Researchers Measure Psychedelic Trips with a Mystical Experience Questionnaire (Study)

A team of researchers from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine believe they have developed a method to scientifically study the “mystical experiences” produced by shrooms.

Publishing their findings in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the team defines “mystical experience” using four central characteristics:

1. A sense of “mysticism,” meaning a sensation of sacredness or unity with all things

2. Positive mood

3. Transcendence of time and space

4. Ineffability, a feeling that the experience is beyond words.

The team of psychiatrists and neuroscientists created a 30-item Mystical Experience Questionnaire, called the MEQ30, which addresses all four of these “mystical experience” elements and can be used to obtain an overall score to describe the intensity of the mystical experience.

This was achieved by analyzing data collected from five laboratory-based experiments, in which a total of 184 participants were given moderate to high doses of psilocybin mushrooms and asked to describe their experience.

The results led to a number of theories. Psilocybin is thought to cause a decrease in brain activity in the parts of the brain typically associated with the “sense of self,” or “ego.” At the same time, an increase in communication between certain other parts of the brain was observed, producing a pattern of activity that resembled “dream sleep.”

> Scientists Can Now Measure The “Mystical” Effects Of Magic Mushrooms | IFL Science

Largest Ayahuasca Research Study Confirms Mental Healing Benefits

Ayahuasca has gotten the attention of researchers by demonstrating its critical healing potential for individuals living with psychological issues.

In a study published by the Scientific Reports Journal, specialists at University of Exeter and University College London confirmed results showing that the 527 ayahuasca consumers out of 96,000 surveyed individuals reported higher general well-being, along with less problematic alcohol and drug use, over the previous 12 months than other respondents in the survey.

These findings lend some support to the notion that ayahuasca could be an important and powerful tool in treating depression and alcohol use disorders – Will Lawn, Ph.D., of University College London, Lead Researcher

Biggest Scientific Ayahausca Study Ever Shows Psychological Benefits | Ayahausca Today

Acid Casualty a Myth: No Link Found Between Psychedelics and Psychosis (Study)

Acid Casualty a Myth: No Link Found Between Psychedelics and Psychosis (Study) | Third Monk

Psychedelics and Psychosis

Data from population surveys in the United States challenge public fears that psychedelic drugs such as LSD can lead to psychosis and other mental-health conditions and to increased risk of suicide, two studies have found.

In the first study, clinical psychologists Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Suzanne Krebs, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, scoured data from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an annual random sample of the general population, and analysed answers from more than 135,000 people who took part in surveys from 2008 to 2011.

Of those, 14% described themselves as having used at any point in their lives any of the three ‘classic’ psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms) and mescaline (found in the peyote and San Pedro cacti).

The researchers found that individuals in this group were not at increased risk of developing 11 indicators of mental health problems such as schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, anxiety disorders and suicide attempts. Their paper appears in the March issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

The findings are likely to raise eyebrows. Fears that psychedelics can lead to psychosis date to the 1960s, with widespread reports of “acid casualties” in the mainstream news. But Krebs says that because psychotic disorders are relatively prevalent, affecting about one in 50 people, correlations can often be mistaken for causations.

Psychedelics are psychologically intense, and many people will blame anything that happens for the rest of their lives on a psychedelic experience. – Krebs

The three substances Johansen and Krebs looked at all act through the brain’s serotonin 2A receptor. The authors did not include ketamine, PCP, MDMA, fly agaric mushrooms, DMT or other drugs that fall broadly into the category of hallucinogens, because they act on other receptors and have different modes of biochemical action. Ketamine and PCP, for example, act on the NMDA receptor and are both known to be addictive and to cause severe physical harms, such as damage to the bladder.

Absolutely, people can become addicted to drugs like ketamine or PCP, and the effects can be very destructive. We restricted our study to the ‘classic psychedelics’ to clarify the findings. – Johansen

The ‘Acid Casualty’ Myth: Psychedelics and Psychosis

“This study assures us that there were not widespread ‘acid casualties’ in the 1960s,” says Charles Grob, a paediatric psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has long has advocated the therapeutic use of psychedelics, such as administering psilocybin to treat anxiety in terminal-stage cancer. But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.

