Richard Baker Roshi is Harvard educated, and one of only three Dharma heirs to Shunryu Suzuki-roshi. In 1966, he cofounded the internationally renowned Tassajara Zen Monastery. He also conceived and designed the world-famous Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, as well as the Green Gulch Farm in Marin County, California. Baker-roshi was the second abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center for twelve years. He directs Dharma Sangha in the United States and Europe, and serves as abbot of Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado and the Buddhist Study Center in the Black Forest in Germany. He is the author of Original Mind: The Practice of Zen in the West.

John Perry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has also been a director of the online community known as The WELL. Born in Wyoming, Barlow graduated from Wesleyan University with an honors degree in comparative religion. He is a writer and lecturer on subjects relating to the virtualization of society and is a contributing editor for Wired.

Stephen Batchelor was born in Scotland and educated in Buddhist monasteries in India, Switzerland, and Korea. He was a monk for ten years in both the Tibetan and the Zen traditions and the director of studies at Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies in England. Batchelor has written many books including: Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism, and Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime.

David Chadwick began practicing with Shunryu Suzuki in 1966 at the age of twenty-one and was ordained by him in 1971. He is the author of Thank You and OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan, which chronicled his years in Japan, and Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki, and To Shine One Corner of the World: Moments with Shunryu Suzuki.  He lives in Sonoma County, California. <www.cuke.com >

Lama Surya Das is a Buddhist meditation teacher, scholar, and director of the Dzogchen Foundation in Massachusetts. Born Jeffrey Miller, he grew up on New York's Long Island, and was active in the antiwar movement in his college years. Surya Das has spent nearly thirty years studying Buddhism, and now teaches, lectures, and conducts retreats and workshops worldwide.  Surya Das is the author of Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment, Awakening to the Sacred: Building a Spiritual Life from Scratch, and Awakening the Buddhist Heart: Integrating Love, Meaning and Connection into Every Part of Your Life. <www.dzogchen.org/>

Ram Dass has been a professor at Harvard and Stanford Universities and a well-known leader at the forefront of change.  He led the baby boomers to psychedelic drugs, Eastern spirituality, and social activism. Now he leads the graying boomers toward aging and sickness, using his experience of a stroke to proclaim old age a spiritual opportunity .  He is the author of many books including Be Here Now, The Psychedelic Experience (with Ralph Metzner), The Only Dance There Is, How Can I Help?, and his latest book, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying.

Erik Davis was born during the Summer of Love, under the sign of Gemini, not far from his current home of San Francisco. He is a Yale graduate and wrote an award-winning thesis on Philip K. Dick. Erik authored the book Techgnosis and has frequently written about popular culture for Spin, Wired, Details, Rolling Stone, Lingua Franca, The Nation, and The Village Voice.  <www.levity.com/figment>

Rick Fields (1948-1999) was the editor in chief of Yoga Journal, author of The Code of the Warrior and How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, and coauthor of Chop Wood, Carry Water and The Turquoise Bee.

Robert Forte is an independent scholar, writer, and editor, who studied the history and psychology of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion, Timothy Leary Outside Looking In, and the twentieth anniversary edition of The Road to Eleusis, by R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A.P. Ruck.  He has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served on the board of directors of the Albert Hofmann Foundation. He is president of the Church of the Awakening and director of The Garden@Eden Restoration Project.

China Galland is the director of the Images of Divinity Research Project, an independent project sponsored by The Center for Women and Religion, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California.  She is the author of The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion, and Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. <www.imagesofdivinity.org>

Alex Grey is an artist, author, and teacher.  His series of twenty-one life-sized paintings are illustrated in Sacred Mirrors:The Visionary Art of Alex Grey. Grey's artwork has been exhibited worldwide, and has been included in the album art of such popular rock groups as Nirvana, the Beastie Boys, and the Talking Heads.  Alex teaches courses in visionary art with his wife Allyson Grey at the Open Center in New York City, Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. He authored a book, The Mission of Art, which represents his exploration of art as a spiritual path.  Grey has been a student and practitioner of Buddhism for twenty years. <www.alexgrey.com>

Joan Halifax, Ph.D., is a Buddhist teacher and an anthropologist. She has been a member of the faculty of Columbia University, the University of Miami School of Medicine, the New School for Social Research, the Naropa Institute, California Institute for Integral Studies, and is the founder of The Ojai Foundation. Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof), Shamanic Voices, Shaman: The Wounded Healer, The Fruitful Darkness, Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America, and Being with Dying.  She founded Upaya in Santa Fe, NM, where she now practices, teaches, and works with prisoners and dying people.  She has been ordained as a Buddhist roshi by Zen master Seung Sahn, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Roshi Bernie Glassman. <www.upaya.org>

