Elevate and Evolve | Cannabis & Psychedelic Culture Blog
The Story of the Chinese Farmer is a parable about life and nature narrated by Alan Watts, animated by Steve Agnos, and with music by Chris Zabriskie.
The whole process of nature is a process of immense complexity and it is really impossible to tell whether something that happens in it is good or bad.
Because you never know the consequences of the misfortune. Or, you never know the consequences of good fortune. – Alan Watts
Psilocybin is a chemical found in shrooms that causes a sensory overload of saturated colors and patterns. Recent research has found that this effect happens because the brain becomes “hyperconnected” and allows for increased communication between different brain regions.
Prior studies have found that shrooming doesn’t just create a colorful, psychedelic experience for a couple of hours; it can cause positive neurological changes that last over a year. These changes resulted in a personality that was more open to the creative arts and became happier, even 14 months after receiving the psilocybin.
The study used 15 participants with prior positive experiences with hallucinogens to avoid a bad trip inside the enclosed machine. Some of the participants received saline placebo (a), while the other half received psilocybin (b) .
Surprisingly, the researchers saw that upon receiving psilocybin, the brain actually re-organized connections and linked previously unconnected regions of the brain. These connections were not random, but appeared very organized and stable. Once the drug wore off, the connections returned to normal.
We can speculate on the implications of such an organization. One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synesthesia (subconscious pairing of two things) which is often reported in conjunction with the psychedelic state. – Giovanni Petri, Lead Researcher at ISI Foundation
The mechanism of how psilocybin is creating these changes is not yet known and will require further study. The researchers believe that in understanding the drug’s mechanism for temporarily re-wiring the brain and altering mood, it could potentially be manipulated into making a functional treatment for depression or other disorders.
> How Magic Mushrooms Change Your Brain | IFL Science
A new report describes how cannabis use originated thousands of years ago in Asia, and has since found its way to many regions of the world, eventually spreading to the Americas.
Cannabis plants are believed to have evolved on the steppes of Central Asia, specifically in the regions that are now Mongolia and southern Siberia. The history of cannabis use goes back as far as 12,000 years, which places the plant among humanity’s oldest cultivated crops.
Burned cannabis seeds have also been found in kurgan burial mounds in Siberia dating back to 3,000 B.C., and some of the tombs of noble people buried in Xinjiang region of China and Siberia around 2500 B.C. have included large quantities of mummified psychoactive marijuana.
For the most part, it was widely used for medicine and spiritual purposes during pre-modern times. For example, the Vikings and medieval Germans used cannabis for relieving pain during childbirth and for toothaches.
The idea that this (cannabis) is an evil drug is a very recent construction and the fact that it is illegal is a “historical anomaly”.
Marijuana has been legal in many regions of the world for most of its history.
– Barney Warf, Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas
Marijuana became widely used in India, where it was celebrated as one of “five kingdoms of herbs … which release us from anxiety” in one of the ancient Sanskrit Vedic poems whose name translate into “Science of Charms.”
Over the next centuries, cannabis migrated to various regions of the world, traveling through Africa, reaching South America in the 19th century and being carried north afterwards, eventually reaching North America.
> Marijuana’s History: How One Plant Spread Through the World | Live Science
Researchers from the Université De Bordeaux suggest that the desire to consume food after ingesting cannabis stems from how THC, the herb’s psychoactive compound, meshes with the olfactory bulb in the brain.
Weed magnifies our sense of smell, which in turn stimulates the appetite (munchies) and makes food more attractive – a major benefit for those patients suffering from eating disorders.
Marijuana can be salvation’s wing for people inflicted with conditions like anorexia nervosa, which has a tendency to contribute to the perception that food is evil.
However, by using cannabis to put a patient’s sense of smell into overdrive, they experience an increased appreciation for food that is typically lost with these types of disorders.
– Lead Researcher Giovanni Marsicano, Marijuana and Food – Nature Neuroscience
The study monitored several groups of stoned and sober mice by watching how they reacted to the presence of almond and banana oils. The stoner mice consumed a lot more oil than their sober counterparts.
In a special group of stoner mice genetically engineered without olfactory bulbs, THC did not cause them to crave food anymore than the sober mice.
