Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Saybrook University, is a Fellow in five APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, in Brooklyn NY. He is co-author of Dream Telepathy, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, The Mythic Path, and Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, and co-editor of Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion, Healing Tales, Healing Stories, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, Advances in Parapsychological Research and many other books. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual content in dreams.
Here he describes his encounters, during the early days of the psychedelic movement, with such notable figures as Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, Salvador Roquet, Maria Sabina, Jean Houston, Robert Masters, and the Grateful Dead. He maintains that psychedelic experiences have been uniformly positive for him – and that he always approaches them in terms of what can be learned. He discusses parapsychology research on psychedelic drugs. He suggests that marijuana, a mild psychedelic, has potential as a tool in psychotherapy. He favors decriminalization. However, more research is needed.
New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.
(Recorded on May 12, 2016)