Allan Hunt Badiner is a student of Buddhism, a contributing editor at Tricycle magazine, and an ecological activist.  He edited the special section on Buddhism and psychedelics in the Fall, 1996 issue of Tricycle, and the book, Dharma Gaia: A Harvest in Buddhism and Ecology.  His written work appears in several other books including Dharma Family Treasures, Meeting the Buddha, and Ecological Responsibility: A Dialogue with Buddhism. Allan holds a masters degree in Buddhist Studies from the College of Buddhist Studies in Los Angeles and serves on the boards of Rainforest Action Network and the Center for Investigative Reporting.  <www.teknozen.com>

Robert Jesse is director of the Council on Spiritual Practices in San Francisco, a collaboration among spiritual guides, experts in the behavioral and biomedical sciences, and scholars of religion, dedicated to studying primary religious experience, with special interest in the entheogens. Through CSP, Bob has sponsored the drafting of a Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides. He was trained in engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. <www.csp.org>

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. He is a founder of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center and has taught meditation internationally since 1974. He also holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and is a husband and father. His books include A Path with Heart; Buddha's Little Instruction Book; Teachings of the Buddha; Seeking the Heart of Wisdom; Living Dharma; A Still Forest Pool; Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart; and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. <www.spiritrock.org/html/KornfieldSched.htm>

George Leonard is president of Esalen Institute and a pioneer in the field of human potential. He is author of twelve books, including The Transformation, Education and Ecstasy, The Ultimate Athlete, and Mastery. He was a senior editor for Look magazine, and wrote numerous articles in such magazines as Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, New York, Saturday Review, and The Nation. Leonard holds a fifth-degree black belt in aikido, and is co-owner of a martial arts school in Mill Valley, California.

Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City, a graduate of Yale University, and founder of the Paris Review.  Peter worked as a commercial fisherman and was ordained as a Zen priest.  Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he has published many novels, most notably Far Tortuga and Killing Mr. Watson. Mr. Matthiessen's parallel career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous and widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them The Tree Where Man Was Born and The Snow Leopard.

Michele McDonald-Smith is the senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society, Guiding Teacher of Vipassana Hawaii. Teaching at IMS and worldwide since 1982, she previously taught environmental education and public school for ten years and is currently active in exploring sustainable living in Hawaii.

Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was a scholar of the ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation. An innovative theoretician and spellbinding orator, Terence was a powerful voice for the emergent societal tendency he calls The Archaic Revival. Poetically dispensing enlightened social criticism and new theories of the fractal dynamics of time, Terence was the author of The Invisible Landscape, The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods, Trialogues at the Edge of the West (with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham), and True Hallucinations.

Brigid Cavan Meier lives in New Mexico where she writes and paints and does Taoist real estate with a passion for feng shui and permaculture.

Claudia Mueller-Ebeling was born in 1956 and lives in Hamburg, Germany.  She is an art historian and anthropologist who wrote her doctoral thesis on visionary art in nineteenth-century France.  Mueller-Ebeling is coauthor (with Christian Raetsch) of Witches Medicine and Shamanism and Tantra in Nepal.

Michael Murphy is the cofounder and CEO of Esalen, and author of Golf in the Kingdom, The Future of the Body, and The Life We Are Given: A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul.  A graduate of Stanford University, he lived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India in the early 1950s. In the 1980s, he began a successful Soviet-American exchange program, which initiated Boris Yeltsin's first visit to America. <www.itp-life.com>

Christian Raetsch was born in 1957 and lives in Hamburg, Germany. Raetsch is an anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on the magical spells used by the Lacandon Indians of Chiapas, Mexico. He is an authority on the subject of shamanic plants and their use in healing and rituals, and has authored several books, including Plants of Love, Marihuana as Medicine, and Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants.

Robert Schrei is an artist, healer, Rolfer, and ex-Zen teacher living in the mountains outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is currently working on a series of plant essences created specifically for bodyworkers and a series of paintings to bring healing energies into the environment.

Huston Smith lives in Berkeley, California.  He is the holder of eleven honorary degrees, and an internationally recognized philosopher and scholar of religion. His book, The World's Religions, is the most widely used textbook on its subject. Smith has taught at Washington University, M.I.T., Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley. He has authored over eighty articles in professional and popular journals and twelve books including, most recently, Cleansing the Doors of Perception.

