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January 1 - January 19, 2021
Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938,
psilocybin, had been used by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America for hundreds of years as a sacrament. Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs, or “flesh of the gods,”
The advent of LSD can be linked to the revolution in brain science that begins in the 1950s, when scientists discovered the role of neurotransmitters in the brain.
One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.
Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place. Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.
Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.
“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”
Kids’ perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is; as adults, she explained, our minds don’t simply take in the world as it is so much as they make educated guesses about it. Relying on these guesses, which are based on past experience, saves the mind time and energy, as when, say, it’s trying to figure out what that fractal pattern of green dots in its visual field might be.
LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (Leaves!)
The study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe.
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego—that may be the key to changing one’s mind.
There is not a culture on earth (well, one*) that doesn’t make use of certain plants to change the contents of the mind, whether as a matter of healing, habit, or spiritual practice.
over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.
Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner.
The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.
The whole idea of expanding our repertoire of conscious states is not an entirely new idea: Hinduism and Buddhism are steeped in it, and there are intriguing precedents even in Western science.
IF EVERYDAY WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS is but one of several possible ways to construct a world, then perhaps there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity.
Despite the 1960s trappings, the term “psychedelic,” coined in 1956, is etymologically accurate. Drawn from the Greek, it means simply “mind manifesting,” which is precisely what these extraordinary molecules hold the power to do.
Ergot is a fungus that can infect grain, often rye, occasionally causing those who consume bread made from it to appear mad or possessed.
Once the acute effects wore off, Hofmann felt the “afterglow” that frequently follows a psychedelic experience, the exact opposite of a hangover.
“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”
Dalai Lama had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without question by most scientists—“is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.”
Grof began teaching instead something called Holotropic Breathwork, a technique for inducing a psychedelic state of consciousness without drugs, by means of deep, rapid, and rhythmic breathing, usually accompanied by loud drumming.
The first is that the experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—that is, not just a figment of the imagination.
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.”
consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.
“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”
The flight instructions advise guides to use mantras like “Trust the trajectory” and “TLO—Trust, Let Go, Be Open.” Some guides like to quote John Lennon: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”
“The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.”
The idea that we can now approach mystical states of consciousness with the tools of science is what gets Roland Griffiths out of bed in the morning. “As a scientific phenomenon, if you can create a condition in which 70 percent of people will say they have had one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives . . . well, as a scientist that’s just incredible.”
“The Johns Hopkins experiment shows—proves—that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it does so in the very teeth of the unscientific prejudices built into our current drug laws.”
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”
Why did they evolve the ability to produce a chemical compound so closely related to serotonin, the neurotransmitter, that it can slip across the blood-brain barrier and temporarily take charge of the mammalian brain?
One could reasonably conclude from the action of psychedelics that the gods are nothing more than chemically induced figments of the hominid imagination.
The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.
the vast web of mycelia in the soil as “Earth’s natural Internet”—a redundant, complexly branched, self-repairing, and scalable communications network linking many species over tremendous distances.
The mycelia in a forest do link the trees in it, root to root, not only supplying them with nutrients, but serving as a medium that conveys information about environmental threats and allows trees to selectively send nutrients to other trees in the forest.* A forest is a far more complex, sociable, and intelligent entity than we knew, and it is fungi that organize the arboreal society.
Psilocybes are saprophytes, living off dead plant matter and dung.
They are denizens of disturbed land, popping up most often in the habitats created by ecological catastrophe, such as landslides, floods, storms, and volcanoes. They also prosper in the ecological catastrophes caused by our species: clear-cut forests, road cuts, the wakes of bulldozers, and agriculture. (Several species live in and fruit from the manure of ruminants.)
“If a gilled mushroom has purplish brown to black spores, and the flesh bruises bluish, the mushroom in question is very likely a psilocybin-producing species.”
Altered States of Consciousness, that made a tremendous impression on Paul. Edited by Charles T. Tart, a psychologist, the book is a doorstop of an anthology of scholarly writings about non-ordinary mental states, covering the spectrum from dreaming and hypnosis to meditation and psychedelics.
teonanácatl—the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs and their descendants—as well as ololiuqui, the seeds of the morning glory, which the Aztecs also consumed sacramentally and which contain an alkaloid closely related to LSD.
In 1620, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the use of plants for divination was “an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith.”
The Nahuatl word for the mushrooms—flesh of the gods—must have sounded to Spanish ears like a direct challenge to the Christian Sacrament, which of course was also understood to be the flesh of the gods, or rather of the one God.
the mushrooms “carry you there where god is.”
“In man’s evolutionary past . . . there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell . . . One is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of a God.”
Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,” and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.” This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become
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In McKenna’s vision, it is the mushroom itself that helped form precisely the kind of mind—endowed with the tools of language and fired by imagination—that could best advance its interests.
Foraging mushrooms is prohibited in most state parks, and being in possession of psilocybin mushrooms is both a state and a federal crime.
mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.
