Making Meaning from Experience: Visionary Art, Creativity, and Integration.

April 9 – 19, 2027

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  • A man with long dark hair and a gray beard is wearing a black shirt and looking at the camera. He stands outdoors in front of green foliage and a tree trunk.
  • A woman with wavy blonde hair, wearing a tan blazer, orange top, blue jeans, and amber jewelry, sits outdoors on a rock, smiling at the camera with greenery in the background.
  • A bearded man with glasses holds a microphone and gestures with his other hand while speaking outdoors, with green foliage blurred in the background.
  • A woman smiling in front of a brick wall.
  • A man in a black jacket is smiling for the camera.

Invited speakers

Laurence Caruana, Artist, Writer and Lecturer
Rebecca A. Wilkinson, Licensed Professional Counselor, Art Therapist
Larry Norris, PhD – California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)

Organizers

Adriana Rosa, Cultural Producer
Luis Eduardo Luna, Anthropologist

Laurence Caruana:

Biography

Laurence Caruana is an artist, writer and lecturer best known for his contribution to the Visionary Art movement. A graduate of The University of Toronto, he earned a degree in Ancient Greek and German Philosophy before traveling across Asia, Europe and Central America to study their sacred art and traditions.

After apprenticing with the Viennese master Ernst Fuchs in Monaco, he began teaching classical techniques of painting (the Mischtechnik) in Italy, which led to his founding of The Vienna Academy of Visionary Art in Austria. Here, he served as principle lecturer and academy director for seven years, creating an innovative institution with studios, exhibition halls, craft ateliers and a cultural space to explore new modalities in soul healing.

As a painter, his highly-detailed works explore the interplay of myths, symbols & styles from different sacred traditions – seeking out history’s symbolic responses to ‘the eternal questions’ on time, the world’s creation, and the afterlife. As a result of his ongoing research into visionary experience, and he is often invited to speak at psychedelic conferences.

As a writer, L. Caruana has authored five books, including Sacred Codes, Enter Through the Image and The First Manifesto of Visionnary Art. The artist presently lives between Vienna Austria and Burgundy France, where he is developing a new project – The Apocryphon Chapel – which will depict the over-arching myth of Gnostic Christianity in fifteen large-scale paintings.

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Lectures by Laurence Caruana:

In a rich visual presentation, we’ll review the recent history of Visionary art and its current state in our culture, asking several vital questions. What makes a work of art visionary? What is its aim and purpose in our present cultural context? How important is the psychedelic componant? Can creativity, vision journeys and image-contemplation help us to center ourselves and induce healing – both individually and for society as a whole?

Over time, various cultures have attempted to map out vision journeys experienced in altered states of consciousness. We will begin with the Buddhist tradition of thangka meditation (sadhana) and compare it to the Gnostic-Christian rite of the soul ascent (psychanodia). In both cases, the visionary experience may be likened to an immersion in a mirrored sphere that immediately reflects the person’s thoughts, feelings and other impulses. To help navigate the vision journey, a vision vehicle (ochema) may be created with the aid of hand signs or vowel sounds. In this presentation we will explore various aspects of this visualization practice.

Rebecca Wilkinson

Biography

Rebecca Wilkinson, LPC, LCPAT, ATR-BC, ITR-CTS, is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Art Therapist and educator. She is co-founder of the Psychedelic Art Therapy Network, co-author of the seminal article Psychedelic Art Therapy: The Intersection of Psychedelics, Creativity and Art Therapy, and teaches on the topic through the George Washington University (Washington, DC). Rebecca is also a practicing artist and author/illustrator of Coloring Creates Wellbeing: The Desert Mandalas Coloring Book.

She lives between Washington, DC with her twin sister and the Arizona Southwest with her husband and some cats. https://www.psychedelicarttherapynetwork.org/

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Lectures by Rebecca Wilkinson:

In this lecture/workshop, we will explore the role the creative process can play in helping to prepare for journeys into non-ordinary states of consciousness by tapping into parts of the mind that are usually outside of our awareness and warming us up for the deeper dive into medicine work. Imagery made before ceremony also provides us with a visual baseline that can be useful to compare to artwork we make after the journey, giving us a graphic illustration of the impact that it has had on our psyche.

