Bryan Lewis Saunders likes to take drugs, both legal and illegal, and then draw pictures of himself. The results are strikingly different from drug to drug, and they vary from beautiful to grotesque, abstract and just plain bizarre.
[I’m most interested in] things that are still a mystery to us all. – Bryan Lewis Saunders
Bryan devised an experiment in which every day he took a different drug and drew himself under the influence. These psychedelic self-portraits are a window into Bryan’s different states of mind.
1 shot of Dilaudid/3 shots of morphine (in the ER with kidney stones)
DMT (during and after)
Hash (cannabis)
Heroin (snorted)
7.5mg Hydrocodone/7.5mgOxycodone/3mg Xanax
Marijuana
Morphine IV (dosage unknown)
Nicotine gum (after quitting smoking for two months)
20mg Valium
Salvia Divinorum
Nitrous Oxide / Valium I.V. (doseage unknown in hospital)
After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of self. – Bryan Lewis Saunders
The incredible therapeutic properties of LSD have once again been confirmed in arecent Swiss study.
The first therapeutic study on LSD to take place in 40 years specifically focused on treating anxiety associated with life-threatening illnesses. Psychotherapy was also used in conjunction with LSD to treat participants’ anxiety.
Amazingly, every single participant (out of 12) reported experiencing major decreases in anxiety levels due to the LSD-assisted psychotherapy. These decreases in anxiety persisted even 12 months after being administered the LSD. Furthermore, no negative effects were reported by any of the participants. The study was led by Peter Gasser, M.D., who stated:
…we had in 30 sessions (22 with full dose 200 μg LSD and 8 with placebo dose 20 μg LSD) no severe side effects such as psychotic experiences or suicidal crisis or flashbacks or severe anxieties (bad trips)…That means that we can show that LSD treatment can be safe when it is done in a carefully controlled clinical setting.
Subjects receiving 200 µg LSD and psychotherapy, compared to an active placebo of 20 µg LSD, experienced a reduction in anxiety. Because the reduction in anxiety was still present at a 12-month follow up, Gasser believes that LSD has incredible potential for treating a whole array of psychological conditions.
Researchers noted that one of the most important aspects of the study was that the participants were able to freely contemplate and discuss their experiences while under the effects of LSD, as well as after the trip had ended.
Psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin do not cause brain damage and are considered by medical professionals to be non-addictive. Over 30 million people currently living in the US have used LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline.
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was discovered accidentally by Albert Hofmann on April 16, 1943. He had actually unintentionally created it 5 years prior while attempting to synthesize potentially medicinal active constituents from ergot fungus, a fungus that grows on rye. For 5 years the synthesis collected dust until he decided to reexamine it. While reexamining the LSD a small amount was absorbed into Hofmann’s fingertip.
Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away. – Albert Hofmann
Hofmann was intrigued, and three days later he tried it again, marking April 19, 1943 as the first day a human being ever intentionally consumed LSD.
This day is now known as “Bicycle Day,” because Hofmann rode his bike home while he was tripping. Hofmann and his wife spent the rest of their lives advocating the use of LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics in the field of psychotherapy.
Below is a documentary on LSD which focuses on Albert Hofmann.
Hofmann’s Potion – Albert Hofmann LSD Documentary
By the mid-1950s, LSD-research was being published in medical and academic journals all over the world. It showed potential benefits in the treatment of alcoholism, drug addiction, and other mental illnesses. This film explores those potential benefits, and the researchers who explored them.
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.
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
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.
Hearing Terence talk about his ideas is even better than reading them.
His eloquent passion drips with every spoken word, and his emphasis on certain words reveals glimpses into his mind-set when he was writing.
True Hallucinations is, well, perhaps Publishers Weekly’s hilarious review said it best:
In 1971 ethnobotanist McKenna ( The Archaic Revival ), his brother Dennis and three friends boated to a town in Amazonian Colombia, seeking a hallucinogenic plant that enables the Witoto tribe to talk to elf-like “little men.” In psychedelicized ravings interspersed with diary excerpts, McKenna records their experiences after ingesting mind-altering mushrooms and other psychoactive plants.
A flying saucer slowly flew over McKenna’s head; he calls it a “holographic mirage” of a future technology. Dennis had a revelation about a “psychofluid” that pervades the universe. McKenna flashes forward to Hawaii in 1975 where mantis-like creatures from hyperspace attack his lover, and flashes back to his tantric lovemaking in Tibet and to Indonesia where unrepentant Nazi scientists tried to recruit him in 1970. He posits the existence of a particle of time, the chronon , which conditions matter. A bizarre book. – Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc
Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors. – Terrence McKenna
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
Psychedelic culture is full of wisdom and creative figures that show us just how boring the world would be if the recreational use of mind-altering substances did not exist.
As aggressive as the War on Drugs has been throughout the years, it has been no match for geniuses who have smoked and tripped their way over to the other side.
Why is marijuana against the law?
It grows naturally upon our planet.
Doesn’t the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit . . . unnatural?
If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant…….
And if this world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution
Then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.
Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use.
– Jimmy Carter
They lie about marijuana.
Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated.
Lie!
When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well — you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort.
This short film combines 300,000 photos of riots, wildfires, and paintings in abandoned houses. The entire stop motion time lapse was created without any digital special effects.
Circle of Abstract Ritual began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing.
The destruction end of that thought began in earnest when riots broke out in my neighborhood in Anaheim, California, 2012. I immediately climbed onto my landlord’s roof without asking and began recording the unfolding events. The news agencies I contacted had no idea what to do with time lapse footage of riots, which was okay with me because I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time. After that I got the bug.
I chased down wildfires, walked down storm drains on the L.A. River and found abandoned houses where I could set up elaborate optical illusion paintings. The illusion part of the paintings are not an end in themselves in my work. They’re an intimation of things we can’t physically detect; a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.
In this audio high, you will hear a looped sample of the Risset Rhythm. What’s weird is that this loop will sound as though it is constantly speeding up, yet it never actually increases in beat.
We know: that doesn’t make any sense.
How the Risset Rhythm Works
French electronic music experimenter Jean-Claude Risset based this audio high on Shepard Tones, the looped notes that sound as if they are constantly increasing or decreasing in pitch even though they are just repeating. Risset duplicated Shepard Tones in rhythmic form. The result is a drum-based track that sounds as though it gets faster and faster when, in actuality, it is playing the same steady beat.
The following is a detailed explanation only for the most dedicated of audio heads out there. You’ve been warned…….
To get an idea of how Risset Rhythm works we’ll need to review how our brains process sound. Consider the brain as a famously impulsive file clerk who can’t stand to have information just sitting around, clogging up its synapses. As such, when information comes in, the brain quickly places it in what it considers to be the most appropriate “file” to make room for new input. When the brain gets bits of information that don’t fit exactly into a prescribed file, it makes an assumption, throwing this information into a file that it considers “close enough.” Sometimes the brain misplaces information into the wrong file. These wrong assumptions, or “file” placements, are why we mistake visual, audio, or other sensory details: why we think a mirage in the desert is a watering hole, a prick of a needle on a couch is an insect bite, the voice on the other end of the phone line is your current girlfriend not your psycho ex.
The brain can make these same incorrect assumptions with rhythms.
When we hear any repeated pattern of sounds the brain will immediately try to place the pattern into a rhythm file, even if this pattern is random and doesn’t perfectly fit. In this rhythm file the brain will attempt to put the pattern in a logical sequence of beats. Risset Rhythm takes advantage of these incorrect assumptions. It subtly merges a loop of increasing beats and sounds over and over. The brain doesn’t notice these subtle transitions between the beginning and ending of the loop, it assumes that the rhythm is constantly speeding up. As a result, we hear the Risset Rhythm loop as a continuous pattern, one that is constantly getting faster and faster.
For another one of Jean Claude Risset’s trippy audio specials take a listen to Mutations. Old school out of this world sound for all you trippy psychonauts.
Thank you – I mean, you’re welcome!
Mutations by Lillian F. Schwartz, Music by Jean-Claude Risset, 1973
British psychiatrist David Nutt specializes in neuropsychopharmacology, the research of mind-altering drugs. In hisinterview with The Guardian’s Science Weekly Podcast, he discusses the science and politics of mind-altering substances. The neuroscience blogMindHacks 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.
Psychedelic agents, when properly understood, are probably one of the most valuable, useful, and powerful tools available to humanity. Yet, their use is extremely complex, which means that they are widely misunderstood and often abused.
It is not psychedelics that are complex. In their most useful application, they play a rather straightforward role. In my observation one of the outstanding actions of psychedelics is permitting the dissolving of minds sets. One of the most powerful mind set humans employ is the hiding of undesirable material from consciousness. Thus, a very important function of psychedelic substances is to permit access to the unconscious mind.
The unconscious mind is enormously complex and possesses an extremely wide range of attributes, from repressed, painful material to the sublime realization of universal love. With such variance in experience, learning more about psychedelics is essential for safe, sustained benefit.
These 4 books about psychedelics are an amazing foundational base for Psychedelic Knowledge.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. – William Blake from the poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Beyond essential reading, Huxley’s recount of his afternoon trip with mescaline tops many psychonauts list for psychedelic themed reading. Aldous is well known for his love of psychedelics, and his narrative ability is undeniable.
To pierce the veil and gain insight into reality and ourselves, yet still bring back a semblance of those insights once rigid mind sets again solidify is the hope of many psychedelic users.
That within sameness there is difference, although that difference is not different from sameness. – Aldous Huxley
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. – Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is known as the quintessential book that first documented the rise and growth of the burgeoning hippie movement.
Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters brought psychedelic use to the mainstream. This was a time before it was perverted by hedonistic tendencies, but more importantly, before both sides of the coin knew the other even existed.
The world was simply and sheerly divided into ‘the aware’, those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of ‘the unaware’, ‘the unmusical’, the unattuned. – Tom Wolfe
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.
On the surface Hofstadter’s book may seem like it is about mathematics, art, and music, but it is actually about how cognition, thinking, and meaning itself arise from well-hidden neurological mechanisms.
