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>> The story of psilocybin, or commonly known as magic
mushrooms, is a long and controversial one.
Because of Hollywood, Disney films, and word of mouth,
psychedelic mushrooms have been given a serious reputation.
Are they drugs?
Are they medicine?
Are they safe?
Are they keys to heaven or hell?
Let's put the rumors aside and investigate
what we know to date.
It has been suggested that because psilocybin mushrooms
most commonly grew in droppings of cattle
and these animals have been revered and followed
by many humans and religions for thousands of years,
it is unlikely that our ancestors disregarded
these mushrooms and ignored experiencing
their mind-bending effects.
What exactly is the mysterious world of the magic mushroom
experience?
What is the latest scientific research showing us?
What are the most cutting edge and cultural uses of them?
And what might they be trying to teach us?
These strange beings have been speculated
to predate the human race.
They may be able to survive intergalactic space
travel and even volatile entry into Earth's atmosphere,
floating from unknown distances to our planet, our species,
and into our minds.
Mushroom species outnumber plant species 10 to 1,
and their mycelia spreads far and wide
under the Earth to connect with, communicate to, and integrate
a fractal web across many life forms.
Terence McKenna wrote from the perspective
of the mushroom in the book "Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom
Growers Guide," "I am old, older than thought
in your species, which is itself 50 times older
than your history.
Though I have been on Earth for ages, I am from the stars.
My home is no one planet.
From many worlds scattered through the shining
disk of the galaxy have conditions
which allow my spores an opportunity for life."
His brother, ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna,
traces this mysterious spore's historical use.
>> The mushrooms were used in Mexico,
the psilocybin mushrooms by the Aztecs, the Mayans,
and probably the Mazatecs, and even older cultures.
So that's the epicenter of the use
of these Psilocybe cubensis, which grows on cow dung
and is a globally distributed mushroom.
They'll show up pretty much in any pasture in the tropics
where you have cattle.
So they had to be around for millions of years,
you know, or many hundreds of thousands of years,
probably in proximity to human civilizations
or nomadic tribes, if they had cattle.
But then we also know there's evidence
they were used in Europe and probably in South America,
maybe in Africa, maybe in Asia.
So how long have they been used?
There's no way to know.
But I would like to think they'd been used a very long time.
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>> Because most of the classical psychedelics require human
intervention, psilocybin mushrooms were probably
the first psychedelic to be discovered,
as they grew anywhere in the tropics or subtropical climates
and would appear sprouting from the droppings of large animals
like cows.
They could stand as much as a foot tall with a cap
the size of a dinner plate.
It's likely that the first wave of experiences
with eating these mushrooms would
have made the individual think that they had been poisoned.
But after a while, the phenomena would likely
have been seen as divine, otherworldly, and, quite
possibly, an experience with death and rebirth,
a resurrection of the psyche.
When the Spanish conquistadors spread
through present-day Mexico exploring new lands,
they encountered many indigenous groups
practicing peculiar rituals.
The 16th century Aztec statue of Xochipilli
was found in Southern Mexico with engravings
of sacred psychoactive plants like tobacco, Morning Glory,
along with several other flowers,
and the Psilocybe aztecorum mushrooms.
Maya archaeologist Stephen De Borhegyi
believed that hallucinogenic mushroom rituals
were central to Maya religions.
The mushroom stones of the Guatemalan
highlands date to at least 1,000 BC
and are believed to have been used to honor and grind
the dried mushrooms before use.
There are some that believe that these mushrooms,
or the ergot fungus that grew on barley,
were used in the Eleusinian Mystery's fabled Kykeon brew.
>> The question is, what were they offering to these people
that they kept the attention of the antique world for 2000
years?
It's a long time.
I mean, fads come and go.
But what they were doing was quite--
not quite clear until Albert Hoffman discovered LSD.
Steve Gordon Wasson, who brought the Mexican magic mushrooms
from the Mazatec culture and Carl Ruck, a Greek scholar.
They spent several years, very, very meticulous research,
and they came to the conclusion that the key was a beverage,
sacred beverage, which was called Kykeon,
K-Y-K-E-O-N that was administered in a very critical
part of the ceremony.
