Last Week in Psychedelic Sundays

“Three hundred and fifty years ago, Shulgin notes, the Church proclaimed, “The earth is the center of the universe, and anyone who says otherwise is a heretic.” Today, the government proclaims, “All drugs that can expand consciousness are without medical or social justification, and anyone who uses them is a criminal.” In Galileo’s time, the authorities said, “We do not need to actually look through that mysterious contraption.” Now the government says, “There is no need to actually taste those mysterious compounds.” In the past, the Church said, “How dare you claim that the earth is not the center of the universe?” Today the government says, “How dare you to claim that an understanding of God is to be found in a white powder?” (Daniel Pinchbeck)

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.

As psychedelics increasingly hit the mainstream, we need to educate ourselves about their risks as well as their incredible potential for healing and growth. While the headlines keep on coming about psychedelics boosting creativity and ‘curing’ depression, there’s far less accessible information available about the care and precautions involved in the research behind the news stories.

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Psychedelica: Psychedelics And Consciousness

Facing Our Fears With Psychedelic Meditation

Often, when we think of facing our fears, we think of taking some sort of massive action. We think of standing up to someone at work, coming clean with our family, starting a project that we’ve been holding off on. This is one way, but I’m talking about another.

I’m talking about facing fears in meditation. On Sunday, I was on my cushion. Suddenly, I could hardly breathe. My belly was tight, and it was shaking. There was both discomfort and confusion. I pretended I didn’t know what to do about it, except I did. I just didn’t want to do it. Witness it, lean into it, look it squarely in the face. This horrible anxious clenching in my low belly. As it pulsated painfully in my awareness, I started to hear the voice of fear and self-hatred, ‘you don’t have enough, you aren’t enough’. Over and over, like a mantra. 108 repetitions of self hatred.

HOW TO USE PSYCHEDELICS SAFELY – WITH PSYCHEDELICS TODAY HOST KYLE BULLER

We dig into the history of psychedelic therapy, from the times when LSD was shipped out to psychotherapists around the world with the request that they find some kind of use for it, to the prohibition years and the Third Wave of Psychedelics which we’re in today.

But this isn’t just about mushrooms and LSD. This is about healing and personal growth. The Navigating Psychedelics course incorporates a wealth of knowledge from the explorations of Stanislav Grof into the body’s ability to heal itself through breath- and bodywork. How much trauma do we hold onto in the cells of our body? And can meditative, trance-like states release repressed memories?

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A Melbourne Hospital Will Trial Magic Mushroom Therapy for Dying Patients

A medical trial will use magic mushrooms to treat end-of-life anxiety at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital this year. The controversial study has finally been approved by ethics committees and state and federal authorities, and will see a number of terminally ill patients being given a single dose of synthetic psilocybin—the psychoactive ingredient in mushrooms—under the supervision and guidance of psychiatrists to help them come to terms with their own mortality. Treatment of the first 30 patients is due to begin in April, NewsCorp reports.

Psychedelics appear to have promising effects on human well-being — but rigorous research is lacking

“We found that there is a double bias when it comes to psychedelics. On the one hand, mainstream medicine — respectively psychiatry — is often unrealistically concerned with the negative side effects of psychedelic use like HPPD (hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder) or cases of psychosis,” said Henrik Jungaberle of the MIND European Foundation for Psychedelic Science, the corresponding author of the review.

Serotonergic Psychedelics LSD & Psilocybin Increase the Fractal Dimension of Cortical Brain Activity in Spatial and Temporal Domains

Psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin and LSD, represent unique tools for researchers investigating the neural origins of consciousness. Currently, the most compelling theories of how psychedelics exert their effects is by increasing the complexity of brain activity and moving the system towards a critical point between order and disorder, creating more dynamic and complex patterns of neural activity. While the concept of criticality is of central importance to this theory, few of the published studies on psychedelics investigate it directly, testing instead related measures such as algorithmic complexity or Shannon entropy. We propose using the fractal dimension of functional activity in the brain as a measure of complexity since findings from physics suggest that as a system organizes towards criticality, it tends to take on a fractal structure. We tested two different measures of fractal dimension, one spatial and one temporal, using fMRI data from volunteers under the influence of both LSD and psilocybin. The first was the fractal dimension of cortical functional connectivity networks and the second was the fractal dimension of BOLD time-series. We were able to show that both psychedelic drugs significantly increased the fractal dimension of functional connectivity networks, and that LSD significantly increased the fractal dimension of BOLD signals, with psilocybin showing a non-significant trend in the same direction. With both LSD and psilocybin, we were able to localize changes in the fractal dimension of BOLD signals to brain areas assigned to the dorsal-attentional network. These results show that psychedelic drugs increase the fractal character of activity in the brain and we see this as an indicator that the changes in consciousness triggered by psychedelics are associated with evolution towards a critical zone.

The Future of MDMA: Phase 3 and Beyond

More psychedelic research is happening right now than at any other point in the last 50 years. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) — a non-profit entity with a for-profit arm — has provided much of the funding and support for this research. They are now moving into unprecedented territory: Phase 3 trials for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy

Psychedelic drug ayahuasca could help treat diabetes

A new study shows that one of the key ingredients in ayahuasca — harmine — could help cure diabetes or prediabetes. Those diseases affects 100 million adults in this country — about a third of us — and are one of the top five most common causes of death in the world.
Published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the study suggests that harmine could jumpstart cells in the pancreas, called beta cells, into replicating at faster rates than scientists have ever seen.
Harmine is present in the ayahuasca vine in high numbers. The compound is what allows a psychedelic drug in the leaf, a psychedelic called DMT, to work its magic, and create visions and hallucinations.

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This guy wrote a short story about carrier sailors tripping on acid and it’s glorious

News of more than a dozen sailors from the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan’s nuclear department being disciplined or charged for their participation in an alleged LSD ring sent shock waves across the Navy.
But what if a carrier’s executive officer spiked his CO’s morning coffee with the hallucinogenic drug?

Meet the Painter Who Turns His Psychedelic Experiences Into Gallery Art

Born In Madison, Wisconsin, Roberts takes inspiration from comic books, skateboarding, space exploration, and his experiences with psychedelics. Roberts, a.k.a. LSD World Peace, has collaborated with Supreme and designed graphics for GX1000, a skate brand based in San Francisco, where he works and lives. In December, Roberts released his second monograph, We Ate the Acid, which features over 100 new and recent works.

Acid and the sexual psychonauts

Determined to try LSD, Constance Newland used her self-professed “frigidity” to take part in an acid-fuelled psychological experiment in the late 1950s. We uncover Newland’s experiences – documented in a book published in 1962 – and explore what Newland has in common with contemporary sexual psychonauts.