(TMU) — In a vast stride forward for the nationwide movement to legalize psilocybin—or “magic” mushrooms—the Oakland City Council has voted unanimously to decriminalize natural psychedelics—including mushrooms—making the major California Bay Area city the second city in the United States to do so.The resolution orders law enforcement to immediately halt the investigation and prosecution of those who use the drugs and applies to psychedelics that derive from plants and fungi, including psilocybin mushrooms and the psychedelic plants ayahuasca, cacti and iboga. The law will not apply to synthetic drugs like LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), or other manmade chemicals.The move comes one month after voters in Denver approved the decriminalization of psilocybin mushrooms, halting the use of city resources to pursue criminal penalties for people over 21 who use or possess magic mushrooms.
Following the vote in Oakland, 100 supporters rose from their chairs, clapping and cheering for the move, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nicolle Greenheart, co-founder of Decriminalize Nature Oakland, said:
“I don’t have words, I could cry … I’m thrilled. I’m glad that our communities will now have access to the healing medicines and we can start working on healing our communities.”
Save the date and spread the word!!! June 4th, 2019! We will start gathering at 7pm to prepare for the final City Council vote to #DecriminalizeNature#Oakland! There is room for more than 2-300 people with overflow, let’s pack the house! pic.twitter.com/0Db4xARHFt
— Decriminalize Nature (@DecrimNature) May 31, 2019
In addition to demanding that police halt the policing of the drugs, the resolution also instructs state and federal lobbyists from Oakland to push a decriminalization agenda. The resolution further calls for the Alameda County district attorney’s officials to “cease prosecution of persons involved in the use of Entheogenic Plants or plant-based compounds” that are presently listed in Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act.
The resolution was championed by Councilman Noel Gallo, who introduced it after meeting with Decriminalize Nature, supporters of the use of natural psychedelics for mental health and people’s wellbeing.
Gallo told the Chronicle that the move is a strong step toward legitimizing the medicinal use of the plants, explaining:
“My grandmother took care of us. She didn’t go to Walgreens to heal us spiritually and physically, she did it out of plants we use as Native Americans.”
The Oakland City Council listened to the testimonies of 30 people who emphatically laid out how psilocybin helped them deal with mental health disorders including depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma, according toUSA Today.
During public comment, one woman said:
“I wasn’t really living a life, I was so disconnected … it was hard for me to survive everyday. It has helped me reach deep inside my soul and helped cure damage that had been done to me.”
Another man who explained that he struggled with heroin addiction said:
“It was the most beautiful and life-changing thing that ever happened to me.”
The council president, Rebecca Kaplan, thanked supporters of the resolution for sharing their “deep and personal and profound” stories.
An amendment to the resolution clarifies that it does not authorize the commercial sale or manufacture of the plants, possession or distribution in schools, or driving while under the influence of the psychedelic drugs.
The amendment also explains that potential users of psychedelics who are in the throes of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should first consult with a doctor before taking a dose, adding that natural psychedelics should be used in small doses for inexperienced users and “don’t go solo.”
The move comes as a growing body of research has laid out the benefits of magic mushrooms. Recent studies have shown how a microdose of psilocybin—far from the level needed for a full-blown trip—actually increases the creativity and empathy of participants. Advocates note that psilocybin has shown great promise in psychotherapeutic settings, shattering the decades-old stereotype of magic mushrooms as some intoxicating and hallucination-inducing party drug that drives its users insane.
Speaking before last week’s public safety committee, Councilman Gallo explained:
“We want to be able to provide another medical service… to be able to help us at home and that is what this is all about … And it’s nothing new. It’s been happening for thousands of years in different countries, in different spiritual backgrounds.”
The passage of the resolution comes amid a wave of activism supporting policy changes that would decriminalize natural psychedelics, with similar efforts advancing in the state of Iowa along with efforts to place a psilocybin legalization measure on the ballot in Oregon.
“Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote in her inquiry into how our conditioned way of looking narrows the lens of our perception. Attention, after all, is the handmaiden of consciousness, and consciousness the central fact and the central mystery of our creaturely experience. From the days of Plato’s cave to the birth of neuroscience, we have endeavored to fathom its nature. But it is a mystery that only seems to deepen with each increment of approach. “Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his landmark 1902 treatise on spirituality, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
Half a century after James, two new molecules punctured the filmy screen to unlatch a portal to a wholly novel universe of consciousness, shaking up our most elemental assumptions about the nature of the mind, our orientation toward mortality, and the foundations of our social, political, and cultural constructs. One of these molecules — lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD — was a triumph of twentieth-century science, somewhat accidentally synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the year physicist Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission. The other — the compound psilocin, known among the Aztecs as “flesh of the gods” — was the rediscovery of a substance produced by a humble brown mushroom, which indigenous cultures across eras and civilizations had been incorporating into their spiritual rituals since ancient times, and which the Roman Catholic Church had violently suppressed and buried during the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Together, these two molecules commenced the psychedelic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, frothing the stream of consciousness — a term James coined — into a turbulent existential rapids. Their proselytes included artists, scientists, political leaders, and ordinary people of all stripes. Their most ardent champions were the psychiatrists and physicians who lauded them as miracle drugs for salving psychic maladies as wide-ranging as anxiety, addition, and clinical depression. Their cultural consequence was likened to that of to the era’s other cataclysmic disruptor: the atomic bomb.
And then — much thanks to Timothy Leary’s reckless handling of his Harvard psilocybin studies that landed him in prison, where Carl Sagan sent him cosmic poetry — a landslide of moral panic and political backlash outlawed psychedelics, shut down clinical studies of their medical and psychiatric uses, and drove them into the underground. For decades, academic research into their potential for human flourishing languished and nearly perished. But a small subset of scientists, psychiatrists, and amateur explorers refused to relinquish their curiosity about that potential.
The 1990s brought a quiet groundswell of second-wave interest in psychedelics — a resurgence that culminated with a 2006 paper reporting on studies at Johns Hopkins, which had found that psilocybin had occasioned “mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and significance” for terminally ill cancer patients — experiences from which they “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” In other words, the humble mushroom compound had helped people face the ultimate frontier of existence — their own mortality — with unparalleled equanimity. The basis of the experience, researchers found, was a sense of the dissolution of the personal ego, followed by a sense of becoming one with the universe — a notion strikingly similar to Bertrand Russell’s insistence that a fulfilling life and a rewarding old age are a matter of “[making] your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
More clinical experiments followed at UCLA, NYU, and other leading universities, demonstrating that this psilocybin-induced dissolution of the ego, extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve in our ordinary consciousness, has profound benefits in rewiring the faulty mental mechanisms responsible for disorders like alcoholism, anxiety, and depression.
One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the “neural correlates” of the sense of self and spiritual experience.
Pollan reflects on the psilocybin studies of cancer patients, which reignited scientific interest in psychedelics, and the profound results of subsequent studies exploring the use of psychedelics in treating mental illness, including addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder:
What was most remarkable about the results… is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.” Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly. The volunteers reported significant improvements in their “personal well-being, life satisfaction and positive behavior change,” changes that were confirmed by their family members and friends.