>> These mysterious events spanned from 1,600 BC to 392 AD
until Theodosius I closed the sanctuaries.
The exact recipe has never been found,
and the last remaining hints of the mystery school
was demolished by King Alaric of the Goths,
who brought a Christian invasion to destroy the old sites.
This invasion was the beginning of a long reign
of the new religion in town, forbidding
the use of plant sacraments.
Now, fast forward to 1955.
R. Gordon Wasson, who is an amateur mycologist and banker
to JP Morgan, made his way to Sierra Mazateca
in Southern Mexico to visit a curandera named Maria Sabina.
In this shamanic village, Sabina was
known for healing her community with powerful mushroom rituals.
She agreed to welcome Wasson into one
of the rituals in good faith that he could take pictures,
but none were allowed to be published.
This was to maintain the sacred space of those being healed
and to protect the village from outsiders knowing
too much of their rituals.
So Wasson agreed and proceeded to take
private pictures of Maria Sabina calling in the mushroom
spirits for healing.
>> She said the spirits in the mushrooms, the ninos,
little children, were the ones that she worked with in concert
with the mushroom entities for healing for her patients.
So, Gordon Wasson went down, and had a photographer,
and had a team of people, and published this in 1957,
a hit in "Life Magazine" in 1957 and then
got into every home in middle America
and basically initiated the psychedelic '60s in '57
by telling people that this mushroom existed
in New Mexico, which altered consciousness and had
this shamanic lineage.
>> On May 13, 1957, "Life Magazine"
published Wasson's photographs, and the story of the mushroom
rituals swept through the Western world.
Flocks of Americans began to flood this small town
in search of the most mind-expanding experience they
could find.
Sabina was reported as saying, it doesn't work in this way.
The spirits of the mushrooms helped
to heal humanity from illness instead of introducing them
to God.
But by this point, the Western world
was hypnotized by the claims being
made about these mushrooms, and shortly thereafter,
the university studies began, but not without pushback.
>> There is nothing smart.
There's nothing grown up or sophisticated in taking an LSD
trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
>> Don't you feel that it's wrong to encourage the use
of these illegal drugs by college students.
This is, in effect, admitting encouraging
the breaking of the law?
>> Well, I never tell anyone what to do with their body
because what we're talking about here is the first and last
frontier of freedom, my body.
>> Timothy Leary was a part of the original psilocybin studies
at Harvard University.
40 years after these studies and after the prohibition
of psychedelics finally loosened,
professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences
at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Roland Griffiths,
took up psilocybin research once more.
>> We began our studies in 2000, and I initiated my interest
in this because I had taken a meditation practice up,
and I was interested in shifts in states of consciousness.
I was actually skeptical about the idea
that psilocybin could produce deeply
spiritually-significant, mystical-type experiences.
But indeed, the data spoke very clearly to us that it could.
So we did choose psilocybin, I think thoughtfully.
One is that most people at the time we initiated
this work couldn't spell psilocybin,
didn't quite know what it was, and it certainly
didn't have the cultural baggage that LSD did.
So LSD and mescaline have very long duration of action,
more on the order of 12 hours as opposed
to psilocybin, which is four to six hours.
So that makes it a much more tractable compound
to work with in a clinical setting.
DMT, on the other hand, is very short acting and can also
be given with an MAO inhibitor.
>> An MAO inhibitor makes DMT last four to six hours.
But the pharmacology is more complex and difficult
to receive approval from the FDA.
However, psilocybin produces similar results
with far less complexity.
>> The psilocybin molecule and the DMT molecule are very
closely related to one another.
In a sense, psilocybin can be rightly described
as orally-active DMT because DMT is not normally orally active.
>> Even though the molecules are very similar,
the mind-expanding experiences aren't as similar as it would
seem.
Each psychedelic molecule, called a tryptamine,
is structured in a very specific way
to trigger specific neurotransmitters in the brain,
causing every psychedelic plant to elicit different effects.
And it all depends upon the neurotransmitters
that the substances play on.
Serotonin mimicking is the hallmark of psychedelica.
