The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner

Author of over 100 scientific papers and scholarly essays, he is the editor of and contributor to two collections of essays on the pharmacology, anthropology and phenomenology of ayahuasca ( The Ayahuasca Experience, 2006) and of psilocybe mushrooms ( Sacred Mushroom of Visions, 2004). His conversational memoir of the Harvard projects in the early 1960s, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture with Ram Dass and Gary Bravo, was published in 2010. He is a psychotherapist in private practice in the SF Bay Area and Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he taught for 30 years. While at Harvard he collaborated with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in classic studies of psychedelics in the 1960s, co-authored The Psychedelic Experience and was editor of The Psychedelic Review. in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University and held a post-doctoral NIMH fellowship in pharmacology at the Harvard Medical School. He attended The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he obtained a BA in philosophy and psychology. Subsequently, he obtained his Ph.D. is a recognized pioneer in psychological, philosophical and cross-cultural studies of consciousness and its transformations. At this time, it seems appropriate for Europeans and Euro-Americans likewise to probe their own ancestral mythology for insight and self-understanding.'įocusing on the mythology and worldview of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, Metzner offers a meaningful exploration of Western ancestry.Ralph Metzner, Ph.D. They seek to define their own ethnic or national identities by referring to ancestral traditions and mythic patterns of knowledge. Many individuals, tribes, and nations are struggling to free themselves from the residues of the ideological oppression practiced by what they see as Eurocentric culture.

This domination has involved not only economic and political systems but also values, basic attitudes, religious beliefs, language, scientific understanding, and technological applications. 'This book explores some of the mythic roots of the Western worldview, the worldview of the culture that, for better and worse, has come to dominate most of the rest of the world's peoples.

In his introduction to The Well of Remembrance, author Ralph Metzner provides a telling explanation of the theme of his work:

The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner