More Mushrooms

Author Simon G. Powell

Just read a great article over at Reality Sandwich, reviewing Simon Powell's The Psilocybin Solution: The Role of Sacred Mushrooms in the Quest for Meaning. For those with a little patience this is actually a good article even for newbies. A lot of basics are covered here, including the idea that hallucinogens don't so much 'cause us to hallucinate, as to experience data our brain normally filters.

Considering that some people report encountering other intelligences while under the influence of psilocybin, this is pretty extreme stuff. What I like about this article is that it takes a long hard look at the possibility that such altered states allow us to, essentially, download huge amounts of information in a very short—even sudden—manner. The article further focuses on the idea that psilocybin allows users to another purer, more direct language than the one we normally use—a language of images and, even, matter.

"…language is essentially an informational system not restricted to words alone. Language, in the abstract way in which I refer to it, is a system of informational elements bearing definite relations with one another; hence a language of words, of molecules, of symbols, and so forth."