[…]
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.
Pollan approaches his subject as a science writer and a skeptic endowed with equal parts rigorous critical thinking and openminded curiosity. In a sentiment evocative of physicist Alan Lightman’s elegant braiding of the numinous and the scientific, he echoes Carl Sagan’s views on the mystery of reality and examines his own lens:
My default perspective is that of the philosophical materialist, who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens. I start from the assumption that nature is all that there is and gravitate toward scientific explanations of phenomena. That said, I’m also sensitive to the limitations of the scientific-materialist perspective and believe that nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.
Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience — something that turned on nothing more than the ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper — could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how one thought about mortality? Actually change one’s mind in enduring ways?
The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room — the room of your own mind — that you had somehow never noticed before and being told by people you trusted (scientists!) that a whole other way of thinking — of being! — lay waiting on the other side. All you had to do was turn the knob and enter. Who wouldn’t be curious? I might not have been looking to change my life, but the idea of learning something new about it, and of shining a fresh light on this old world, began to occupy my thoughts. Maybe there was something missing from my life, something I just hadn’t named.
Art by Maurice Sendak from Kenny’s Window — his forgotten first children’s book.
The root of this unnamed dimension of existence, Pollan suggests, is the inevitable narrowing of perspective that takes place as we grow up and learn to navigate the world by cataloguing its elements into mental categories that often fail to hold the complexity and richness of the experiences they name — an impulse born out of our longing for absolutes in a relative world. Psychedelics break down these artificial categories and swing open the doors of perception — to borrow William Blake’s famous phrase later famously appropriated by Aldous Huxley as the slogan of the first-wave psychedelic revolution — so that life can enter our consciousness in its unfiltered, unfragmented completeness. In consequence, we view the world — the inner world and the outer world — with a child’s eyes.
Pollan writes:
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.
A century after William James examined how habit gives shape and structure to our lives, Pollan considers the other edge of the sword — how habit can constrict us in a prison of excessive structure, blinding us to the full view of reality:
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. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.)
[…]
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.
One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful — wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.
Psychedelics, Pollan argues, eject us from our habitual consciousness to invite a pure experience of reality that calls to mind Jeanette Winterson’s notion of “active surrender” and Emerson’s exultation in “the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity.” Pollan arrives at this conclusion not only by surveying the history of and research on psychedelics, but by conducting a series of carefully monitored experiments on himself — he travels the world to meet with mycologists, shamans, and trained facilitators, and to experience first-hand the most potent psychedelics nature and the chemistry lab have produced, from the psilocybin mushroom to LSD to the smoked venom of a desert toad.
Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
Together with his wife, Judith, he ingests a psilocybin mushroom he himself has picked from the woods of the Pacific Northwest with the mycologist Paul Stamets, author of the foundational guide to psilocybin mushrooms. Pollan reflects on the perplexity of the experience:
In a certain light at certain moments, I feel as though I had had some kind of spiritual experience. I had felt the personhood of other beings in a way I hadn’t before; whatever it is that keeps us from feeling our full implication in nature had been temporarily in abeyance. There had also been, I felt, an opening of the heart, toward my parents, yes, and toward Judith, but also, weirdly, toward some of the plants and trees and birds and even the damn bugs on our property. Some of this openness has persisted. I think back on it now as an experience of wonder and immanence.
The fact that this transformation of my familiar world into something I can only describe as numinous was occasioned by the eating of a little brown mushroom that Stamets and I had found growing on the edge of a parking lot in a state park on the Pacific coast — well, that fact can be viewed in one of two ways: either as an additional wonder or as support for a more prosaic and materialist interpretation of what happened to me that August afternoon. According to one interpretation, I had had “a drug experience,” plain and simple. It was a kind of waking dream, interesting and pleasurable but signifying nothing. The psilocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events that, among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired with my visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants and insects in my field of vision.
Not quite a hallucination, “projection” is probably the psychological term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so that they appear to glisten with meaning. T. S. Eliot called these things and situations the “objective correlatives” of human emotion.
Pollan finds in the experience an affirmation of James’s notion that we possess different modes of consciousness separated from our standard waking consciousness by a thin and permeable membrane. The psychedelic puncturing of that membrane, he suggests, is what people across the ages have considered “mystical experiences.” But they are purely biochemical, devoid of the divine visitations ascribed to them:
I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight… Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.
[…]
Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural — of God, of a Beyond — but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think.
After another psychedelic journey on the drug LSD, which left him with “a cascading dam break of love” for everyone from his wife to his grandmother to his awkward childhood music teacher, Pollan reflects on some of the things he had said during the experience, recorded by his guide, and the limitations of language in conveying the depth and dimension of the feelings stirred in him. A century after William James listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences, Pollan writes:
It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.
Psychedelics, Pollan’s experience suggests, can be a potent antidote to our conditioned cynicism — that habitual narrowing and hardening of the soul, to which we resort as a maladaptive coping mechanism amid the chaos and uncertainty of life, a kind of defensive cowardice reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt’s indictment that “the poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.” Half a century after psychedelics evangelist Aldous Huxley confronted our fear of the obvious with the assertion that “all great truths are obvious truths,” Pollan writes:
Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious… For what after all is the sense of banality, or the ironic perspective, if not two of the sturdier defenses the adult ego deploys to keep from being overwhelmed — by our emotions, certainly, but perhaps also by our senses, which are liable at any time to astonish us with news of the sheer wonder of the world. If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled “Known,” to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and “Novel,” to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn’t that anymore. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we’ve seen and felt it all before.
Pollan’s reflections bear undertones of the concept of complementarity in quantum physics. But perhaps more than anything, in widening the lens of his attention to include all beings and the whole of the universe, his psychedelic experience calls to mind philosopher Simone Weil. After what she considered a point of contact with the divine — a mystical experience she had while reciting George Herbert’s poem Love III — Weil wrote that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer, [for] it presupposes faith and love.”
In a passage that calls to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stunning description of the transcendent state between wakefulness and sleep, Pollan writes:
Because the acid had not completely dissolved my ego, I never completely lost the ability to redirect the stream of my consciousness or the awareness it was in fact mine. But the stream itself felt distinctly different, less subject to will or outside interference. It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we’re poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness. The ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gentle eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended indefinitely, yet with some ability to direct your attention to this or that, as if in an especially vivid and absorbing daydream. Unlike a daydream, however, you are fully present to the contents of whatever narrative is unfolding, completely inside it and beyond the reach of distraction. I had little choice but to obey the daydream’s logic, its ontological and epistemological rules, until, either by force of will or by the fresh notes of a new song, the mental channel would change and I would find myself somewhere else entirely.
Echoing Hannah Arendt’s distinction between thought and cognition, in which she asserted that “thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency,” Pollan adds:
For me it felt less like a drug experience… than a novel mode of cognition, falling somewhere between intellection and feeling.
[…]
Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats’s “negative capability” — the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness (literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or — it comes to the same thing — widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness — that platitude — is felt, becomes flesh. Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.
