Conference participant David Lukoff offers reflections on the value of enduring resources generated by this conference & an upcoming workshop

I just finished presenting on the panel: Histories and Legacies II: Interviews with Elders. Mixed blessing to be reminded of being an elderly person, but also feels good to have my decades of work on the intersection of psychedelics, spirituality and psychosis recognized this way. I think back to my own LSD-triggered psychotic episode that was also my spiritual awakening. For 2 months, following my first LSD experience, I believed myself to be the founder of a new global religion who was writing a new “Holy Book” that would unite the world. After my feet were back on the ground, back in 1971 it took me many years of searching for ways to understand what I had experienced, while also being quite embarrassed about its grandiosity. (I tell this story in at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ-_oUvV2w0). Jung and Campbell were incredibly helpful resources, but the collected wisdom recorded in the various panels and presentations in this conference would have gone a long way to help me to integrate these experiences back then, and hopefully their ready accessibility built into the conference design, will make it easier for people having such psychedelic experiences today to understand and integrate their experience. I expect these resources will serve to reduce misdiagnoses and iatrogenic treatment with medications and forced hospitalization of people having distressing or non-ordinary psychedelic experiences.​
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It is in the spirit of getting more useful information to people using psychedelic substances that we have organized a workshop 'Psychedelic Substances Then and Now: Medicinal and Spiritual Perspectives' which will be led by Torsten Passie, MD, MA, one of the leading researchers on psychopharmacological & clinical uses of psychedelic drugs, and me, as someone who has researched the intersection of psychedelics, spirituality and psychosis as well as the uses of spirituality in therapy.
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​The workshop will take place July 2-4 in Germany at Tempelhof, an ecovillage in Kreßberg in northern Baden-Württemberg located in the midst of a beautiful, rural, hilly landscape. To reserve a place for the workshop, book your reservation for a room or camping site through Tempelhof Seminarhaus. For more information on the workshop and to register, go to: https://spiritualcompetencyacademy.com/361-2/.