Psykedeelisen Sivistyksen Liitto ry
ASSOCIATION FOR
PSYCHEDELIC
EDUCATION & CULTURE
About our association
As interest in psychedelics is steadily growing in Finland and around the world, the Association for Finnish Psychedelic Education & Culture (Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto ry) is dedicated to collaboratively learning how to handle them more wisely and responsibly.
We’re a Finnish non-profit that creates spaces to discuss psychedelics, organizes events such as lectures, workshops, movie screenings and group discussions, and partakes in psychedelic-themed conversations in the media. We also publish printed materials, one example being Psykedeelit ja luovuus kotimaisessa kuvataiteessa (Psychedelics and creativity in Finnish visual art), a 300 page art book with art and heartfelt stories (in Finnish) from 62 artists whose life and creativity has in some way been affected by psychedelics.
Whether you’re a psychonaut, a healthcare professional, a family member, a researcher, a policymaker, a journalist, or simply curious, we’re here to work with you in making sense of the different uses, effects, cultures, questions, potentials and risks related to these substances.
You can reach out to us at info@sivistysliitto.fi. If you’d like to keep up to date with what we’re doing, you can subscribe to our email newsletter here.
If you are a speaker – researcher, artist, clinician or just someone with a good psychedelics-related story to share and would like to reach a Finnish audience, don’t hesitate to drop us a note.
Below, you’ll find a collection of some of the events we’ve organized, and themes and angles we’ve covered. The event selection only covers English-friendly events – for a list also including our Finnish events, see here.
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Collaboration
We’re collaborating with the Danish Center for Psykedelisk Dannelse which shares much of our approach. Their members get free access to our English member webinars and vice versa.
We’re also interested in collaborating with other psychedelic organizations around the world. If you’d like to do something with us, do drop us a note!
Upcoming English-friendly events
"Ayahuasca told me that…” Positive and harmful interpretations of psychedelic experiences (Jerónimo Mazarrasa)
Webinar, April 8th 2025 at 6PM UTC+3
Sometimes people come out of plant medicine experiences with renewed clarity, insight, and sense of direction. At other times, the experiences can be harder to decode. On Tuesday April 8th 2025, Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto (PSL, Association for Finnish Psychedelic Education & Culture) presents a webinar lecture by Jerónimo Mazarrasa, Program Director at ICEERS, who will inspire us to think about how to wisely handle such experiences.
In the lecture, we’ll examine the common pitfalls related to powerful experiences, and both dangerous and constructive approaches to interpreting them. We’ll look at examples of practices to avoid and practices to encourage, both for facilitators and participants, in order to better discern what these experiences tell us. Click here to read more…
5MEO: Are Some Doors Better Left Unopened
Movie screening in Tampere, Thu April 10th, 2025
How do you prepare for a totally unpredictable experience? This question is explored deeply in the documentary 5MEO: Are Some Doors Better Left Unopened? (2020). The Association for Finnish Psychedelic Education & Culture (Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto ry, PSL) will host a screening of the movie on Thursday, April 10th, at Kulttuurikeskus Kaista in Tampere. Click here to read more…
Past English-friendly events
It’s a Beautiful Wound – psychedelic monologue by playwright Rich Orloff in Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Joensuu
Psychedelic monologue, mar 8th and 13th 2025
In March 2025, American playwright Rich Orloff will perform his monologue It's a Beautiful Wound in three Finnish cities. In the monologue, he shares a raw, funny and personal account of his psychedelic therapy journey using psilocybin and MDMA. Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto (Association for Finnish Psychedelic Education & Culture) is organizing two of these events: It's a Beautiful Wound will be presented on March 8th in Helsinki and on March 13th in Jyväskylä. Click here to read more…
Psychonautics: A Comic's Exploration of Psychedelics (Helsinki)
movie screening and panel discussion, Tue Feb 25h
Comedian and science podcaster Shane Mauss has done quite a bit of psychedelic traveling, and breaking down stigmas surrounding psychedelics through factual information is a cause he holds dear. A new avenue for this opens as he is set to star in a documentary about the topic. Things, however, take an unexpected turn when his use of psychedelics triggers a psychotic episode featuring intense paranoia, aliens, telepathic waves crossing the boundaries of space-time, gangsters, and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters. After two manic weeks of going without sleep, Mauss ends up in a psychiatric ward. Returning to shared reality requires a lot of honest self-reflection (and some more traditional medication). On Tue Feb 25th, we’ll screen the documentary Psychonautics that follows this intense process. After the movie, we’ll have a panel discussion on stigmas related to psychoactive substances and mental health. Click here to read more…
Benjamin De Loenen (ICEERS): Building a global alliance for safer plant medicine practice
Lecture event, feb 7th 2025
For 15 years, the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS) has worked to advance the respectful and safety-aware handling of ayahuasca and other forms of traditional indigenous medicine. The organization has helped in hundreds of court cases, conducted and coordinated scientific research, organized international conferences, developed regulatory bills for plant medicines, seeded and accompanied self-regulation within communities that use them, and provided support for individuals who have gone through challenging psychedelic experiences. ICEERS founder Benjamin De Loenen will visit Helsinki in February to share the organization’s journey and his visions for what the future holds. Click here to read more…
Psychedelic documentary Dosed 2: The Trip of a Lifetime
movie screening, nov 12th, 2024
Laurie, a Canadian mother of four battling colon cancer, gains legal permission to use psychedelics to address anxiety associated with her potentially deadly illness. Confronting the limits of her existence and exploring alternative treatments for cancer, she also experiments with cannabis oil. Her deepening journey of self-awareness and healing has profound effects on her entire family.
