Magic Mushrooms Stimulate Growth of New Brain Cells (Study)

Magic Mushrooms Stimulate Growth of New Brain Cells (Study) | Third Monk image 2

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Psilocybin Drawing by Sara K. Glazier

New studies from The University of South Florida indicate that psilocybin found in “shrooms”, triggers new brain cell growth, and erases frightening memories from mice.

The studies showed that mice treated with low doses of psilocybin had significant growth of new brain cells, because the mushroom binds to a brain receptor that stimulates new brain cell growth, and short term memory formation.

This interesting discovery has given more plausibility to the Stoned Ape Theory, Terence Mckenna’s suggestion that human evolution was initiated by the mind expanding benefits of psychedelic experiences.

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Researchers are eager to look into the idea of using magic mushrooms to cure mental problems like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and chronic depression but the legal status of shrooms restricts freedom in experiments.

Mice trained to fear electric shock when hearing a noise associated with the shock, stopped reacting in fear to the noise when given a small dose of psilocybin, much more quickly, in contrast to mice given no psilocybin.

The science behind psilocybin treating depression is, depressed individuals typically have over active medial prefrontal cortex regions of the brain, and psilocybin eases this, and makes the brain function normally here.

Despite its harmlessness, amazing medical potential, and ability to produce phenomenal spiritual/mystical experiences, the governments across the world have nearly all banned Psilocybin Mushrooms. Dangerous pharmaceutical pills can’t compete with the toxic cell purging benefits of cannabis and the positive mental state that shrooming promotes. 

Evidence of Psilocybin “Magic Mushrooms” Growing New Brain Cells

Juan R. Sanchez-Ramos, Professor of Neurology at USF presents the effects of psilocybin mushrooms on neurogenesis (birth of new neuron cells).

Psilocybin Mushrooms Promote Growth of New Brain Cells, Can Even Cure PTSD And Depression | Banoosh

Terence McKenna – The Psychedelic Experience is Illegal Because it Promotes an Open Mind

Terence McKenna - The Psychedelic Experience is Illegal Because it Promotes an Open Mind | Third Monk

In this kinetic typography animation, Terence Mckenna talks about the core reasons that prevent us from exploring our consciousness with psychedelics.

The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal.

We are somehow told, we are infantilized. We are told you know you can wander around with in the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness, and we have some intoxicants over here if you wanna mess your self up, we’ve got some scotch here and some tobacco and red meat and some sugar and a little T.V. and so forth and so on.

But, these boundary dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It’s a sign of cultural immaturity and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past. – Terence Mkcenna, Eros And The Eschaton Lecture

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Terence McKenna, Alan Watts – Surrender Your Ego to the Universe (Video)

Terence McKenna, Alan Watts - Surrender Your Ego to the Universe (Video) | Third Monk

Alan Watts and Terence McKenna talk about our need for a collective consciousness as our solvable global issues get neglected, causing us to become enemies of our planet and each other. Video produced by the Omega Point

What I am involves what you are, the problem is you see… We haven’t been taught to feel that way.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it–aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we ARE the eternal universe, each one of us.

– Alan Watts, The Nature Of Consciousness

It comes out of a personal act of courage made by the individual. An act of courage which involves Surrender. Surrender is the opposite side of the coin of Ego. The central issue of our times is the inability to surrender to what we KNOW is right.

We have the ability to feed the hungry, we have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment, to eliminate sexism, to eliminate racism. The question is: CAN WE CHANGE OUR MINDS FAST ENOUGH?

– Terence McKenna, MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Conference 1990

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Terence McKenna – Shrooms Are Organic Space Probes Sent to Earth by Aliens

Terence McKenna - Shrooms Are Organic Space Probes Sent to Earth by Aliens | Third Monk

In this awesome lecture, Terence Mckenna adds some psychedelic flavor to Panspermia, the theory that life in the universe is distributed by meteors and asteroids. Mckenna believed that mushroom spores were able to survive space travel to become the catalyst of human evolution.

Shrooms Are the Most Unique Lifeform on Earth

First argument – entirely a physical argument. Psilocybin is O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. What this means is that there is a phosphorous group substituted at the 4 position of the molecule. Now here’s the headline folks: This is the ONLY 4-phosphorylated indole on this planet! On this planet.

Now, if you were searching for extraterrestrial thumbprints on the biology of Earth, you would look for molecules that are unique – that don’t have near relatives spread through other lifeforms. In psilocybin we have a perfect example of this. It is the only 4-phosphorylated indole known to occur in nature! Nature doesn’t work like that folks, nature builds, always, on what has previously been accomplished. So this is a red flag saying at the molecular level this thing looks like an alien artifact – at the molecular level.