Myron J. Stolaroff holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and left an executive position in business to conduct psychedelic research.  He is the founder of the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California.

Rick J. Strassman, M.D., lives in Taos, New Mexico, and is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Strassman conducted U.S. government-approved and funded clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, is a detailed account of those sessions and a riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., was born in New Jersey and studied at M.I.T., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Stanford University.  He is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Davis,  a member of the core faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology. He is the author of twelve books including Altered States of Consciousness, Transpersonal Psychologies, On Being Stoned, and Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality.  <psychology.ucdavis.edu/tart/taste/>

James K. Thornton is executive director of The Heffter Research Institute, the world's only neuroscience research institute dedicated to the study of psychedelic molecules. He is a Zen teacher, and the author of A Field Guide to the Soul. <www.heffter.org> <www.jameskthornton.com>

Dokushô Villalba Sensei is a Soto Zen master, founder and spiritual director of the Spanish Soto Zen Buddhist Community and of the Luz Serena (Serene Light) Zen Temple. He has written four books on Zen in the Spanish language.

Roger Walsh has been a practitioner of Buddhist meditation for twenty years and is professor of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology at the University of California at Irvine.  His publications include The Spirit of Shamanism; Meditation: Classic and Contemporary perspectives; Paths Beyond Ego, and Gifts from a Course in Miracles. <www.essentialspirituality.com>

Trudy Walter was born in 1958 and lives in Boulder, Colorado.  She is a practicing Jungian psychotherapist and wrote her master's thesis for Antioch University on the archetype of the Crone.  Walter has practiced Buddhism for twenty-five years. 

Robert Beer is a British artist who has studied and practiced Tibetan thangka painting for the last thirty years. One of the first westerners to become actively involved in this art form, he initially studied in India and Nepal with several of the finest Tibetan artists living at that time. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including: Buddhist Masters of Enchantment, and The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs.

Dean Chamberlain has traveled the world taking his unusual glowing portraits of significant psychedelic chemists and cultural heroes, including Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna. The illumination in Chamberlain's work is a result of his photographic process in which he leaves open the shutter of a camera as he shines a series of lanterns and high-powered flashlights in the environment, thereby painting light directly onto the film.  His subjects take on symbolic importance because of their unusual illumination.  He currently lives in Los Angeles. More of his work can be seen at <www.deanchamberlain.com>

Francesco Clemente was born in Naples, Italy in 1952.  His hallucinatory style expresses an internal imaginary world ranging from tragic scenes to ironic self-portraits.  Subtle and unpredictable, his figures have a primitivism reminiscent of the symbolists such as Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon.  Self-taught, Clemente came to prominence worldwide in the 1980s and has since had major retrospectives at the Philadelphia Museum (1990), the Sezon Museum in Tokyo (1994), and the Guggenheim Museum (2000) in New York.  He divides his time between Italy, New York, and Madras.

EUN (1598-1679) was the 184th abbot of Daitokuji Monastery. The Enso is the circle of infinity, completion, and oneness, the Zen satori experience embodied in a symbol. 

Allyson Grey was born in Baltimore in 1952 and studied at the Museum School of Boston. Her watercolor and oil paintings are filled with a mystical unpronounceable alphabet and vivid spectral geometries of order and chaos.  Grey's abstract works employ densely measured grids coalescing into crystalline mandalic imagery or shattering into fields of lush impastoed color. The labor-intensive and spiritual quality of the paintings relate them to tantric art, Jain cosmological diagrams, and the science of chaos dynamics.  Her work has been exhibited at Stux Gallery in New York City.   <www.allysongrey.com>

Mati Klarwein was born in 1932 and emigrated to Israel in 1934. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris, then met Ernst Fuchs who taught him the mixed tempera and oil technique of the Flemish masters. Klarwein's paintings meticulously reproduce his magnificent and outrageous imagination, including vibrant, colored landscapes and scenes richly populated with every race and nationality. Klarwein painted the cover to Carlos Santana's most popular album, Abraxas, and is a well-known exponent of psychedelic art. Klarwein's many books include Milk and Honey, A Thousand Windows, and Improved Paintings. <www.museummorpheus.com/Contemp/klarwein/biography.htm>

Paul Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940 and studied at Brown University, Harvard School of Design and in New York City with visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. In Boston he founded a one-man think tank called the Boston Visionary Cell. His ingenius inventions and fantastic architectural plans include time machines, levitating gyroscopes, and Klein-bottle houses. A postmodern Leonardo, his work integrates extensive and diverse scientific, philosophical, and spiritual references. He is represented by Kent Galleries in New York City and has had numerous one-man exhibitions throughout the country.

