The Leading Edge

Dan Lawrence is a former futures trader turned Jungian analyst and writer. This is the remarkable story of his silent childhood, precognitive dreams, work in high-security psychiatric units and a near-death experience in a Malaysian ICU.
He did a pretty mind-blowing lecture about dreams for Leading Edge’s Accelerating Wisdom series. He’s someone who let his curiosity guide him from a very young age, and it took him through a traditionally successful path into a world filled with mystery and intuition. Obviously he would never say this, but listening to him speak, particularly towards the end of his story, I was really struck by the fact that this is what a successfully integrated life looks like.

Adam M. Curry is an inventor and tech entrepreneur in San Francisco. He thinks the idea that consciousness and reality may be interconnected is really cool. He was fascinated enough by the idea to organize the Collective Consciousness app project. Technology advances by trying something new, and he’s very excited to explore the horizons of “consciousness technology.”
He was the recipient of the MIT Ceres Connection Prize at age 17 for an invention that converted electro-gravitational phenomena into signals that can help forecast seismic events, such as earthquakes. Adam has been featured in the Discovery Channel’s Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and is on the board of the Society for Scientific Exploration. He has worked at the Princeton’s PEAR Lab and Psyleron.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As the founder of the Animas Valley Institute he has spent nearly 45 years guiding thousands of women and men through nature-based initiatory passages.

Plotkin describes an essential developmental process that is missing from modern culture. Beyond merely diagnosis, he also provides a map and mechanism to reincorporate greater meaning into our lives. Our conversation is an introduction to his work

Leading Edge member Allison Paradise holds degrees in neuroscience from Brown and Harvard. Based in Los Angeles, she’s the founder of The Epicenter. They work with children aged 7-22 on the cultivation and recovery of their intuitive capabilities. She’s a dear friend, and one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met, something I think comes across in our conversation.

Dr. Christopher Bache is Professor Emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training.

Dr. Bache is perhaps best known for his remarkable 2019 book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It relates his insights and experiences from 73 therapeutically-structured, massive-dose LSD sessions over the 20 years from 1979-1999. Upon revisiting the book for this interview I was struck by how remarkable it is. I am not aware of anyone else who underwent such a sustained exploration of the outer limits of consciousness, especially one who returned able to lucidly articulate exactly what they experienced. Bache also maintained a high-level teaching career throughout his sessions.

While he admits his adventure was perhaps foolhardy, and he strongly dissuades anyone else from attempting it, his commitment to travel to the very edges of human experience offers an unparalleled vision of our present reality and maybe even our collective future.

For our conversation I was joined by my friend Devin Martin, an experienced transformational and psychedelic coach