Psychedelic Sangha welcomes,
Phil Wolfson, MD
to its Seminar Series with host Tomas Sander

Talk: "Meditation, Psychedelics, Activism and the Spiritual Path"
December 19, 2023, 7-9 pm ET
online

Summary: These are truly difficult and disintegrating times. My friend and colleague Robert Thurman did a recent calculation of 71 wars going on simultaneously. The too many traumatizing assaults on presence, consciousness, and being in the world are strenuous and for many of us overwhelming. Perhaps we have entered the Kaliyuga. Struggling for clarity, building Sangha, manifesting an activist stance in our particular ways are all important for sanity and resistance to nihilism and despair. Not so easy. We need the tools to enable sharing, connection, love, and peace. Psychedelics, ketamine as one of them, are a set of consciousness tools of consequence. They manifest in both enlargement of our possibilities for mindfulness and a release from our ordinary minds.

With the psychedelic letting go, generally, there comes a relaxation from the grip of our obsessive and attitudinal attachments. What can arise are clarity, presence, renaissance, liberation, the reflex of starting anew, resumption of identity with the opportunity for difference, a sense of flexibility, humility, perhaps some disorientation—Who am I really? What do I want? Where am I? The Tibetans say that in the state of letting go ‘Compassion arises’—for all beings, including for me. Indeed, there is a new sense of the Balance Point, the fulcrum for my being in my life, this life, this world.

All conception is suspect as limitingly derivative from direct experience, however comforting that construction may be, as it is a step away front that which is experienced. This is the radical reconstruction of being that arises from feeling and the letting go of form--and this is possible at any moment. ‘I am clear. I am alive. This Is my precious life and I want to live it well and in connection to all’. Howsoever it comes alive in us, by whatever mechanism, or circumstance that engages realization and clarity, we enter the stream. And then there is staying in the stream, or not, and the question of our determination to return to it when we hit the rocks, or we are choked by the sand of the desert.

Psychedelic medicines give rise to this renewal of soul and spirit, each with their own Signature to achieving this in the myriad ways the mind moves, and the medicine moves with us.

Speaker bio: Phil Wolfson MD is the creator of a new psychotherapy modality based on use of the medicine ketamine—Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). Phil is the CEO of the non-profit Ketamine Research Foundation and directs the training of KAP practitioners through The Ketamine Training Center—now numbering over 900 practitioners across the US and Internationally. KRF’s Ketamine Psychotherapy Associates membership organization promotes the development of KAP practices and KAP wisdom on an ongoing basis. He is the author of The Ketamine Papers and Noe – A Father/Son Song of Love, Life, Illness and Death. He has been the Principal Investigator of the MAPS.org Phase 2 study of MDMA treatment for individuals with life-threatening illnesses. Dr. Wolfson’s work is the result of an intense, now many decades long clinical psychiatry/psychotherapy practice. He is a Founder of Progressive Therapeutics Inc, an exciting new commercial psychedelic and psychoactive drug development corporation that is allied with his non-profit. The second volume of The Ketamine Papers is being prepared for publication in 2024. He was featured in a lead article in the New Yorker and in Vanity Fair. KRF’s research and its Indra’s Net Coalition for the healing of trauma are leading the field.

Phil Wolfson is a sixties activist, psychiatrist/psychotherapist, writer, practicing Buddhist and psychonaut who has lived in the Bay Area for 46 years. In the 1980s, he participated in clinical research with MDMA (Ecstasy). He has created 9 patents for unique herbal medicines and ketamine. Phil was a founding member of the Heffter Research Institute. He is a journalist and author of numerous articles on politics, transformation, psychedelics, consciousness and spirit.

He is a graduate of Brandeis University and NYU School of Medicine.

Host bio: Tomas Sander is a Buddhist practitioner and author based in New York. He has been practicing mostly in the Tibetan tradition. His teachers include Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche and Greg Goode. He co-authored the book "Emptiness and Joyful Freedom" which explores Buddhist insights into the nature of reality using tools from Western philosophy.
Tomas is an early member of Psychedelic Sangha. He has a strong curiosity for the boundless possibilities at the nexus of psychedelic medicines, personal healing and spiritual awakening.
Tomas has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and works on data privacy in the tech industry.