Dieter Hagenbach, publisher Deborah Parrish Snyder, Lucius Werthmüller, and editor Linda Sperling

Synergetic Press just returned from the 2^nd International Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland, California hosted by the MAPS Organization (Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). According to the conference website, “over 100 of the world’s leading researchers from 13 countries presented recent findings on the benefits and risks of LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, ibogaine, 2C-B, ketamine, marijuana, and more, over three days of conference presentations, and two days of pre- and post-conference workshops.”

Since MAPS had already attracted the global psychedelic intelligentsia to northern California, and furthermore chose to kick-off the event on ‘Bicycle Day,’ the 70^th anniversary of Albert Hofmann’s legendary first trip, the occasion provided the perfect venue for Synergetic Press to showcase our bold new authoritative biography, MYSTIC CHEMIST: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD. Authors Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller, close personal friends of Albert Hofmann, flew in from Basel, Switzerland to meet us in Oakland and participate in the conference through both on and offsite talks, as well as several book signings.

Each appearance was a resounding success! Dieter and Lucius held the first lecture in the main ballroom, describing Albert Hofmann’s life to a live audience with the same passion and precision with which they write. Their rich slide show presentation revealed many of the rare and illustrative images that enliven nearly every page of their thorough and comprehensive book.

Synergetic had a special advance order of both the soft and hardcover editions shipped directly to the conference center for sale through MAPS. The books flew off the tables as readers lined up to meet the authors, exchanging a brief word of gratitude and personalizing the new purchases with a signature or note.

The authors also had  a book-signing and talk at the historic City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, immortalized by the literary mavericks and cultural prophets of the ‘Beat’ scene so long ago. City Lights events manager Peter Maravelis, the Synergetic Press team, authors Dieter and Lucius, as well as the attending audience flowing down the edge of the stairs, brimmed with excitement and honor to participate in this historic intersection of research, publishing and intellectual fellowship.

Back at the MAPS conference, Synergetic Press discovered a bounty of promising new allies through the richly populated halls and lounges of the hotel. By deepening decades-old bonds and discovering wholly new and unpredictable relationships with luminaries in a number of fields, we are emboldened to pursue the next stage of our company’s growth. Whispers of new projects are best kept as such, but suffice to say that following the launch of Mystic Chemist and the upcoming American edition of Tony Juniper’s, What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? (Why Money Really Does Grow on Trees), which is already a best-seller in England, we at Synergetic Press have our hands full with wonderful new content to develop and bring to our readers!

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Podcast interview by Pat Thurston with Lucius Werthmüller  - April 20, 8pm (54:00)

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Foreword by Stanislav Grof

Launched on APRIL 19^th, 2013

• Celebrating the 70^th anniversary of LSD’s discovery

• A history of science, consciousness research and psychedelic studies

Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD – Only a few discoveries of the 20^th century have had such a crucial and meaningful influence on science, society and culture as LSD; this mysterious and extremely potent substance which causes profound changes of consciousness in doses of just a few hundred micrograms. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first experienced its remarkable effects during a self-experiment with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide in 1943 at Sandoz Laboratory in Basel. It changed his life deeply, as it also has the lives of millions of people all around the world. His bicycle ride during this first LSD trip became legendary.

Authors Hagenbach and Werthmüller, close friends of Hofmann, take us on a journey through the 20^th century from his mystical childhood experiences with nature; to his chemistry studies with Nobel Prize winner Paul Karrer in Zurich through his discoveries of both LSD and psilocybin at Sandoz; to his adventurous expeditions; to his many years of retirement devoted to philosophy of nature and a rich social life. The authors reveal the eventful history of LSD, which became the subject of numerous clinical studies opening the way for innovative forms of therapy. It fueled the youth movement of the sixties, influenced developments in computer technology and science and helped spawn a new science of consciousness. Albert Hofmann was voted “greatest living genius” in 2007 by the British newspaper, The Telegraph. He lived an active life to the age of 102.

“Future generations will see Albert Hofmann as one the most important figures of the twentieth century; a Promethean visionary who helped chart a new trajectory for the evolution of the human species.”

-Stanislav Grof, Psychiatrist

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”

-Steve Jobs

“Albert gave us LSD and now Dieter and Lucius give us Albert in their profoundly important and timely biography, Mystic Chemist, The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD. Dieter and Lucius tell an inspiring story of how Albert integrated psychedelic mystical experiences into his life, family and culture, suggesting that perhaps we can do so as well and avoid another backlash. As psychedelic research is dramatically expanding, Albert’s life journey deserves to become more widely known. There is much to learn from this book and from Albert’s example.”

-Rick Doblin, MAPS Founder and Executive Director

“Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, the most potent mind-expanding substance ever found, was an event of multiple synchronicities – it occurred in 1943 in Switzerland, a neutral country, within months of the building of the atomic bomb – as if it was to be a kind of psychospiritual healing antidote to the mass death weapons. It occurred in a country with a centuries-long tradition of alchemy, the psychospiritual counterpoint to reductionist material science – and involved a previously unknown substance that could induce integrative expansions of awareness with profound implications for healing, for creative problem-solving, and for cosmological understanding. Albert Hofmann had the scientific and the spiritual insight to recognize the enormous significance of his discovery and spent the rest of his long life exploring it with an ever-widening international circle of fellow scientists, artists and visionary explorers. The authors of this biography have done a marvelous job of pulling together documentation and commentary, not only about Hofmann and LSD but also the socio-cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s, during which LSD and all mind-expanding drugs played an enormous role – and were made illegal. The story of LSD and its potential role in society is however far from over, as Hofmann himself also thought. Please read this book and stay tuned… “

-Ralph Metzner, PhD

“The best compendium of the birth and transformative effect of one of the greatest discoveries ever made.”

