PABLO AMARINGO was born in 1943 in Puerto Libertad, in the Peruvian Amazon region. He was ten years old when he first took ayahuasca--a visionary brew used in shamanism, made from the plants Banisteriopsis caapi (yagé) and Psychotria viridis (chacruna). A severe heart illness--and the magical treatment of this via ayahuasca--led Amaringo toward the life of a shaman, and he eventually became a powerful curandero--learning the icaros, or healing songs that the ayahuasca brew taught him. However, in 1977, Amaringo abandoned his vocation as a shaman, and he is now a painter and painting teacher at his Usko-Ayar school, where there is no charge for the students to learn how to paint. Amaringo has painted and described numerous ayahuasca visions, some of which have appeared in his book Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. He is currently working on paintings of angels for a forthcoming book, as well as paintings that document the flora and fauna of Peru. See www.pabloamaringo.com to view some recent paintings.

ANTON BARBEAU is a singer/songwriter whose music has been compared to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope, Brian Eno, and David Bowie. With his esoteric and highly-personalized brand of psychedelic power-pop, his "mind-bending" stage show that borders on rock-shamanism, and his auto-neurotic humor, he is quietly yet quickly building a global fan-base. His new record, King of Missouri, recorded in England with psychedelic legends the Bevis Frond as backing band, is due in January 2003 in Europe on the Frond's Woronzow label. King of Missouri is Barbeau's seventh record and will be his fifth indie-label release since 1999. Barbeau has worked extensively with Loud Family/Game Theory guru Scott Miller, each appearing on the other's records. Barbeau can also count Andy Partridge of XTC, Stew/The Negro Problem and several Soft Boys among his fans. And yes, Adrienne is his cousin. In his hometown of Sacramento, Barbeau has won a number of SAMMIE Awards for Album of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, and most recently the somewhat puzzling Most Popular Folk Singer Award. In 2001, a 23-hour "Anton-a-thon" was held in his honor with over 20 performers covering Barbeau's songs, and the sleep-deprived star performing sets with members of his various backing bands. Upcoming projects include a split CD with Kevin Seconds, Kepi (from the Groovie Ghoulies) and Jonah Matranga (onelinedrawing), due out on the Poprockit label. Barbeau is currently in the studio with Cake's Gabe Nelson working on a new psychedelipop album entitled In the Village of the Apple Sun. See www.antonbarbeau.com for more information, and click here to download some tunes.

DEIRDRE BARRETT teaches psychology at Harvard Medical School. Her latest book, The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving—And How You Can, Too, describes Nobel Prize-winning experiments and literature coming from dreams. Her earlier books, The Pregnant Man and Other Stories from a Hypnotherapist’s Couch and Trauma and Dreams, present lessons learned from exotic disorders such as multiple personality, false pregnancy, and post-traumatic nightmares. Dr. Barrett’s work with post-traumatic nightmares in Kuwait following the Gulf War has just been published as a chapter in The Psychological Effects of War on Civilians, and she is also the author of numerous professional articles and chapters on dreams, imagery, and hypnosis. She has served in the past as president for the Association for the Study of Dreams, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Dreaming. Her lectures have been presented in locales as diverse as Kuwait, Israel, Holland, and the Smithsonian, and she is a frequent media guest for shows such as NBC Today, NPR News, Voice of America, and the Discovery Channel.

SUSAN BLACKMORE is a former university psychology lecturer and now a free-lance writer and broadcaster living in Bristol, England. After getting a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) she decided to devote herself to parapsychology and obtained one of the first Ph.D.s in parapsychology in Britain, but after twenty-five years of increasing skepticism finally gave up studying the paranormal. Her research interests now include memetics, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and the effects of meditation. She has been practising Zen for many years. Sue writes for several magazines and newspapers, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, forty book contributions and many book reviews. Her books include Beyond the Body (1982), Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (an autobiography, 1996), Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997) and most recently the best-selling The Meme Machine (1999) which has been translated into ten other languages. She is currently writing a textbook on consciousness due out in June 2003. See www.susanblackmore.co.uk.