Through analogies between mathematics (Godel), art (Escher), and music (Bach), Hofstadter explains how self-referential loops – ‘strange loops‘ – are the foundation for all meaning. Basically how meaning actually comes about from complex interactions between parts which when taken individually, possess none.
It is a wonderful book that will have you reevaluating the way you perceive and interact with your reality.
Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.
– Douglas R. Hofstadter
How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn’t matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it. – Alexander Shulgin
PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story is a book by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin. The main title is an acronym that stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved.
Arranged in two parts, the book is considered the Bible of Phenethylamines (a class of chemicals known for their psychoactive and stimulant effects):
1st Part: A fictionalized autobiography of the couple.
2nd Part: Detailed synthesis instructions for 179 different psychedelic compounds, including bioassays, dosages, and commentary.
How he could be a good user of LSD,” I asked, “And know about the spiritual dimension – all that sort of thing – and still be a crook? I don’t understand.” “Then it’s time you did. Psychedelic drugs don’t change you – they don’t change you character – unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can’t impose it… – Alexander Shulgin
Ann and Sasha Shulgin – PiHKAL and TiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story
What other psychedelic books have you enjoyed reading?
The tiny, pea sized pineal gland located in the center of the human brain has for ages been thought to be the seat of the soul. Prone to calcification from fluoridated water and other toxins in our food supply, many people are actively interested indetoxifyingand de-calcifying their pineal gland. The rush of cosmic energy that is available when the mind’s eye is wide open, there is no other spiritual experience that compares to it.
What happens to a person who loses this gland to disease or some kind of accident?
Shawn Thorton, who, while studying art in school developed an illuminated painting style that baffles the rational mind. Experiencing severe illness, and often having manic and visionary episodes which revealed the contents of his extraordinary paintings, Shawn was learning to paint while, yet unbeknownst to him, he was suffering from brain cancer and had a tumor forming right where his pineal gland sits.
The over-arching style is reminiscent of an alien technology, laden with intricacies, schematics, and winding connections, a sort of motherboard of madness. Much like the human brain, his paintings show a complexity that is not easily understood.
Was his pineal gland releasing DMT, the spirit molecule in elevated levels while battling cancer?
I suffered from a slow growing cancer in my pineal gland while I attended art school and during subsequent years while my paintings developed with an underlined mythology that alluded directly to the pineal years before I even know of its existence.
I think I’d work myself into a frenzy for a while and yes, when I would fall lie down in bed I’d have something like a manic episode that was very lucid and visionary. That still applies to this day, but I try to control it better so I don’t get sick again.
I’ve had a lot of truly mystical and otherworldly experiences as a result of my history and battle with brain cancer and I’m really drawn to things that resonate with a certain powerful energy, and I’m always honing in on that more and more. whether consciously or subconsciously.
I treat depression with mushrooms. Haven’t done DMT ‘intentionally’. Man made chemicals are a thing of the past for me, as I’m really sensitive. –Reddit
Painting, for me, is largely an attempt to decrypt the mechanisms of illness through a disciplined medium. I feel, on some deep internal level, that through my painting practice I’m engaged in a psychic process to illuminate the intricate vessels and cogs of an insidious physic current that stems, in part, from having had a serious illness, and all the subtle and profound ways I was altered by this experience.
All throughout my early adulthood, I struggled from the mental and physical effects of a slow growing tumor in my brain, the symptoms of which were repeatedly misdiagnosed by my doctors as purely psychological in origin, and it ultimately took over half a decade to get a proper diagnosis and treatment to shrink the tumor. I suffered immeasurably during this period from having repeatedly undergone a host of treatments meant to treat the symptoms of mental illness, and paradoxically, from a mental illness that ultimately could not be contained. The tumor was in the very center of my brain, in a small, mysterious organ at the top of the spinal column, the pineal gland. I didn’t have any prior reason to consider the actual material existence of the pineal before this.
As for its spiritually ominous and physically precarious location at epicenter of my being, my ability to conceptualize these facts seemed utterly unreal, ethereal, like nothing short of a sordid space exploration, as it had been making its presence known to me for so long and now there were surgeons probing into my head – into my consciousness. As I further researched my illness directly after being released from the hospital, and after having had undergone emergency brain surgery a few days earlier, I quickly became very quizzical by what I was finding. What had been developing in my art, half unconsciously, over the previous several years in which I had been very ill and labored to keep painting, all of a sudden became very clear. Elements in the paintings seemed to correlate directly to the pineal gland and to many of its mystical and biological functions that have puzzled humankind for centuries.
All throughout the history of human sciences, religions, and philosophies, of different civilizations and cultures all over the world, people have contemplated and researched the pineal because of its mysterious location at the center of our brain. For me, most notable, was its purposed role in the production of endogenous DMT in humans, and its proximity in our brains to the Ajna chakra, or third eye. I also found it intriguing that the pineal gland regulates biorhythms in humans through the production of the hormone melatonin. This brought to mind images of medical charts; of archetypal schematics and universal symbols.-Shawn Thornton
