After ingesting mescaline, Aldous Huxley wrote that he saw “a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were char...

When it comes to the belief in plant spirits, there may be a tendency to exoticise indigenous beliefs and be biased towards them over other religious beliefs one is exposed to or familiar with. This i...

Southern Europe and Ireland hit hardest by air tourism-driven housing crisis, T&E study finds

The UK experienced an unprecedented heatwave last month, along with the rest of Europe. In the UK, where I am, the heatwave broke June temperature records (peaking at 37.7C), while Germany hit an all-...

Being passionate and enthusiastic about psychedelics – or even evangelical about them – can sometimes lead to seeing their influence everywhere. When you spend a lot of time thinking about these subst...

The Immortality Key builds a sweeping psychedelic-religion narrative on evidence that its own primary scientific authority later rejected as methodologically flawed, undermining the book's credibility...

Home Sweet Home (1982), a television film directed by Mike Leigh, part of the BBC’s Play for Today series, might be Leigh’s bleakest film. In it, the last of his contributions to this series, Leigh po...

I’m a big fan of horror, as well as the subgenre of ‘psychedelic horror’, in which the psychedelic experience or ‘psychedelic’ aesthetic’ is used to unsettle and terrify viewers. I’m also interested i...

In a blog post from a couple of years ago, I described my first experience with high ventilation breathwork – a form known as Psychedelic Breath, based on the principles of Holotropic Breathwork, deve...

Explore psychedelic culture, consciousness, and community. Science-backed articles, personal experiences, and guides for safe exploration.

Yoga nidra (or yogic sleep) is a technique for inducing a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. I often use it when I’m sleep-deprived, either as a way to (hopefully) have a nap, or at l...

I recently rewatched Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve), adapted from Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life, having first watched it five years ago. My experience, based on what I can remember, was di...

The embellishment of memories is a widespread phenomenon. Sometimes, the distortion of memory goes beyond embellishment and becomes fabrication: false memories are common, and they can be easily induc...

Anemoia, a coinage from the writer John Koenig – author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – refers to a feeling of nostalgia for a time one didn’t live through. I previously wrote about why this fe...

Emo music is full of references to car crashes. When you’ve listened to enough of this type of music or watched enough music videos for emo songs, it can become apparent how recurrent this theme is in...

Writing is sometimes described as both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because of the enjoyment and all the benefits that come with a writing practice, and a curse because, as many writers know, it...

The word ‘meekness’ might seem old-fashioned – and not a positive trait. But understanding its original meaning can identify an important virtue.

Jungian psychology is highly popular in the New Age movement, and this is for several reasons, some perhaps quite obvious, and others less so. I would like to detail these connections between New Age ...

A client recently gave me some feedback on an article I wrote, and they picked up on my use of en dashes (in this piece, mostly to offset parenthetical information) and thought it best to avoid them, ...

While one of the main recognised benefits of psychedelics is a lessening or elimination of the fear of death (particularly in those with a terminal illness), this effect is not universal. Indeed, a 20...

I recently watched Mike Leigh’s 1971 film Bleak Moments – his directorial debut. And while watching it, I again felt something about Leigh’s characters (or at least some of them), which I’ve felt watc...

<p><em>Déjà vu, the perceived memory of an event happening in the present moment, is one of the most peculiar human experiences there is. It can make us feel as if we have lived our lives before, exac...

Psychedelic experiences can be weird – sometimes extremely weird. Yet, the notion of weirdness is often not the primary focus in the psychedelic renaissance or psychedelic culture. Instead, the focus ...

From around 2006 to 2008, in my ‘scene kid’ phase, I was listening to a lot of deathcore – a genre combining death metal with metalcore – as a lot of scene kids were. We wanted to hear breakdowns, gut...

Apeirophobia – the fear of eternal life – is not a common phobia (it is considered extremely rare, although it’s true prevalence is unknown, as there is very little research on it), nor is it a common...

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is well known for his defence of solitude; as he said, “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love ...

If Alfred Hitchcock is the ‘master of suspense’, then I think we can call filmmaker Brian Yuzna the ‘master of disgust’ (or at least, one of the masters in this subtype of horror). Born in 1949, the A...

Parallels are often made between animism (the belief that spirits are everywhere) and panpsychism (the belief that consciousness/mind is everywhere). Indeed, under an animistic belief system, it is po...

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My first book, Altered Perspectives: Critical Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness, is available from major retailers worldwide. You can order it here. Summary This book consists of essays that are pri...

One of the main motivations for creating designer psychedelics – or analogues of existing compounds – is to evade bans. LSD is illegal, so an analogue can be created (typically a purported prodrug of ...

In an earlier post on remembering dreams, I described recalling some adventurous and awe-inspiring dreams I had in the past, which got me thinking about how I often feel that these sorts of dreams are...

I’ve found it curious that many of the pioneers of Western Buddhism – those who brought Buddhism to the West and helped popularise it – are Jewish. Frank Descher details this phenomenon in his 2017 es...

Time distortion is one of the classic effects of psychedelics (although I rarely see this mentioned as an expected effect of psychedelics on educational, retreat, and therapy sites). I think that time...

Just as psychedelics can help straight people address issues of shame and depression, for reasons unrelated to sexuality, they can also be helpful for gay people in processing similar issues, but spec...

(and just...suffering in general)

Many men quietly carry anxiety and shame around sex and ideas of masculinity. It's time to update the conversation.

Darkness retreats involve spending a period of time in complete isolation and darkness. People do this for different reasons – to achieve an introspective state, a digital detox, a period of rest, or ...

This essay presents an overview and analysis of Sam Woolfe's Altered Perspectives: Critical Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness. My critical remarks focus on the naturalistic "explaining away" of stra...

Since I started using Letterboxd (four years ago), an unconscious tendency I developed when watching films is that, throughout the film, I’ll think about what Letterboxd rating I’m going to give it. I...