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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. This is what he has to say about the topic of his talk:

Since the 17th century, there has been a gradual process of reducing the realm of mind first into the bodies of human beings, especially those of the “civilized men”, and then solely into their “awakened” brains, disregarding dreamtime. A strict separation between culture and nature has been accepted as a given fact, the supposed intelligence of the world – animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, and abiotic phenomena – relegated to the superstition of traditional societies. 

The results of this disenchanted worldview has been the reckless destruction of ecosystems, the extinction of countless organisms, and above all, a feeling of separation, loneliness, loss of meaning and lack of solidarity with the world at large. In this lecture, I will present my own experience with Amazonian practitioners and their use of sacred plants. I will also refer to contemporary studies of plant and animal intelligence by evolutionary ecologists.

The event takes place at 5pm in Helsinki. Schedule:

5:00pm Doors open
6:00pm Lecture
7:00pm Audience discussion
8:00pm Free interaction
9:30pm Doors close

To hear more about the event, please join our email list or, even better, become a member!

About the speaker: 

Born in Florencia, Colombia, in 1947, Luis Eduardo Luna has a B. A. from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1972), an interdisciplinary Masters from Oslo University (1980), and a PhD from the Department of Comparative Religion, Stockholm University (1989). He received a Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, appointed for a study of the ethnobotany and ethnomedicine of the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon (1986), and the title Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, from St. Lawrence, Canton, New York (2002). He was an associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University (1987) and was elected Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London (1989). He was an Assistant Professor in Anthropology (1994–1998) at the Department of Anthropology of Santa Catarina Federal University (UFSC) in Florianópolis, Brazil. He retired in 2011 from the Department of Modern Language and Communication at the Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki. 

Besides publications in various journals, Dr. Luna is the author of Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon (1986), a co-author with Pablo Amaringo of Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1991), and co-author with Slawek Wojtowicz, Rick Strassman and Ede Frecska of Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (2008). He is also a co-editor with Steven White of Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (2000, enlarged second edition 2016). 

Dr. Luna has lectured worldwide on indigenous and mestizo shamanism and has been a curator of visionary art exhibits in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan. He is the Director of Wasiwaska, Research Center for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art and Consciousness, Florianópolis, Brazil (www.wasiwaska.org). From June 2022, he is also an Honorary Research Fellow of University of Exeter, England.