Ethel Le Rossignol is a British artist who began receiving painting instructions from spiritual beings in 1920. Ten years of drawings and gilded gouaches followed, showing symbol-laden and intertwined rainbow hued spirits representing the hereafter's great companionship of shared unity. A selection of her psychic artworks and writings were published as a book entitled A Goodly Company. She passed away in 1970. Her paintings are on permanent display at the College of Psychic Studies in London.

Bernard Maisner was born in Patterson, New Jersey in 1954 and received his BFA at the Cooper Union College of Art in 1977. He has been lecturer and instructor of medieval manuscript illumination at the Cloister's Museum, The Getty Museum and the Morgan Library. His subtly nuanced abstractions intricately weave together text and image. A twenty-five-year retrospective of paintings and modern illuminated manuscripts entitled Entrance to the Scriptorium is touring nationally in 2001. Maisner lives in Bay Head, New Jersey and New York City.

Mariko Mori was born in Tokyo in 1967, studied fashion design in Japan, and worked as a fashion model during the late 1980s. She attended art schools in London and New York, and her work reflects the influences of Eastern and Western pop culture and ancient shamanic ritual. Mori is known for her large photographs and video performance installations that present elaborately costumed self-portraits in futuristic and spiritual scenes. She has had several major museum shows, including at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

In 1978 Michael Newhall was invited to lecture and teach as a visiting artist at Osaka Institute of Arts in Japan. Newhall's Buddha Field Series began in 1979 and has taken many forms, including ceramic works, oil paintings, and many drawings. The series is influenced by the Chicago imagist movement and comics, but primarily referenced to historical Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Newhall has been the director of the Jikoji Zen Retreat Center in Los Gatos, California.

Born in Chicago in 1939, Ed Paschke is widely regarded as one of the greatest of the  Chicago imagist painters and has long been represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery. He learned to paint based on the principles of abstraction and expressionism, but in the late sixties began surrealistically appropriating images from popular culture. His early violent themes have transitioned to imagery influenced by electronic media, carefully modeled in aggressive and brilliant colors. In his most recent work, Paschke paints enlarged and unnaturally colored portraits of well-known figures including Elvis, the Mona Lisa, or the Buddha.  <www.edpaschke.com/>

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was a primarily self-taught painter who lived in Bordeaux and Paris. He is considered the greatest of the French symbolists.  Until Redon was in his fifties, he worked exclusively in black and white, exhibiting charcoal drawings, lithographs, etchings, and engravings. In the 1890s, Redon revealed his amazing powers as a colorist as he began his dreamworks using oil paint and pastels. His flower pieces, in particular, were much admired by Matisse, and the surrealists regarded Redon as one of their precursors. http:<www.artmagick.com/artist.asp?artist=redon>

Mark Rothko was born in Russia in 1903 and emigrated to the United States in 1913. Rothko is considered one of the preeminent artists of the abstract expressionist movement. His timeless abstract paintings are characterized by subtly toned rectangles of color, huge in scale, and capture a fundamentally religious feeling without any identifiable object or symbol of worship.  Public installations of his work include a mural in the Seagram's Building in New York City and the Rothko Chapel in Houston owned by the Menil Collection. <www.menil.org/rothko.html>     <www.nga.gov/exhibitions/rothwel.htm>

Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica, California in 1956. He credits the influence of psychedelics as one of the inspirations for his retinally enthralling art.   His work incorporates arrangements of thousands of actual hemp leaves and pills suggesting the visual pleasures of looking at art and ingesting psychopharmaceuticals are parallel experiences of transport into another reality. Beneath a veneer of resin are collaged biological illustrations, actual plants, paint, and drugs in web patterns and imagery that refer to both Eastern and Western art history. His works have been shown throughout the U.S. and Europe with recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and James Cohan Gallery in New York City.

Robert Venosa is internationally recognized as one of the outstanding masters of fantastic realismin art. Associated with such artists as Salvador Dalí, Ernst Fuchs, Mati Klarwein and H. R. Giger, Venosa's work has been exhibited worldwide as well as being the subject of three books: Manas Manna, Noospheres, and Illuminatus. His work has also graced the CD covers for such artists as Santana and Kitaro, and he has created conceptual design for the films Fire in the Sky, Race for Atlantis, and Dune. <www.venosa.com>