https://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end
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Sunday, 11 December 2016
Friday, 25 November 2016
Psilocybin bee shaman cave painting c.5000
Bufflehead Cabin — From Tassili, Algeria (c. 5000) Deep in the...
Bufflehead Cabin — From Tassili, Algeria (c. 5000) Deep in the...
Sent from my iPhone
Tuesday, 22 November 2016
Saturday, 19 November 2016
Monday, 14 November 2016
Mycelium Mind and Magic Mushrooms
Mycelium Mind and Magic Mushrooms
Earlier this year I moved to a new place on the edge of a large village. My window looks out on to rolling hills and crevices with patches of native woodland. Feeling immediately drawn I walked out there with my dog. Straight away it felt warm and familiar, welcoming, loving even. Various grasses, thistles and reeds punctuated the ground, cropped short and rotovated by grazing cattle. Deer and badgers, hidden deep undercover were warned of our presence by the calls of green woodpeckers, jays and ravens. The whole place stretching several square miles has a collective feel of sentience. Deep green patches, lines and circles underfoot were evidence of numerous mycelium masses that cover the whole area. As autumn began the mushrooms, fruiting bodies of mycelium sprung up in abundance. This secret and hidden world, equally significant to the world of plants is overlooked by most people. An experience I had a couple of years ago when out in woodland revealed a sentience that is all around us. Perhaps it was the mycelium beneath the forest floor that had sought me out. It brought back hidden memories from my early to mid teens when magic mushrooms had found me. Epiphanies I had foolishly dismissed as delusional took on a new meaning. Reading books by mycologists, particularly the work of Paul Stamets inspired me to look again at psilocybin mushrooms.
The more is learned about mycelium the clearer it becomes how free of boundaries the subject has. Mycelium masses are the biggest life forms on the planet. Some are known to be several thousand acres in size. They are everywhere we are. Life is dependant on them. They are a parallel reality virtually unacknowledged, invisible to most yet, once you are awakened to this you never see the world as one dimensional again. Mycelium is the bridge between life and death. I have come to believe they are conscious and their sentience broader than ours.
Lift up a fallen log in any forest and you will see fine Lacey white mycelium networks. These are the most well known and visible along with those found in timber roof struts, evidence of dry rot. Beneath field and forest these hidden and inconspicuous life forms have largely escaped our attention and few grasp their importance nor their implications and possibilities. Mycelium is essential for human and planetary health. Human digestion is dependant on bacteria performing a similar job as subsurface mycelium in the forest, breaking down organic matter, creating soil. Trees could not grow without symbiotic association with the mycelial interface between plant roots and nutrients. Mycelium runs throughout the planet, mushrooms being the visible fruiting body. Mycelium protects and heals the planet yet still many feel an aversion even fear though we would be wise to see them as teachers and allies. Mycelial networks of threadlike cells have begun to be used in biotechnology, through harnessing their ability to clean up polluted rivers, to enhance forest health and for agricultural pest control. Paul Stamets has recently been brought in to clear up the bio hazardous areas damaged by the chemical weapons used by the Saddam Hussein regime. Utilising specially bred strains of symbiotic termite mound mycelium his company has been able to clear up oil spillage, returning be spoiled areas to healthy habitat.
There are more species of fungi, bacteria and Protozoa in a handful of soil than their are species of plant and vertebrate animal in all of North America. Through the breakdown of plant nutrients they create soil. With each footstep on field or forest floor we walk on these vast, sentient cellular membranes, causing disturbance and debris the threads respond to. Working to channel nutrients to where they are needed over vast distances. Mycelium threads travel several inches in a days growth. They are the interface between life and death and perhaps for this reason are feared though, more accurately should be seen as planetary guardians.
Stamets believes random selection is no longer the dominant force in nature. Instead it is our political, economic and biotechnology that will determine the fate of the Earth. Ecologists now believe that at the current rate of extinction half the vertebrate animal species on the planet will be lost in a hundred years. Yet if we are correctly motivated the twentieth century could be remembered as the age of biotechnology.
Mycelium mass is the neurological network of the planet. An interlacing network of information sharing with the long term health of the host in mind. The mycelium strays in constant molecular communication with its environment devising complex enzymatic and chemical responses to changes. Spreading thousands of acres in mass. The largest life forms on the planet. Intelligent. Unseen. Working for the common good. To me that qualifies as something close to a god.
We are more closely related to mycelium than we are to plants sharing some 25% of the same DNA. Fungi employs an external digestive system secreting acids and enzymes into their immediate environment and then absorbing nutrients using netlike cell chains. They marched onto land allowing plants to subsequently inhabit, some 700 million years ago. Many millions of years later, one branch of fungi led to the development of animals including us. We developed to capture nutrients internally. 250 million years ago a catastrophe wiped out 90% of the Earths species. Probably following a meteorite strike Earth darkened under a volcanic dust cloud causing mass extinction. Fungi inherited the Earth. The age of the dinosaurs followed until 185 million years ago another meteorite struck and the same happened again. Mycelium prepares the scene for other life.
James Lovelocks Gaia theory sees the planet as a singular intelligent whole. Mycelium is the living, sentient network responsive to everything from a landslide to a tree fall to a footstep of a human, a mouse or a fly. A complex information sharing network of fungal consciousness. The mycelium mass emits alluring attractants, scent trails most noticeable to us when walking through a forest after a rainfall. Mycelium operates at a level of complexity way beyond our most powerful computers. A biological internet where information on all life forms is communicated through the land. It my seem something of a leap of imagination to see mycelium as intelligent yet recent studies suggest otherwise. Complex mazes hiding food sources have baffled scientists as mycelial threads find their way without error. Perhaps only through an alliance can we work together for a brighter future. Mycelium has the ability to grow through rocks. It is this important capacity that could lead to bringing life to desert planets. It is now thought by many cosmologists that life came to earth through techniques that in future may be harnessed. It is entirely likely that life travels throughout the cosmos, mycelium spores riding upon comets or carried by stellar winds that kiss life onto desert planets.
Nature copies good ideas. Mycelial architecture is immediately familiar. Neuronal networks inside the brain, turbulence patterns in hurricanes, dark matter that though invisible has been mapped out, the Internet all have conform to similar pattern and structure. Biological patterns are influenced by the laws of physics. Mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter.
Any catastrophe from a fallen tree to an oil spill creates a field of debris to which many fungi respond with waves of mycelium. These abilities are being harnessed to clear up disease and toxic waste. Outnumbering plant species by six to one mycelium is the bigger hidden reality. They are everywhere from our bodies, environs and habitats serving as immune systems. Fungi are the common bridge that links all life. The inter connectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our own peril. Destroying our environment is suicide. Enlisting the help of fungi can help. Dried mushroom balls have been found with the bodies of peat bog men. Their use being a spark can smoulder within for days, allowing fire to be transported. Penicillin was harnessed to cure infection. Walking in woodland where mycelium scents the air statistically is proven to trump Prozac in treating depression. Psilocybin, once thought to cure PTSD and depression through the mind coming to terms with life experiences is now thought to cause biological neuronal changes that physically cure depression.
The parallel unseen reality of the mycelial mind reached out to me in my early teens, as it did many others, a secret bond between the earth and humanity, stretching back in time to palaeolithic mycologists. For thirty five years it didn't contact me again until this year.
Psilocybin mushrooms are scarce in the wild forest but common where there are humans. They are prolific in disturbed land around cities, forest tracks, landscaping among new buildings where wood chips are used and at the edge or interface between field and woodland, between civilisation and the wild. They are abundant where people meet; courtrooms, prison grounds, hospitals, college campuses, utility substations, municipal buildings, office complexes, sports fields, the suburban spread, public concerts, anywhere with humans and sawdust.
