mind states costa rica
JUNE 13-17, 2007
LAST DAY TO PURCHASE A TICKET WAS JUNE 9.
mind states costa rica | ||
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FEATURING PRESENTATIONS BY | ||
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| JOE COLEMAN is an apocalyptic visionary painter. At age seven, he drew his first pictures of bleeding saints and death by fire and stabbing; by age ten he had won an art award from Lady Bird Johnson for a drawing of garbage. His first publication, Bizarre Sex, was published in 1976 by Kitchen Sink press. His art has graced the books Apocalypse Culture; Cosmic Retribution; The Man of Sorrows; Original Sin: The Visionary Art of Joe Coleman; The Book of Joe; Muzzlers, Guzzlers and Good Yeggs; and the magazines Raw Vision, World Art, Poliester, and Juxtapoz. He has appeared in several films, including the documentary about his life, R.I.P.: Rest in Pieces by Robert Pejo; a documentary about serial killers and art aficionados called The Collectors; the film Scarlet Diva by Asia Argento (playing the part of an unscrupulous Hollywood producer); and Doppelganger (playing the part of a psychotic derelict). His painting for a movie poster of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, was dropped by the film company for being too extreme. His art has appeared in countless exhibits; a retrospective of his work was presented in 2006 at the Jack Tilton Gallery, featuring 33 paintings and a selection from The Odditorium, his freakish personal museum. Regarding the retrospective, New York Times writer John Strausbaugh commented: "If P.T. Barnum had hired Breughel or Bosch to paint sideshow banners, they might have resembled the art of Joe Coleman." The "Internal Digging” showing, which encompases all aspects of Coleman's work, takes place May 27 - August 19, 2007, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ERIK DAVIS is an award-winning journalist, independent scholar, and teacher based in San Francisco. His most recent book is The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, with photographs by Michael Rauner. He also wrote Led Zeppelin IV and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, the latter a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages. His essays on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality have appeared in over a dozen books, including AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man, Zig Zag Zen, The Disinformation Book of Lies, 010101: Art in Technological Times (SFMOMA), and Prefiguring Cyberculture. Davis has contributed articles and essays to various publications, including Bookforum, ArtForum, Salon, Blender, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice. For many years he was a contributing writer at Wired. A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught workshops and seminars at UC Berkeley, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New York Open Center, and Esalen. He occasionally plays guitar in front of microphones. Erik will be discussing the works of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, whose story A Scanner Darkly was recently made into an animated film by Richard Linklater. Erik will also discuss Linklater's movie Waking Life.
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EARTH EROWID co-created The Vaults of Erowid in 1995. This non-commercial web site collects data and publishes original research on the topic of psychoactive plants and chemicals. The site boasts nearly 35,000 content pages and over 50,000 individual visitors each day (9 million each year). Earth has written and edited hundreds of documents published on-line; his writing has also appeared in print publications such as Trip magazine, The Entheogen Review, and Erowid Extracts. Along with his partner Fire, Earth has lectured at numerous conferences and events, including trips in 2006 to Basel for the gathering celebrating Dr. Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday, the Burning Man Arts Festival, and the North American Congress of Clinical Toxicology. | |||||||||||
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| FIRE EROWID co-created The Vaults of Erowid. She has been the primary designer and chief editor of the Erowid site since its inception. Fire has innovated and developed drug information designs that have been emulated across the web. Her work is cited by newspapers, books, school education programs, college classes, and professional seminars around the world. Her well-referenced article "70 Common Drug Myths," which appeared in The Resonance Project, exemplifies the dedication to straightforward, factual information that is the hallmark of the Erowid web site. As a self-described "photo geek," she is responsible for countless images posted online at the site. Earth and Fire will be presenting in discussion with Sasha and Ann Shulgin. They will also be presenting a response to and continuation of Jon Hanna's talk "The Alchemy of Thought," described below. | |||||||||||
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JOHN GILMORE is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He was an early employee of Sun Microsystems, early open source author, and co-created Cygnus Solutions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks, the DES Cracker, and the Internet's "alt" newsgroups. He's spent thirty years doing programming, hardware and software design, management, philosophy, philanthropy, and investment. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the USENIX Association, CodeWeavers, ReQuest, and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He's trying to get people to think more about the society they are building. His advocacy on drug policy aims to reduce the immense harm caused by current attempts to control the mental states of free citizens. His advocacy on encryption policy aims to improve public understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in open societies. His efforts on intellectual property policy seek to create a healthy balance among the rights of creators, readers, middlemen, competitors, critics, and archivists. For more information, click here. John will be presenting two talks, one related to privacy issues and the other covering identity issues. | |||||||||||||
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JON HANNA is a skull farmer specializing in neurobotany and memetic engineering. He writes, edits, and lectures. He denies all rumors that he was responsible for the text of the Chick Tract parody posted here. As a "psychedelic consumer advocate," through his PRL book and writings for The Entheogen Review, Hanna highlights reputable vendors as well as exposing companies, events, and individuals that have less than scrupulous records. His words have also appeared in Entheogene Blätter, Erowid Extracts, Hanfblatt, Heads, High Times, the MAPS Bulletin, Morbid Curiosity, The Resonance Project, and elsewhere. He has spoken internationally on the topics of visionary art and entheogens, most recently at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in NYC, where he showcased a collection of hallucinatory animation. He also produces the Mind States conference series. Jon will provide introductory remarks at the start of the conference, and later give a talk titled “The Alchemy of Thought,” dealing with ways in which speculative ideas transmogrify into firmly held beliefs—with a particular focus on the entheomythic realm. | |||||||||||
