Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

As it was, Graves need not have worried. Unable to write during his rapture, he passively let the experience overwhelm him. Afterward he was to write that he had seen a “mountain-top Eden” and experienced the “bliss of innocence” and “the knowledge of good and evil.” {18} 18 9. Graves, Oxford Addresses on Poetry, 124. He had even felt capable of solving any problem in the world, as if he had access to all of the world’s knowledge.

Graves went on to predict that a once-sacred substance entrusted to an elite few would soon be sought by “jaded sensation seekers,” although they would likely be dissatisfied with psilocybin, as it was not a “drug” as such because it failed to stupefy like alcohol. He ended his descriptive account with the following warning, which still rings true today:

Good and evil alternate in most people’s hearts. Few are habitually at peace with themselves; and whoever prepares to eat hallucinogenic mushrooms should take as careful stock of his mental and moral well-being as initiates took before attending the Eleusinian Mysteries…. This peculiar virtue of psilocybin, the power to enhance personal reality, turns “Know Thyself!” into a practical precept; and may commend it as the sacramental food of some new religion. {19} 19 10. Ibid., 127.

Fine and prescient words indeed, once more indicative that psilocybin should be approached cautiously and with a “good heart.” Graves’s remark about “jaded sensation seekers” is almost identical to Wasson’s emerging dismay at the hoards of “oddballs,” “thrill seekers,” and “riffraff ” who were already descending in droves upon Mexico in search of divine mushrooms. However, this type of popular reaction to a new phenomenon was surely inevitable. Although it was to cause abject consternation among the psilocybin elite, to deny the mushroom outright to the masses is an impractical, short-sighted reaction to basic human nature. I would argue that knowledge of psilocybin’s spiritual power is best laid open to all who might wish to seek it out. If this be considered by some as casting pearls before swine, then so be it. The point is that the end will justify the means, this end being, hopefully, a culture transformed with a revitalized veneration for the natural systems of the Earth and a deeper insight into the transcendental aspects of the reality process. The eco-destructive age in which we live surely demands a cure along these lines.

Aldous Huxley explicitly summed up the early mood of optimism surrounding psychedelics in a speech he delivered to psychologists in 1961, and somewhat more implicitly in his Utopian novel Island, published in 1962. In the speech Huxley predicted that psychological science would inevitably be confronted with more and more data on the visionary experience induced by substances like psilocybin. Although these experiences might be valueless—no more significant than a trip to the movies—it might be the case that if the visionary experience were cooperated with, if some deep meaning were ascertained and acted on, then this could be crucial in changing the lot of humanity. Huxley conjectured that psychedelics encouraged a state of mind in which reality is perceived in a non-utilitarian manner and that the visionary experience could lead to a change in behavior for the good. If so, this would reinforce the maxim of eminent psychologist William James that a spiritual or mystical experience be judged pragmatically through its consequences upon the life of the experiencer. If the psychedelic visionary state can enrich one’s life, then, by definition, it is for the good.

In Island, which was Huxley’s final novel, his fictional Edenic islanders use “moksha-medicine,” an entheogenic mushroom, as part of their religious rites. Indeed, the mushroom supports the islanders’ paradise. This invented mushroom was almost certainly based upon the psilocybin mushroom, as Huxley had tried psilocybin on a number of occasions.

The issues raised in his earlier work The Doors of Perception are discussed by his islanders, in particular, whether the effects of moksha-medicine are illusory or real. Through one particular piece of fictional dialogue we are asked to consider the idea that perhaps the brain transmits consciousness rather than produces it. In other words, perhaps moksha-medicine allows a larger volume of what Huxley refers to as Mind at Large (Mind with a big “M”) to enter one’s individual mind (mind with a small “m”). Later, I will have much to say on this deceptively simple remark, as it bears heavily upon the whole notion of the stuff of consciousness.

As the islanders who champion moksha-medicine assert, even the bottom line places value on the experiences engendered by their mushroom, for if there is no objective content at all in the experience, it is still life-enriching and provides a “blessed transformation.”

At one point in the story, the archetypal skeptic and disbelieving character Murugan receives the following rejoinder.

You’ve been told that we are just a set of self-indulgent dope-takers wallowing in illusion and false samadhis . Listen, Murugan—forget all the bad language that’s been pumped into you. Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred milligrams of moksha -medicine and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you’ve got to live in, learn in, suffer in, and finally die in. Yes, even you will have to die one day—maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? But it’s going to happen, and one’s a fool if one doesn’t prepare for it. {20} 20 11. Huxley, Island, 170.

Arguably the greatest, most eloquent, and most passionate spokesperson for the intelligent use of psychedelics during the 1950s and early 1960s, Aldous Huxley was unaware that his beloved moksha-medicinal fungi were, even as he wrote Island, spreading their mycelial networks throughout the wild unfarmed soil of most of the planet’s Temperate Zone, their presence stretching across vast tracts of unspoiled land. In the autumn months, this secret underground arrangement was yielding countless psilocybin mushrooms, and Huxley never lived to discover this most astonishing of truths. All but forgotten by the mid-1960s, the psilocybin mushroom would eventually rise and fruit again.

Mexico and South America are the areas most associated with ritual entheogenic plant use. Apart from utilizing over twenty species of psilocybin mushroom, native Mexicans are also known to have employed the peyote cactus, the morning glory plant, and various species of datura, all of which contain potent visionary substances. The appeal of these plants, like the appeal of the mushroom, is that they support a channel of communication between the shaman and the spiritual domain. As we have seen, this unusual state of affairs arises not from hearsay or dogma, but from the mind-expanding effect of these plants on the human psyche, an effect equally reported by Westerners who might not necessarily be as spiritually inclined as native shamans.

In South America, aboriginal Amazonians still prepare a highly innervating psychedelic concoction called ayahuasca, made principally from an indigenous species of Banisteriopsis jungle vine, along with various other plant ingredients. This same potion is also taken as a sacramental tea by members of the União do Vegetal, an officially sanctioned church found throughout Brazil. The active principles in these potions are the substances harmine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT for short), the latter being a close structural relative of psilocybin. Shamans claim that ayahuasca facilitates communion with mythological beings as well as the souls of their ancestors. Similarly, species of Virola tree—the resin of which also contains DMT—are used to prepare entheogenic snuffs in Amazonian Colombia, which are taken to free the soul so that it may travel in the spiritual dimension.