Looking back on his theoretical and empirical investigation — his research on the ancient history and modern science of psychedelics; his interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, mycologists, hospice patients, and ordinary psychonauts; his own experience with a variety of these substances and his sometimes meticulous, sometimes messy field notes on the interiority of his mind under their influence — Pollan writes:
The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress. But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty… That stingy, vigilant security guard admits only the narrowest bandwidth of reality… It’s really good at performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
What of the world it does admit it tends to objectify, for the ego wants to reserve the gifts of subjectivity to itself. That’s why it fails to see that there is a whole world of souls and spirits out there, by which I simply mean subjectivities other than our own. It was only when the voice of my ego was quieted by psilocybin that I was able to sense that the plants in my garden had a spirit too.
Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
It is a notion evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin’s conception of poetry as a means to “subjectifying the universe” — a counterpoint to the way science objectifies it. “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates,” Le Guin wrote. Perhaps psychedelics, then, are a portal to the poetic truth that resides beyond scientific fact — the kind of transcendence Rachel Carson found in beholding the marvels of bioluminescence, “one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves.” Such a feeling radiates beyond the walls of the ego-bound self and into a deep sense of belonging to the whole of nature, part and particle of the universe.
Pollan writes:
The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry — that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic — that is, more spiritual — idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.
[…]
One of the gifts of psychedelics is the way they reanimate the world, as if they were distributing the blessings of consciousness more widely and evenly over the landscape, in the process breaking the human monopoly on subjectivity that we moderns take as a given. To us, we are the world’s only conscious subjects, with the rest of creation made up of objects; to the more egotistical among us, even other people count as objects. Psychedelic consciousness overturns that view, by granting us a wider, more generous lens through which we can glimpse the subject-hood — the spirit! — of everything, animal, vegetable, even mineral, all of it now somehow returning our gaze. Spirits, it seems, are everywhere. New rays of relation appear between us and all the world’s Others.
In the remainder of the immensely fascinating How to Change Your Mind, Pollan goes on to explore the neuroscience of what actually happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, how such a temporary rewiring of the cognitive apparatus can translate into enduring psychological change and precipitate profound personal growth, and why this breaking down of “the usually firm handshake between brain and world” may be particularly palliative to those perched on the precipice of mortality. Complement it with Albert Camus on consciousness and the lacuna between truth and meaning, then revisit William James’s trailblazing treatise on the limits of materialism.
A small, experimental study from researchers at Imperial College-London suggests that in addition to helping treat depression, psychedelic mushrooms may actually reduce politically authoritarian leanings.
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of Psychedelic Research at the Centre for Neuropsychopharmacology, Division of Brain Sciences, led a small investigation into the effects of mushrooms on seven individuals with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). The results, titled “Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression,” were published last week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Citing previous research showing psychedelic use can alter personality traits, attitudes, and beliefs, Carhart-Harris and Ph.D. student Taylor Lyons set out to examine changes in attitudes toward nature and politics. According to their summary, they “compared the effects of psilocybin on nature relatedness and libertarian–authoritarian political perspective in patients with TRD versus healthy control subjects.” Patients who received psilocybin treatment each had two doses a week apart.
The participants’ views were all evaluated “at baseline and then again at the 1 week and 7-12-months follow-ups” using a Libertarian-Authoritarian political survey, as well as a nature-relatedness survey.
The study authors found that with regard to nature-relatedness, their “results suggest that psilocybin therapy increases the subjective sense of connectedness to nature 1 week after treatment, and that these effects are sustained for at least 7–12 months.”
“Before I enjoyed nature, now I feel part of it. Before I was looking at it as a thing, like TV or a painting… [But now I see] there’s no separation or distinction, you are it,” said one participant.
They also found that one week after treatment, dosed subjects with TRD “had depressive symptoms were significantly reduced to levels more comparable with controls.”
Further, “Patients showed a significant decrease in authoritarian political perspective 1 week after psilocybin treatment,” the authors summarized, noting that “results suggest that psilocybin therapy may persistently decrease authoritarian attitudes post-treatment with psilocybin.” They cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions and advised that “further research is required to test the robustness of this relationship.”
Carhart and Lyons advocated more investigation for reasons including the small sample size of their study, the potential of other factors besides psilocybin to influence the results, and gender disparities between the TRD and control groups (there were more men in the TRD group and more women in the control group).
Nevertheless, they pointed to the historical relationship between psychedelic use and breaking away from authoritarian beliefs, also citing the relevance of their most recent study:
“Psychedelic drug use in the 1960s and 1970s was strongly associated with anti-establishment and egalitarian counter-culture movements (Nichols, 2016), yet very little controlled research has investigated the link between psychedelic use and political perspectives. Here we show for the first time, in a controlled study, lasting changes in political values after exposure to a psychedelic drug. This is in line with early research showing that recreational LSD users score higher on attitudes of ‘personal liberty’ and ‘foreign policy liberalism’ than control subjects.”
A revolutionary new study is once again revealing a natural approach to be far superior to big pharma solutions—this time involving psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.
The study, published in the scientific journal Neuropharmacology, found that clinically depressed people had increased neural responses to fearful faces one day after a psilocybin-assisted therapy session, which positively predicted positive clinical outcomes.
“Psilocybin-assisted therapy might mitigate depression by increasing emotional connection,” neuroscientist and study author Leor Roseman, a Ph.D. student at Imperial College London, explained to PsyPost.
This is almost the exact opposite of how standard anti-depressants operate, as SSRI’s typically work by creating an “emotional blunting.”
“[T]his is unlike SSRI antidepressants which are criticized for creating in many people a general emotional blunting,” noted Roseman.
“I believe that psychedelics hold a potential to cure deep psychological wounds, and I believe that by investigating their neuropsychopharmacological mechanism, we can learn to understand this potential,” explained Roseman.
The study examined 20 individuals diagnosed with moderate-to-severe treatment-resistant depression, in an effort to investigate how psilocybin would affect brain activity and chronic depressive symptoms.
Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, has long been known to deliver therapeutic effects to people with depression, and researchers think this is because the drug helps to revive emotional responsiveness in the brain.
What’s so remarkable is this kind of mechanism is actually the opposite effect of a major class of antidepressants used to treat the condition, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
Some of the same researchers, in a previous study, revealed that psilocybin seems to ‘reset’ brain circuits in depressed people. In that study, patients reported the benefits of psilocybin lasted up to five weeks after ending the treatment.
In the most recent study, researchers set out to determine the impact of psilocybin on the amygdala—a primitive part of the brain that helps process emotional reactions—as well as the compound’s effects on depression.
The study’s participants underwent fMRI brain scans prior to taking the drug.
The participants were then involved in two individual sessions, one week apart, in which they took doses of psilocybin prior to undergoing another fMRI the morning after consuming the second dose.
Science Alert went on to report:
During the fMRI scans, the group were shown images of faces with either fearful, happy, or neutral expressions, and the researchers wanted to investigate what effect these faces had on the participants’ amygdala after taking psilocybin.
After the experiment, the majority of patients reported that the psilocybin had eased their depressive symptoms, with almost half the group still seeing benefits from the treatment five weeks later – in line with the kinds of benefits other depression studies using the drug have shown.
