Shroom's Mystical Properties Confirmed

DdC

Drug's Mystical Properties Confirmed By David Brown
Source: Washington Post July 11, 2006 USA

Psilocybin, the active ingredient of "magic mushrooms," expands the mind. After a thousand years of use, that's now scientifically official. The chemical promoted a mystical experience in two-thirds of people who took it for the first time, according to a new study.

One-third rated a session with psilocybin as the "single most spiritually significant" experience of their lives. Another third put it in the top five.

"As a cancer survivor, I found that humor helped me deal with treatment. Unfortunately, some of my healthy counterparts had trouble with me laughing going through the ordeal. I'm glad to see I was not alone. Whether it be cancer or anything else, we can laugh about it or cry about it why cry?"

The study, published online today in the journal Psychopharmacology, is the first randomized, controlled trial of a substance used for centuries in Mexico and Central America to produce mystical insights. Almost no research on a psychedelic drug in human subjects has been done in this country since the 1960s. It confirms what both shamans and hippies have long said -- taking psilocybin is a scary, reality-bending and occasionally life-changing experience.

The researchers say they hope the experiment opens a door to the study of a class of compounds that alter human perception and erode the boundaries of self -- at least in some users. They hope it will provide new insight into how the brain works and what neurochemical events underlie moments of mystical rapture.

If the generally positive effects of the drug are confirmed by other studies, the research is likely to raise the question of whether people should be allowed access to psilocybin for self-improvement or recreation.

Rigorous study of these substances has been shunned since the 1960s, although it is not legally prohibited. Research on them was a casualty of the muddled mix of science and advocacy by people like Timothy Leary, the LSD guru and former Harvard psychologist once called the "most dangerous man in America" by President Richard M. Nixon.

"Our study has shown we can conduct a study of this type safely, and that the effects produced are really quite interesting," said Roland R. Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who ran the experiment. "There is a clear neuroscience agenda to understand those effects, and clear clinical applications that could be pursued."

Other brain researchers hailed the experiment as much for the fact that it was done at all as for its findings.

"These are some of the most potent compounds we know of that can change consciousness," said David E. Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University who has studied the effects of psychedelics on rats and cultured cells. "It's kind of peculiar they have just been kind of sitting on the shelf for 40 years. There is no other class of biologically active substances I am aware of that have been ignored like that."

The study, which involved 36 middle-aged adults from the Baltimore-Washington area, was conducted over five years. The subjects were chosen from 135 people who answered newspaper ads. All said they were members of a religious organization, practiced meditation or took part in other spiritual activity.

The study was designed to minimize the effects of anticipation and group enthusiasm, which might color a person's response. It also sought to examine the delayed, as well as immediate, effects of the drug.

The volunteers were randomly assigned to take either 30 milligrams of psilocybin (chemically synthesized, not extracted from mushrooms) or 40 milligrams of methylphenidate, the stimulant sold as Ritalin. The sessions lasted eight hours in a room where a person could listen to music, relax on a couch with eyeshades or talk with two monitors always in attendance. Each subject then took the other drug in a different session two months later.

Of the 36 people, 22 had a "complete" mystical experience as judged by several question-based scales used for rating such experiences. Two-thirds judged it to be among their top five life experiences, equal to the birth of a first child or death of a parent. Two months after a session, the people who had taken psilocybin reported small but significant positive changes in behavior and attitudes compared with those who had taken Ritalin.

One-third of the subjects, however, said they experienced "strong or extreme" fear at some point in the hours after they took the hallucinogen. Four people said the entire session was dominated by anxiety or psychological struggle.

Nichols thinks that last finding should give people pause.

"I think these drugs are potentially very dangerous," he said. "I would be very disappointed if in any sense these results were used to encourage recreational use of these compounds. I wouldn't want to take responsibility for anyone under unmonitored conditions coming up with those feelings."

Alan Leshner, who headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse for seven years and now leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was both wary and excited about psilocybin's reported effects.

"If it is ultimately shown to be benign but enriches people's lives, who could object to that? But I don't have that level of confidence at this point, given the paucity of research on it," he said.