> Why Does Pot Make Food Smell and Taste Better? | High Times
DMT is an illegal, psychedelic compound found in the human body and at least 60 species of plants worldwide. Terence McKenna (who has raised awareness of DMT to its present level) called DMT “the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science” in his 1994 lecture Rap Dancing Into the Third Millennium
McKenna first smoked DMT as an undergraduate at Berkeley in early 1967. He had experience with LSD—ingesting it “once a month or so”—and other psychedelics, but said in an interview:
It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience.
DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so. – Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (1992)
From 1990 to 1995, Dr. Rick Strassman administered 400 intravenous doses of DMT to 60 heavily pre-screened volunteers with extensive experience with psychedelics. He documented the results—in fascinating detail, because it “was important that other people knew how to wind their way through this maze,” the two-year process was published in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Dec 2000), nine months after Terence McKenna died.
The pineal gland of older life forms, like lizards, is called “the ‘third’ eye” and has a lens, cornea, and retina. As life evolved, the pineal moved deeper into the brain. The human pineal gland is not actually part of the brain. Rather, it develops from specialized tissues in the roof of the fetal mouth. From there it migrates to the center of the brain, where it seems to have the best seat in the house.
Twenty-five years ago, Japanese scientists discovered that the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. I know of no other psychedelic drug that the brain treats with such eagerness.
This is a startling fact that we should keep in mind when we recall how readily biological psychiatrists dismissed a vital role for DMT in our lives.
If DMT were only an insignificant, irrelevant by-product of our metabolism, why does the brain go out of its way to draw it into its confines? – Dr. Rick Strassman, DMT Researcher
> DMT: You cannot imagine a stranger drug or experience | VICE
Carl Sagan never got to see the day when people could go to a store and purchase weed without fear of the law. But thanks to a collection of his papers recently made available by the Library of Congress, we now have Sagan’s personal writings on cannabis.
This 1988 Sagan letter shows why a government-funded scientist might be reluctant to draw too much public attention to his views about marijuana in the midst of President Reagan’s drug war.
Writing to Dr. Grinspoon (editor of Sagan’s famous essay on the benefits of cannabis), Sagan expressed outrage about language in a congressional funding bill for NASA that required contractors like him to adopt written anti-drug-use policies:
The oath required seems to smack of prior restraint and is unsymmetrical with respect to other crimes.
Annie Druyan confirmed Sagan enjoyed marijuana “frequently.” She made it clear just how important cannabis was in their life together: “We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way.”
Druyan also described how Sagan utilized marijuana’s medicinal properties to experience a measure of relief. He used cannabis to treat “not only the lack of appetite and the nausea [from chemotherapy]but to refocus on the beauty of life in the midst of such torture.”
The plant’s effects directly impacted the couple’s work over their decades of collaboration on everything from “Contact” to the 1980 PBS series “Cosmos” that Sagan hosted and that they wrote together. The 2014 Fox reboot of “Cosmos” — hosted this time by Neil deGrasse Tyson and again co-written by Druyan — not only took home four Emmys, but made mention in one episode of 17th Century scientist Robert Hooke’s use of cannabis while describing him as “possibly the most inventive person who ever lived.”
This disconnect from science was among Sagan’s chief concerns about the criminalization of marijuana. It was “something that particularly infuriated Carl as a scientist,” Druyan says. He was troubled by not only the “bad civic engineering but the very bad science behind prohibition.”
In 1990, Sagan wrote to leading drug policy reform campaigners suggesting they organize a rebuttal to the propaganda being spread by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America:
In another letter from 1990 Sagan laid out these fundamental philosophical questions underpinning America’s drug war:
Why are all “drugs” lumped together in American rhetoric and public policy questions?
Why are hallucinogenic drugs so widely distributed among the cultures of the Earth?
Do research findings that indicate a given drug to be safe get as much public attention as those that indicate it to be dangerous?
How do social and economic inequities drive the underprivileged to drug use?
With the success the Cosmos reboot and with more states voting on legalizing marijuana in November, the newly unearthed Sagan documents add to the growing consensus that marijuana prohibition is not grounded in science and is not supported by leading thinkers and prominent people.
“We are going at warp speed toward getting rid of that prohibition now,” says Grinspoon.