For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.

Krebs and Johansen, however, point to studies that have found symptoms of HPPD in people who have never used psychedelics.

The second of the new two studies, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, looked at 190,000 NSDUH respondents from 2008 to 2012. It also found that the classic psychedelics were not associated with adverse mental health outcomes. In addition, it found that people who had used LSD and psilocybin had lower lifetime rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

“We are not claiming that no individuals have ever been harmed by psychedelics,” says author Matthew Johnson, an associate professor in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Anecdotes about acid casualties can be very powerful — but these instances are rare,” he says. At the population level, he says, the data suggest that the harms of psychedelics “have been overstated”.

> No Link Found Between Psychosis and Psychedelics | Nature

Salvia – The Most Potent Natural Psychedelic

Salvia - The Most Potent Natural Psychedelic | Third Monk image 3

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A uniquely potent and psychedelic plant, salvia is no LSD. Indeed, the trip it elicits is so intense and dizzying that it was deemed an “atypical psychedelic”—one even the most experienced trippers may struggle to enjoy—at the 2014 Horizons psychedelics conference. At the event in downtown Manhattan, a couple hundred students, dreadlocked trippers, and middle-aged advocate types received an earful on how—and why—salvia makes you trip harder, and weirder, than pretty much anything else.

The main effect of salvia is tactile hallucinations. The feeling is kind of like a bug crawling on your skin.

Salvia also leads to a kind of synesthesia [the crossing of senses so that stimulation of one provides a sensation in another] I’ve never seen before in the literature.

– Dr. Peter H. Addy, a research associate at Yale who has studied the substance for five years.

While visual-auditory synesthesia is often reported with LSD use (users claim the ability to “see” music, for instance), salvia causes visual and tactile synesthesia, meaning “you see things and feel them in your body,” as Dr. Addy put it. A subject in one of his studies told the researcher he “could see everything going on in the room, but he could see it through his skin, not through his eyes.”

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Part of what sets salvia apart is its peculiar chemistry. While salvinorin A—the psychotropic molecule in Salvia divinorum—binds only to the dopamine-reducing kappa-opioid receptor, most psychedelics increase serotonin by binding to the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, among others.

Salvia is operating on completely different pathways

If morphine (mu-opioid agonist receptor) causes euphoria, Salvia (k-opioid agonist receptor) causes dysphoria.

But the dysphoria from salvia  is not quite a state of uncontrollable sadness but more of a disassociation of the warmth and familiarity with your body and human connections.

The most potent naturally occurring psychedelic, salvia is so intense that everything’s fine and then two seconds later, everything is chaotic and different and I don’t even have feet anymore.

– Dr. Peter H. Addy, Yale Researcher

In the course of his studies, Dr. Addy traveled with Xka Pastora, a nonprofit group documenting traditional uses of salvia, to the Sierra Mazateca mountains in southern Mexico. There, the Mazatec people have a long history of using salvia “as a powerful medicine” in religious ceremonies, and their ritualistic focus on the drug provides a glimpse into how the its effects might be channeled toward therapeutic purposes.

Participants in the ritual gather around an altar and chew on the raw, salvia leaves, or else drink them as a watery liquid before joining in ritualistic singing and chanting, a trip that lasts about three hours.

One thing we can learn from the Mazatecs is that smoking salvia is not the ideal ingestion method. While the Mazatec rituals last hours, smoking salvia produces intense effects for no longer than about 20 minutes.

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The natural habitat of salvia is disputed, but “what we do know is that in pretty much every area growing salvia, it was put there on purpose by humans,” according to Dr. Addy. “It’s a cultigen,” meaning that it rarely seeds.

The profound, disorienting effects of salvia create an experience that few people have sought out, despite its continued existence as a federally legal psychedelic. “It’s not a party drug,” nor is it popular, Dr. Addy said. As a result, from a policy perspective, “It’s just kind of stayed under the radar.”