A scholar of mysticism, G. William Barnard of Southern Methodist University, suspects that most mystical traditions would not object to the idea that a chemical could allow a person to tune into a preexisting state of consciousness, usually ignored, just as fasting, prayer, yoga and other activities can. But there is less enthusiasm for the idea that this kind of research will unlock the mechanism of mystical insight.

"Most people I suspect would say that the neurochemistry is not the full cause of these experiences," he said.

Note: 36 Area Adults Took Psilocybin in Study; Many Called Experience Spiritual.

Contact: letterstoed@washpost.com * Website

Go Ask Alice: Mushroom Drug Is Studied Anew

Hallucinogen Found To Have Diverse Effects

Counterculture Drug Provides Spiritual Boost

Timothy Leary (1920-1996)

An absolutely unequalled guide for those interested in collecting and potentially using psilocybin containing mushrooms. A wealth of accurate information, beautiful graphics, and sound advice from one of the world's foremost experts on psilocybe mushrooms. With the help of this book, any serious student of the sacred mushroom will be much better equipped to successfully discover, correctly identify, and wisely use these powerful sacraments.

Alice's Adentures in Wonderland (1865) Lewis Caroll

The theme of growing up is central here. Note that without eating any mushrooms, Alice begins to grow. She also barely notices it. Her growth here is a metaphor for gradually growing into an adult. She entered Wonderland as a tiny version of herself, but she will leave a giant.

DdC · Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 6:19 am Post subject:

At any given moment, life is completely senseless.
But viewed over a period,
it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time,
having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963

First LSD Trip Experienced on a Bicycle
Published January 10, 2006 by The Independent

Dr Albert Hofmann was an anonymous Swiss chemist - then he inadvertently created the mind-altering 'psychedelic' drug that would shape popular culture for generations. As he celebrates his 100th birthday, David McCandless hears about the trip of his lifetime

LSD — My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann

Stanislav Grof interviews Dr. Albert Hofmann
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, 1984
Editor's note: This remarkable dialogue from 1984 has never been published. We're printing it now in part to provide historical context for a new effort, in which MAPS is participating, to restart LSD psychotherapy research in the United States. In addition, this dialogue addresses and helps clarify the idealist view of the potential value of psychedelics, when used properly, to help "engender ecological sensitivity, reverence for life, and capacity for peaceful cooperation with other people and other species," qualities that are desperately needed in these times of terrorism and war.

Under the motto “The Spirit of Basel” the Gaia Media Foundation presents
symposiums and congresses to themes and phenomena of human consciousness.

2006 LSD Symposium
Reviews and Impressions from Basel, Switzerland
Submitted by Conference Attendees Jan 2006

Tom Volk's Fungus of the Month for December 1999
This month's fungus is Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric.

The psychedelic secrets of Santa Claus
by Dana Larsen (18 Dec, 2003)

Modern Christmas traditions are based on ancient mushroom-using shamans.

Erowid: Vikings and Mushrooms

These mushrooms were effectively used by the Vikings when they were getting ready to invade a land. The Vikings essentially turned off their fear emotions, thus gaining their reputation for their fierceness. The people of many cultures of northern Europe lived in constant fear of invasion. Vikings would enter a village fearlessly, wreak havoc among the people and carry off the women. Before entering battle, the Vikings would go through a religious ritual in which they would dance around the woods and consume Amanita muscaria. So the main reason the Vikings were able to fight without fear is that they were on drugs! For this reason the Vikings were also known as the berserkers.

There are other cultures that used Amanita muscaria for religious or recreational purposes. The shamans in Siberia used this mushroom, called "mukhomor," to speak to their gods. R. Gordon Wasson wrote a book about this mushrooms (Soma-- the divine mushroom of immortality, 1968, NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) and believed Amanita muscaria to be Soma, which played an important role in Hindu culture and which he believed to have had a marked influence on the development of world religions. Further interesting reading on this would be "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East". --by John M. Allegro, (1970) Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.
Thomas J. Volk, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Magic Mushroom Sites

Erowid Psychoactive Vaults

MUSHROOMS

Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy By Clark Heinrich

CANNABIS

PEYOTE

MESCALINE

AYAHUASCA

D M T

L S D

MDMA (ECSTASY)

The Partnership for Drug Freedom in America supports the preservation and protection of the natural human right to freely choose our food, drink, spice, medicine, sacrament, fiber and other nourishments from the bountiful harvest of planet Earth.