The award-winning documentary DOSED 2: The Trip of a Lifetime, by Tyler Chandler and Nicholas Meyers, is a story about facing mortality, love, courage, and resilience. The Finnish Association for Psychedelic Education and Culture presents the film with Finnish subtitles at Malmitalo’s Pieni Sali auditorium in Helsinki on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, at 7:00 PM. Read more (in Finnish) here.
Luis Eduardo Luna – Animism: on the necessity of recovering an ancestral paradigm in a soulless world
Lecture event April 5th 2024
On April 5th, 2024, the Association for Psychedelic Education & Culture will organize a lecture event featuring renowned anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, one of the pioneers of ayahuasca research who first published on the topic in the 80s. The event takes place on April 5th 2024 at 5pm in Helsinki. Click here to read more…
Bicycle Day's Psychedelic Tales
: a transcendental open mic
On Wednesday 19 April, we’re organizing an open mic event celebrating the 80th anniversary of Albert Hofmann’s celebrated first conscious LSD trip. Read more (in Finnish)…
Film screening: Psychedelic documentary Dosed on Dec 10th 2022.
The Association for Psychedelic Education & Culture (PSL) will hold its first public film screening in Helsinki on Saturday, December 10th at 3PM with the award-winning Canadian documentary Dosed that follows the psychedelic healing story of Adrianne who suffers from depression, anxiety and opioid addiction. Read more…
Webinar September 26th, 2022. Healing from Healing: Psychedelics and new age hyperindividualism (Adam Aronovich)
Psychedelic experiences and psychedelic facilitation don't happen in a vacuum. While there's an overall increase in the awareness of the importance of set and setting, we rarely pay much attention to a critical component: the overarching discourse and narratives that condition experience, interpretation, meaning-making and integration. The recent ongoing medicalization of psychedelics and plant "medicines" have primed many facilitators and providers to align with a hyper-medicalised orientation. We use terms such as "medicines", "healing" or "doing the work", not always questioning the assumptions underlying these approaches.
In a Zoom webinar organized by the Association for Psychedelic Education & Culture on Sep 26th at 7PM (UTC+3), medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry doctoral candidate Adam Aronovich will facilitate a discussion about "Healing Culture" where we will examine the ideologies, narratives and politics that shape and envelop much of the "work" we do, often unconsciously. From New Age spirituality, Pop-psychology, the marketing of caricature-like versions of indigenous ontologies dressed as "ancestral wisdom", conspiritual rabbit holes and recreational paranoia and all the way to consumerism, loneliness, alienation and the hyper-individualism typical of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism.
We will see why it’s critical to expand our understanding of "healing", and shed light on the intrinsic links between individual and social health, cultural health and environmental health, and where we can draw inspiration from indigenous ontologies without romanticizing or idealizing them. Read more…
Webinar June 2nd, 2022. Nicolas Langlitz & Juuso Kähönen: Psychedelic morals are more complicated than you think
Psychedelics do not cause their effects in isolation: they are always embedded in complex cultural and social contexts. In psychedelic research, relatively little attention has been given to moral, ethical and cultural aspects that might have a crucial influence by creating a matrix of expectations and ideas which guide attention and feed into the experience. Furthermore, worldviews and values do not only affect the experience: psychedelic experiences can also shift our conceptions of the world, self and values. These shifts raise intriguing and difficult philosophical and moral questions which cannot be answered by the methodology of questionnaires and brain-imaging studies.
From these starting points, anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz and PhD student Juuso Kähönen enter into dialogue in a Zoom webinar session on June 2nd, 6PM in a session organized by the Association for Psychedelic Education & Culture (Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto ry, https://sivistysliitto.fi). The speakers will untangle the web of extra-pharmacological considerations that surrounds psychedelic experiences and psychedelic research. The role of cultural context, epistemic and worldview-related changes will be considered: why are psychedelic experiences sometimes described as diminishing the ego or assisting in pushing someone a bit too deep into conspiracy theory rabbit holes? Political dimensions, commercialization and medicalization of psychedelic experiences also interest us – for example, whether it is good if mystical experiences are embedded into profit-yielding medical systems as their main cultural avenue.