More intriguingly, the fMRI scans showed the drug heightened activity in the right amygdala, with increased responses to both fearful and happy faces – and the increases to fearful faces were predictive of clinical improvements in depressive symptoms one week after the experiment.
“The major caveats are a lack of control group, a lack of SSRI group, and that the time point of investigation is only one day after the psilocybin session and not more than that. All of these caveats will be addressed in our next trial,” Roseman told PsyPost.
Revealing a major problem with the current pharmaceutical treatments model for depression, which attempts to negate emotional receptivity using SSRIs—the alleviation of depression using psilocybin is achieved by increasing emotional receptivity.
“It is important to emphasize that psilocybin-assisted therapy is a model in which the patient is undergoing a deep psychological process in one or few psychedelic sessions, in which he might have an intense cathartic experience, or peak experience,” Roseman explained.
A dose of psilocybin was administered in a controlled setting while professionals are on hand to provide the patients with psychological support. Typically, the patients receive counseling before and after each session, in an effort to assist them in preparing for, and integrating, their psychedelic experience.
“This is unlike antidepressants which are given as chronic pharmacological intervention with less psychological insights,” Roseman noted.
It is important to note that the study clearly shows that increased emotional receptivity being enhanced alleviates depression—almost the exact opposite of how SSRI antidepressants operate.
Please share this important information with someone who could benefit from this revolutionary treatment for depression!
Psychedelic Renaissance Is Bringing An Era of Incredible Natural Medicine
Every few years, there is a surge in scientific interest followed by breathless proclamations of the long-awaited psychedelic renaissance. It is now entering a new stage, with a series of startling insights gracing the pages of leading journals and clinical trials making progress.
The story always follows the same arc: psychedelic therapy showed huge promise in the 1950s, was crushed by the establishment in the late 1960s and is now being revived by a group of fearless visionaries. In five years, 10 at the most, doctors will be routinely prescribing LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and other psychedelic drugs for a range of conditions.
More researchers are accepting the power of psychedelics with unprecedented potential to treat disease and psychological trauma, but most of all, to reorganize the brain and shift thought patterns.
“Psychedelics” are substances with the ability to expand human awareness beyond our normal modes of perception. Some may be the most amazing substances known to humanity, so potent that just 1/10,000th of a gram can send one on a journey beyond time and space, beyond life and death.
On the back of encouraging results from clinical trials and brain scans, scientists are again confidently asserting that psychedelics are on the verge of medical approval.
“Scientists are again making confident assertions that psychedelics are on the verge of medical approval”
So is it really different this time? We cannot know the future, but there are a number of reasons to believe that psychedelic medicine really can break out of its ghetto and into the mainstream.
One is that the grey-suited establishment is more receptive than it was a decade ago. Back then, psychedelic research operated under a cloud, always scratching around for money and constantly butting up against onerous drug laws. But the times they are a-changin’, with money flowing from mainstream sources and noises emanating from the US Food and Drug Administration and others about loosening the regulatory straitjacket. Can it be a coincidence that the people now occupying positions of power lived through the acid, ecstasy and shroom-fuelled youth culture of the late 80s and early 90s?
More still needs to be done. The law remains excessively tight: psychedelics are still schedule 1 drugs, which means they have no acknowledged uses in medicine. The onus is on scientists to show conclusively that they do.
Some of the scientists also need to embrace the system rather than pushing against it. Talk to many a psychedelics researcher and it doesn’t take long to hear complaints of risk-averse funders and regulators. Enough. The outlaw-maverick pose was once an asset in this field; it is increasingly becoming a liability.
It may transpire that, as with so many drugs, the early promise melts away under the glare of full-scale clinical trials. Such is life in pharma research. What must not be allowed to happen is for these promising and much-needed drugs to fail for anything other than the purest of scientific reasons.
While the psychedelic state has been previously compared with dreaming, the opposite effect has been observed in the brain network from which we get our sense of “self” (called the default-mode network or ego-system). Put simply, while activity became “louder” in the emotion system, it became more disjointed and so “quieter” in the ego system.
The first study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, revealed decreases in brain activity after injection of psilocybin that were localized to the default-mode network.
It’s hard to argue. Mental illness has reached crisis proportions, yet we still have no clear links between psychiatric diagnoses and what’s going on in the brain — and no effective new classes of drugs. There is one group of compounds that shows promise. They seem to be capable of alleviating symptoms for long periods, in some cases with just a single dose. The catch is that these substances, known as psychedelics, have been outlawed for decades.
A psychedelic renaissance has been feted many times, without ever delivering on the high hopes. But this time feels different. Now there is a growing band of respected scientists whose rigorous work is finally bearing fruit — not only in terms of benefits for patients, but also unprecedented insights into how psychedelics reset the brain. If the latest results stand up to closer scrutiny, they will transform the way we understand and treat mental illnesses.
“The psychedelic revival is finally bearing fruit with a series of startling results”
In the meantime, treatment for depression, the most common mental illness, came to be dominated by drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which boost levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in synapses by blocking its reabsorption by neurons. Their success in early trials fuelled the idea that depression is caused by a deficiency in serotonin. But recently, this idea has been called into question, as more and more studies suggest SSRIs aren’t as effective as we thought.
That comes as no surprise to many psychiatrists. Despite their ubiquity — 8.5 percent of people in the US take them — SSRIs work for just 1 in 5 people. Even when they do work, there are problems, not least that coming off the drugs brings severe side effects. The picture is no less grim for other mental illnesses: there is a chronic shortage of new treatments and precious few ideas about where fresh options might come from.
MDMA, better known as the party drug ecstasy, is the furthest along. Although not a classic psychedelic in that it doesn’t induce hallucinations, MDMA works by flooding the brain with serotonin, which makes users feel euphoric. These mood-altering effects are the reason researchers became interested in using it as a tool to assist psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
PTSD will affect roughly 7 percent of people in the US at some point in their lives. The most effective treatment involves memory reconsolidation. People are asked to recall traumatic events so that their memories of them can be stripped of fearful associations by processing them in a new way. The problem is that recall can sometimes be so terrifying that they have to stop receiving this form of therapy. MDMA appears to help, not only because it extinguishes anxiety and stress, but also because it triggers the release of oxytocin, a pro-social hormone that strengthens feelings of trust towards therapists.
Last year, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, California, a group led by Michael Mithoefer at the Medical University of South Carolina presented results from trials in which 107 people with PTSD underwent a psychotherapy while under the influence of MDMA. A year or so after having the therapy, roughly 67 percent of them no longer had PTSD, according to a measure based on symptoms such as anxiety levels and frequency of nightmares. About 23 percent of the control group, which had psychotherapy and a placebo drug, got the same benefit.
Healing TripMeanwhile, Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, has been working with people with depression that has resisted all available treatments. In a trial involving 20 people, participants had two sessions — one on a single low dose of psilocybin (10 milligrams), one on a single high dose (25 mg) — during which they each separately lay listening to specially chosen music, accompanied by therapists.