Book Says Nixon Took Mood-Altering Drug
Fixin' Under Nixon!
Fixin' Under Nixon Part Two!
Nixon Launched The 30 Years' War as Election Issue

"I said, in The Natural Mind, that I often have the suspicion that everything that we do in the name of stopping the drug problem is the drug problem. It's not just the laws but the whole mentality that sees drugs as the problem and tries to fight them. By doing that I think we've made it all worse...
Dr. Andrew Weil

Weil Says LSD Cured His Allergy

Andrew Weil on medical uses of Ecstasy, MDMA, by Dan Skeen

Ecstasy Use Studied To Ease Fear in Terminally Ill 12/27/2004

Therapists Hope To Make Case for Ecstasy 8/01/2004

United Nations Drug Report “Disappointing”
XTC using Meth to get results to scare the people into passing the RAVE Ax.

Medical Establishment Cares More About Profits Than People

No Bad Drugs: The Newservice Interview: Dr. Andrew Weil

From Chocolate to Morphine Dr. Andrew Weil
Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs.

Dr. Andrew Weil
www.drweil.com
Mainstream Medicine's Serene Rebel
The New Face Of Medicine
Hemp TV: Dr. Andrew Weil on drug policy at Harvard's Zinberg ...

Dr. Andrew Weil of the University of Arizona College of Medicine states, "There is not a shred of hope from history or from cross-culture studies to suggest that human beings can live without psychoactive substances." Bees drop to the ground after having nectar from certain orchards. Birds get drunk off berries and then fly into windows. After cats sniff certain plants they swing at imaginary objects. Certain range weeds will make cows shake, twitch, and stumble back for more. Elephants purposely get drunk on fermented fruits..."

The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension
Drug War Truce

Kindred Sites

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.
—Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna

Stoned scientists

Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan's Teachings

Revisiting the 60's With One Who Knew
NYT: November 28, 2005
In his prime, the astral singer-songwriter Donovan appeared to take a serene view of show business and its cutthroat ways. Not anymore. Nowadays, Donovan would like you to know that he never received proper credit for Flower Power, World Music, New Age Music, the boxed-set album package, using LSD and the lyric "Love, Love, Love" before the Beatles did and playing folk-rock five months before Bob Dylan wielded an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Lyrics

Beatles

Dylan

Jefferson Airplane

Donovan

Folk, Rock, 60/70's

Bob Marley

Grateful Dead

Internationally, "the war on drugs" provides a cover for intervention. Domestically, it has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties.
—Noam Chomsky, "The war on (certain) drugs"
is What Uncle Sam Really Wants

Noam Chomsky Archives

Noam Chomsky on Renee Boje

Alan Watts

Here and Now

What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come ? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week's meals become "now."

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.-- Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom Of Insecurity

The Lycium

The Schaffer Library

The Vaults of Erowid

Carl Olsen Library

"All war is based on deception."
- Sun Tzu, "The Art of War," circa 500 BC

Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library

Drug Library.Org

Lindesmith Center

Jack Herer Emperor Wears No Cloths

Who are these people? We are the yeast that makes the dough rise. And it's not just us, there's been people like us for centuries. Before there were hippies, there were beatniks, before there beatniks, there were bohemians. The European counterculture ran away from Nazî Germany. They brought hundreds of thousands of artists and musicians and writers into this country. Before that there were people like George Bernard Shaw and Voltaire and all the way back to Socrates. There have always been that fraction of people who have said, "I want to see the truth."
Stephen Gasken Thank God for Hippies

Spirit Web

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.
Timothy Leary
The Politics of Ecstasy

. . . unfortunately, we can't control the actions of everyone.
-- Bill Clinton, April 20, 1993

by Allen Ginsberg

Remember Be Here Now

More people die every year as a result of the war on drugs
than die from what we call, generically, overdosing."
- William F Buckley-

