A Clinical Framework
After four decades of prohibition, psychedelic substances are returning to clinical medicine — not as counterculture relics but as the most significant breakthrough in psychiatric treatment since the development of SSRIs. The research is emerging from the world's most rigorous institutions —...
The Science of Mystical Experience: When the Brain Touches the Infinite
There is an experience that defies language yet has been described — haltingly, inadequately, but consistently — across every culture, every century, every religious tradition and none. A moment in which the boundaries of the self dissolve.
Cook-Greuter's Ego Development Framework: The Most Empirically Validated Map of Adult Consciousness
If Ken Wilber built the most comprehensive architecture diagram of consciousness and Spiral Dynamics mapped the cultural operating systems of human civilizations, then Susanne Cook-Greuter produced the most rigorously validated firmware diagnostic tool for individual ego development. Her...