The findings, also reported last year, were impressive. Those two doses, combined with the psychological support, were sufficient to lift depression in all 20 participants for three weeks, and to keep it at bay for five of them for three months.
That is in stark contrast to the best available antidepressants. “What’s weird and so different about these [psychedelics] is that we’re talking about a single dose having long-term effects,” says Insel, now at a start-up called Mindstrong. “That’s a remarkably different approach to what we’ve been doing, with drugs that people take chronically.”
Hints as to why psychedelics work so quickly and so enduringly have come from brain scans. Since 2010, Carhart-Harris has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of people without mental illness while they are experiencing the effects of different psychedelic drugs. He has found that LSD and psilocybin both cause activity in parts of the brain that normally work separately to become more synchronous, meaning the neurons fire at the same time. In addition, connectivity across a collection of brain regions called the “default mode network”, which is linked to our sense of self, or ego, is drastically reduced. The more this network disintegrates, the more volunteers report a dissolving of the boundaries between themselves and the world around them.
Carhart-Harris thinks psilocybin therapy interrupts the spirals of rumination and negative thoughts that depressed people get caught up in. In that sense, it seemed telling that people in his psilocybin-for-depression trial who experienced aspects of a spiritual or mystical experience saw a bigger decrease in their depression scores than those who didn’t.
The biggest danger now might be that history repeats itself. The first wave of psychedelics research was to a great extent doomed by excessive enthusiasm. Today, as the revival has gathered steam, some doctors have likewise grown impatient and gone rogue, offering their patients underground psychedelic treatments. Hence the current crop of researchers are at pains to preach patience and rigour.
— A groundbreaking new study shows that magic mushrooms may actually be an effective treatment for people with depression. Researchers from Imperial College London found that patients taking psilocybin, the psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in magic mushrooms, showed reduced symptoms weeks after treatment following a “reset” of their brains.
In the clinical trials, patients with treatment-resistant depression received two doses of psilocybin — 10 mg followed by 25 mg, one-week apart — while researchers focused on changes in brain function before and after treatment with the drug. The findings showed that the treatment produced “rapid and sustained antidepressant effects.”
Brain scans show a reset of brain connectivity and blood flow.
Comparisons of images of patients’ brains before and after treatment with psilocybin showed reduced blood flow in areas of the brain responsible for processing emotional responses like stress and fear. Researchers found increased stability in another brain network that has been previously linked to psilocybin’s immediate effects, as well as to depression itself.
The small study of 19 people was led by Head of Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who said:
“We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments.
“Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted.’
“Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy.”
In addition, the trials revealed that patients scoring highest on “peak” or “mystical” experience showed a more significant change. This is consistent with findings from previous studies that have shown that such experiences can lead to long-term changes in the behaviors, attitudes, and values of patients treated with psilocybin.
Finally, even some of the most staunchly conservative people in the world – CLERGY – get it! There is a natural remedy for nearly everything that ails us.
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have enlisted two dozen religious leaders from a wide range of denominations, to participate in a study in which they will be given two powerful doses of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.
April 27, 2017 If you’re the kind of person who relishes adventure, you may literally see the world differently. People who are open to new experiences can take in more visual information than other people and combine it in unique ways. This may explain why they tend to be particularly creative.
Openness to experience is one of the “big five” traits often used to describe personality. It is characterised by curiosity, creativity and an interest in exploring new things. Open people tend to do well at tasks that test our ability to come up with creative ideas, such as imagining new uses for everyday objects like bricks, mugs or table tennis balls.
There’s some evidence that people with a greater degree of openness also have better visual awareness. For example, when focusing on letters moving on a screen, they are more likely to notice a grey square appearing elsewhere on the display.
Now Anna Antinori at the University of Melbourne in Australia and her team are showing that people who score more highly when it comes to the openness trait “see” more possibilities. “They seem to have a more flexible gate for the visual information that breaks through into their consciousness,” Antinori says.
Patchwork PicturesAntinori and her colleagues asked 123 university students to complete a binocular rivalry test, in which they simultaneously saw a red image with one eye and a green image with the other eye for 2 minutes.
Usually, the brain can only perceive one image at a time, and most participants reported seeing the image flip between red and green. But some subjects saw the two images fused into a patchwork of red and green — a phenomenon known as “mixed percept”.
The higher the participants scored for openness on a personality questionnaire, the more they experienced this mixed perception.
“When you present open people with the binocular rivalry dilemma, their brains are able to flexibly engage with less conventional solutions,” Antinori says. “We believe this is the first empirical evidence that they have different visual experiences to the average individual.”
In contrast, the other four major personality traits — extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness — weren’t significantly linked to experiencing this mixed perception.
Mind ExpandingThe results could explain why people with a high degree of openness tend to be more creative and innovative, Antinori says. “When they come up with all these crazy new uses for bricks, it might be because they really perceive the world differently,” she says.
The findings also hint at why extremely open people are more prone to paranoia and delusions, says Niko Tiliopoulos at the University of Sydney, Australia. “At those levels of openness, people may actually see reality differently,” he says. “For example, they may ‘see’ spirits, or misinterpret interpersonal or other signals.”
According to Antinori, there are similarities between high levels of openness and the experience of taking magic mushrooms. Previous work by her team has found that psilocybin — a hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms — increases a person’s openness scores in a personality questionnaire, and their experience of mixed percept in binocular rivalry tests.
The team has also found that some forms of meditation can increase mixed image perception in binocular rivalry tests.
Antinori next wants to see if similar neural processes are involved in mixed perception, creative thinking and the shifts in visual perception caused by psilocybin and meditation. “It seems that openness alters the filter of consciousness, and we’d like to know how,” she says.
April 20, 2017 More researchers are accepting the power of psychedelics with unprecedented potential to treat disease and psychological trauma, but most of all, to reorganize the brain and shift thought patterns. Measuring neuron activity has revealed that psychedelic drugs really do alter the state of the brain, creating a different kind of consciousness.
Many researchers have been interested in the idea that psychedelics facilitate communication across the brain and, more specifically, how the default-mode network in the brain, arguably science’s best biological correlate of the self, normally works to constrain this.
“Psychedelics” are substances with the ability to expand human awareness beyond our normal modes of perception. Some may be the most amazing substances known to humanity, so potent that just 1/10,000th of a gram can send one on a journey beyond time and space, beyond life and death.
“We see an increase in the diversity of signals from the brain,” says Anil Seth, at the University of Sussex, UK. “The brain is more complex in its activity.”
In mathematical terms, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There’s not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.
“We can speculate on the implications of such an organization,” wrote researchers, who were led by neurobiologist Paul Expert of King’s College London. “One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia” common during psychedelic experiences, of sensory mix-up: tasting colors, feeling sounds, seeing smells, and so on.
While the psychedelic state has been previously compared with dreaming, the opposite effect has been observed in the brain network from which we get our sense of “self” (called the default-mode network or ego-system). Put simply, while activity became “louder” in the emotion system, it became more disjointed and so “quieter” in the ego system.The first study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, revealed decreases in brain activity after injection of psilocybin that were localized to the default-mode network.
