Decomposing The Shadow presents a psychological model for the experience of the magic psilocybin mushroom. It explores what the experience of this psychedelic medicine exposes to us about the nature of mind, emotion, society, psychospiritual maturity, and reality itself. This book is about facing the darkness within each of us, developing the courage of emotional honesty, and investigating how the unacknowledged aspects of self, the shadow, can make the grounds of personal growth fertile again. The psilocybin mushroom offers us the opportunity to experience life from a point of amplified emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance. It unlocks a perspective of self and other that is naturally occurring within us, but culturally suppressed to the point of nearly complete omission. When we begin to navigate the vastly novel experiences this substance can provide us, we further enable its potential for not only exposing, but healing the unconscious narratives that hold us back from being our fullest, most courageous, most honest self.

For thousands of years on our planet, humanity has been involved in a symbiotic relationship with plants. Not only have plants supplied mankind with a never-ending food source, the necessary nourishment for our bodies, and life itself, but they have also served us in another way: an extremely important and intricate one, yet an often overlooked one. This book uncovers the natural link between man, consciousness, and God.

DIVA collection of Ferguson's essays that bring the question of Africa into the center of current debates on globalization, modernity, and emerging forms of world order./div

All Hadley wants is for everything to go back to the way it used to be—back when she didn’t have to share her mother with her stepfather and stepbrother. Back when she wasn't forced to live in a musty, decomposing house. Back when she had a life in the city with her friends. As Hadley whiles away what’s left of her summer, exploring the nearby woods and splitting her time between her strange, bug-obsessed neighbor Gabe and the nice old lady that lives above the garage, she begins to notice the house isn’t just old and creaky. It’s full of secrets, just like appearance of a mysterious dollhouse and the family of perfect dolls she finds. Oh, how she wishes her family were more like those lovely dolls! Then one day, Hadley discovers a lone glass eye rolling around the floor of the attic. Holding it close one night, she makes a wish that just might change her world forever.

"If you've forgotten the thrills and chills of child's play, the incendiary imagination of adolescence, Mark Childress's second novel -- a speeding bullet of a book -- will ignite your memory. In this adventure story the hero, Victor, is sublimely lost, a celebrated ragamuffin like Huck Finn or one of Peter Pan's lost tribe." -- Marianne Gingher, New York Times Book Review "A crackling good adventure is tough to pull off, but Mark Childress has done just this and he's done it brilliantly. From his lyrical opening passages, which evoke the softness of adolescent innocence, right up through his explosive finale, he never lets us come up for air. And we never want to. Think of the Hardy Boys if you will, but also think of Harper Lee, and early Capote. This is a yarn spun with poetry. This is storytelling at its best." -- Peter Buckley, Vogue "The whole 'great watery plain of Mobile Bay' is a world the author and his gangly hero know with a strong and lovely intimacy." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

Storytelling and visionary medicines are fundamental aspects of the human experience. The latter takes us to places beyond ourselves, into realms of the mind unplumbed, unfathomable, and often unpleasant. The former allows us to share such experiences with each other. It unlocks personal experiences from the individuated shell and releases them into the collective, whereby we can learn from them together. From the author of Decomposing The Shadow: Lessons From The Psilocybin Mushroom (2013) comes a captivating and vulnerable exposé into the dark recesses of the human psyche. This book follows James W. Jesso as he recounts in three of his most turbulent and dark experiences with visionary mushrooms. Through story, he takes us along as he travels through depression, self-loathing, inadequacy and feeling unable to love, and out the other side into confidence, courage, and inspiration. From daytime trips with friends gone sour, beyond a night rife with psychotic breaks, and into the watery confines of facing depression in a sensory deprivation tank, The True Light Of Darkness is a vehicle of insight on what it means to ask to be broken in the hopes of finding wholeness.