-Alex Grey, Visionary Artist

“Mystic Chemist is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest innovators of the 20th century. In addition to its meticulous coverage of Albert Hofmann’s 100 years on this planet, the authors have given their readers a marvelous panoply of LSD’s impact on art, biochemistry, psychotherapy, and spirituality, Indeed, it is a book of wonders.”

-Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Saybrook University

“What a gift to humanity, history, and seekers of truth! Tears welled up spontaneously as I read so simply and factually the horrors of the perverted destruction of such marvelous scenes and such harassment and torture of so many wonderful, idealistic people. Having participated in some of those events the authors evoked so tenderly, I found their account brilliantly restrained, which makes those glories and horrors even more eloquent to the discerning.

Deepest congratulations on transmitting an extraordinarily complete account of one of the greatest men I ever knew and whose presence was a direct manifestation of brilliant function, profound being, and illuminated understanding.”

-John Allen, FLS, Chairman, Global Ecotechnics Corporation Inventor, Biosphere 2

“This book is more than a superb biography of Albert Hofmann, it’s the story of LSD and pretty much covers everything of importance in the scientific, social, spiritual and artistic realms that resulted from his epochal discovery.”

-Michael Horowitz, psychoactive drug historian, editor of works by Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary

Report from the California book launch at MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference and City Lights

Order Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD

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• 

  Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2

  ISBN: 9780907791379

  By  John Allen

  $39.95 Add to cart
• 

  Geochemistry & The Biosphere: Essays by Vladimir Vernadsky

  ISBN: 9780907791362

  By Vladimir Vernadsky

  $49.95 Add to cart
• 

  Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2

  ISBN: 188248072

  By Abigail Alling, Mark Nelson

  $16.95 Add to cart

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Serious Wonder Radio Interview with John Allen

Martian Biospheres. What will these micro environments be like? Would you choose to live in on Mars? What will our first Martian bound colonists take with them? What will the first Martian babies be like? How will their consciousness differ from that of Earth children? Serious Wonder Radio Host Gray Scott talks with John Allen the creator of Biosphere 2 about his book Me and the Biospheres.

Listen to the interview:

Serious Wonder Interview with John Allen

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Ornette: Made In America captures Ornette’s evolution over three decades. Returning home to Fort Worth, Texas in 1983 as a famed performer and composer, documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music video-style segments ever made, chronicle his boyhood in segregated Texas and his subsequent emergence as an American cultural pioneer and world-class icon. Among those who contribute to the film include William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Buckminster Fuller, Don Cherry, Yoko Ono, Charlie Haden, Robert Palmer, Jayne Cortez and John Rockwell.

The film was recently featured in the New York Times:

“Ornette: Made in America,” which was released theatrically in 1985 and opens again, in a print restored by Milestone Films, at the IFC Center in Manhattan on Friday, is full of such tantalizing stuff: formal juxtapositions, half-sketched implications, parallel experiments of image and sound. By virtue of the footage alone, it’s a valuable time capsule for anyone drawn to Mr. Coleman’s work, particularly in the two decades following the cusp of the 1960s, when his dauntless, affirming vision of free improvisation famously created a crisis of faith in jazz.

-By NATE CHINEN from the New York Times

Read the full NYT ReviewWatch a clip from the film

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“Visions of Biospheres”

Please join us at Camp Above the Limit (9:15 and B)

John Allen is a pioneer in biosphere science, author, poet, playwright and architect of ideas. His most famous work was the invention, design, construction and operation of Biosphere 2 project, world’s largest laboratory for global ecology ever built. He has created over the last forty years a number of other ecological demonstration projects around the world including designing and building a sailing ship, the Heraclitus, which has sailed over 250,000 miles around the world engaging in ethnobotanical investigations, coral reef research, oceanic exploration, cultural interchange and adventure. His latest writing is on the ethnosphere and humanity’s futures.

More info at: http://www.synergeticpress.com/authors/john-allen/

Tango Parrish Snyder, publisher of Synergetic Press since 1984, brings out cutting edge books in biospherics, ethnobotany, psychedelics, vanguard fiction and poetry. (www.synergeticpress.com) She is also Exec. VP of Global Ecotechnics Corporation (www.globalecotechnics.com), an international project development and management company. She cofounded and directed the Biosphere Press publishing division for the Biosphere 2 project, set-up its educational programs department, and produced over twenty books, video and educational curriculum titles in the start-up years (1990 -1994). She is also a Director of the Institute of Ecotechnics (www.ecotechnics.edu), non-profit ecological think-tank convening international conferences on global trends and closed ecological systems.

The post Burning Man: Visions of Biospheres Talk appeared first on Synergetic Press.

Metzner joins the show to talk about the book he co authored with Ram Dass and Gary Bravo, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties.

Listen to the interview here:

• 

  Birth of a Psychedelic Culture

  ISBN: 9780907791386

  By Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner

  $29.95 Add to cart

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The Biologist, the bi-monthly magazine produced by the Society of Biology reviewed John Allen’s Me and the Biospheres.

See more from The Biologist on the Society of Biology web site.

© 2012 www.societyofbiology.org

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