Peter McWilliams Homepage

"When you undergo a visionary experience, what you are really doing is blowing your socially conditioned, 20th century, hive mind and allowing your brain to, literally, come to its senses."
- Steve Kubby, "The Politics Of Consciousness

The Kubby Chronicles

Cannibis News
Marijuanna News

"The drug war is an excuse to murder the poor in campaigns of terror, and steal their land for free-trade style development by multinational corporations."
- Reverend Damuzi, Senior Writer for Cannabis Culture

Demonizing Drugs By Paul Campos

One measure of a drug's dangerousness is the gap between the typical effective dose and the typical fatal dose. By this measure alcohol, which is fatal at a dose about ten times greater than that that produces the initial desired effect in users, is about as dangerous as cocaine and heroin, and vastly more dangerous than LSD or marijuana.

All drugs have both good and bad effects. Alcohol, whose compulsive use plays a part in a certain amount of human self-destruction, enhances the lives of most people who use it. And what is true for alcohol is also true for substances that are no more (and often less) dangerous, but which our government now demonizes, just as liquor was demonized not that long ago.

Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE)
Alchemind Society

The Alchemind Society's Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE) today filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals asking the court to reconsider its recent decision permitting the government to continue forcibly injecting a St. Louis dentist with mind-altering drugs. Dr. Sell is currently being administered drugs against his will in an effort to make him "competent to stand trial" on federal fraud charges.
Continued...alchemind.org/DLL/sell

Forced Drugging OK'd By Federal Court

If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.
President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993

British troops being administered LSD
Black and White educational video clip

MKULTRA: CIA LSD Mind Control

The Frank Olson Murder

excerpted: The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window, is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history.

The documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information were White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, today the nation's vice president and secretary of Defense.

``These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth,'' said the scientist's son, Eric Olson, who gave them to the Mercury News. ``For 22 years there was a coverup. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new coverup.''

“Murder of CIA Scientist”

Bushit Rumcheney Cocktail:Fascist Nationalism and MKULTRA

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- President John F. Kennedy

Ayahuasca.com is a library and community collectively researching the botany, ethnography, mythology, arts, music, therapeutic mechanisms, and phenomenology of the Amazonian Spirit Vine.

Ayahuasca (aya-soul/dead, wasca-vine/rope) or Yage (ya-hey) are native Amazonian names for the jungle vine Banisteriopsis Caapi, and the medicinal tea prepared from it.

Terence McKenna

Erowid : Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca Healing Session by Marlene Dobkin de Rios
Ayahuasca and its Mechanism of Healing by Marlene Dobkin de Rios

Peru seeks tribal cure for addiction - BBC, Nov 5 2003
Ayahuasca as a Possible Treatment for Alcoholism - MNDaily, May 8 2003

Santo Daime Website

Spiritual Traditions - Africa meets Brazil in Florianópolis
11/02/2006
Céu do Patriarca/ Sky of the Patriarch hosts Gogo Numzimane, the Zulu spiritual leader from South Africa.

UDV Santa Fe Church can serve the Sacred Tea in its Christmas service
12/12/2004
Jonathan Goldman comments on the new legal victory obtained by UDV in the US. The Supreme Court granted the permission for the Santa Fe group to use ayahuasca tea as part of its services this Christmas.

The Ritual and Religious Use of Ayahuasca in Contemporary Brazil
- 08/03/2002
New article published in the Archives section: Edward Macrae points out the essential Brazilian elements which formed the Rainforest Doctrine

Announcement
3 of the UK based facilitators, Gary Reich, Sue Minns and Alistair Appleton will be giving a talk on Ayahuasca and the seminars at The Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn from 7-9pm on Feb 9th (Suggested donation of £2).

After the talk they'll also be showing the documentary they made of Alistair's first experiences with the plant (shot at the eco lodge) called &lsquoThe Man Who Drank The Universe&rdquo.