> Carl Sagan’s Long Lost Deep Thoughts On The War on Drugs | Marijuana News
Yoga’s forms recreated in X-ray imaging shows the beautiful flow that the body gets into when going into one pose after the other. Although there are no muscles or tendons, the movements give off a sort of flexibility allowing the bone structures to move smoothly and seamlessly through each progression.
One awesome benefit of seeing X-ray Yoga is the ability to see how your skeleton aligns itself properly in every pose. Yoga clearly aids in proper skeletal alignment and increased flexibility which helps prevent injuries from other types of physical activities.
Regardless of the type of Yoga you prefer, you’re bound to find a pose or two you recognize.
Your eyes are unique orbs of resplendent beauty that shine with the light of your soul.
As above, so below. The ancient Hermetic maxim is correct.
The windows into our souls look reassuringly similar to the bigger windows of Planetary Nebulas.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. – Robert Hunter
Eyes & Nebulas, together at last.
We last left Calvin and Hobbes as they contemplated the stars.
Now, they question existence itself.
Calvin: Let’s say life is this square of the sidewalk. We’re born at this crack and we die at that crack.
Calvin: Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square, and in the process of walking out of it. Suddenly we realize our time in here is fleeting.
Calvin: Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?
Behind the legal battle for cannabis — both medical and recreational — are deep-pocketed entities who have a stake in the outcome.
One of the largest anti Cannabis groups is the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, best known for its long-running ad campaign “This is Your Brain on Drugs,” featuring young people cooking eggs and smashing things. While most kids found the message inaccurate, the advertising and anti-drug communities lauded the campaign as one of the most effective PSAs in history.
The PDFK is funded by special interest groups, which means corporations. By law, the organization must make public its donor list. At the top tier, donations of $250,000 or more, there are eight benefactors, here are six of them:
A biotechnology company responsible for Humira, a drug that treats rheumatoid arthritis and has earned the company more than $10 billion.
Maker of OxyContin
The leading trade and lobbying organization for makers and sellers of over-the-counter drugs and nutritional supplements.
The drug store chain with more than 7,700 locations in the United States. In 2010, a single location in Sanford, Florida, (population 53,000) ordered more than 1.8 million Oxy-Codone pills.
The largest U.S. supplier, by prescription, of opioid pain-killer medications.
One of the biggest and most influential lobbying groups in the United States, representing the interests of 48 pharmaceutical companies.
Hmmmm, why would these companies want to prevent access to a natural and medicinal plant?
> Here’s a List of the Biggest Donors to the Anti-Pot Lobby | Marijuana News
From a 1991 lecture entitled Where Does Reality Begin and End?, Terence McKenna talks about the role of human beings in nature and reality.
We can become a highly evolved and aware species that acts as the voice of nature but artificial conflicts are holding us back.
We are energy storage and release mechanisms, sanctioned by nature for some purpose which will be visible somewhere downstream in the flow of time but which is opaque to us now.
– Terence McKenna
Soundtrack: DJ Shadow – Transmission 2
Eco Villages offer people socially aware self-sustaining micro-communities.
This is a critical time in human history. Clearly we are destroying the natural environment and we are warming up the globe. We can be sure that our species will not going to be around very long if we don’t get our consumption habits under control. – Liz Walker, co-founder and executive director of Ecovillage at Ithaca (EVI), who also has written two books on sustainable development.
The eco village mission has two aspects: conservation and living in a sustainable way and having people live in harmony together. The eco village and the cohousing movement both started in the early 1990s in Denmark and has since spread across the world.
Unlike self-sufficient communities in the past, EVI members have their own homes and manage their own finances separately, but each pays a monthly fee for maintaining the common buildings, land, and to fund future projects. Eco villagers are actively involved in the governance of the community and make decisions through a consensus process during the board of directors meetings that include members of EVI.
It’s a chance to be with our neighbors, it’s a chance to have friends without having to drive across a big city. – Barbara Pease, EVI member, retired computer scientist
Three Groves EcoVillage (TGE) in West Grove, Pennsylvania, has a similar vision of building an ecologically sustainable neighborhood.
It’s not just the environmental sustainability, it’s social sustainability… you can share your resources, you can come together and accomplish so much more because by sharing resources with my neighbor, I have to consume less. – Janet Hesselberth, co founder of Three Groves Eco Village