The ecological awakening that mushroomed out of the 1960s to combat planetary destruction was concurrent with the reemergence of interest in psilocybin, a visionary quest continuing through the next two decades on into my generations coming of age. Active species have become massively abundant in response, testament to their evolutionary success. These indigenous entheogens directly spread by the spiritually inclined. There are no means of stopping their spread without causing ecological disaster. Mushrooms are present so long as there are plants.
Magic mushrooms are a powerful sacrament and offer a significant evolutionary advantage for those sensitive enough to hear the call. Their use goes back at least 7000 years and probably existed in palaeolithic times. Their use has been documented in shamanic ceremonies by Mesoamerican people's. Modern day mushroom cults are remnants of an ancient religion practiced by Aztec and Mayan civilisations. Mushroom motifs and mushroom stones have been frequently found in Mayan temples. These were religions were practises until Catholic missionaries arrived, persecuting practitioners and driving out mysticism until they were all but wiped out. In Europe they played an important part in cultural history. Aristotle, Plato, Homer and Sophocles all partook of sacred mushrooms. A ritual ceremony was carried out in a temple honouring Demeter, the agriculture God. It's continuance for 2000 years is testament to its importance. Thousands of pilgrims walked from Athens to Eleusis paying the equivalent of a months wages for the privilege. Once there they assembled in the initiation hall, a great telestrion where sat in rows on steps that descended to a hidden, central chamber from which a fungal concoction was served. They spent the night there and reportedly came away changed forever. They were sworn to secrecy on the ceremonies specifics on pain of imprisonment, even death. These ceremonies continued until early Christian centuries. Clearly mushrooms have had a profound effect on western consciousness.
Mushrooms follow human disturbances to the environment and also natural disasters such as earthquakes, avalanches and volcanoes. As humans destroy woodlands to create new built areas, psilocybes and other sacrophites proliferate. They thrive at the interface where humans, forest and grassland coexist. Psilocybin occurs wherever people congregate. Civilisation and fungi have co evolved. Mycelium is innately intelligent and speaks as a voice for the land to those sensitive enough to hear.
Deforestation and the domestication of animals would have seen the explosion in numbers of psilocybin active species mirroring the growth in human numbers. The importation of exotic plants caused the spread of invisible spores of none native species. The mushrooms we see are but the small fruiting bodies of an ever present invisible other reality. They are at the front end of evolution precisely because of their psilocybin content. Travelling wherever we go it is a great evolutionary strategy. They carry a message from nature. At a time of planetary crisis brought on by humans, the earth calls out through the mushrooms, sacraments that lead directly to a deeper ecological consciousness and motivate people to take action.
As a youth mushrooms called out to me revealing the fractal mathematical patterns common to Sufi mosques, Buddhist sand paintings and countless examples of sacred art depicting the same place of space or mind. Once more the earth called out to me a few years ago in a mystical experience where my consciousness entered the land. I lost all sense of self as though all my particles dispersed and merged with all others in the quantum field. Like seeing things as they really are for a time. It felt warm, loving. And now I find once more that the mycelial mind, the voice of the earth has spoken to me again as it speaks to many others. I don't see this as supernatural but biological. Mystical states surely have a biology much like there must be a neural biology to falling in love. I believe mycelium is sentient and seeks us out.
Sent from my iPad
Earlier this year I moved to a new place on the edge of a large village. My window looks out on to rolling hills and crevices with patches of native woodland. Feeling immediately drawn I walked out there with my dog. Straight away it felt warm and familiar, welcoming, loving even. Various grasses, thistles and reeds punctuated the ground, cropped short and rotovated by grazing cattle. Deer and badgers, hidden deep undercover were warned of our presence by the calls of green woodpeckers, jays and ravens. The whole place stretching several square miles has a collective feel of sentience. Deep green patches, lines and circles underfoot were evidence of numerous mycelium masses that cover the whole area. As autumn began the mushrooms, fruiting bodies of mycelium sprung up in abundance. This secret and hidden world, equally significant to the world of plants is overlooked by most people. An experience I had a couple of years ago when out in woodland revealed a sentience that is all around us. Perhaps it was the mycelium beneath the forest floor that had sought me out. It brought back hidden memories from my early to mid teens when magic mushrooms had found me. Epiphanies I had foolishly dismissed as delusional took on a new meaning. Reading books by mycologists, particularly the work of Paul Stamets inspired me to look again at psilocybin mushrooms.
The more is learned about mycelium the clearer it becomes how free of boundaries the subject has. Mycelium masses are the biggest life forms on the planet. Some are known to be several thousand acres in size. They are everywhere we are. Life is dependant on them. They are a parallel reality virtually unacknowledged, invisible to most yet, once you are awakened to this you never see the world as one dimensional again. Mycelium is the bridge between life and death. I have come to believe they are conscious and their sentience broader than ours.
Lift up a fallen log in any forest and you will see fine Lacey white mycelium networks. These are the most well known and visible along with those found in timber roof struts, evidence of dry rot. Beneath field and forest these hidden and inconspicuous life forms have largely escaped our attention and few grasp their importance nor their implications and possibilities. Mycelium is essential for human and planetary health. Human digestion is dependant on bacteria performing a similar job as subsurface mycelium in the forest, breaking down organic matter, creating soil. Trees could not grow without symbiotic association with the mycelial interface between plant roots and nutrients. Mycelium runs throughout the planet, mushrooms being the visible fruiting body. Mycelium protects and heals the planet yet still many feel an aversion even fear though we would be wise to see them as teachers and allies. Mycelial networks of threadlike cells have begun to be used in biotechnology, through harnessing their ability to clean up polluted rivers, to enhance forest health and for agricultural pest control. Paul Stamets has recently been brought in to clear up the bio hazardous areas damaged by the chemical weapons used by the Saddam Hussein regime. Utilising specially bred strains of symbiotic termite mound mycelium his company has been able to clear up oil spillage, returning be spoiled areas to healthy habitat.
There are more species of fungi, bacteria and Protozoa in a handful of soil than their are species of plant and vertebrate animal in all of North America. Through the breakdown of plant nutrients they create soil. With each footstep on field or forest floor we walk on these vast, sentient cellular membranes, causing disturbance and debris the threads respond to. Working to channel nutrients to where they are needed over vast distances. Mycelium threads travel several inches in a days growth. They are the interface between life and death and perhaps for this reason are feared though, more accurately should be seen as planetary guardians.
Stamets believes random selection is no longer the dominant force in nature. Instead it is our political, economic and biotechnology that will determine the fate of the Earth. Ecologists now believe that at the current rate of extinction half the vertebrate animal species on the planet will be lost in a hundred years. Yet if we are correctly motivated the twentieth century could be remembered as the age of biotechnology.
Mycelium mass is the neurological network of the planet. An interlacing network of information sharing with the long term health of the host in mind. The mycelium strays in constant molecular communication with its environment devising complex enzymatic and chemical responses to changes. Spreading thousands of acres in mass. The largest life forms on the planet. Intelligent. Unseen. Working for the common good. To me that qualifies as something close to a god.
