Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

To experience the mushroom’s visionary effect, one should lie down in silence with eyes closed during the period when the mushroom’s influence is most active. Although this is a decidedly daunting venture, the colorful splendor of psilocybinetic visions and their unmistakable revelational quality make it very much worthwhile.

If psilocybin mushrooms are consumed on an empty stomach, their effects may be felt within as little as twenty minutes. (Taking them on an empty stomach is preferable because they are stronger that way and the act of fasting prior to ingestion becomes, like sexual abstinence, somewhat ritually symbolic.) If mushrooms are consumed after a meal, the effects can take up to an hour and a half to emerge. In either case, the first changes that one notices are likely to be somatic, in that one might feel a little restless and edgy. This would appear to be the initial reaction of the body and the psyche to the mushroom’s exotic influence, a sort of “retuning” process. These mild uneasy feelings generally subside as one’s perception gradually begins to open up and expand. One is then bathed in a decidedly warm and numinous presence.

I find it curiously apt that an adventure into the nature of reality should gravitate around a wild fungus native to most parts of the Earth’s surface. It really is the case that we can turn to Nature if we wish to fully comprehend the sense and significance of our lives. This is like the plot of some elaborate adult fairy tale. If we genuinely wish to gain self-knowledge and realize our place within Nature’s endlessly creative transmutations, we can deliberately seek out and consume the “truth.” Like cosmic actors, by performing an age-old ritual act in time and space, we can perceive the world afresh and anew. Through psilocybinetic gnosis we may even glimpse the full majesty of this astounding Universe in which we are so privileged to find ourselves.

And so I end my enthusiastic tale. The sacred mushroom now beckons, affording us communion with the natural intelligence of which we are a part. Astonishingly, such a communion may be nearer than ever. The choice is wholly yours. Born in the 1950s and 1960s, the sacred endeavor in which the doors of perception are thrust wide apart is set to blossom in the coming years. Be there.

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