Kenneth Symington

Kenneth A. Symington of Cañal was a British-Cuban civic leader, the last National Executive Commissioner of the Asociación de Scouts de Cuba.

Kenneth Symington
National Executive Commissioner of the Asociación de Scouts de Cuba

Professionally he was a chemical engineer for Industria Sanitarios Nacional, S.A. in San José de las Lajas.

Born in Cuba of English and Cuban parentage where he lived until he moved to the USA to attend college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Kenneth A. Symington graduated with a Chemical Engineering degree and went to do graduate work in other institutions. He worked for many years in several major American corporations as an executive in national and international operations. After retirement, he owned and operated several small businesses. His credits include several books, some translated from Spanish to English and published in the USA. He lived in California, and had an infectious passion for close friends, plants, animals, ethnobotany, music, and literature. Additionally he was also a British-Cuban civic leader, and the last National Executive Commissioner of the Asociación de Scouts de Cuba and

Ken had over thirty-five years of broad-based, diversified business experience in international and domestic operations and was responsible for profit and loss accountability, strategic planning, manufacturing, marketing, corporate development, sales, administration, and supervision. Ken’s last ten years in the corporate world involved ownership and development of four separate small businesses.

His industry experience covered agricultural chemicals and machinery, industrial process equipment, food processing, fermentation, ceramics, medical and dental supplies. specialty chemicals. the health care field, fast groceries, and retail sales. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and some Portuguese.

Professional career

1953–1965 Standard Brands Inc, Sanitarios Nacional. and Procter and Gamble

Production Supervisor and Project Engineer in operations dealing with processing, industrial ceramics, and soap and detergents supervising production department while performing studies in manufacturing and methods engineering.

1957–1960 Sanitarios Nacional SA

Production Superintendent—Directed plant start.up operations; organized, staffed, trained, and supervised a force Of 200 hourly plant workers. Experience in industrial ceramics. tile, ceramic fixtures.

1960–1965 STANDARD BRANDS

Project Engineer - Prepared designs. and layouts for new plants and installations, prepared cost estimates arid feasibility studies Directed equipment and procurement, supervised work done by Outside consultants, denned contracts and schedules, and coordinated development projects from inception installation, Experience in 1006 processing, fermentation. Confectionery, tom pt«10CtS, distilled products.

International Manager 1965–1967

Consolidated and expanded international division selling agricultural chemicals and equipment. Made market and feasibility Studies in foreign Countries: subsequently organized, incorporated and started four successful international subsidiary companies in Europe and in Latin America, to expand operations.

1965–1982 Pennwalt Corporation

Held a number of positions of increasing responsibility, as International Manager, General Manager of a Division Assistant to the Chairman and president a major division. Responsibilities covered International marketing expansion. incorporation and start up of overseas subsidiaries. and loss accountability, turn-around of troubled divisions, acquisitions, capital investment and long range planning programs, new product introductions, and public relations.

1982–1992 Owner - purchased. secured site, and started four small businesses as an independent Sole proprietor, which were profitably sold in 1992. Operations included forty employees and seven managers.

Relevant Experience

Ken travelled extensively throughout Europe, as well as middle and Latin America analyzing business conditions in these countries.

1953 Received scholarship from the US government for a summer of study at Michigan State College covering economic and small business development in Latin America.

1957 Served as Executive Director for a Boy Scout organization with special responsibility for public relations with government, churches, civic groups, and companies.

1983 Assisted Vendo Corporation in Fresno, CA in solving some of their manufacturing problems.

1987 Participated in Small Business Development Seminars in San Martin province (Peru) to assist and actual small business owners in modernization of their operations.

1988 Founded and became first president of La Manda Park Neighborhood Association (Pasadena) and represented it in city and state affairs affecting the interests of the association. Won national sales increase award (38%) from a franchise organization covering one of the businesses he started.

Served as a Director in the Executive Board of Nature Friends, an outdoors conservancy organization, and head Its Building Committee.

1990 Received and recognition from the City of Pasadena for outstanding contributions in the organization of neighborhood associations and encouraging resident participations in City affairs,

1991 Worked with small business buyers in representing loan applications to the SBA and completing all necessary SBA requirements.