Serotonin allows human consciousness
to assemble the consensus reality that we typically
inhabit, and it even forges our sense of self and identity,
and psilocybin mushrooms break down the rigid perceptions
of normal waking consciousness.
>> Psilocybin appears acutely to decrease activity within
a certain network of brain hubs called the default mode
network.
And that network is very active under conditions of vigilance
and depression, and it's deactivated
when people are, for instance, long-term meditators.
And it's thought that that area is somehow
tied up in with respect to self-referential processing,
a sense of self.
It turns out that psilocybin decreases
default mode networking or functioning much
as the same way that meditation decreases
activity in that brain center.
And that brain center happens to be activated in depression.
So that might account for anti-depressant effects
of psilocybin.
>> The fact that brain imaging is now showing similar results
between the benefits of psilocybin and meditation has
not only confirmed what Tim Leary, Richard Alpert,
and Ralph Metzner were looking for in the original Harvard
studies, it seems to lend to the healing properties of ancient
shamanic tribes as well.
For the experiences met within the psilocybin trip
are seen by spiritual adepts to be mere glimpses
into the higher domains.
They are not necessary to get us there.
And if done irresponsibly, they will
atrophy our inner faculties that allow
us to achieve these states without these substances.
So the judicious use of psychedelics
are seen by many to be merely the reminder that these states
exist, that inner healing is possible,
that human consciousness is not static,
but an ever-evolving phenomena.
Therefore, long-term meditators and psilocybin volunteers
at Johns Hopkins are tapping into their own neurology
and disrupting the inner identity that is unwell.
What does it mean that de-stabilizing people's sense
of self can be useful in healing?
Is it because human illness lies in our beliefs about ourselves
and how we fit into the world around us?
Why are the same effects seen in long-term meditators?
>> They are fundamentally re-organizational experiences
that people describe as having a sense of interconnectedness
of all people and things, a sense of sacredness,
a truth value and authenticity to the experience that they
find uniquely compelling and authoritative, positive mood,
a sense of love or open heartedness,
transcendence of time and space, and then another feature
described is ineffability.
They find it difficult to put these experiences in words.
>> Whether it's caused by a psychedelic substance,
the act of meditation, or caused spontaneously,
recalling mystical-type experiences in words seems
to pale in comparison to the underlying meaning.
However, whether the experience itself
can be spoken about or not, psilocybin mushrooms
are being found to help with a number of epidemic-level health
issues in the modern world.
>> The spectrum of therapeutic effects are great, you know,
anxiety in terminal patients, anxiety about--
existential anxiety for people who are dying.
That's one.
PTSD, it's promising for that.
It looks promising for addictions.
There's been spectacular work on psilocybin and smoking
cessation, which is kind of unexpected,
but it's very effective for smoking cessation.
Depression is another one.
Depression is being identified as these FDA protocols are
advanced, and psilocybin can have
a therapeutic effect on it.
>> While so many mental and physical health issues are
given hope in the face of new psilocybin research,
the fact that federally-controlled research
is being overseen by someone who is open to studying and mapping
even the abstract phenomena that fill people with purpose
and meaning is hopeful to those who believe that there is more
than meets the eye behind these psychedelic journeys that
people are explaining.
>> I think that the most compelling and remarkable
finding across all of our populations is that psilocybin,
when administered under these conditions to people who have
been carefully screened and prepared and then received
psilocybin in a setting such as this when they are laying
on a couch, and have eye shades on, and headphones,
and they're in the presence of people who have developed
rapport and trust with them, that the great majority
of these people have these remarkable experiences that,
in fact, map on to naturally-occurring,
mystical-type experiences.
>> When the mindset and physical setting has been carefully
constructed for a healing experience,
there is an abundance of accounts of not only
the occurrence of healing, but a congruent sense of a deep inner
knowing that the healing is beyond physical mechanisms
alone, that an underlying universal shift is taking
place, and the whole being, not just the body,
is receiving healing, that we are more than what we could
ever conceive of and, in fact, we are all different
expressions of the same underlying fabric.
And because these mushrooms reliably
bring about these experiences, the neurology
can finally be analyzed in a scientific setting.
>> We know that people have such experiences in absence
of psychedelics, but under these special set and setting
conditions, we can occasion these experiences at very high
probability.