We are more closely related to mycelium than we are to plants sharing some 25% of the same DNA. Fungi employs an external digestive system secreting acids and enzymes into their immediate environment and then absorbing nutrients using netlike cell chains. They marched onto land allowing plants to subsequently inhabit, some 700 million years ago. Many millions of years later, one branch of fungi led to the development of animals including us. We developed to capture nutrients internally. 250 million years ago a catastrophe wiped out 90% of the Earths species. Probably following a meteorite strike Earth darkened under a volcanic dust cloud causing mass extinction. Fungi inherited the Earth. The age of the dinosaurs followed until 185 million years ago another meteorite struck and the same happened again. Mycelium prepares the scene for other life.
James Lovelocks Gaia theory sees the planet as a singular intelligent whole. Mycelium is the living, sentient network responsive to everything from a landslide to a tree fall to a footstep of a human, a mouse or a fly. A complex information sharing network of fungal consciousness. The mycelium mass emits alluring attractants, scent trails most noticeable to us when walking through a forest after a rainfall. Mycelium operates at a level of complexity way beyond our most powerful computers. A biological internet where information on all life forms is communicated through the land. It my seem something of a leap of imagination to see mycelium as intelligent yet recent studies suggest otherwise. Complex mazes hiding food sources have baffled scientists as mycelial threads find their way without error. Perhaps only through an alliance can we work together for a brighter future. Mycelium has the ability to grow through rocks. It is this important capacity that could lead to bringing life to desert planets. It is now thought by many cosmologists that life came to earth through techniques that in future may be harnessed. It is entirely likely that life travels throughout the cosmos, mycelium spores riding upon comets or carried by stellar winds that kiss life onto desert planets.
Nature copies good ideas. Mycelial architecture is immediately familiar. Neuronal networks inside the brain, turbulence patterns in hurricanes, dark matter that though invisible has been mapped out, the Internet all have conform to similar pattern and structure. Biological patterns are influenced by the laws of physics. Mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter.
Any catastrophe from a fallen tree to an oil spill creates a field of debris to which many fungi respond with waves of mycelium. These abilities are being harnessed to clear up disease and toxic waste. Outnumbering plant species by six to one mycelium is the bigger hidden reality. They are everywhere from our bodies, environs and habitats serving as immune systems. Fungi are the common bridge that links all life. The inter connectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our own peril. Destroying our environment is suicide. Enlisting the help of fungi can help. Dried mushroom balls have been found with the bodies of peat bog men. Their use being a spark can smoulder within for days, allowing fire to be transported. Penicillin was harnessed to cure infection. Walking in woodland where mycelium scents the air statistically is proven to trump Prozac in treating depression. Psilocybin, once thought to cure PTSD and depression through the mind coming to terms with life experiences is now thought to cause biological neuronal changes that physically cure depression.
The parallel unseen reality of the mycelial mind reached out to me in my early teens, as it did many others, a secret bond between the earth and humanity, stretching back in time to palaeolithic mycologists. For thirty five years it didn't contact me again until this year.
Psilocybin mushrooms are scarce in the wild forest but common where there are humans. They are prolific in disturbed land around cities, forest tracks, landscaping among new buildings where wood chips are used and at the edge or interface between field and woodland, between civilisation and the wild. They are abundant where people meet; courtrooms, prison grounds, hospitals, college campuses, utility substations, municipal buildings, office complexes, sports fields, the suburban spread, public concerts, anywhere with humans and sawdust.
The ecological awakening that mushroomed out of the 1960s to combat planetary destruction was concurrent with the reemergence of interest in psilocybin, a visionary quest continuing through the next two decades on into my generations coming of age. Active species have become massively abundant in response, testament to their evolutionary success. These indigenous entheogens directly spread by the spiritually inclined. There are no means of stopping their spread without causing ecological disaster. Mushrooms are present so long as there are plants.
Magic mushrooms are a powerful sacrament and offer a significant evolutionary advantage for those sensitive enough to hear the call. Their use goes back at least 7000 years and probably existed in palaeolithic times. Their use has been documented in shamanic ceremonies by Mesoamerican people's. Modern day mushroom cults are remnants of an ancient religion practiced by Aztec and Mayan civilisations. Mushroom motifs and mushroom stones have been frequently found in Mayan temples. These were religions were practises until Catholic missionaries arrived, persecuting practitioners and driving out mysticism until they were all but wiped out. In Europe they played an important part in cultural history. Aristotle, Plato, Homer and Sophocles all partook of sacred mushrooms. A ritual ceremony was carried out in a temple honouring Demeter, the agriculture God. It's continuance for 2000 years is testament to its importance. Thousands of pilgrims walked from Athens to Eleusis paying the equivalent of a months wages for the privilege. Once there they assembled in the initiation hall, a great telestrion where sat in rows on steps that descended to a hidden, central chamber from which a fungal concoction was served. They spent the night there and reportedly came away changed forever. They were sworn to secrecy on the ceremonies specifics on pain of imprisonment, even death. These ceremonies continued until early Christian centuries. Clearly mushrooms have had a profound effect on western consciousness.
Mushrooms follow human disturbances to the environment and also natural disasters such as earthquakes, avalanches and volcanoes. As humans destroy woodlands to create new built areas, psilocybes and other sacrophites proliferate. They thrive at the interface where humans, forest and grassland coexist. Psilocybin occurs wherever people congregate. Civilisation and fungi have co evolved. Mycelium is innately intelligent and speaks as a voice for the land to those sensitive enough to hear.
Deforestation and the domestication of animals would have seen the explosion in numbers of psilocybin active species mirroring the growth in human numbers. The importation of exotic plants caused the spread of invisible spores of none native species. The mushrooms we see are but the small fruiting bodies of an ever present invisible other reality. They are at the front end of evolution precisely because of their psilocybin content. Travelling wherever we go it is a great evolutionary strategy. They carry a message from nature. At a time of planetary crisis brought on by humans, the earth calls out through the mushrooms, sacraments that lead directly to a deeper ecological consciousness and motivate people to take action.
As a youth mushrooms called out to me revealing the fractal mathematical patterns common to Sufi mosques, Buddhist sand paintings and countless examples of sacred art depicting the same place of space or mind. Once more the earth called out to me a few years ago in a mystical experience where my consciousness entered the land. I lost all sense of self as though all my particles dispersed and merged with all others in the quantum field. Like seeing things as they really are for a time. It felt warm, loving. And now I find once more that the mycelial mind, the voice of the earth has spoken to me again as it speaks to many others. I don't see this as supernatural but biological. Mystical states surely have a biology much like there must be a neural biology to falling in love. I believe mycelium is sentient and seeks us out.