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JONATHAN OTT is a prolific and highly regarded writer, translator, publisher, reviewer, and pundit on virtually every aspect of entheogen botany, chemistry, pharmacology, bioassay, culture, history, and politics. The term "entheogen" itself is most closely attributed to him; he was one of the people who helped coin it, and its propagation as a meme is due in large part to its use in his books. Ott has also produced and co-produced numerous conferences and seminars on entheogens over the past 25+ years. Ott was the translator of Albert Hofmann’s 1979 LSD—Mein Sorgenkind (first published in English in 1980 as LSD: My Problem Child), and he produced an English translation of On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko. Articles and excerpts of his books have been translated into many other languages. His writing has appeared in numerous journals, and he was co-editor (with Giorgio Samorini) of the bilingual publication Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds. He likes chocolate a lot. | |||||||||||||||
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| MARK PESCE is internationally renowned as a writer, an educator, and the man who brought virtual reality onto the world wide web. He has been exploring the frontiers of the future for over two decades. The author of five books, Pesce is widely respected as a futurist, philosopher, and thinker who possesses vision paired with a unique ability to translate abstract concepts into concrete explanations. Mainstream publications such as Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED and the New York Times have profiled him and his views on the future. A well-respected journalist, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed, Salon, and PC Magazine. His controversial article about the current evolution of the Burning Man Arts Festival, "McBurners," is a perennial favorite. For more, see Pesce's homepage, his highly informative blog, and www.playfulworld.com. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ALEXANDER “SASHA” SHULGIN is a pharmacologist and chemist who has synthesized and bioassayed hundreds of psychoactive compounds. He wrote the book Controlled Substances: A Chemical & Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, and along with his wife Ann, he co-authored the books PIHKAL and TIHKAL. His most recent tome is the reference book The Simple Plant Isoquinolines, co-authored with Wendy E. Perry. He is currently working on his next book, The Psychedelic Index, similar in format to The Merck Index. This work will catalog compounds that are psychedelic, that may be psychedelic, or that are interesting to study, and will contain the chemical structure, an outline of the synthesis, and the physical, biological, and chemical properties, and the legal status for each chemical and its analogues, homologues, and isomers. There are currently 2000 compounds in the book, which may ultimately run 1,500-2,000 pages. Sasha will be presenting a talk on "The Future of Psychedelics." | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ANN SHULGIN is a researcher and writer who—for a time, while they were still legal—worked with empathogens such as MDMA and 2C-B as a lay therapist. Her unique insight into the beneficial effects that these and similar compounds can have is invaluable. With her husband Sasha, she has co-authored the books Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved: A Chemical Love Story (PIHKAL) and the sequel, Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved: The Continuation (TIHKAL). Ann will be talking about a topic TBA. Sasha and Ann will also be presenting in discussion with Earth and Fire Erowid. | |||||||||||
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TOMMY THOMAS is a gentleman farmer living on his twenty acre herb farm in the central valley of Costa Rica. As a peace corps volunteer, he worked in Rajgir India, home of Lord Buddha. He received a degree in Architecture and a Masters in Urban Planning, after which he worked for the government of Jordan designing thirty-three communities on the East Bank of the Jordan River Valley. He then started his own real estate development company in Washington DC. After which he moved to Costa Rica, where--for the last twenty years--he has worked to develop an herb and spice company: The Ark Herb Farm. The farm has a four-acre ethnobotanical garden with a large collection of ornamental, medicinal, and psychotropic plants, including Argyreia nervosa, Artemisia absinthium, Atropa belladonna, Banisteriopsis caapi, Brugmansia aurea, Catha edulis, Cestrum laevigatum, Datura inoxia, Erythrina americana, Ipomoea violacea, Justicia pectoralis, Papaver somniferum, Peganum harmala, Psychotria viridis, Salvia divinorum, Tagetes lucida, Turbina corymbosa, and Turnera diffusa, among others. Tommy will talk about Costa Rica in general and his experiences growing various types of plants. He will include lots of show and tell, with live and processed plants and photos. Mind States attendees who have some time before or after the conference are encouraged to arrange for a tour of the spectacular grounds at his herb farm, which is only a short distance from San Jose. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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HOLOTROPIC BREATHWORK | ||||||
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Mind States Costa Rica will begin in the afternoon on June 13, with an introductory session; the final wrap-up session will be on the morning of June 18, prior to check out. There will be ample time available to explore the grounds of the eco-resort, a 2,000 acre sanctuary of virgin rainforest set at the juncture of two rivers near the town of Horquetas of Sarapiqui, in the north region of Costa Rica: swim by natural waterfalls or in the pool, relax in the hot tub, enjoy refreshing beverages at the bar, challenge one of the presenters to a paddle boat race, marvel at the botanical gardens, or arrange a zip-line canopy tour, horseback ride, white water rafting trip, or massage through the resort. Price includes admission to lectures and workshops, one spot in an incredibly spacious double-occupancy room, and all meals (vegetarian and vegan available).
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