The Worm’s Waking

This is how a human being can change.
There is a worm
addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that does not need to devour.

Rumi

by Coleman Barks

Robert Forte

When 10 years old in 1967, sitting by a stream called the Glen, I had a sudden, unbidden, very brief mystical experience of becoming one with nature.

After learning a bit about meditation, in 1978 I became interested in the history of religion. How did ancient people come up with these simple and profound techniques and insights into the nature of consciousness and reality? When I learned that psychedelic mushrooms played a significant role I began a life long inquiry into 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, a phenomenologist, conference organizer, researcher, outlaw, guide, college and graduate school instructor, editor, writer, publisher and now as a philosopher and story teller.

As an undergraduate I studied psychology, sociology, political science and religion, at Boston University, Dartmouth College, Bates College, Columbia University, finally receiving a BA (honors in Psychology) at the University of California 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 (1985). Most of the time since then I’ve worked outside of institutional auspices, except for brief appointments to the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I am an adjunct assistant professor. James Fadiman calls me a “great, not well known hero of the psychedelic movement.” This is my first website. A subject long underground, is now blossoming.

I’ve been lucky to know, learn, and work closely with the founders of the modern psychedelic movements and many great scholars of the history and psychology of religion, 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. I’ve published three anthologies:

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

Second book is a Festschrift (festival of writing) for and about Timothy Leary. Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, Reminiscences, was published by Park Street Press in 1998.

Also in 1998 I started Hermes Press International, 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 was published by North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California in 2008.

The Road to Eleusis 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 of psychedelic plants and drugs in traditional shamanic societies has been well known for many decades, while the significance of these substances to the Western religious 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.

For most of my career I have been interested in the esoteric and the healing potentials of these plants and drugs. Lately I’ve been more curious about the sociological and political aspects of the different psychedelic movements of our time. My research has brought me to realize another layer to the modern psychedelic scene, revealing a story that is somewhat at odds with the prevailing mainstream narrative that is now broadcast enthusiastically in contemporary media around the world.

The history of religion contains the entire spectrum of human experience, including the most beneficent concepts and experience of enlightenment, God, universal intelligence, and so on. It also includes the most malefic realms of humanity: occult mind control, subjugation of populations, exploitation of our good nature, rationales for genocide, war, human sacrifice, and other perversions. The history of psychedelics is no different.

Used since the beginning of recorded history as sacraments to experience the farthest reaches of human nature, and to heal, psychedelic plants also figure in mind control. In modern times it is important to understand that psychedelics were originally introduced as part of a social engineering scheme, in America, a CIA operation known as MKULTRA. This attempt at ultra mind control backfired a little and sparked a momentary humanistic, anti war, ecological awakening.

Psychedelics are again becoming popular. While their therapeutic and religious significance is being researched again, absent from this new movement are social justice and anti war memes; no surprise when we consider the leading figures of the current renaissance. We are being turned into a Brave New World just as Aldous Huxley warned in 1938. He repeated his warning explicitly in Brave New World Revisited, a lesser known essay, published in 1958 where he clearly states that psychedelic drugs like LSD are the dictator’s newest form of soma, that is, the mythical drug of his novel, used to thwart dissidence, to stifle social, economic, and political justice.

This website is for sharing and discussing all these ideas with colleagues and students around the world. To participate in these discussions I’m inviting you all for a nominal fee of $25 per year to ensure an engaged readership and high level of conversation. If you can’t afford the fee and would like to join us anyway, just contact me. I’m seeing this space as constantly evolving ‘living book’ about the altered states of America. I welcome your attention and your ideas to help it grow. Subscribe here.