Sent from my iPad
Saturday, 12 November 2016
Friday, 11 November 2016
Thursday, 10 November 2016
Wednesday, 9 November 2016
Return to Mushrooms after 35 years
Return to Mushrooms after 35 years
As leaves turned to bronze and gold I waited for the rain. It fell in a single flurry at first and once it cleared right across the road on the village cricket green various ground mushrooms appeared. A light dusting of Liberty caps, perhaps 60, then a further few provided a small harvest for two trips. Over at my other place, a mile or two away the land is far more wild. Hills and valleys of open fields and clusters of woodland where grass is chewed short by cattle and deer. Untainted with nitrogen fertilisers the ground shows dark patches, lines and circles where the mycelium below colour the grass. After the rains an abundance of field fungi of some thirty varieties suggested this place would be abundant psylocibin country. Soon I was finding the odd cream white Liberty cap and soon had sufficient for a few trips. Picking furtively, reluctant to kneel down in the grass to hunt on all fours for fear of puritanical neighbour interference I soon discovered a magical place. The land rolls down to a spate stream ditch where a line of native hardwoods divide two fields. A boggy patch rotovated by cattle hooves keeps all but the most keen walker away and I've still not seen another soul in that field. Sat below the church yard this hidden oasis provides an unhindered view across the valley. I knew I was on sacred ground. Churches were usually built on old pagan sites when Christianity replaced the old beliefs. Here was no exception. Positioned perfectly. The idyllic point in the landscape. The alarmed cry of green woodpeckers informed other creatures of my presence. Jays screeched out continuing the warning. Making my way across the brow of the hill my dog, some twenty yards ahead caught scent of deer and a stag sprang at speed, making for sanctuary in the woodland below as Dook followed in futile chase. Mycologist Paul Sannetts believes mycelium has sentience. As we walk through field and forest, each step we take disturbs debris and mycelium responds to digest the freshly released nutrients. His perspective is given support from numerous clues. Easily the biggest life forms on the planet, mycelium masses below ground in wooded areas can stretch over hundreds even thousands of acres. Their hairlike strands have a visual similarity to neurones and dendrites, the hair like strands that permit communication in the brains of animals including ourselves, forming vast communicative subterranean networks. Mycelial masses are the veins and arteries of forests, transporting nutrients hundreds of feet from one area to another providing sustenance where needed. Pitched between life and death mycelium, fungi, mushrooms face prejudice. Many people feel a natural aversion to these amazing life forms, neither plant nor animal. Yet it is they that make life. Perhaps even brought life to earth through spores brought here on meteorites. Able to grow mycelium strands through rock they break it down in to sand. Feeding on decaying plant matter creating humus that is nutrition for further plant growth. It is mycelium that creates life. Following each of the great extinctions it was mycelial breakdown that created the nutrient soup from which life reemerged. With this in mind it is no big leap to believe there is sentience. Entering the forest we walk upon a subsurface mind stretching throughout, feeling where we tread, aware of us as we are not aware of it. Most of us when walking in woodland will have felt the presence of a singular mind, larger, deeper and greater than ours. Statistically superior to antidepressants in curing our malaise, a walk in the woods, abandonment to the mycelial super being as its scent and moist calming, age old existence, soothes away human riddles and ire.
Soon I was taking walks twice a day across the patchy field. Reeds are a common clue as can be odd thistles and gorse. Close too to deer faeces. Each time I gathered fifty or so.
Though my intent had been to gather mushrooms by Priddy nine barrows due to the chance I'd be picking from the fruit from ancestral mycelium mass where Christ once walked, it was rewarding to find this sacred fungi less than fifty yards from either of my homes. Mycelium, being such vast life forms arguably qualify as higher beings if not as gods. An earlier post on this blog titled Psylocibin Christ explains my quest. During this most pagan time of year, no doubt embedded in to our culture due to being peak mushroom season we still celebrate Halloween. The old pagan festival, now cloaked in later Christian mythologies. Bonfire night. Also a pagan festival on top of which is now superimposed the celebration of the catholic uprising and attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The old wicker man burning ceremony, remodelled around a ritual burning of a guy. The close similarity in names of the Yorkshire born mercenary Guido Fawkes, tortured by the state for his failed act of terrorism. Fawkes was to be hung drawn and quartered before his parts scattered to the remotest corners of the island yet following his torture he succeeded in his bid to avoid witnessing his own disembowelment and castration by leaping from the scaffold, snapping his neck before the authorities could have their horrific revenge. Still this time of year retains the whiff of the wild. By now the nights are longer and cold. The last tatters of leaves. The moist scent of fungi and for most the last outdoor event of the year sees communities gather together round large outdoor bonfires. Fireworks light up the skies, reminders of the unlit gunpowder of Fawkes. And for the pagan mystic; sprites, elves, pixies, hedge spirits are rife. Whether genetic memories hurled up from within or superstitious imaginings from forgotten childhood fairy tails, it is only the extremely desensitised who feel nothing untoward this time of year.
Though life would later find me exploring the possibilities of a variety of substances it is psychedelics that I began with and to where I would finally return in later life sobriety. It is important to recognise that entheogenic plants and compounds are quite separate from other drugs if we should even categorise them as such. The ritual use of mushrooms was integral to Aztec culture and features heavily in what remains of their sacred art. The earliest cave paintings reveal the importance of mushrooms to ancient man. Some believe psylocibin may even have triggered human consciousness. Perhaps it was not an apple in the garden of Eden but a mushroom that triggered mans step away from animals. In my mid teens I used to take many trips during the mushroom season though grew out of it. By my early twenties I never took them, fearing them if anything. Drifting from the mysticism of my youth and rebelling from what I'd grown to see as fantasy, instead seeking material substance. Joining up with the straight world, first as a joiner then later as a furniture maker. Alcohol is the tipple of the mainstream and psychedelics seen as suspicious. Sadly this path led to deep unhappiness. Finally, after two decades of rarely acknowledged depression and self medication to get through, I realised I'd had enough. On discovering the new lysergamides, AL LAD, ETH lad etc my life changed. One particularly strong mystical experience caused me to question all I knew. My depression was swept away as was the habitual substance use I had used to contain it. So having not taken mushrooms for three decades my psychedelic renaissance brought them back to mind. The mystical experience returned a number of hidden memories. The epiphanies of mushrooms that I had once dismissed as the illusions of a teenager were reevaluated. During my teens all trips had at least a sense of the possibility of dark corridors of the mind. Where al lad and family differed was in their being anxiety free. Was this due to their chemistry or my being older? Less scared in general of life's diverse and weird corners or instead due to specifics in the differing chemistry and biology.
Two years ago, not long after discovering the new lysergamides , the most peculiar thing happened. So slim a chance that some might call it the hand of God. Through AL LAD something had reached out and touched me. Though in no way close to any ideas I had previously about the shape or feel of what a god or a consciousness might be like, something, the earth, life, whatever it is, had rescued me. I have written about this often in earlier postings so won't repeat but further strange happenings followed.
Whilst walking the dog through a local churchyard I came upon a rucksack. It was a Wednesday evening, maybe eight or nine o'clock. Looking around to see if anyone was about before picking it up. Then shouting at the night shadows to see if the owner might have slipped into the bushes for a swift wazz. The place was silent. Not a soul turned up for the following twenty minutes I spent throwing sticks for the dog. Only then did I take a peep inside. Two big plastic bags of some green leaves made me think I must have stumbled upon a weed deal gone wrong but after studying more closely the rough herbage had a deeper, almost grey green tone, quite unlike any weed. Unsure what to do and finding no immediate evidence of ownership I took it home. Inside were various entheogenic organic substances. Nothing else. Three large bags, two containing psychotria viridis and one Baanisteria Caapi, three smaller bags of powdered kratoum and a number of small bottles of ground Syrian rue seeds. After some research I realised I'd chanced upon ingredients for ayuashka, the sacred entheogenic beverage used by Amazonian shamans. For two years prior to this I'd been researching shamanism, it appeared this was a gift. What chances are there of someone of such obscure shamanic interests finding this bag? Few would have had a clue what any of it was. I couldn't find any owner and handing it to any authorities would have been wasteful and disrespectful to higher powers. This was meant for me.