And that opens this up to the interrogation
by scientific method so we can now ask questions
about the nature of these experiences
and the transformative changes that heretofore couldn't
be asked because we didn't understand what processes
or what conditions optimize the probability
of these experiences.
>> Because scientific technology has advanced considerably since
the 1960 Harvard studies, psilocybin effects on the brain
are far more understood today.
With the destabilization of the default mode network
in the brain, causing for internal neural communication
to change dramatically, we have a glimpse
at what functions of the brain hold trauma in the body.
Most physiological illness that has been conditioned into us
is seen as unhealthy communication
between brain regions.
When someone has the opportunity to view
their life, their beliefs, their world, and the interactions
between them all in a new and unbiased perspective,
as psychedelics often do, it seems
that the innate intelligence of the human being
can identify the communication error
and bring neurochemical processes back into balance.
Whereas most pharmaceutical meds address symptoms only,
and most of the time merely mask them,
psilocybin is being seen to address
the source of these symptoms, causing
a lasting rippling effect into all areas of life.
>> I think that the most interesting feature is not that
these drugs produce these acute salient effects,
but that these effects are remembered, and there--
and there become attribution points for which people say,
you know, I remember that experience every day.
My life has changed because of it.
My attitudes have changed because of it.
We really only, at this point, have the faintest hint
of what kind of network processes, what kind of brain
processes, are altered.
Exactly which networks are involved and how they interact
is still largely a mystery to us.
>> Perhaps science is still unable to definitively map
the neurological basis of psilocybin.
But new advancements are seeing in our understanding
of these mushrooms' effects on the brain.
Meanwhile, to arrive at the mind bending and life changing
experiences that they afford, people
have been left to secretive methods
to get their hands on them, keeping this age-old sacrament
and it's shamanic use alive in the underground.
>> Mushrooms are recolonizing the world right now one
basement at a time.
A lot of people are growing this medicine
and are using it with sacred intention
and not speaking about it very much.
It's a very personal experience for them.
And people are cultivating mushrooms both for large
experiences, being spiritual, trans-personal experiences,
but people are also primarily cultivating this medicine
for micro dosing and using low--
incredibly low doses of psilocybin mushrooms
pretty regularly for the treatment of depression,
anxiety, or to provide a little more energy than they
would normally have.
>> Micro-dosing psychedelic plants has been popularized
mostly by Dr. James Fadiman, who after 40 years of experience
has called this sub-perceptible dose a problem-solving amount.
Whereas moderate doses are effective for therapy,
and high doses for spirituality.
And because of this, the phenomena
has recently found itself in unsuspecting places
like the workplace in Silicon Valley
and other analytical occupations.
>> A lot of software engineers, myself included,
tend to be victims of constrained thinking,
or we think very logically and analytically like this is
the way.
Like you know, you start seeing code everywhere in everything
you look at.
But the psychedelics just take all of that,
and rip it up, and tear it into pieces,
and you're like, oh, my god, I don't really
know what I know anymore.
And that can be really difficult and really, really amazing.
And so like, with engineering, what it tends to do
is I'll like get stuck on a problem, you know,
like maybe it's some engineering solution.
I just can't think of anything, and I sit with it,
and then I just like suddenly, like,
I can almost see the problem I'm working on,
like in three dimensions, you know what I mean?
Like my eyes closed or whatever and to just see it
in a new way.
>> Dosage is the most surefire way to dramatically change
the effects gained from psychedelic mushrooms.
Terence McKenna is known for categorizing
what he called the heroic dose at 5
or sometimes 5 and 1/2 grams.
To most, this would be considered an amount enough
to elicit a spiritual experience.
Psychologist and author Rick Strassmann,
aside from his famed DMT research,
also administered psilocybin to volunteers
in a lesser-known study.
>> The kinds of psilocybin doses,
which are now being called high, were just, you know,
barely threshold psychedelic in our volunteers.
And, yeah, our final large dose of psilocybin,
if we had continued with the studies,
would have been twice what is considered a high dose now.
So that's what was the main finding.
You know, we just pushed the dose more
than anybody had ever pushed it.
