Greetings fellow workers and seekers of wisdom and healing.

This is the first post of 2015 for the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference (SPMC). If you’re new to the conference you may want to take a look (under “Past Guides and Visionaries” at the SPMC website) at the list of remarkable people who have spoken at the conference in past years. The conference is now in its fifth year and each year the vision grows stronger.

It’s a remarkable time in fact, perhaps a little akin to Charles Dickens’ famous opening line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” While heedless corporate interests continue to tear at the Earth and the planetary environment and climate become increasingly unstable and threatening, a gathering determination is bubbling up from many corners to bring intelligence, creativity, sanity, and compassion to bear on a multitude of issues.

The word Buddha basically means “one who is awake.” As Buddhist teachings say, we all have Buddha nature. It’s not something we have to create, it’s an unconditioned condition we can uncover. Another old saw has it that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” It seems that an era of disconnection and of disregard for consequences is coming to an end as more and more of us realize we have to put our best minds and hearts to the task of restoring “the balance of the universal mind”, as musician Shimshai put it.

It’s probably no coincidence whatsoever that the entheogens/psychedelics, the sacramental healing and awakening medicines, are taking an increasingly important place in this rebalancing. When a thick cloud of obscuration has covered the noosphere, the entheogens are needed to “shock the monkey.” The mission of the SPMC, you may have seen elsewhere, is to contribute to the wise and responsible development of the use of these sacramental medicines.

With that commitment firmly in mind, we are again working hard to bring strong and clear voices to Vancouver for the conference. As of this writing, in late May, we’re about two-thirds of the way there. You can see the current list of presenters on the “Guides and Visionaries 2015” page of the conference website.

So once again we are sounding the bell and calling out to all who have any level of involvement and interest in the entheogens to come and learn and celebrate and help strengthen the vision of healing and awakening for ourselves, for our communities, and for the planet altogether.