Memberships and professional trade associations

Philadelphia Athletic Club, Urban club, International House, Rotary Club, Chamber Commerce, New York Athletic Club, Sierra Club, Nature Friends

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bachelor in Chemical Engineering, Phi Lambda Upsilon, 1953

Michigan State College, U.S. Government Scholarship, Seminar on Industrial Development, 1953

New York City College, Credit toward MBA Degree, 1962 – 1965

Newark College of Engineering, Executive Development Conferences, 1966

American Management Association, Courses in finance, mergers, acquisitions, and licensing, 1967 – 1971

Drexel University, Seminar on long range planning, 1972

Publications
  • "Caverns of St. Tomas", Antonio Nunez Jimenez and Kenneth A. Symington, Bulletin of the National Speleological Society - ISSN 0146-9517 Number 17: 2-7 - December 1955

Hypomnemata: Stories, Fables, Memories Paperback – July 26, 2018

A collection of fictional stories, dreams, visions, word plays, metaphors, and personal memories about the human predicament, accumulated over the span of a lifetime in various locations throughout the world, by an interested explorer who enjoys a good laugh whenever circumstances permit.

The Path Along The Way: Stories, Inventions, Incidents, and Encounters Along A Long Life – October 15, 2019

“The Path Along The Way” is collection of stories, incidents, and happenings, some real, some assumed, and some pure fiction. The author encountered these along the course of a long life lived in several countries, continents, and environments.

The contents are arranged in five different periods of his life; they are periods normally recognized by most persons, but they describe ever changing and richer stages in a lifetime. They include myths, dreams, anecdotes, descriptions of places, and imaginative perambulations of interest to any reader curious about life’s surprises, and revelations.

The Invisible Theater: An Experiment in Group Stage Presentation Paperback – February 13, 2020

This book tells the story of what happened when a small group of adventurous and aware men joined together, and each Fall for a period of 10 consecutive years, presented a series theatrical productions, with themes based on the life experience of maleness and masculinity, and then staged them in a relatively small venue in Lose Angeles, California, in front of a male audience which immediately grew from an initial 25 to more than 100. Most of the presenters and directors were not professional actors, or directors, or theatre people.

This is a collection of programs, pictures and anecdotes of what turned out to be an immensely creative engagement for all the men who participated either as actors or even as audience.

Translations

Three Halves of Ino Moxo : Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon - January 1, 1995

Award-winning Peruvian author Cesar Calvo takes us on a quest through the mysterious, dreamlike world of powerful Amazonian sorcerers.

A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age

Antonio Escohotado is a professor of philosophy and social science methodology at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain. In A Brief History Of Drugs Escohotado outlined a clear-eyed look at the instrumental role drugs have played in our cultural, social, and spiritual development.

Later life

In his later years Ken organized and led expeditions throughout the Peruvian Amazon and the Andes to investigate ancient cultures, plant medicines, and indigenous shamanism. He founded the Botanical Preservation Corps, which produced the legendary entheobotany conferences and was the co-founder along with Terence McKenna, Rob Montgomery, and Jonathan Ott of the conferences which took place every year from 1994 to 2001, held mostly at Chan-Kah resort near the Maya archaeological site of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, as well as the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco, California in October 1996, the Maya ruins of Uxmal in the Yucatan Peninsula in 1998, and the Entheobotany Conference in Whistler, British Columbia Canada in May 1991. He also produced the AllChemical Arts Conference in September 1999 which was Terence Mckenna’s last public appearance.

Entheobotany conferences The stated aim of the conferences was to discuss the history, and latest research on: ayahuasca, psychoactive mushrooms, tobacco, iboga, LSD-type drugs, entheogenic snuffs and their contained tryptamines, and peyote and the entheogenic mescalines. These discussions were well presented by an international array of anthropologists, chemists, art historians and neuroscientists, but the real importance of the conference extended beyond the podium where the presenters mingled with the audience and everyone shared information and experiences amidst exhibits of botanical plants and psychedelic artwork.