This lecture workshop/lecture explores the use of artmaking and expressive techniques after journeywork, such as dialoguing with imagery, movement, and poetry to “capture the download”. We will explore personal and archetypal symbols and metaphors that emerge through these practices as a way of deepening the meaning-making process and integrating the journey.

Larry Norris

Biography

Larry Norris, PhD, earned his doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, where he defended a dissertation on ayahuasca and archetypes of transformation utilizing reports from the Wasiwaska archive.

Larry serves as assistant director and teaches courses in the Master of Divinity Psychedelic Chaplaincy program at Starr King School for the Ministry. He is also co-founder and executive director of Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education (ERIE) and Decriminalize Nature (DN). His work with DN focuses on advocating for the unalienable right to develop one’s own relationship with nature and supporting efforts to decriminalize entheogenic plants and fungi, which includes ayahuasca, iboga, cacti, and mushrooms.

He supports communities across the United States and internationally that are pursuing similar legislative initiatives.

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Lectures by Larry Norris:

This talk explores the inner worlds and realms of experience and how creativity can be both a bridge and a practice for embodying transformation. Blending perspectives from creativity, psychology, spirituality, and artistic practice, this presentation asks: how do we make meaning from experiences that resist language?

What happens when non-ordinary states meet a world in transition? This talk explores how entheogenic and psychedelic states of consciousness can unlock creativity, expand perception, and help us reimagine the systems that shape modern life.

Adriana Rosa

Biography

Adriana Rosa is a cultural producer, an actress, and a theater and art educator. She has a Master in Cultural Management from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Besides her work as an organizer of cultural events in the city of Florianópolis, she is the producer of the Wasiwaska seminars since its creation. Adriana is in charge of providing healthy and nutritious food for seminars, adapted, when necessary, to the needs of our participants. She is with Dale Millard in charge of Wasiwaska’s ethnobotanical garden.

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Luis Eduardo Luna

Biography

Luis Eduardo Luna was born in Florencia, in the Colombian Amazon region (1947). He studied Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, earned an interdisciplinary Masters degree while teaching Spanish and Latin American Literature at the Department of Romance Languages of Oslo University. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, from where he retired in 2011, and a former Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (1994-1998).

He received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Comparative Religion at Stockholm University (1989), and an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York (2000). He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology and Sociology of Exeter University, England.

Luna is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. He is the author of Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon (1986), and with Pablo Amaringo of Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1991). He is co-editor with Steven F. White of Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (2000, with a revised new edition in 2016), and co-author with Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz and Ede Frecska of Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies.

In 1986 he co-founded with Pablo Amaringo the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting of Pucallpa, Peru, serving as its Director of International Exhibitions until 1994. He has lectured about Amazonian shamanism and modified states of consciousness worldwide, and has curated exhibitions of visionary art in several countries. Luis Eduardo Luna is the Director of Wasiwaska.

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Lectures by Luis Eduardo Luna

This talk explores how indigenous Amerindian peoples perceive the world—both its biological and geological diversity—as alive, infused with intelligence, and inhabited by non-human persons of many kinds. Special emphasis will be placed on Amazonian societies, highlighting how this worldview is expressed artistically through the iconography of ceramics, textiles, featherwork, and body painting. Finally, I will present the work of Peruvian painter Pablo Amaringo, the creation of the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting (which we co-founded in 1988), and its influence on a new generation of Amazonian visionary artists.

This talk explores the evolving philosophical and scientific perspectives on the relationship between life and mind from antiquity to the present. Beginning with Aristotle’s view of the mind as the highest aspect of the soul animating living beings, and moving through medieval conceptions of an immaterial soul, it examines how modern philosophy introduced a strict mind-body dualism through Cartesian thought.

Subsequently, materialist philosophies and advances in biology shifted focus to understanding mind as emerging from physical life processes. Today, interdisciplinary approaches emphasize the inseparability of mind and embodied life, investigating how consciousness is intertwined with living systems. Complementing this philosophical evolution, contemporary biological research reveals intelligence in both animals and plants- demonstrating complex cognition, communication, and adaptive behaviors across species, as well as sophisticated signaling and memory in plants. This body of work challenges traditional human-centered views of intelligence and calls for a broader understanding of cognition as a diverse and widespread phenomenon within the living world.