Goldsmiths University of London
Lewisham Way, New Cross, London SE14 6NW
UK
The traditional use of psychoactive plants as sacramentals in spiritual and shamanic rituals has continued for thousands of years, apparently, while the use of these substances in the developed world has also grown steadily in the last century as ever more plants are discovered and new synthetic chemicals are created. Since the earliest clinical, anthropological and recreational reports of the use of these powerful psychoactive substances they have been associated with all manner of exceptional and anomalous experiences, ranging from the mystical to the psychical. With the return to academic research of these substances with humans after a 40-year hiatus the question arises as to whether these transpersonal and ostensibly paranormal experiences are genuine and what can be gained from studying them clinically, psychologically, neuroscientifically, and indeed ontologically.
Biography
David Luke completed his PhD on the psychology of luck in 2007, and is now Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich where he teaches an undergraduate course on the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience, and is also guest lecturer on the MSc in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness Studies at the University of Northampton.
He was President of the Parapsychological Association between 2009 and 2011 and as a researcher he has a special interest in transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, having published 100 academic papers in this area. Dr Luke is co-editor of Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds (Daily Grail, 2014) and Breaking Convention: Essays in Psychedelic Consciousness (Strange Attractor, 2013), editor of Ecopsychology and the Psychedelic Experiences (2013), and is also coauthor, with Professor Chris French, of the undergraduate textbook Anomalistic Psychology (2012, Palgrave Macmillan).
This talk is part of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit Invited Speaker Series, 2014/15.