In Growing Up Psychedelic, the author recounts the five years spent actively exploring LSD during his high school and college years, examined through the lens of the spiritual teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner - the force behind the development of the Waldorf Schools, Biodynamic agriculture, the dance art of Eurythmy, Weleda, and more - was most importantly the source of the teaching known as anthroposophy or spiritual science. The journeys and explorations described began over fifty years ago, during the first wave of psychedelic enthusiasm. In the time since the author has followed a path leading to a life-long study of Steiner's work.

In the psychedelic renaissance underway today much is written and spoken about the therapeutic and healing possibilities of psychedelics. Equally significant is the potential of these medicines to catalyze the process of spiritual awakening. Steiner's teachings, rooted in the Western esoteric tradition, provide an important counterpoint to the elements from Eastern understandings that have been woven into the psychedelic spiritual mainstream going back to the days of Ram Dass and others.

Through its nuanced, spiritual, and modern perspective, anthroposophy contains ideas that are highly relevant to those in today's psychedelic cohort who find themselves - intentionally, or perhaps only half-knowingly - encountering what Steiner would call the threshold of the spiritual world. For psychedelics to be truly fruitful in the modern world, they need to be understood with a sophisticated spiritual insight that can see through and beyond the merely material models that permeate so much of our thinking today, and come to be seen as part of an evolutionary spiritual dynamic.

The process of the author's journey through the gamut from recreational tripping to high-dosage cosmic encounters provides the phenomenological material to illustrate how psychedelics can be understood in the light of the anthroposophical image of the human being. The narrative is the testament of a search across a lifetime, rooted in an embrace and encounter with the soul-shattering and soul-transforming possibilities of psychedelics.