While some states ban sale of the substance to minors and more than 15 ban its sale flat-out, the drug is still sold in head shops and gas stations around the country.

Why Is Salvia So Uniquely Terrifying? | VICE

Ayahuasca, The Psychedelic Reset Button (Documentary)

Ayahuasca, The Psychedelic Reset Button (Documentary) | Third Monk

Lisa Ling goes inside an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru and talks to people who are drinking this potent brew in hopes that it will alleviate their mental and emotional traumas.

Former Marine Ryan LeCompte organizes trips to Peru for war veterans, like himself, who are seeking ayahuasca as a possible treatment for PTSD and other emotional and mental trauma suffered after multiple combat deployments.

Ayahuasca is a way to give relief to those who are suffering, Many veterans are not satisfied with the PTSD treatment they receive when they return from combat.

It’s just, ‘Here’s a pill, here’s a Band-Aid.’ The ayahuasca medicine is a way to, instead of sweeping your dirt under the rug, you know, these medicines force you to take the rug outside and beat it with a stick until it’s clean, And that’s how I prefer to clean my house. – Ryan LeCompte, VETEntheogenic

Safe Use of Ayahuasca

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Through IndieGogo.com, the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council is raising money to create a health guide for ayahuasca centers in the Amazon, so tourists know which centers are safe and harvesting the plants in a sustainable manner that supports the local communities.

The idea would be to put the ESC’s logo outside ayahuasca ceremony sites to signify those centers that meet the council’s criteria for safety and sustainability.

In addition, there are efforts to study the medicinal benefits of ayahuasca so that it can be regulated and legalized in the United States, explains Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies.

Could this be the next medicinal marijuana? | CNN Health

The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine – Dr. Sanjay Gupta (Video)

The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine - Dr. Sanjay Gupta (Video) | Third Monk image 2

I have tons of respect for Dr. Sanjay Gupta, especially for admitting he was wrong on the cannabis issue. Now Dr. Gupta dives into the world of psychedelic medicine.

Gupta speaks with Rick Doblin and Tom Shroder, the author to Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy and The Power to Heal. They discuss psychedelics’ place in assisted psycho therapy, the challenges associated with using psychedelics as medicine and how the social stigmas have slowed the progress in this field of study.

The beauty of psychedelics is not that it heals you, instead it puts you in the optimum state of being so that you may heal yourself.

psychedelic medicine

Shroom Awareness – Tracking Activity of the Sober Vs Psychedelic Brain (Study)

Shroom Awareness - Tracking Activity of the Sober Vs Psychedelic Brain (Study) | Third Monk

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.

Psychedelic Connections

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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

DMT – Hallucinogenic Fuel Produced By Our Brains

DMT - Hallucinogenic Fuel Produced By Our Brains | Third Monk

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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)

Third Eye Perception

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

The Science and Politics of Mind Altering Drugs

The Science and Politics of Mind Altering Drugs | Third Monk image 1

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British psychiatrist David Nutt specializes in neuropsychopharmacology, the research of mind-altering drugs. In his interview with The Guardian’s Science Weekly Podcast, he discusses the science and politics of mind-altering substances. The neuroscience blog MindHacks refers to it as “essential listening” and…

Possibly one of the most sensible discussions of drugs and drug harms you are likely to hear in a long time.

Prof. Nutt is quite well-known in the UK – largely due to being fired by the Government from their drugs advisory panel for pointing out in a scientific paper that the health risks of taking ecstasy are about equivalent to going horse riding.

Rather than doing the usual dishonest apology required of government advisors where they ask forgiveness for ‘unintentionally misleading the public’ away from a convenient collective illusion, he decided to take the government to task about their disingenuous drug policy.

He is now a straight-talking, evidence-based, pain-in-the-arse to the government who doggedly stick to the ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric that not even they believe any more.

In the interview the discussion ranges from how psychedelics affect the brain to the scientific basis (or lack thereof) of drug policy. He also claims that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol, proposes research into the potential use of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and how he founded the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

Give it a listen.