Seth and his team discovered this by re-analysing data previously collected by researchers at Imperial College London. Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues had monitored brain activity in 19 volunteers who had taken ketamine, 15 who had had LSD, and 14 who were under the influence of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms. Carhart-Harris’s team used sets of sensors attached to the skull to measure the magnetic fields produced by these volunteer’s neurons, and compared these to when each person took a placebo.
“We took the activity data, cleaned it up then chopped it into 2-second chunks,” says Seth, whose team worked with Carhart-Harris on the re-analysis. “For each chunk, we could calculate a measure of diversity.”
Higher State Previous work had shown that people in a state of wakefulness have more diverse patterns of brain activity than people who are asleep. Seth’s team has found that people who have taken psychedelic drugs show even more diversity — the highest level ever measured.
These patterns of very high diversity coincided with the volunteers reporting “ego-dissolution” — a feeling that the boundaries between oneself and the world have been blurred. The degree of diversity was also linked to more vivid experiences.
There’s mounting evidence that psychedelic drugs may help people with depression in ways that other treatments can’t. Some benefits have already been seen with LSD, ketamine, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, a potion used in South America during religious rites.
“I think there’s an awful lot of potential here,” says Seth. “If you suddenly see things in a different way, it could give your outlook a jolt that existing antidepressants can’t because they work on the routine, wakeful state.”
Psychedelics Create A Kind of Consciousness We Have Never Seen Before
More researchers are accepting the power of psychedelics with unprecedented potential to treat disease and psychological trauma, but most of all, to reorganize the brain and shift thought patterns. Measuring neuron activity has revealed that psychedelic drugs really do alter the state of the brain, creating a different kind of consciousness.
Many researchers have been interested in the idea that psychedelics facilitate communication across the brain and, more specifically, how the default-mode network in the brain, arguably science’s best biological correlate of the self, normally works to constrain this.
“Psychedelics” are substances with the ability to expand human awareness beyond our normal modes of perception. Some may be the most amazing substances known to humanity, so potent that just 1/10,000th of a gram can send one on a journey beyond time and space, beyond life and death.
“We see an increase in the diversity of signals from the brain,” says Anil Seth, at the University of Sussex, UK. “The brain is more complex in its activity.”
In mathematical terms, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There’s not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.
“We can speculate on the implications of such an organization,” wrote researchers, who were led by neurobiologist Paul Expert of King’s College London. “One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia” common during psychedelic experiences, of sensory mix-up: tasting colors, feeling sounds, seeing smells, and so on.
While the psychedelic state has been previously compared with dreaming, the opposite effect has been observed in the brain network from which we get our sense of “self” (called the default-mode network or ego-system). Put simply, while activity became “louder” in the emotion system, it became more disjointed and so “quieter” in the ego system.The first study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, revealed decreases in brain activity after injection of psilocybin that were localized to the default-mode network.
Seth and his team discovered this by re-analysing data previously collected by researchers at Imperial College London. Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues had monitored brain activity in 19 volunteers who had taken ketamine, 15 who had had LSD, and 14 who were under the influence of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms. Carhart-Harris’s team used sets of sensors attached to the skull to measure the magnetic fields produced by these volunteer’s neurons, and compared these to when each person took a placebo.
“We took the activity data, cleaned it up then chopped it into 2-second chunks,” says Seth, whose team worked with Carhart-Harris on the re-analysis. “For each chunk, we could calculate a measure of diversity.”
Higher State Previous work had shown that people in a state of wakefulness have more diverse patterns of brain activity than people who are asleep. Seth’s team has found that people who have taken psychedelic drugs show even more diversity — the highest level ever measured.
These patterns of very high diversity coincided with the volunteers reporting “ego-dissolution” — a feeling that the boundaries between oneself and the world have been blurred. The degree of diversity was also linked to more vivid experiences.
There’s mounting evidence that psychedelic drugs may help people with depression in ways that other treatments can’t. Some benefits have already been seen with LSD, ketamine, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, a potion used in South America during religious rites.
“I think there’s an awful lot of potential here,” says Seth. “If you suddenly see things in a different way, it could give your outlook a jolt that existing antidepressants can’t because they work on the routine, wakeful state.”
Depression is real, however the treatment approach offered by the medical/pharmaceutical establishment is most often a prescription for a lifetime of dependence on expensive, mind-altering pills which make life bearable but numb the joy of living as well as the pain. Still, people are suffering, and an understanding of the root causes of depression and anxiety can go a long way in helping people to truly overcome them.
Mental health is greatly affected by the quality of foods we eat, and more research is leading us to understand that the digestive system in the human body functions as a type of second brain, where emotional information is stored and processed. If the digestive system is constantly bombarded by inflammatory foods and the myriad chemicals in our environment, the system is incapable of performing properly and efficiently.
Under the umbrella of diet, a major factor in mental health is gut health, specifically the health of the microbiome of healthy bacteria which exists inside each of us, functioning as a both a system of detoxification or a system of toxification, depending on its health.
Consumption of probiotic foods and supplements greatly enhance the health of the microbiota, while consumption of chemical laden processed foods, GMO foods, exposure to chemicals such as glyphosate, and especially sugary foods serves to feed and increase the production of negative bacteria within the body, leading to poor mental health. A healthy is critical to a healthy mind.
Lack of Sunlight
Vitamin D deficiency is increasingly understood to be highly detrimental to mental health, as is highlighted in areas of the world with lower exposure to sunlight, such as the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where millions of people can expect to suffer from what is now known as seasonal affective disorder (SAD). SAD is a fact of life in many areas, and is effectively treated medically with high dose supplementation of vitamin D.
“Research has shown having a vitamin D level below 20 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) can raise your risk for depression by as much as 85 percent, compared to having a vitamin D level greater than 30 ng/mL. A number of studies have also confirmed that adequate levels of vitamin D can help alleviate symptoms of depression. One of the mechanisms is thought to be vitamin D’s anti-inflammatory properties, which again hints at inflammation being a root cause of depression.” [Source]
Exposure to sunlight is crucial to sound mental health, for the body naturally produces vitamin D when it receives ample sunlight, however there are many other benefits to receiving abundant natural light.
“According to a paper published in the journal Dermato Endocrinology, a large number of light-absorbing molecules (chromophores) found in the different layers of your skin absorb and interact with ultraviolet rays, producing a number of complex and synergistic effects.”[Source]
Spiritual Anemia
Perhaps the most important, yet most misunderstood factor in mental health arises from a sort of spiritual anemia, which is in part, a cultural malaise arising from a lack of interpersonal and cosmic connection in our technologically advanced modern world.
Evidence is mounting that profound spiritual experiences can turn depression and anxiety around in no time at all, and many forward-thinking researchers are exploring the effectiveness of psychedelic experiences which can be a surefire way to experience a direct connection to the infinite and cosmic nature of being alive and human.
Psilocybin mushrooms, or magic mushrooms, are the most talked about psychedelic for quickly achieving stable mental health, although many other natural and synthetic substances are known to trigger the kind of spiritual experiences which can directly and positively impact one’s worldview, leading to a healthier sense of self and purpose in this world.
