Last Week in Psychedelic Sundays

The potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy.— Stanislav Grof

Research on psychedelics — a word that comes from the Greek roots "psyche," or soul, and "delos," or manifest — has been heating up in recent years. The drugs appear to have a unique ability to treat conditions that fail to respond to even the best current treatments. Oftentimes, all that's required to see those effects is a single dose, or "trip," in a supervised medical setting.

The power of psychedelics is that they can reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. Psychedelics help to accelerate a maturation process, where we can see that we’re not operating within silos. Instead, we’re operating as part of a larger collective and part of a larger community. Thanks to the revival of psychedelic science, we’ve (re)discovered that psychedelic therapy can benefit sufferers of severely debilitating conditions where current treatments fail. We’ve started to develop an understanding of what psychedelics do to the brain, and how psychedelics can have such transformative power.

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Scientists Identify Key Neural Mechanisms Behind an LSD Trip

New research has identified a key neural mechanism that leads to altered states of consciousness in humans after taking LSD. The research lends strong support to a decade-old theory that attributes the trippy effects of many psychedelics to a breakdown of information processing in a region of the brain that regulates how we respond to internal and external stimuli.

A top psychedelic scientist says 'the climate's looking good' for magic mushrooms and MDMA to turn into medicines at a gathering of the world's billionaires

Nonprofit groups have largely blazed the psychedelic trail for the past few years. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, for example, has raised more than $70 million for research on MDMA, marijuana, LSD, and ayahuasca.

Oregon couple pushes to put mushroom therapy on the ballot

"Treating a variety of mental health issues including depression, anxiety, addiction of all kinds including alcoholism and smoking," said Eckert. Eckert and his wife, Sheri, lead the Oregon Psilocybin Society. They're pushing to legalize Psilocybin and make it accessible by creating safe spaces for regulated and supervised therapy sessions. They're hoping to get enough signatures to get PSI on the 2020 Oregon ballot.

Scientists Rethink Psychedelics As Attitudes Change Toward Formerly Illicit Drugs

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently suggested that the FDA’s classification for psilocybin— the psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in hallucinogenic or magic mushrooms—be changed from a Schedule I drug, which has no known medical benefit, to a Schedule IV drug, which is similar to conventional prescription drugs.

Michael Pollan & The New Science of Psychedelics

A Collection of Trip Sitter Manuals and Guides

People want to sit for each other. It’s only natural for friends to look out for, and want to take care of each other. People come to integration circle to figure out how ways to be safe and minimize risk during psychedelic journeys, and having a trip sitter is certainly one of the ways to do this. Of course, the fact that people want trip sitters mean that some one else has to want to be a trip sitter, and a competent one.

Embodied Healing: A Personal Perspective on Resolving Trauma with Psychedelics

The very essence of trauma is when an event, or many events over a period of time, wounds us so deeply our bodies continue to go back to that moment in an attempt to protect us from the harm of the past. While trauma can occur from a single incident, such as a car crash, I’m focusing here on interpersonal or relational trauma; trauma that is sustained when someone uses their position of power to harm another person, as in cases of sexual abuse and assault, physical abuse, and psychological and emotional abuse.

Sacred Sexuality, Psychedelics and Erotic Hustle: Interview with Lana Baumgartner

Lana Baumgartner is the co-founder of Psychedelic Times and author of the upcoming book Erotic Hustle: Redefining Sin Through Sacred Sexuality, where she recounts her work in the sex industry as an exotic dancer and webcam model. We discussed her journey into this field as a young woman, and the visions she has received through plant medicine work for how to bring sacredness and positivity back into this highly stigmatized realm.

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The Psychedelic Emotion: Why We Need More “Awe” In Everyday Life

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed

Finding Psychedelic Mushrooms

There is evidence to suggest that psychedelic mushrooms have been used ritually by Aztecs, Mayas, and other ancient Mesoamerican cultures, and perhaps many thousands of years before that by aboriginal Saharan tribes in North Africa. According to Terence McKenna, psilocybin might actually be responsible for the development of our creativity hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In any case, humans have been connecting with the divine via magic mushrooms for a long time, and this tradition has carried on into the modern age. However, in this modern age, possession and use of shrooms is forbidden by law in most of the world. The question poses itself – how and where to find magic mushrooms? Without further ado, below are a few of the most accessible ways to source them.

I Cooked DMT in My Kitchen for Four Years

Willem was 21 when he smoked DMT for the first time. Ever since high school, he'd been curious about the psychedelic—but as it's quite rare, he initially found it hard to come by. Eventually, he got his hands on some. "The first time I did it, my blood was racing through my body," he remembers. "I took a deep breath, followed by three puffs, and before I could put the pipe down I was in a completely different world. It works immediately. The pipe and lighter were taken out of my hands, and with a delicate shove I was pushed onto my friend's sofa. I had lost all control."

Willem describes seeing every object in the room come away from the walls and fly around. Meanwhile, his friends were contorting into different shapes, before floating up and walking on the ceiling. "You have no time to process it—it's all happening too fast," he says. "During a trip like that, you don't feel any fear—all you experience is an indescribable sense of connection and love. But when I came back to reality, I shit my pants. It was traumatizing—yet at the same time, it was beautiful."