Pharma-huasca

K, full disclosure: my lab uses psilocybin synthesized in a manner based on A. Hoffman's work on the sacred mushrooms in the late 1950's; the mushrooms were given to him by Gordon Wasson, who received them from Maria Sabina, a Maztec shaman of some fame in our non-native-American society. When given Hoffman's preparation, she said the spirit of Teonanacatl (the little gods, the sacred mushrooms) was in the powder, and it would be useful when the mushrooms were not in season. However, that is someone from another culture speaking of a shared experience; we must translate.

Thankfully, it is now common knowledge that the psychological "set" and the physical "setting" are big players in the nature of a psychodelic experience. (OMG, the spell check accepts the correct spelling of 'psychodelic' right off the bat!) When one has grown up in a world of wires and lights, a person with feathers and smoke is not necessarily going to be the right kind of guide. We used to have priest/healers, now we have psychologists and doctors. I have no argument about which is 'better', but I do want to point out that a Euro-American would likely be most trusting and respectful of someone accomplished in our reductionist philosophy of medicine (a doctor, psychiatrist), rather than someone who holds the markings of another culture's priesthood.

A similar divide must be recognized in this matter of synthetics/non-synthetics. Maria Sabina lived in a world that had not experienced the reductionist philosophy of Descartes, Bacon, and the alchemists; I would guess that to get to where she was, you would want to read a lot of Aristotle and his system of Qualities, then dig into everything you could find on Mayan religion, then erase half of that from your head and pick up the anthropology of the conquering Maztecs... for a start. We deal with neurotransmitters and phamacokinetics, ligands and receptors; the idea of a drug having an alien effect upon a body is a meme of the older system which would not have recognized a meaningful difference between crushed mushroom powder, and the 30mg of white powder we drop into a chalice of water. But we do not live in that world; as primitive as one tries to make themselves, they cannot forget that we *can* make these substances, by something we call 'chemistry'. If you are in our society, you must not think of a psychodelic experience as a "drug effect", we must look at it in a properly reductionist, materialist sense.

We recognize that our bodies create endogenous opioids in order to reduce both immediate and long-term pain, endocannabinoids for long-term potentiation (learning), Acetylcholine for the calming of hunger; when we take morphine, cannabis, or nicotine, we are merely supplying the brain with an excess of what it normally works with. This does allow the mind (brain, I call them the same thing) to achieve an altered state, but one that it *could* reach, given the proper set and setting. (Please, do not think that the above list is anything like a full description of the effects of said neurotransmitters; I am generalizing like mad.)

The deepest psychodelic state, the noetic, is identical to the "peak experiences" as described by Maslow, or the religious mystic states experienced by Joan of Arc, or Meister Eckhart (read both Pahnke's and Griffiths' work for more on this). As such, it is a state which is available to the sober mind; some people have trips which would make Huxley proud merely by laying in bed one night, listening to the street sounds and the wind chimes. This is not a drug effect; to use a term of Huston Smith: the drug occasions the experience. Each of us has the ability to have these experiences, we merely need to become the kind of person who would have the experience wherever we are, or go to the place that would give us such an experience; the drug just relaxes the rules a bit.

-Andrew Byrne
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Community Outreach Coordinator
Psilocybin Cancer Research Project
Johns Hopkins Behavioral Biology Research Unit

Link to study: http://www.cancer-insight.org

I too would hesitate to apply her terminology to our culture; it is not just a matter of using different words to talk about the same thing, but instead that we look at _things_ differently, so that our culture's consciousness categorizes the world in different ways. This is why I am hesitant to talk of shamanic souls in a culture which differentiates between synthetic and non-synthetic, and questions how "drugs" affect "minds".

I will write more later (oh, how I want to!), but am rushed today by dinner and a film crew. However, I want to give you a present. I don't think I can upload .PDFs to this site, but I can upload it to my data site until it gets too popular:
https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu/xythoswfs/webview/_xy-1991302_1?stk=8B3E...

This is an address the late Walter Pahnke (Ph.D, MD, MDiv) gave to the Ingersol community back in the day-o. Background: the "good Friday experiment" was his graduate thesis, he studied the similarity of the psychodelic mystic experience with the spontaneous religious mystic experiences documented in western history--we now think them identical--and was one of the most promising stars in psychodelic research until his tragic death. This lecture is about birth, death, and psychodelic states.

Enjoy.

Good Friday
-Andrew Byrne
--------
Community Outreach Coordinator
Psilocybin Cancer Research Project
Johns Hopkins Behavioral Biology Research Unit

Link to study: http://www.cancer-insight.org

I have often had the sense that chemicals have spirits too. To put it better, I have experienced chemicals to have 'spirits' as part of the psychedelic sensations they engender. Now these are not like plant allies in my understanding...
To explain, some Bjork Lyrics from her song 'Modern Things':
"All the Modern things/Like cars and such/Have always existed
They've just been waiting/In a mountain/For the right moment
Listening to the irritating noises of dinosaurs..."
To me, this makes sense in the context of chemical entheogens. With one particular chemical , over months of usage, I got the sense of a 'spirit' that had waited to millennia to be expressed. It exploded into me with a sense of frustration and relief in a kind of genie-out-of-the-bottle way. Like it had been waiting a looooong time!
Thus the tribal view that such things are somewhat unsafe can be understood: genies out of bottles can be quite overpowerful in their sudden expression, their pent-up millennia-old potential bursting out like a supernova.
Does this make sense to anyone? I am deliberately speaking metaphorically. Chemical 'spirits' is not something I literally believe in but an aspect of my own psychedelic experience which is worth exploring in a model-agnostic kind of way...
Bruce
www.biroz.net

My experience tells me that there are devas who can interact with us more directly when we are in the altered state, and that honoring these devas brings more to the experience. The devas work through the plants themselves, and the closer we are to the plants, the closer we get to the devas.

isnt synthetic a copy .arent originals generally better no matter wat were talkin bout

I don't think it's ever "too late in the game". Like Terence McKenna says, "you don't even want to play in that game, you want to reclaim your mind..." ; )