Ep. 569 – Mindfulness, Transformation & Resilience with Leonard Pickard

Raghu interviews Leonard Pickard about his early involvement in psychedelics, zen practice, his 20-year incarceration, and building resilience via mindfulness.

Leonard will be joining Raghu, Zach Leary, Trevor Hall and others at a Ram Dass Legacy Event in Denver on December 12th, 2024. For more info, click HERE.

This week on Mindrolling, Leonard and Raghu chat about: 

• Transformative experiences as not dependent on substances
• Delving into the great leaders of the sixties and honoring Ram Dass
• The psychedelic revolution that is currently taking place
• Our total dependence on one another
• The way that music transformed throughout the 1960’s
• Leonard’s time at the San Francisco Zen Center studying Buddhism, meditation, and yoga
• Carrying our practice out into the world
• How Buddhism prepared Leonard for years of incarceration
• The beauty of spiritual practice and growing ones heart

Check out Leonard’s book, The Rose of Paracelsus, which he wrote while incarcerated, to explore more about psychedelics, spirituality, science, and human evolution.

About Leonard Pickard:

Once known as the Acid King, Leonard Pickard is a former research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, Harvard fellow in drug policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Deputy Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at UCLA. His 1996 prediction of the fentanyl epidemic was published by RAND in The Future of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids. Leonard Pickard is one of two people convicted in the largest LSD manufacturing case in history. On July 27, 2020, Pickard was granted compassionate release from federal prison 20 years into his sentence.

“Transformative experience, if it is to be valid, cannot be drug dependent. It would be a terrible offense to think that such beautiful insights were dependent upon a mere substance.” – Leonard Pickard

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