Come back through the dance of space and time
through all the things you’ve avoided
through all the things it seems 
you’re the only one willing to see
redirect your rankled conscience 
find your bed of feathers 
slip into yourself
return home to the place you never left
your beautiful body
be with what you know 
and discover it all anew 
let the past rewrite itself 
pray with me 
on the forest floor 
follow the primordial scent
and become instinctive again
woven by the gravity of root deep longing  
and levity of impulse
we seek and grow
finding these bodies 
we are linked 
soul pilgrim 
to all we experience 
no matter the flavor
show up 
cry the sorrow
scream in agony 
burn with anger 
sing your heart out
fill with joy 
dance any way you can
let’s not let any moment 
escape our tasting

Sarita Jessica Benn-towle

When I was 10 years old, in 1967, sitting by a stream near my home we called ‘The Glen,’ I had a sudden, unbidden, very brief mystical experience of becoming one with nature.

I ran home to tell my mother. “Mom,” I said excitedly, “I turned into the Glen.” She looked at me worried. “Bobby, did you take something?” Take something? “No mom, I was at the Glen. When I breathed, the wind blew.” She put down the groceries, held me firmly by the shoulders and smelled my mouth. “Robert, if I find out you’ve been smoking marijuana, you’ll be in big trouble.” I thought, marijuana will do that? Ever since then I’ve been fascinated by altered states of consciousness.

After learning a bit about meditation, in 1978 I became especially interested in the effects of psychedelic drugs, or what are now called entheogens when used to elicit a spiritual or religious experience…

I have pursued that interest as a student, conference organizer, researcher, outlaw, guide, college and graduate school instructor, editor, writer, publisher, and now a philosopher who loves the stories of what these marvelous substances have done and can do. I’ve been lucky to know, learn, and work with many of the founders of the modern psychedelic movements including R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Frank Barron, Timothy Leary, Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith, Alexander Shulgin, Ralph Metzner, Claudio Naranjo, and many others whose work I’ve published in three anthologies.

The first, Entheogens and the Future of Religion (1997) Huston Smith said was “the best single inquiry into the religious significance of chemically occasioned mystical experiences that has yet appeared."

As an undergraduate I studied psychology, sociology, political science, religion, at Boston University, Dartmouth College, Bates College, Columbia University, finally receiving a BA (honors in Psychology) from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1981. After an internship with Stanislav Grof at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Ca, I went to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago for a Masters of Arts in Religious Studies, received in 1985. Most of the time since then I’ve been underground and off the grid. James Fadiman calls me a “great, not well known hero of the psychedelic movement.” This is my first website designed to reach a larger audience. A subject long underground, is now blossoming.

Second book, a Festschrift for Timothy Leary, Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, Reminiscences, was published by Park Street Press in 1998.

Also in 1998 I edited and published the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of The Road To Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl Ruck, and Blaise Staples. A Thirtieth Anniversary updated edition I edited was published by North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California in 2008.

This was my most ambitious project, one that has not gained much traction until the recent publication The Immortality Key: The Secret History of No Religion by Classics scholar, Brian Muraresku. As I wrote in the Publisher’s Note to the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Road to Eleusis, the role psychedelic plants and drugs in traditional shamanic societies and Indian religion has been well known for many decades while the significance of these substances to the Western religion and philosophical traditions has been ignored. The Road To Eleusis and now, The Immortality Key that it inspired, can help change all that, with important consequences for drug policy, freedom of religion, and the evolution of human consciousness. We will be discussing all these ideas in the Currents section of this site.