The entheobotany conferences helped promote a clearer and more accurate understanding of the distinction between addictive and abusive drugs and the spiritual, religious use of nonaddictive sacramental entheogens largely based on R. Gordon Wasson's unified field theory of anthropology, connecting shamanic ecstasy with the origin of all religion, from non-western shamanism to the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, stating that visionary experience is the primal heart and soul of religious revelation, but somewhere in the history of western civilization direct experience of the divine became the supreme heresy, taking all the religion out of religion, leaving an empty and hollow shell with no value or attraction to human kind. Contemporary drug prohibition can be seen as the modern secular expression of the ruling politics inquisition against direct personal experience of the divine. This taboo direct personal experience is what Wasson himself discovered in a quiet mountain top village in southern Mexico, which he aptly described as "religion, pure and simple, free of theology, free of dogmatics, expressing itself in awe and reverence." The entheobotany conferences explored the current state of shamanic plant sciences with evidence presented by scholars of art and culture which suggested that entheobotanical plants have played a far greater role in the development of our civilization than historians have previously suspected. From anthropology we see the roles that these plants still play in direct visionary experience used in healing, communion with nature and the Divine, and simply for ecstatic enjoyment. From chemistry and neuroscience attendees learned the bio-physical description of how these plants work in the human body. Their usefulness as a sacrament in religious practice is time honored and, as we are discovering, neurochemically valid.

Topics covered in the conferences primarily focused on the following:

  • Botany, chemistry & cultivation of psychoactive plants.
  • History of ethnopharmacology & ethnomycology
  • New data on hallucinogenic snuff cults
  • Field techniques for collecting ethnobotanical specimens
  • Plant teachers of Amazonian shamanism; modern ayahuasca cults
  • Uses and preparation of entheogenic plants; ayahuasca analogs
  • Ethnobotany, chemistry and cultivation of entheogenic fungi
  • Field trip to archaeology sites.

Speakers included:

James Callaway, neurochemist from the University of Kuopio, Finland

Wade Davis, the ethnobotanist who first analyzed the voodoo drugs of Haiti and published his studies in the book The Serpent and the Rainbow

Antonio Escohotado, Professor Of Sociology and Political Science, Universidad Nacional, Madrid, Spain

Peter Furst, anthropologist, SUNY, New York

Lester Grinspoon, Assoc. Prof of Psychology Harvard Medical School, author of "Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered" and "Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine"

Luis Eduardo Luna, anthropologist, Universidade do Florianopolis, Brazil

Dennis McKenna,  ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacognosist, lecturer and author.

Terence McKenna, noted author of "Food of the Gods", "True Hallucinations", scholar, researcher, lecturer; and great story-teller.

Rob Montgomery, Botanical Preservation Corps founder, field ethnobotany expert, manager of exotic/entheogenic plant business.

Claudia Muller-Ebeling, Art historian and ethnobotanist, editor of the German magazine Dao and an expert on aphrodiaiacs.

Kary Mullis, the chemist who pioneered the technology of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that amplifies DNA for detection, diagnosis, and research, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993.

Jonathan Ott, noted author of Pharmacotheon, Ayahuasca Analogs, many others; chemist, researcher, & ethnobotanist.

Christian Ratsch, Germany's leading expert on plant hallucinogens, author of "The Gateway to Inner Space" and numerous works in botany and ethnography.

Giorgio Samorini, Italian ethnobotanist, author, and expert on the entheobotany of Tabernanthe iboga.

Stacy Schaefer, anthropologist, University of Texas Pan- American

Alexander (Sasha) & Ann Shulgin, noted authors of PIHKAL and TIKAL, Sascha is the creator of hundreds of novel psychedelic compounds, Ann is a renowned psychotherapist.

Paul Stamets, Mycologist and author of "The Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World" and numerous other works of mycology.

Ken Symington, ayahuasca & entheogen expert, translator of The Three Halves of Ino Moxo; also Entheobotany Seminars registrar.

Manuel Torres, Archeologist, art historian and expert on ancient snuff use in the Americas.



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