Ayahuasca, the Amazonian shamanic medicine, is revered for it’s ability to release past trauma and achieve a deeper understanding of the self. Iboga, a natural entheogen from Western Africa, is incredibly affective at treating depression and anxiety through a journey which allows one to meet and make peace with their own soul and their past. Additionally, chemicals like ketamine and ecstasy (MDMA) are also known to create an experience of connection and spiritual peace. All of these medicines are illegal in the United States.
Final Thoughts
It is estimated that some 15 million American adults are affected by depression, and that some 40 million Americans are affected by anxiety. These outstanding statistics are shadowed by the disturbing fact that one in six Americans are on antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, and when drugs are prescribed to a patient, doctors commonly ignore contributing factors and causes of poor mental health, advising their patients to take pills as the main way to cope with poor mental health.
If doctors focused instead on the causes of poor mental health, offering sound advice on diet, advising people to get more sunlight, and most importantly, steered patients in the direction of spiritual wellness, our society as a whole would greatly benefit.
Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and Offgrid Outpost, a provider ofstorable food and emergency kits. Alex is an avid student of Yoga and life.
What can I tell you? I liked the previous article so much it made want to know more. Magic mushrooms to all those stuck in a mental rut? Mental blocks? Bad belief systems? Antiquated opinions? Unresolved aggressive issues? Sooth your mind with psilocybin.
The bulk of William Richards life’s work was spent dosing people with a variety of psychedelics to research the therapeutic benefits for treating a number of conditions — or even to enrich the lives of perfectly healthy people.
Richards helped to co-found a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine program 15 years ago, through which hundreds of people have had life-changing experiences. He credits the “sacred molecules” in such chemicals for causing the beneficial effects. While many psychedelics are employed, psilocybin — found in ‘magic’ mushrooms — is most often used by the researchers for its reliable and promising indication in the treatment of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), among other conditions.
Albert Garcia-Romeu, a researcher at Hopkins, working on a study to use psilocybin for smoking cessation, said of Richards, “Bill was part of the pioneering team here in the U.S. doing psychedelic research and psychedelic therapy model,” according to The Guardian.“ Basically, you give someone a really high dose and they have a really transformative experience. And you’ve prepared them for that,” he explained about the program. “And then after the fact, you help them integrate it, and they get on with their lives.”
In 2006, the Hopkins group published their first study of psilocybin, titled “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance” — which Charles R. Schuster, former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, described as “noteworthy both for the rigorousness of its design and execution, as well as the clarity of its results.” In a commentary about the study, Schuster stated:
“It is striking that majority of participants reported 2 months later that the psilocybin-induced experience was personally very meaningful and spiritually significant. Indeed, most of them rated the psilocybin-induced experience as one of the top five most important experiences in their life. It is especially notable that participants reported that the drug produced positive changes in attitudes and behaviors well after the sessions, and these self-observations were consistent with ratings by friends and relatives […]
“The term psychedelic, when applied to drugs, implies that the drug experience is ‘mind-expanding.’ The paper [reporting the study findings] illustrates the accuracy of this description for psilocybin, and I hope that this landmark paper will also be ‘field-expanding.’”
Richards, who had his first personal experience with psychedelics “in a laboratory basement in Germany, in 1963,” when he received an injection of liquid psilocybin — an experience about which he described, “‘Awe’, ‘glory’, and ‘gratitude’ were the only words that remained relevant.” Recently, Richards published a new book, “Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience” — in which he claims he and his colleagues“ have so reliably been able to induce mystical experience that they have empirically proven Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious — the idea that there is archetypal imagery we all share, regardless of our culture,” reported The Guardian.
Research into psychedelics wasn’t without difficulty; in 1977, Richards led the last legal study before such research was shut down in, as The Independent noted, “the worst case of censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo.” But, 22 years later, he regained permission to begin again, with a comparison study between psilocybin and Ritalin — with results so astonishing, even 14 months after it ended, participants continued to report “enduring positive life changes.” One of the study’s participants even “ended up resigning from his job in weapon design and became a Zen monk.”
Richards opts for a different term than psychedelic drugs, instead choosing “entheogens” — meaning “generating god within.” With such extraordinary results, that description isn’t surprising — nor is the government’s concerted effort to squash research into such a promising field.
In June 2015 we reported on the re-emerging field of using psychedelics to treat mental illness, with psilocybin, in particular, showing great promise for chronic anxiety and depression. Western medicine began realizing its potential in the 1940s, but medical research was stamped out with the War on Drugs.
Now, as the injustice of the drug war is fully exposed, research is again turning to the amazing, natural power of psilocybin. William Richards at Johns Hopkins University has been dosing people with psilocybin for 15 years, and in 2006 published his first study demonstrating positive therapeutic results.
That study provided the impetus for a rapid expansion in psychedelic research. On December 1, results of the first two major clinical trials were published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology – showing yet again psilocybin’s remarkable effect on depression and end-of-life stress.
Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial
Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial
Authors of the first study summarize their results as follows:
“Prior to the crossover, psilocybin produced immediate, substantial, and sustained improvements in anxiety and depression and led to decreases in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual wellbeing, and increased quality of life. At the 6.5-month follow-up, psilocybin was associated with enduring anxiolytic and anti-depressant effects (approximately 60–80% of participants continued with clinically significant reductions in depression or anxiety), sustained benefits in existential distress and quality of life, as well as improved attitudes towards death. The psilocybin-induced mystical experience mediated the therapeutic effect of psilocybin on anxiety and depression.”
Authors of the second study concluded:
“…a single dose of psilocybin produced substantial and enduring decreases in depressed mood and anxiety along with increases in quality of life and decreases in death anxiety in patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis. Ratings by patients themselves, clinicians, and community observers suggested these effects endured at least 6 months. The overall rate of clinical response at 6 months on clinician-rated depression and anxiety was 78% and 83%, respectively.”
In both studies, there were no serious adverse events, although less than 18 percent of patients experienced some degree of nausea, headache or other symptoms that did not require medical intervention.
Magic mushrooms
The experience for some patients was nothing short of amazing. Dinah Bazer, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was consumed with fear and anxiety. However, the psilocybin treatment allowed her to visualize her fear as a physical mass which she confronted and expelled.
Bazer is a self-proclaimed atheist, but she described her subsequent state of mind in spiritual terms.
“I was bathed in God’s love, and that continued for hours,” said Bazer. “I really had no other way to describe this incredibly powerful experience.”
Her fear, depression, and anxiety have not returned.
This mystical experience is characteristic of many patients in the clinical setting, and can be truly life-changing in a positive way. It can be described as the opposite of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), where a single event has a lasting negative effect on the mental state.
This is why Roland Griffiths, lead author of one of the aforementioned studies, says the psilocybin treatment is like a “surgical intervention.”
“To many people brought up on the Reagan drug-war era with the ‘drugs fry your brain’ message, psilocybin may seem a strange and possibly even a dangerous drug treatment of serious mental illness,” wrote David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London, in an editorial. But the high quality of the research and the strong support shown for it—the “list of the commentators reads like a Who’s Who of American and European psychiatry”—should “reassure any waverers that this use of psilocybin is well within the accepted scope of modern psychiatry,” Nutt adds.