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The Science and Politics of Psychedelic Drugs | Dis Info

Psilocybin and The Psychedelic Experience Creates a Prolonged Positive Outlook on Life (Study)

Psilocybin and The Psychedelic Experience Creates a Prolonged Positive Outlook on Life (Study) | Third Monk image 2

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The human mind expands with the number of new experiences that are encountered. Psilocybin research points to the possibility that these experiences open up realms of consciousness that are otherwise untapped during normal cognitive functioning. Your brain and body remember these states of being resulting in a positive shift towards one’s outlook on life.

After psilocybin injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in dream sleep.
– Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study

These hyper emotional states are also seen during dream states. By experiencing these senses in your waking life through magic mushrooms you expand your perception and view reality more like a dream long after the initial trip. This helps relieve stress and has shown to lead to a positive outlook on life.

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Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.

Based on these findings, shrooms may take you on a trip to a happier and more positively charged outlook of reality.

Psychedelic Mushrooms Put Your Mind in a “Waking Dream”, Study Finds | Washington Post

Mr. Olympia Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks DMT, Ayahuasca & Unity Consciousness(Video)

Mr. Olympia Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks DMT, Ayahuasca & Unity Consciousness(Video) | Third Monk image 3

Psychedelic Closet - Dorian Yates

Dorian Yates, a six time Mr. Olympia just came out of the psychedelic closet and what he has to say about his psychedelic experiences is worth sharing.

What we need is a massive coming out of people who have done psychedelics and accomplished a lot. – Rick Doblin, Founder of MAPS

Dorian Yates Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks Ayahuasca and Smoking DMT

One of the most important issues we strive for is our collective freedom of consciousness, we dearly need a psychedelic renaissance. 

This is only to come about if we reach a level of social acceptance where reason thwarts taboo. Therefore, it is imperative that more and more people like Dorian step up — we may find our consciousness revolution materialize faster than expected.

The educational value of entheogens and psychedelics may be their capacity to reliably evoke experiences of wonder and awe, to stimulate transcendental or mystical experiences, and to catalyze a sense of life meaning or purpose. – Kenneth W. Tupper, Ph.D.

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Evidence of Ancient Psychedelic Use in Prehistoric Eurasia (Study)

Evidence of Ancient Psychedelic Use in Prehistoric Eurasia (Study) | Third Monk image 2

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A study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (March 2014) suggests that ancient humans did not use mind-altering substances for hedonistic pleasure, as we often do in the modern day.

Elisa Guerra-Doce of the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain contends that the use of these substances was integral to the beliefs of prehistoric peoples, and that their use was believed to aid in communication with the spirit world. Her research adds to the growing body of cutting-edge literature about the cultural and historical context of mind-altering substances in prehistoric Europe.

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In the paper entitled The Origins of Inebriation: Archaeological Evidence of the Consumption of Fermented Beverages and Drugs in Prehistoric Eurasia, the argument is based on evidence found in archaeological sites covering a wide geographic and cultural range in Europe: opium poppies in the teeth of an adult male of Neolithic Spain, traces of barley beer on ceramic vessels recovered on the Iberian Peninsula, artistic depictions of hallucinogenic mushroom use in the Italian Alps, and charred Cannabis seeds in bowls found in Romania.

It’s proposed that the use of these ancient psychedelic substances was intended to alter ordinary consciousness or achieve an advanced trance state. Since the majority of these finds were in tombs and ceremonial spaces, Guerra-Doce came to the conclusion that these substances were strongly linked to ritual use. While details of the rituals remain unclear, her hypothesis is that the substances played a significant role in mortuary rites, as a means of providing sustenance for the departed in their afterlife journey, or as an offering for deities of the underworld.

Far from being consumed for hedonistic purposes, drug plants and alcoholic drinks had a sacred role among prehistoric societies.

It is not surprising that most of the evidence derives from both elite burials and restricted ceremonial sites, suggesting the possibility that the consumption of mind-altering products was socially controlled in prehistoric Europe.

– Elisa Guerra-Doce, Universidad de Valladolid in Spain

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Our Ancestors Were High as Fuck | Ultra Culture