The ayuashka experiences from this 'gift from the gods' were powerful indeed. Many messages came through but one in particular that is relevant here hit home. Dimethyltriptamine, the main active ingredient in psychotria viridis is a triptamine, much the same as psylocibin and pcilocin the psychedelic compounds that naturally occur in magic mushrooms. The similarities in experience to each other are far greater than either to the effects of lysergamides. Amazonian shamanism had been among the focal points of my research in recent years. Ayuashka is seen as a being or God. It has a physicality in the Baanisteria Caapi vine. Her presence animates or is the forest. Foodism though an obsession of the middle classes and hence having numerous ridiculous aspects, can also teach us things. We are expressions of our environment much like any other life form. The Christian mindset has strongly affected western culture embedding an unconscious belief in transcendent souls. Through this way of thinking a separation of man from his environment has developed helped along by technological and agricultural advances. Through food transportation human life is possible anywhere on the planet yet this recent phenomenon disguises a truth. We are animals. All animals evolve in context. The environment in which they live provides the exact nutrition required. Take any animal out of context and it will struggle. Place a Western European in equatorial Africa and they soon fall ill. Countless microbial factors come into play. After a time they can come to survive but never so well as those genetically predisposed to live there. We find the nutrition we need from seasonal foods. Vitamins and trace elements specific to coping with the complex detail of time of year and place. We are fine tuned to thrive in situ. But it is not only food that is site and season specific. Naturally occurring herbs, medicines and bacteria ensure the animal can cope with what it faces. Much of this goes unnoticed. It is not often a conscious thought and the complexity in the chemical and biological make up of the air we walk in, water we drink and wash in and in food we eat isn't fully understood though it is undoubtedly crucial for a healthy balanced organism. This idea of the organism in context carries on through to historic shamanic use of entheogenic plants. We may live in a world where a few clicks on the Internet can bring us sacred plants from around the world but should we be taking them out of context? If foods occur naturally providing the relative nutrition required for living in a place, wouldn't it be natural that the same would be true for entheogens? It was during a particularly discordant episode on an ayuashka trip that the idea of mushrooms set in. It had been more than thirty years since I'd last taken mushrooms. My life had gone full circle. Since March this year when I moved to the area I'd been immediately impressed by what perfect land this was for Liberty caps. Now they were here.
It would be a lie if I said that a return to our primary native entheogen held no apprehension. Memories from over three decades can become misty. Often little is left. It should be born in mind that the cells in the body die off and are replaced by new ones. There is no part of me now that was there thirty five years ago. Unless you believe in the soul independent on a biology and body you believe that the self, the personality, love, mystical states and of course memories have a physical biology. We may be still along way from understanding how any of this can emerge from organic grey mush and meat, nevertheless most no believe it true. Memories from that long ago hence must be memories of memories. Replicated neuronal patterns that mimic those that took place at the time. Besides, memory is renowned for being in part fictitious. We write our own histories. The arrogant write themselves heroic histories justifying and ennobling even their most questionable acts. The depressive does the reverse, changing all achievements into failures. I remembered mushrooms as being fast and close, less expansive than LSD. I remember paranoid fears, dark corridors of the mind, stroboscopic horrors and occasional brutal exposure to the truth of my own weaknesses. I remembered it as quite a challenging ride though I also remember deeply profound moments. Times when it really felt as though I had figured out philosophical truth or 'secrets' of life. Ultimately, in my later teens I recall becoming jaded. How many times had I written down these secrets only to find banal or meaningless words the day after? Yet since taking a more serious look at neuropsychology and neuro philosophy in my late forties my outlook had shifted. In accepting a biology of self, in understanding how the brain creates reality, such dismissal may have been premature. Mistaken even. Unless we take the classical Abrahamic religious view that the soul or spirit is a divine gift, an essence, able to transcend death, not an emergent property of our flesh but something of a super nature that uses the flesh vehicle of the body to negotiate reality, then we accept that what we are has a common biology. All our thoughts, dreams, fears and aspirations are the result of hidden electrical, chemical, biological processes of complex neurological origin. Mystical states, falling in love, the reality we experience, all has a biology and all exists only in our minds. There is no physical evidence to being in love that we can detect as yet. As brain scanning technologies improve the physical truth will one day submit to our searches. Knowing our highest states have a biology doesn't make them any less. The images we see, the feelings we have at any time only exist in our heads. To feel in love is no different to being in love. There can be no objective proof of its existence. Similarly there can be no difference between mystical epiphany and the illusion of mystical epiphany. Such things can only exist from within. Everything or nothing is an illusion. Everything we can ever see or feel has no existence beyond our mind. That isn't to say there is no reality only that we have only a workable map of it. Our eyes send data to the brain which constructs the image. To know God or the secrets of life, mystical gnosis can not be told. Like love it can only be known from within. Perhaps the psychedelic epiphanies of my teens should be taken as seriously as anything else I've experienced? It was with this more open approach I decided to take another look at magic mushrooms.
In order to reacquaint myself with what I remembered as being more challenging than other psychedelics I first took a light dose of forty dried Liberty caps. To soften the ascent I drank a bottle of beer that I washed them down with. Before long I was smiling as the familiarity of a returned and long missed friend joined me. The physical aspect to mushrooms was something I'd forgotten. They were the first drug of any kind that I'd explored in any depth so I had nothing with which to compare them. Now as a Middle Aged man I had more life experience. A tight buzz or tingling came over me that, though intense, was not unpleasant. The yawning and tears, not dissimilar to those experienced during opiate withdrawal alongside wind are perhaps the least pleasant effect. These could be termed side effects and may well be, not due to the psylocibin but due to other trace elements. The experience, as I'd remembered, has a closer feel than lysergamides. A closeness to the expansive feel of meth, eth, al or pro lad. The psychedelic patterning tends towards the dmt or ayuashkan, clearly the inspiration for Sufi mosque ceilings, Buddhist sand mandalas and other many religious iconography. It is clear that all these representations are of the same place or state of mind. It felt good to be here again. Where my last psychedelic experience in early summer using 1p-eth lad was awash with Aqua marine, blues and greens; ocean colours, the mushrooms had an earthy feel of reds, yellows, oranges, the opposite side of the spectrum. A few days later, once tolerance had cleared, I took another reaquaintance trip, both to get any anxiety out of the way so as to be able to use the native entheogen in a more sacramental manner. Again I fell just short of full transcendence. If I stared at the wall or floor I could conjure up hallucinatory visions but there was no hope of breaking through. To my surprise I felt no anxiety at all. No dark corners. No fear at all. Often it can be the most intense and challenging trips that deliver the gnosis. The two may well be inseparable or dependant on each other. But this was not my objective here. Now reacquainted and having dismissed any fears or trepidation I felt able to move forward. My aim now to explore the possibilies of liberty caps, our prime naturally occurring entheogen.
One final point I should make regards recent studies I've read. Ben Sessa, David Nutt and others have been taking the path of Richard Strassman and carrying out academic psychology studies using psychedelics. This type of research, common in the 1960s had all but vanished due to the scare stories from the offspin of the hippy era. One study area has been in deep seated depression and PTSD. Addiction has long been known to submit to psychedelics too. I'd felt an unacknowledged anxiety building in me in recent months. Depression even. Yet following these first two trips I felt freed. It is often suggested that the content of thought during trips is what shifts such mental problems. By engaging and working through the problems that have led to depression through the brutal mirror of psychedelics, that these problems are then come to terms with. Yet I didn't really reflect on myself. It felt biological. Molecules of psylocibin and LSD are almost identical to serotonin. It is becoming known exactly which specific serotonin receptors are accessed by psychedelics. My anxiety and depression were swept away leaving a warm afterglow that remains. Clearly no one suggests that untutored or inexperienced use of psychedelics should be encouraged but I'm certain that, for some, in certain circumstances, they are the only real cure. This idea, that psychedelics are able to treat depression biologically and not just psychologically has real possibilities. This scourge of modern life has a cure.