They will also be around afterwards to answer any more specific questions.
Ayahuasca-healing.net was featured in a Sunday Times article Jan 8th. 2006

Ayahuasca Healing.net

Bahian coast Resort Accommodations
The price for this retreat is US$2,300 per person. (There's a 10% discount for couples.)
The price includes: double occupancy room (private quarters may also be available at some retreats and at a slightly higher price. Please inquire), all activities including excursions, workshops and meals. The plant ceremonies are free to attendees of the retreat. NOT included in this price: airfare, airport taxes or transportation to the hotel, tips, laundry.

Ayahuasca-shamanism

Shamanic Journeys In The Amazon
Ayahuasca Retreats, Shamanic Journeys, Healing and Plant Spirit Medicine (teacher Plants Diets) In The Amazon Rainforest Of Peru

Ayahuasca SpiritQuest

Ayahuasca Art and Craft

Scientists Test Hallucinogens for Mental Ills
Dying patients given LSD have reported less pain and less fear, he said. Ayahuasca (a Brazilian plant extract) and peyote (derived from cactus) have reportedly helped alcoholics stay sober. "We now know a lot about how they work in the brain, but we have not begun to investigate their potential for treating brain disorders,"

Supreme Court Will Revisit Exercise of Religion

Is Taking Psychedelics an Act of Sedition?
The disturbances of Sept. 11 have sent us reeling, driving many to seek relief from anxiety and depression through socially sanctioned psychotropics such as Prozac, Xanax, and alcohol. But some of the so-called psychedelic drugs (cannabis, LSD, peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and MDMA or Ecstasy), targets of America's deeply misguided war on drugs, could have a more profound and healthful effect, if used responsibly.

Only The Stoners Will Survive

...we condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakeable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.
June Jordan

Freedom
"Our programme is cultural revolution thorugh a total assault on culture, which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on... our culture, our art, our music, our books, our posters, our clothing, the way our hair grows long, the way we smoke dope and •••• and eat and sleep-it's all one message-the message is freedom"
-John Sinclair (1969)

Marijuana Revolution by John Sinclair (Thread)

The John and Leni Sinclair Papers, 1957-1999

John Sinclair by John Lennon

It ain't fair, John Sinclair
In the stir for breathing air
Won't you care for John Sinclair?
In the stir for breathing air
Let him be, set him free
Let him be like you and me.

They gave him ten for two
What else can the judges do?
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta
gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta
Gotta, gotta set him free!

Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into two categories: items purchasable for supposed pleasure (such as alcohol), and illicit drugs. The categories were once reversed. Opiates were legal in America before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who campaigned against alcohol during the day, drank their valued "women's tonics" at night, products laced with laudanum (tincture of opium)

The Merry Pranksters

Shameless Shaman
So what was Kesey, devil or deity? Conservatives decry his flabbergastingly irresponsible acid evangelism; when he died two years ago, eulogists stressed his saintly side. Now that his celebrated bus, Further, has long since literally conveyed him to the grave, it's a better time to put Kesey to the moral acid test: He belongs to the ages, not his mourners, and this winter marks his literary last stand.

Kesey's Jail Journal
IntrepidTrips
'Kesey's Jail Journal' Published
Author Ken Kesey, 66, Dies; Led '60s Bus Ride

**Torkel** · Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 10:46 am Post subject:

Thank you for taking the time and effort in putting these vital posts together.

Smile

Peace,
Torkel
_________________
Miller vs U.S. (230 F 2nd 486,489): "The claim and exercise of a Constitutional right cannot be converted into a crime."

Miranda vs Arizona (384 U.S. 436, 125): "Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule-making or legislation which would abrogate them."

HAGANS vs LAVINE (415 US 533 N-3,note 5): "Once JURISDICTION is challenged it must be proven by the Plaintiff."

**Ferre** · Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 1:59 pm Post subject:

Thank you from me too Brother DdC.

Isn't it funny that only now, anno 2006, 'scientists' confirm what Shamans and millions of other people already knew for at least a couple of thousand years?

Isn't it funny that only now, anno 2006, 'scientists' found out about something that is the subject of numerous books that were printed already since printing was invented, and has been and still is, the essence and basic practise of numerous religions since the dawn of time?

Laughing

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People who know truth, speak truth.
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