ralph metzner, Ph.D.

Ralph Metzner  is a recognized pioneer in psychological, philosophical and cross-cultural studies of consciousness and its transformations. He attended The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he obtained a BA in philosophy and psychology. Subsequently, he obtained his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University and held a post-doctoral NIMH fellowship in pharmacology at the Harvard Medical School. 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.

He was a psychotherapist in private practice and Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he taught for 30 years.  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 compiled and edited a collection of essays and experiences with the empathogen MDMA, entitled Through the Gateway of the Heart (1985, 2012). This book was one of the first to document the therapeutic uses and transpersonal effects of MDMA.

​The Green Earth Foundation publishes his writings devoted to psychoactive/psychedelic drugs:  The Toad and the Jaguar – A Field Report of Underground Research on a Visionary Medicine (looking at the molecule 5-meo-dmt)(2013), and Allies for Awakening – Guidelines for productive and safe experiences with entheogens (2015). The Ecology of Consciousness – The Alchemy of Personal, Collective and Planetary Transformation was published in 2017.

For 50 years Ralph refined a method of navigating expanded states of consciousness that he called “Alchemical Divination”. This is a practice that can be used by both guides and individuals to focus their sense of inquiry within psychedelic states of consciousness.

Ralph Metzner left his body in March 2019. We present Ralph speaking to his unique method of guiding people in expanded states of awareness. More about Ralph’s work can be found at https://www.greenearthfound.org .