Sent from my iPad
As leaves turned to bronze and gold I waited for the rain. It fell in a single flurry at first and once it cleared right across the road on the village cricket green various ground mushrooms appeared. A light dusting of Liberty caps, perhaps 60, then a further few provided a small harvest for two trips. Over at my other place, a mile or two away the land is far more wild. Hills and valleys of open fields and clusters of woodland where grass is chewed short by cattle and deer. Untainted with nitrogen fertilisers the ground shows dark patches, lines and circles where the mycelium below colour the grass. After the rains an abundance of field fungi of some thirty varieties suggested this place would be abundant psylocibin country. Soon I was finding the odd cream white Liberty cap and soon had sufficient for a few trips. Picking furtively, reluctant to kneel down in the grass to hunt on all fours for fear of puritanical neighbour interference I soon discovered a magical place. The land rolls down to a spate stream ditch where a line of native hardwoods divide two fields. A boggy patch rotovated by cattle hooves keeps all but the most keen walker away and I've still not seen another soul in that field. Sat below the church yard this hidden oasis provides an unhindered view across the valley. I knew I was on sacred ground. Churches were usually built on old pagan sites when Christianity replaced the old beliefs. Here was no exception. Positioned perfectly. The idyllic point in the landscape. The alarmed cry of green woodpeckers informed other creatures of my presence. Jays screeched out continuing the warning. Making my way across the brow of the hill my dog, some twenty yards ahead caught scent of deer and a stag sprang at speed, making for sanctuary in the woodland below as Dook followed in futile chase. Mycologist Paul Sannetts believes mycelium has sentience. As we walk through field and forest, each step we take disturbs debris and mycelium responds to digest the freshly released nutrients. His perspective is given support from numerous clues. Easily the biggest life forms on the planet, mycelium masses below ground in wooded areas can stretch over hundreds even thousands of acres. Their hairlike strands have a visual similarity to neurones and dendrites, the hair like strands that permit communication in the brains of animals including ourselves, forming vast communicative subterranean networks. Mycelial masses are the veins and arteries of forests, transporting nutrients hundreds of feet from one area to another providing sustenance where needed. Pitched between life and death mycelium, fungi, mushrooms face prejudice. Many people feel a natural aversion to these amazing life forms, neither plant nor animal. Yet it is they that make life. Perhaps even brought life to earth through spores brought here on meteorites. Able to grow mycelium strands through rock they break it down in to sand. Feeding on decaying plant matter creating humus that is nutrition for further plant growth. It is mycelium that creates life. Following each of the great extinctions it was mycelial breakdown that created the nutrient soup from which life reemerged. With this in mind it is no big leap to believe there is sentience. Entering the forest we walk upon a subsurface mind stretching throughout, feeling where we tread, aware of us as we are not aware of it. Most of us when walking in woodland will have felt the presence of a singular mind, larger, deeper and greater than ours. Statistically superior to antidepressants in curing our malaise, a walk in the woods, abandonment to the mycelial super being as its scent and moist calming, age old existence, soothes away human riddles and ire.
Soon I was taking walks twice a day across the patchy field. Reeds are a common clue as can be odd thistles and gorse. Close too to deer faeces. Each time I gathered fifty or so.
Though my intent had been to gather mushrooms by Priddy nine barrows due to the chance I'd be picking from the fruit from ancestral mycelium mass where Christ once walked, it was rewarding to find this sacred fungi less than fifty yards from either of my homes. Mycelium, being such vast life forms arguably qualify as higher beings if not as gods. An earlier post on this blog titled Psylocibin Christ explains my quest. During this most pagan time of year, no doubt embedded in to our culture due to being peak mushroom season we still celebrate Halloween. The old pagan festival, now cloaked in later Christian mythologies. Bonfire night. Also a pagan festival on top of which is now superimposed the celebration of the catholic uprising and attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The old wicker man burning ceremony, remodelled around a ritual burning of a guy. The close similarity in names of the Yorkshire born mercenary Guido Fawkes, tortured by the state for his failed act of terrorism. Fawkes was to be hung drawn and quartered before his parts scattered to the remotest corners of the island yet following his torture he succeeded in his bid to avoid witnessing his own disembowelment and castration by leaping from the scaffold, snapping his neck before the authorities could have their horrific revenge. Still this time of year retains the whiff of the wild. By now the nights are longer and cold. The last tatters of leaves. The moist scent of fungi and for most the last outdoor event of the year sees communities gather together round large outdoor bonfires. Fireworks light up the skies, reminders of the unlit gunpowder of Fawkes. And for the pagan mystic; sprites, elves, pixies, hedge spirits are rife. Whether genetic memories hurled up from within or superstitious imaginings from forgotten childhood fairy tails, it is only the extremely desensitised who feel nothing untoward this time of year.
Though life would later find me exploring the possibilities of a variety of substances it is psychedelics that I began with and to where I would finally return in later life sobriety. It is important to recognise that entheogenic plants and compounds are quite separate from other drugs if we should even categorise them as such. The ritual use of mushrooms was integral to Aztec culture and features heavily in what remains of their sacred art. The earliest cave paintings reveal the importance of mushrooms to ancient man. Some believe psylocibin may even have triggered human consciousness. Perhaps it was not an apple in the garden of Eden but a mushroom that triggered mans step away from animals. In my mid teens I used to take many trips during the mushroom season though grew out of it. By my early twenties I never took them, fearing them if anything. Drifting from the mysticism of my youth and rebelling from what I'd grown to see as fantasy, instead seeking material substance. Joining up with the straight world, first as a joiner then later as a furniture maker. Alcohol is the tipple of the mainstream and psychedelics seen as suspicious. Sadly this path led to deep unhappiness. Finally, after two decades of rarely acknowledged depression and self medication to get through, I realised I'd had enough. On discovering the new lysergamides, AL LAD, ETH lad etc my life changed. One particularly strong mystical experience caused me to question all I knew. My depression was swept away as was the habitual substance use I had used to contain it. So having not taken mushrooms for three decades my psychedelic renaissance brought them back to mind. The mystical experience returned a number of hidden memories. The epiphanies of mushrooms that I had once dismissed as the illusions of a teenager were reevaluated. During my teens all trips had at least a sense of the possibility of dark corridors of the mind. Where al lad and family differed was in their being anxiety free. Was this due to their chemistry or my being older? Less scared in general of life's diverse and weird corners or instead due to specifics in the differing chemistry and biology.
Two years ago, not long after discovering the new lysergamides , the most peculiar thing happened. So slim a chance that some might call it the hand of God. Through AL LAD something had reached out and touched me. Though in no way close to any ideas I had previously about the shape or feel of what a god or a consciousness might be like, something, the earth, life, whatever it is, had rescued me. I have written about this often in earlier postings so won't repeat but further strange happenings followed.
Whilst walking the dog through a local churchyard I came upon a rucksack. It was a Wednesday evening, maybe eight or nine o'clock. Looking around to see if anyone was about before picking it up. Then shouting at the night shadows to see if the owner might have slipped into the bushes for a swift wazz. The place was silent. Not a soul turned up for the following twenty minutes I spent throwing sticks for the dog. Only then did I take a peep inside. Two big plastic bags of some green leaves made me think I must have stumbled upon a weed deal gone wrong but after studying more closely the rough herbage had a deeper, almost grey green tone, quite unlike any weed. Unsure what to do and finding no immediate evidence of ownership I took it home. Inside were various entheogenic organic substances. Nothing else. Three large bags, two containing psychotria viridis and one Baanisteria Caapi, three smaller bags of powdered kratoum and a number of small bottles of ground Syrian rue seeds. After some research I realised I'd chanced upon ingredients for ayuashka, the sacred entheogenic beverage used by Amazonian shamans. For two years prior to this I'd been researching shamanism, it appeared this was a gift. What chances are there of someone of such obscure shamanic interests finding this bag? Few would have had a clue what any of it was. I couldn't find any owner and handing it to any authorities would have been wasteful and disrespectful to higher powers. This was meant for me.