RICHARD GLEN BOIRE is the Executive Director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. Boire holds a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert on constitutional and criminal law, specializing in the jurisprudence of extraordinary states of consciousness, dissident thinking, and shamanic inebriants. As well, Boire is the author of several books exploring the law of visionary plants and drugs, and has written numerous articles on the topic, which have appeared in publications such as the California Lawyer, Daily Journal, Eleusis, The Entheogen Review, The Humanist, Independent Review, JAMA, The Journal of Cognitive Liberties, Left Curve, and The Resonance Project. From 1993­1999, Boire was the editor of The Entheogen Law Reporter, a quarterly journal on law, policy, commentary, and control theory of visionary plants and drugs.

BRUCE DAMER was raised in British Columbia, Canada, but he eventually relocated to Silicon Valley. He now lives at the Ancient Oaks Farm homestead in the Santa Cruz mountains with his love, Ms. Galen Brandt. Besides collecting vintage computers and raising pigs, the duo explore the frontiers of virtual worlds, immersive VR, and virtual community cyberspace. In the early 1980s, Damer wrote some of the first graphical UI software for PCs, leading a team at Elixir Technologies and Xerox to build a rendition of the Xerox Star interface now used worldwide. Damer moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1991 to work on establishing one of the first software laboratories behind the former Iron Curtain. There he also helped initiate a network of high-tech companies and sponsored one of the first post-cold war salons for the arts. Relocating to California in 1994, Damer—along with anthropologist Jim Funaro—established the Contact Consortium, with the goal of catalyzing a new type of cyberspace: virtual worlds with living humans represented inside them as “avatars.” The Consortium hosts conferences and sponsors the Biota.org project, which ponders the meaning of (artificial) life in digital networks. Damer wrote the book Avatars: Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet, and his organization’s work has been featured widely in world media and scientific publications. Damer currently serves as CEO of The Digital Space Commons, an innovative non-shareholder licensee/member “chaordic” style corporation engaged in projects such as modeling future missions to Mars for NASA and working with Adobe on its Atmosphere 3D world platform. See www.damer.com for more information.

ERIK DAVIS is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mystery in the Age of Information. As a freelance journalist, his articles and interviews have appeared in WIRED, The Village Voice, Gnosis, and other publications. He currently pens "The Posthuman Condition" column for Feed magazine, and he is a contributing editor to Trip magazine. He has lectured internationally on the topics of technoculture, visionary drugs, and the fringes of religion. See www.techgnosis.com.

JIM DeKORNE is a writer, gardener, and explorer of the "imaginal realm." Experiencing the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s firsthand while residing in San Francisco, DeKorne was struck by the immense value that psychedelics held when used as a catalyst for personal and social change. His book, Psychedelic Shamanism: The Cultivation, Preparation and Use of Psychotropic Plants, offers a theoretical foundation for voyagers of inner-space. As the founding editor of the underground classic journal, The Entheogen Review, DeKorne has presented cutting-edge information on the plants and preparations used by today's psychonauts.

ANDREW EDMOND, who has BA degrees in Botany and Computer Sciences, was the creator of the Lycaeum. During the late 1990s, the Lycaeum was one of the earliest and largest on-line databases for information about entheogens. When he spoke at the first Mind States conference in 1997, Edmond was a leading figure during a critical period in counter-culture history, when cyber-psychgonauts in their 20s and 30s were first surfing the Internet as well as their neural-nets. Edmond's interests later turned toward pioneering computer programing on the web related to pornography.

EARTH EROWID co-created The Vaults of Erowid in 1996. This non-commercial web site collects data and publishes original research on the topic of visionary plants and drugs. The site receives over 250,000 unique visitors per month and has over 16,000 public documents and over 3000 images. Earth has written and edited hundreds of documents published on-line and his writing has also appeared in print publications such as The Resonance Project and The Entheogen Review, and he is a contributing editor to Trip magazine.

FIRE EROWID co-created The Vaults of Erowid in 1996 (see description above). 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 has become the hallmark of the Erowid web site. Fire is also a contributing editor to Trip magazine.
 

JAMES FADIMAN, Ph.D. has been involved in both teaching and facilitating creative problem-solving with and without psychedelics for more than three decades. His experience ranges from early experimentation with Ram Dass and Tim Leary at Harvard to government-sanctioned legal research with Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman at Stanford. He co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where he now teaches, is the co-author of Essential Sufism, and has recently released a novel, The Other Side of Haight.