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Joe Schraube: Joiner, philosopher, Buddhist, hedonist, Enneagram 7, creative, curious, chaotic, pretty fearless, bundle of energy, unconventional, a little crazy …What I do: I love getting to know people and enjoying the magic of the present moment. Humanity spends 4.6 billion daily on the military. People want love, yet war keeps happening. Why? These and other questions led me from Dresden to Berlin. From 2000 to 2004, I studied political science and philosophy at HU Berlin. |
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What I’m good at: Inspiring people, thinking, and dancing. In recent years, I have engaged deeply with politics, Buddhism, Tantra, and psychedelics. I enjoy inspiring and motivating others, and I love listening to what people have experienced on their journeys. Exploring the question “Who am I?” has profoundly changed me. |
In my school, there were only 2 other students out of 300 who were not members of the FDJ (Free German Youth)—an organization that described itself as the “fighting reserve of the National People’s Army.”
The situation today is not much different. 297 out of 300 Germans accept neoliberalism, which destroys our living environment and everything meaningful and valuable.
My conditioning, which I gladly maintained, is that of an outsider. When a large number of people agree with me, I ask myself if I made a mistake. During GDR times, I completed a joinery apprenticeship, followed by civil service in a local municipality administration.
I lived in squatted houses in Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, and Freiburg. Free radio and pirate radio were attempts to get involved, giving me insight into the West German left-wing scene. I realized the general lack of vision among the Left in the 80s. This led to my studies at HU Berlin, searching for alternative social models. I didn’t graduate, but instead studied across subjects based on interest: philosophy, political science, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, and Buddhism. Rudolph Bahro brought deep ecology, and Ken Wilber introduced Integral Theory. I understood the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” as the desired update to Karl Marx. Member of the Left Party, then briefly with “Die Violetten”, and now a member of the Pirate Party.
Self-employed as a carpenter/joiner since 1999, running my own workshop in Dresden since 2003 focusing on timber construction, carpentry, exhibition stand construction, and solar installations. Arthur Koestler’s essay “The Yogi and the Commissar” made me realize a key reason for the failure of left-wing politics: the lack of willingness to see one’s own consciousness as the first step toward change. The causes of hatred, greed, and delusion must first be recognized and reduced within one’s own system. This led me to an approximately 10-year political retreat, during which I completely stepped away from political movements and debates to focus entirely on self-exploration, personal growth, and Buddhist meditation. I experienced LSD + meditation as a great combination. 18 months in India and Nepal deepened my involvement with Buddhism. A 3-month retreat in Myanmar was my longest and most intense meditation period so far.
Together with other great people, I organize entheo-science.de & psychedelic-society.de. From 2005 to 2019, I was involved with eclipse-online.de and occasionally produced content for jetzt-tv.net.
Professional Background
I completed my joinery apprenticeship in 1988, and even though the fall of the Berlin Wall allowed me to go to university (which was denied to me in the GDR), I gladly remained in craftsmanship.
My professional references can be viewed here:
holzwerkstatt-dresden.de/
What Inspired Me
Books:
Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception / Samuel Widmer – Listening into the Heart of Things / Noam Chomsky – Profit over People / Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now / Yamamoto Tsunetomo – Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Movies:
Bab’Aziz / The Matrix / Crank / The Sea Inside / Dead Man / Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas / La Grande Bouffe (1973) / The Last Samurai
Music:
soundcloud.com/joe-schraube
Talks, Podcasts, Events
Entheo-Science – My Largest Project to Date
For several years, this congress in Berlin kept the topic of psychedelics alive in Germany. Entheo took place four times between 2012 and 2017—during a time when speaking publicly about psychedelics was neither cool nor trendy. Back then, being a psychonaut made you what people today call a “conspiracy theorist”: a person avoided by the mainstream, somehow suspicious. My motivation for spending several months doing full-time volunteer work was gratitude for the gift that psychedelics were and continue to be for me.
The largest Entheo-Science congress took place in 2016 in Berlin, featuring 40 speakers and 325 guests.
Today, there is a wide range of conferences on psychedelics. Whether I will put in the effort and stress to organize such a large event again after the pandemic break—we’ll see 😉 MIND and Breaking Convention are the main sites to keep an eye on today if you are looking for psychedelic congresses.
The Psychedelic Experience as a Denial of Service Attack
My high-dosing talk at Entheo 2016: What happens when you take 600µg of LSD? Watch the video 😉
Photo Gallery
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