The ayuashka experiences from this 'gift from the gods' were powerful indeed. Many messages came through but one in particular that is relevant here hit home. Dimethyltriptamine, the main active ingredient in psychotria viridis is a triptamine, much the same as psylocibin and pcilocin the psychedelic compounds that naturally occur in magic mushrooms. The similarities in experience to each other are far greater than either to the effects of lysergamides. Amazonian shamanism had been among the focal points of my research in recent years. Ayuashka is seen as a being or God. It has a physicality in the Baanisteria Caapi vine. Her presence animates or is the forest. Foodism though an obsession of the middle classes and hence having numerous ridiculous aspects, can also teach us things. We are expressions of our environment much like any other life form. The Christian mindset has strongly affected western culture embedding an unconscious belief in transcendent souls. Through this way of thinking a separation of man from his environment has developed helped along by technological and agricultural advances. Through food transportation human life is possible anywhere on the planet yet this recent phenomenon disguises a truth. We are animals. All animals evolve in context. The environment in which they live provides the exact nutrition required. Take any animal out of context and it will struggle. Place a Western European in equatorial Africa and they soon fall ill. Countless microbial factors come into play. After a time they can come to survive but never so well as those genetically predisposed to live there. We find the nutrition we need from seasonal foods. Vitamins and trace elements specific to coping with the complex detail of time of year and place. We are fine tuned to thrive in situ. But it is not only food that is site and season specific. Naturally occurring herbs, medicines and bacteria ensure the animal can cope with what it faces. Much of this goes unnoticed. It is not often a conscious thought and the complexity in the chemical and biological make up of the air we walk in, water we drink and wash in and in food we eat isn't fully understood though it is undoubtedly crucial for a healthy balanced organism. This idea of the organism in context carries on through to historic shamanic use of entheogenic plants. We may live in a world where a few clicks on the Internet can bring us sacred plants from around the world but should we be taking them out of context? If foods occur naturally providing the relative nutrition required for living in a place, wouldn't it be natural that the same would be true for entheogens? It was during a particularly discordant episode on an ayuashka trip that the idea of mushrooms set in. It had been more than thirty years since I'd last taken mushrooms. My life had gone full circle. Since March this year when I moved to the area I'd been immediately impressed by what perfect land this was for Liberty caps. Now they were here.
It would be a lie if I said that a return to our primary native entheogen held no apprehension. Memories from over three decades can become misty. Often little is left. It should be born in mind that the cells in the body die off and are replaced by new ones. There is no part of me now that was there thirty five years ago. Unless you believe in the soul independent on a biology and body you believe that the self, the personality, love, mystical states and of course memories have a physical biology. We may be still along way from understanding how any of this can emerge from organic grey mush and meat, nevertheless most no believe it true. Memories from that long ago hence must be memories of memories. Replicated neuronal patterns that mimic those that took place at the time. Besides, memory is renowned for being in part fictitious. We write our own histories. The arrogant write themselves heroic histories justifying and ennobling even their most questionable acts. The depressive does the reverse, changing all achievements into failures. I remembered mushrooms as being fast and close, less expansive than LSD. I remember paranoid fears, dark corridors of the mind, stroboscopic horrors and occasional brutal exposure to the truth of my own weaknesses. I remembered it as quite a challenging ride though I also remember deeply profound moments. Times when it really felt as though I had figured out philosophical truth or 'secrets' of life. Ultimately, in my later teens I recall becoming jaded. How many times had I written down these secrets only to find banal or meaningless words the day after? Yet since taking a more serious look at neuropsychology and neuro philosophy in my late forties my outlook had shifted. In accepting a biology of self, in understanding how the brain creates reality, such dismissal may have been premature. Mistaken even. Unless we take the classical Abrahamic religious view that the soul or spirit is a divine gift, an essence, able to transcend death, not an emergent property of our flesh but something of a super nature that uses the flesh vehicle of the body to negotiate reality, then we accept that what we are has a common biology. All our thoughts, dreams, fears and aspirations are the result of hidden electrical, chemical, biological processes of complex neurological origin. Mystical states, falling in love, the reality we experience, all has a biology and all exists only in our minds. There is no physical evidence to being in love that we can detect as yet. As brain scanning technologies improve the physical truth will one day submit to our searches. Knowing our highest states have a biology doesn't make them any less. The images we see, the feelings we have at any time only exist in our heads. To feel in love is no different to being in love. There can be no objective proof of its existence. Similarly there can be no difference between mystical epiphany and the illusion of mystical epiphany. Such things can only exist from within. Everything or nothing is an illusion. Everything we can ever see or feel has no existence beyond our mind. That isn't to say there is no reality only that we have only a workable map of it. Our eyes send data to the brain which constructs the image. To know God or the secrets of life, mystical gnosis can not be told. Like love it can only be known from within. Perhaps the psychedelic epiphanies of my teens should be taken as seriously as anything else I've experienced? It was with this more open approach I decided to take another look at magic mushrooms.
In order to reacquaint myself with what I remembered as being more challenging than other psychedelics I first took a light dose of forty dried Liberty caps. To soften the ascent I drank a bottle of beer that I washed them down with. Before long I was smiling as the familiarity of a returned and long missed friend joined me. The physical aspect to mushrooms was something I'd forgotten. They were the first drug of any kind that I'd explored in any depth so I had nothing with which to compare them. Now as a Middle Aged man I had more life experience. A tight buzz or tingling came over me that, though intense, was not unpleasant. The yawning and tears, not dissimilar to those experienced during opiate withdrawal alongside wind are perhaps the least pleasant effect. These could be termed side effects and may well be, not due to the psylocibin but due to other trace elements. The experience, as I'd remembered, has a closer feel than lysergamides. A closeness to the expansive feel of meth, eth, al or pro lad. The psychedelic patterning tends towards the dmt or ayuashkan, clearly the inspiration for Sufi mosque ceilings, Buddhist sand mandalas and other many religious iconography. It is clear that all these representations are of the same place or state of mind. It felt good to be here again. Where my last psychedelic experience in early summer using 1p-eth lad was awash with Aqua marine, blues and greens; ocean colours, the mushrooms had an earthy feel of reds, yellows, oranges, the opposite side of the spectrum. A few days later, once tolerance had cleared, I took another reaquaintance trip, both to get any anxiety out of the way so as to be able to use the native entheogen in a more sacramental manner. Again I fell just short of full transcendence. If I stared at the wall or floor I could conjure up hallucinatory visions but there was no hope of breaking through. To my surprise I felt no anxiety at all. No dark corners. No fear at all. Often it can be the most intense and challenging trips that deliver the gnosis. The two may well be inseparable or dependant on each other. But this was not my objective here. Now reacquainted and having dismissed any fears or trepidation I felt able to move forward. My aim now to explore the possibilies of liberty caps, our prime naturally occurring entheogen.
