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.

Ralph 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 ground breaking collection of essays and experiences with the empathogen MDMA, entitled Through the Gateway of the Heart (1985, 2012) that detailed for the first time the therapeutic and transpersonal uses 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 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.

Ralph is a respected elder who has influenced much of the critical discourse on psychedelics for over 50 years.

For almost 50 years Ralph refined a method of navigating in expanded states of consciousness that he called “alchemical divination”. He explored in great detail the way in which guides and individuals can use focused inquiry in psychedelic states of consciousness.

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