Webinar tickets (€9/€6) are available in our web store, https://holvi.com/shop/sivistysliitto. The webinar is free of charge for members of Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto ry (Association for Psychedelic Association & Culture) who have paid their membership fee for 2022 – members will receive a registration link through email. Memberships are also available on our web store.
As a special treat, we also offer the webinar free of charge for members of the Finnish Association for Psychedelic Research (Psykedeelitutkimusyhdistys ry, https://psyty.fi), a Finnish non-profit focused on scientific research on psychedelics. Members will receive an email on the webinar in the near future. Read more…
Webinar Dec 3th, 2021. James W. Jesso: In relationship with the mushroom
In current discussions, psychedelics are often referred to as promising tools for therapy, transformation and self-knowledge. After decades of talking about them as just dangerous drugs you need to stay away from, this tool perspective offers an opportunity to reframe the way we talk about psychedelics, thus enabling constructive conversations without the heavy stigma of the drug war.
Author, public speaker, and podcast host James W. Jesso questions the tool perspective: When we refer to something as a tool, we tend to perceive it as something that exists solely for its use by humans. But psychedelics, especially when it comes to non-synthetic ones such as psilocybin mushrooms, exist and extend beyond our human conceptions of their usefulness. They’re living organisms with ways of being in the world that we only partly understand, and even much of their effects on us are still an enigma.
On December 2nd at 6 PM UTC+2, James will join us for the Q&A webinar session “In relationship with the mushroom” over Zoom. He will give an introductory talk, presenting an outline of his thinking on the topic, which forms a basis for an interactive audience discussion which we hope you’ll be joining. Read more…
Webinar Nov 6th, 2021: Philosophy of psychedelics and the comforting delusion objection
Do psychedelics cause their potential therapeutic effects by inducing implausible, even delusional metaphysical beliefs? We’ll have an opportunity to delve into this question on Saturday November 6th with philosopher Chris Letheby. The Zoom webinar offers of a lecture and audience questions.
Letheby’s lecture provides an overview of the arguments presented in his book Philosophy of Psychedelics. The book is motivated by recent evidence that “classic” (serotonergic) psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin can be administered safely in controlled environments, and can cause lasting psychotherapeutic benefits with just one or two administrations. These benefits seem to be predicted by the occurrence of a specific type of experience during the drug action: a “mystical-type” experience of oneness, self-transcendence, or cosmic consciousness.
This fact gives rise to what Letheby calls the Comforting Delusion Objection to psychedelic therapy: the concern that this novel and promising treatment modality works by the induction of implausible metaphysical beliefs, and ought therefore to be avoided. In response to the Objection, Letheby assumes the truth of a naturalistic worldview and shows, within this constraint, that the overall epistemic profile of psychedelic therapy is better than it initially appears. Psychedelic therapy does not work centrally by changing metaphysical beliefs, but by altering the sense of self; moreover, it has myriad epistemic benefits consistent with a naturalistic worldview. The positive side of Letheby’s project is an attempt to reconcile naturalism and an “Entheogenic Conception” of psychedelics as effective agents of knowledge acquisition and spiritual growth. Read more…
Webinar May 7th, 2021: After the psychedelic renaissance: Looking at a post prohibition world
How do we integrate psychedelics into our society and what are the foremost challenges and possible blind spots related to such integration? These are some of the question that ayahuasca community activist and independent researcher Jerónimo M.M. focuses on in his work. In May 2021, we organized a webinar where Jeronimo presented an excellent opportunity for discussing themes related to psychedelics in a post-prohibition world. Jerónimo has especially looked into traditions that utilize ayahuasca and thought about their future, but his thinking also applies to other psychedelics and traditionally used plants and the encounter between them and western cultures.
Our recording of the webinar has now been published on our Youtube channel and includes both Jerónimo’s lecture and a section for audience questions. You can watch a recording of the session or read more on the event.
Themes we’ve covered
2022: Psychedelic Question
One of our projects for 2022 was “Psychedelic Question”. We crowdsourced twelve psychedelic-related questions from the Finnish network. Throughout the year, we then posted these questions, gathered your replies to them, and published them on our channels.
Though we only ran this project in Finnish, we also posted the questions on this English page to inspire our international friends and help them keep up with what’s happening on our turf.
2021
From 2018 to 2021, we had a monthly theme of focus that was reflected in our events, social media posts and other activities.
Below, you’ll find all of the themes that we covered during those years.