One final point I should make regards recent studies I've read. Ben Sessa, David Nutt and others have been taking the path of Richard Strassman and carrying out academic psychology studies using psychedelics. This type of research, common in the 1960s had all but vanished due to the scare stories from the offspin of the hippy era. One study area has been in deep seated depression and PTSD. Addiction has long been known to submit to psychedelics too. I'd felt an unacknowledged anxiety building in me in recent months. Depression even. Yet following these first two trips I felt freed. It is often suggested that the content of thought during trips is what shifts such mental problems. By engaging and working through the problems that have led to depression through the brutal mirror of psychedelics, that these problems are then come to terms with. Yet I didn't really reflect on myself. It felt biological. Molecules of psylocibin and LSD are almost identical to serotonin. It is becoming known exactly which specific serotonin receptors are accessed by psychedelics. My anxiety and depression were swept away leaving a warm afterglow that remains. Clearly no one suggests that untutored or inexperienced use of psychedelics should be encouraged but I'm certain that, for some, in certain circumstances, they are the only real cure. This idea, that psychedelics are able to treat depression biologically and not just psychologically has real possibilities. This scourge of modern life has a cure.
Sent from my iPad
Sunday, 6 November 2016
Thursday, 3 November 2016
Monday, 31 October 2016
Thursday, 27 October 2016
Wednesday, 26 October 2016
Sunday, 23 October 2016
Wildlife
The day the farmers took in the maize, finding the fields clear and easily traversable once more, I walked with Dook up behind the village. Some husky owners believe they should never be let off the lead but a dog bred to run up to 150 miles a day goes through immeasurable suffering if not allowed to run free. Slipping as I made it up the rough shale leasing toward the top area of the nearby disused quarry the dog effortlessly shot passed me. Having seen something I could not he was gone after some trail. Here I question my letting him off the lead as I call out hoping to bring him back. But huskies are not really pets in the way most dogs are. They don't obey like other breeds but instead hear you then decide if it's in thier interest to do your bidding. The prey drive is strong. I hear panting first as he thrashes free from the undergrowth, looking round for some trail or scent he's lost. Then almost silently and unnoticed by the dog a fallow deer springs past me in a series of leaps, close enough to touch. They are relatively common round here. At my other place, not more than two miles from here I see them from my kitchen window at dawn and dusk. Quietly exiting the bushes and moving into the open to look around in trepidation. Two weeks back whilst driving home from the chemist a small muntjac walked across the lane in front of me. This made it three types of deer I'd seen in the last month. The roe deer being the second that come up into the field behind the van when I park up there to sleep. Perhaps my favourite of the three, their short horns balance out the head shape. Rising as is my norm at five thirty I took out Dook with a mind to see the fallow deer last week and felt a slight disappointment to not see them over the fence in the usual place. Yet walking on further I saw why. Two heavy shapes lumbered about on the large grass area that divides the two blocks of housing that face down on to open countryside. Having been so dry this last month the previous nights rain must have brought worms to the surface. The badgers continued feeding until one looked up and saw me watching. They made no haste but gradually returned to the safety of the bushes.
Moving here in the early summer what struck me first was the abundance of house martins. Zipping about, collecting flies caught in parabolic curls to feed their young. Their movement like Christmas decorations draped round the houses. Swallows skirted over the fields not two feet off the ground. The young on fledging sweep past enjoying their skills, testing themselves, coming as close to you as they dare. Impossibly beautiful. On an evening and morning I'd lie in bed where my head lies close to the window. From here I watch the martins come and go. As they arrive to their clay nests the young shriek in hunger. Two broods successfully reared the year ended some six weeks back now. Preparing to leave they group up and one time I saw fifty or more land together on a flat brick gable end. Then in 48 hours from first to last they left for Africa. Now vacated their nests are soon squatted. Finding the place to themselves the sparrows had a party. Trying out the martins nests, showing off manoeuvres they'd not have dared try last week.
Best bird for me this year has been the hobby. I've no doubt I've seen them before but only this year have I become adept at spotting them. The first I saw I thought might be a sparrow hawk as it chased a house Martin in curved linear paths at break neck speed drawing a sphere around a tree the prey sought sanctuary in. But sparrow hawks prefer other methods. Sailing over a hedge before dropping on the unsuspected. Choosing the house martins for prey suggests a pretty smart and fast bird. They circle high up looking down on what is about. Picking out stray birds to catch in flight. I began to see them high up above the fields where I walk the dog. On my birthday was fortunate to see a chase lead to a kill. Most peculiar of all was one afternoon around the time the swallows left I looked out of my front window to see five or six circling together as buzzards sometimes do. They soon dispersed. Who knows why or what they were doing? Perhaps a pair saying fair well to the years offspring.
Finally I should briefly mention the two birds that characterise the area where the deer are abundant. As I walk into the hills over the road from my other home invariably the screeching and squawking lifts my eyes to the trees. A flash of green will be a wood pecker. Though common enough in the green pockets of Frome where I used to live, they are unavoidable here. A guaranteed sight each day. Their racket only broken by the jays. Equally abundant and working in a similar way these too decorate any walk taken.
Sent from my iPhone
Wednesday, 19 October 2016
Noam Chomsky Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'
I always want to give Chomsky a cuddle
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/noam-chomsky-has-never-seen-anything-like-this/
Sent from my iPhone
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/noam-chomsky-has-never-seen-anything-like-this/
Sent from my iPhone
Friday, 14 October 2016
Wednesday, 12 October 2016
Calling up the field fungi
Calling up the field fungi
Summer stretches on into October as with the early tinting of autumn leaves only just beginning. Now three weeks since the swallows and house martins left for Africa the ground still feels dry. The day's slowly grow shorter since the equinox yet each day beginning with a heavy dew fall soon becomes quite warm with clear skies, very little wind and sunshine each day. Along with the salmon and sea trout mycologists hope for rain. Soon frosts will be here and the mushroom season could be short and unfruitful. Taking to the fields across from where I live each day I go to walk the dog, assessing any changes underfoot. Green woodpeckers and jays call out as we survey the hills and mounds nearby. Feeling the mycelium beneath my feet, pregnant with possibility the feel me there. Stretching out beneath me the mass of dendite strands that are the subsurface part of the organism feel me too, reacting to the disturbed debris made by each step. Entering congress I chant and sing to the earth, calling up the psylocibin, the mushrooms that are the fruiting body. This pause in the year feels pregnant. Like a red Indiana dancing for rain I hope to call it on. This year of change has been so extreme that culturally and spiritually the people are in a quandary. We need the entheogens. We need advice from the field fungi.
Sent from my iPad
Summer stretches on into October as with the early tinting of autumn leaves only just beginning. Now three weeks since the swallows and house martins left for Africa the ground still feels dry. The day's slowly grow shorter since the equinox yet each day beginning with a heavy dew fall soon becomes quite warm with clear skies, very little wind and sunshine each day. Along with the salmon and sea trout mycologists hope for rain. Soon frosts will be here and the mushroom season could be short and unfruitful. Taking to the fields across from where I live each day I go to walk the dog, assessing any changes underfoot. Green woodpeckers and jays call out as we survey the hills and mounds nearby. Feeling the mycelium beneath my feet, pregnant with possibility the feel me there. Stretching out beneath me the mass of dendite strands that are the subsurface part of the organism feel me too, reacting to the disturbed debris made by each step. Entering congress I chant and sing to the earth, calling up the psylocibin, the mushrooms that are the fruiting body. This pause in the year feels pregnant. Like a red Indiana dancing for rain I hope to call it on. This year of change has been so extreme that culturally and spiritually the people are in a quandary. We need the entheogens. We need advice from the field fungi.
Sent from my iPad
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