>> The doses in Dr. Strassmann's studies were over 8 grams.
This is almost twice as much as Terence McKenna's heroic dose.
>> Now, we know that the probability of having salient
experiences increases as a function of dose.
But the probability of having difficult experiences
also increases as a function of dose.
But I should say that very often, it's
those deeply uncomfortable experiences that
provide a window of opportunity through which, if people can
investigate and go through, they'll
open into larger experiences.
So, very often experiences that people will subsequently
describe as having been difficult
are among the most interesting and meaningful to them.
>> Trauma is typically deeply uncomfortable at the moment
of its adoption, as it's an experience that is too intense
or complex to process all at once.
So the memory is stored in the neurology and the tissues
of the body, awaiting a moment to resurface and continue
being processed so it can finally be surrendered and let
go of.
Perhaps that is why these larger doses are useful.
They de-stabilize the habitual processes
of the brain, which likely serve as a distraction
and suppressant of trauma and unwanted aspects of the psyche.
But once this neural habituation has destabilized,
the natural healing intelligence of the human being
goes into housecleaning mode, and old wounds are addressed.
But what happens beyond these doses?
There are accounts from Kilindi Iyi, a martial arts instructor
and mycologist, who regularly takes 30-plus grams
in one setting, six times the heroic dose.
The experience, as he publicly noted,
is beyond language, beyond the five senses,
and deeply embedded in a world of symbolism
and primal forces that obliterate
the concepts of space time.
At these astronomical doses, he mentions
that the set and setting has less
of an impact on the journey to come.
Higher doses become less therapeutic and far more
mystical.
The mystical experience may be deeply transformative.
However, it can also be traumatizing
to experience such intensity to the untrained or uninitiated,
which is counter-intuitive to the purpose
of the therapeutic doses.
In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the feeling of safety
is second only to food, water, warmth, and rest, and you
can rest assured that most of those needs
may not be met with higher doses of psilocybin either.
A child entering this world instantly
latches on to predictability and sources
of safety and sustenance from parents, environment,
and culture.
Anything less causes anxiety, fear, and eventually trauma.
Psilocybin mushrooms, even in moderate doses of 3 to 4 grams,
tends to dissolve our grip on these needs.
5 to 8 grams pushes this boundary
to the limit of consensus sanity.
Some believe that nothing valuable
lies beyond that limit.
Nothing out there can be brought back here and made sense of.
But as we see with psychonauts of DMT
or initiates of the mystery schools
like Eleusis, pushing the envelope
is the name of the game.
Venturing where no one has gone before
is born into some seekers' very nature.
Many believe that psilocybin affords the initiate
or volunteer an opportunity to experience
death and return from it.
>> So this work with psilocybin and these reorganizational
kinds of emergent experiences that come out of that speaks
very deeply to my own interest and longing in understanding
the nature of consciousness.
It seems to me that the fundamental question
that we as humans are faced with is,
what are we really doing here?
How is it that we've come to be in this sea of consciousness
and awareness?
You know, what's really going on here?
What happens when we die?
How did this whole phenomenon come about?
These are the existential questions of life,
and personally, I can't think of anything
more interesting and intriguing, and I
think that psilocybin and work with these compounds
provides a unique doorway into exploration
of these sorts of experiences.
>> As science barrels into the future with new technologies
to study ancient methodologies for healing and spiritual
transformation, are we finally on the verge of understanding
these psychedelic substances and their unique effects on human
consciousness and neurochemistry?
If psilocybin is the oldest classical psychedelic
with widespread shamanic use, perhaps we
are in the midst of a revival of the old Eleusinian-style
mysteries, and perhaps these mysteries are finally
being decoded and widespread, a large-medicine heavily
suppressed, demonized, and misunderstood finally
back into the hands of those who intend to heal the world's ills
and voyage into the unknown.
Another highly-suppressed and controversial
mind-expanding plant species that
has been with humanity for ages is the North American peyote
cactus and its sister in South America known
as huachuma or San Pedro.
Up next, join us as we investigate
the history of psychedelic cacti use among indigenous
across the New World and how they mirrored
ancient Greek initiations as well as prophecies
surrounding the unification of shamanic tribes everywhere.
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