Like cannabis, federal government stands in the way of research by listing psilocybin as a Schedule 1 drug, which severely hampers the ease with which researchers can procure the substance and test it. The war on drugs is a war on people. The real crime is government’s continued denial of this miraculous treatment to suffering people because of a drug war borne of racism and political corruption.
Graham Hancock is one of the most amazing modern explorers of both the planet’s material mysteries in terms of ruins and monoliths and the internal aspects of consciousness. I learned of his participation in the Contact in the Desert Conference at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center just prior to going to Illuminate, so I decided to drive through the Arizona and California desert for a rare chance to see and meet him.
By the time I got to Joshua Tree, Graham had already presented his main ideas formally, making this a real treat — an informal interactive session with the man who has unearthed so many of history’s treasures and put them into a meaningful and cosmic context.
Graham gave an account of his journey, beginning with his family roots in England and his horrific experiences being conditioned in a private school, then moving on to becoming a journalist with the ability to travel the world. He had been an atheist until he was cracked open to a new concept of man’s history by encountering stories about the Ark of Covenant in war-torn Ethiopia.
This experience began his interest in “out of place technology.” Noting the connection between the Ethiopian stories of the Ark with his growing interest in the Ancient Egyptian texts, he dropped his atheism and became interested in spirituality — in “levels beyond levels” of reality that pointed to so much beyond the veil of what we take as truth.
Graham credits Robert Bauval with the “fundament breakthrough Orion correlation connection to Egypt,” which is the key breakthrough in tying Egypt to its past by discovering the connection to the stars of the constellation of Orion and more ancient circular ruins pointing to the stars in Ethiopia.
When he began writing about ancient mysteries Graham encountered what he described as the perils of academia; dedicated to making his case, he found that he needed to be beyond perfect with annotations and still he was criticized and vilified by conventional archeologists and historians.
One intriguing aspect of Graham’s insight is that he claims that you “don’t need ancient astronauts”; rather, the veils of consciousness can be lifted by using the resources of the earth itself, and specifically the chemical properties of plants like Ayahuasca to “open the doors of perception.”
Still, the monuments are key sources of inspiration and Graham believes that there is much to learn from the stars, citing how in terms of the ancient skies the constellation of Leo was aligned with the gates of the Sphinx.
Besides conventional academics, political skirmishes also inhibit many new discoveries, but Graham urges that it will take a cooperative and new scientific method, embracing openness, to bring many hidden aspects of reality to light.
A key discovery will be how, after “six million years of boredom” with different primates and versions of humans, there was a sudden leap in consciousness and intelligence signified by the cave drawings of the ancients such as at Lascaux, France.
While some attribute this to extraterrestrial intervention, Graham makes the point that a distinct type of psilocybin mushroom thought to only be in the West actually existed in Europe as well, and he posits that its effect either contributed to or caused this enormous leap in the creative abilities of humans, and the birth of shamanic wisdom.
Graham became interested in the neuropsychology theory of cave art presented by David Lewis Williams of South Africa into deeply altered states of consciousness which suggested that it was psychotropic plants and the shamanic traditions that unfolded from their discovery that was responsible in the dramatic and sudden increase in intelligence among some human groups.
Graham agrees with Williams that the chemical agents in these sacred plants allowed humans to detach from materialism and evolve spiritually and intellectually very rapidly.”
Graham debunks conventional theories of Lascaux as merely paintings of reindeer, saying that of all the paintings, many deep in caves, only one reindeer appears with the feet of another species.
Magic Mushrooms Finally Being Accepted As Viable Treatment For Depression
First cannabis and now magic mushrooms are slowly being introduced back into the vocabulary of medical scientists. Shamans have known for millennia that the benefits of psychedelics for human health far exceed any perceived risks which are close to none. The spiritual benefits are undisputed by those in shamanic practices, however the physical effects have been difficult to relay to the medical community. A first of its kind study on magic mushrooms shows it may be soon recognized as a viable treatment for depression. The trial aimed to test whether psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, could reduce symptoms of, or completely eliminate depression.
Psilocybin mushrooms are one of five powerful psychedilics that treat mental disorders and change human consciousness. They have long been studied for their spiritual effects. In 2006, Johns Hopkins University studied psilocybin in particular and found that one-third of all participants reported that the experience was the single most spiritually significant moment of their lives and more than two-thirds reported it was among the top five most spiritually significant experiences. Two months after the study, 79% of the participants reported increased well-being or satisfaction; friends, relatives, and associates confirmed this.
Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been part of human culture as far back as the earliest recorded history. Ancient paintings of mushroom-ed humanoids have been found in caves in the Saharan desert. Central and Southern America cultures built temples to mushroom gods and carved “mushroom stones”. These stone carvings in the shape of mushrooms, or in which figures are depicted under the cap of a mushroom, have been dated to as early as 1000-500 B.C.
There are approximately 190 species of psilocybin mushrooms and there is strong archaeological evidence for the use of psyilocybin-containing mushrooms in ancient times.
From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, research was carried out exploring the use of hallucinogens to treat the existential anxiety, despair and isolation often associated with advanced-stage cancer. Those studies described critically ill individuals undergoing psychospiritual epiphanies, often with powerful and sustained improvement in mood and anxiety as well as diminished need for narcotic pain medication.”
Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and his colleagues believe there is a need to revisit the biological effects of psilocybin, which have been virtually ignored by the scientific community for about 40 years. “It so traumatized our society that we’ve demonized this compound,” he says.
Trial
As reported in The Lancet Psychiatry Each participant underwent two psychotherapy sessions, both conducted after doses of psilocybin. A week after the second session, all of them had reduced symptoms. After three months, five no longer met the clinical criteria for depression.
Enthusiasts have long believed that the drug’s ability to induce profound-feeling experiences could be therapeutically useful. Brain-imaging studies have shown that psilocybin targets areas of the brain overactive in depression.
Psilocybin is a serotonin receptor agonist that occurs naturally in some mushroom species. Recent studies have assessed the therapeutic potential of psilocybin for various conditions, including end-of-life anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and smoking and alcohol dependence, with promising preliminary results.
Psilocybin’s acute psychedelic effects typically became detectable 30-60 min after dosing, peaked 2-3 h after dosing, and subsided to negligible levels at least 6 h after dosing. According to the researchers, “this study provides preliminary support for the safety and efficacy of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and motivates further trials, with more rigorous designs, to better examine the therapeutic potential of this approach.”
While the psychedelic state has been previously compared with dreaming, the opposite effect has been observed in the brain network from which we get our sense of “self” (called the default-mode network or ego-system). Put simply, while activity became “louder” in the emotion system, it became more disjointed and so “quieter” in the ego system.
One study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, revealed decreases in brain activity after injection of psilocybin that were localized to the default-mode network.
This finding was exciting because it synced with the idea that psychedelics cause temporary “ego dissolution”, in other words diminishing one’s sense of having a firm and enduring personality. New research adds to our understanding about how this happens and how it can effective treat almost any mental disorder in human beings.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 