Shrooms Used as Probes to Detect Life

A single mushroom in the sporelization phase can shed up to 3 million spores a minute for up to six weeks. ONE mushroom could do this. I maintain, that a strategy for extraterrestrial contact carried on by a super technology would take the following form:

Build a probe.

Give the probe the ability to replicate itself.

Start these probes out from your home planet.

The probes replicate so the volume of the probes stays constant as the volume of space increases.

If you’re carrying out an exhaustive search of the galaxy for life, it’s very hard to imagine a civilization that could visit and monitor every star over long periods of time. A much more efficient strategy would be the “phone home” strategy. You send, essentially a calling card which says if you get this message, call the enclosed toll free number and immediately report your location, we will come at that point. That’s what I think is going on.

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Terence McKenna – The Role of Psychedelics in Simulation Theory (Video)

Terence McKenna – The Role of Psychedelics in Simulation Theory (Video) | Third Monk image 2

An artistic visual presentation of a Terence McKenna lecture that explores simulation theory and how code can be the language behind our DNA, space, time, matter, and energy.

Terence McKenna -DNA, Life Codes Lecture Excerpts

In other words, we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations like quantum connectivity. It’s one thing to bask in the overarching metaphor, which says that everything is connected to everything else. It’s quite another thing to say, and so then what are the consequences, for me, of this? The answer seems to me to be that the inside of our imagination, the inside of our heads really is the most vast frontier imaginable, and we must leave it for future generations figure out why an animal nervous system would evolve a propensity for accessing non-local data, in other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the physics of things. 

What we have to grapple with is that it is so, that you have the Hubble telescope inside of you. You have inside of you an informational gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence about things so immeasurably distant from this point that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless. It’s just elsewhere; the elsewhere of the absolute infinite of the plenum of the imagination in which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea, and of course the psychedelics are the naturally evolved nano-machinery of the Gaian matrix that knits together this cosmic ecology, this system of living relationships.

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Terence McKenna – Cannabis Edibles and Creativity, Animation (Video)

Terence McKenna - Cannabis Edibles and Creativity, Animation (Video) | Third Monk

Sleep Sweepers by Flying Lotus is used as the background track for Terence Mckenna’s take on the psychedelic effects caused by eating cannabis edibles.

We in the 20th century tend to smoke our cannabis aside from the occasional holiday cannabis cookie, cannabis for us is something that is smoked. On the other hand for the 19th century and for all of European civilization cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared and this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience.

If you read the accounts of people like Theodore Gautier, Baudelaire and Fitz Hugh Ludlow written in the mid 19th century they are describing experiences that are obviously, or are for them as powerful as a 500 micro gram dose of LSD proved in our own life times, and we forget this, we tend to think of it as a social drug and a kind of a minor drug on a par with smoking a cigarette or having a cognac or something like that. Well in fact for the serious eater of hashish it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology.

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Terence Mckenna – Cannabis Breaks the Chains of Mental Slavery (Video)

Terence Mckenna - Cannabis Breaks the Chains of Mental Slavery (Video) | Third Monk

A clip from Terence Mckenna’s Under the Teaching Tree talk, about how cannabis compares to legal drugs such as caffeine, alcohol and tobacco.

Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state.

Why is caffeine enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the western world as a sacred right for workers, twice daily?  And why is cannabis…you can lose your house, car, bank account, art collection simply because you have six plants in the backyard. Why this disparity?

Well what is the effect of caffeine? It makes it possible for you to perform your duty during the last 3 hours of the work cycle with efficiency equal to the first 3 hours of the work cycle. It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets until hell freezes over without a thought ever rising in their mind that maybe this is a ridiculous way to spend your life

Cannabis on the other hand, people aren’t so interested in going to work. They’d rather lay around and make love. They don’t want to watch TV, they’d rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend. In other words (cannabis) promotes activates that don’t make anyone any money and cause people to question the institutions and the social philosophies that are being shoved down their throats.

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Terence Mckenna – Culture is Your Operating System, Reset it with Shrooms (Video)

Terence Mckenna - Culture is Your Operating System, Reset it with Shrooms (Video) | Third Monk

The late, great Terence McKenna explains how the psychedelic experience clears all preconceived notions and prejudices and leaves the psyche with a clean, pure view of the self and the universe.

Psychedelics Resets Your Operating System

Data has been arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet that they dissolve ordinary realities, ordinary cultural values, through an interaction and symbioses. A relationship to local plants that perturb brain chemistry. And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry, the cultural operating system is wiped clean and some thing older – even for these people , something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul, replaces it.

Replaces the cultural operating system with some thing not determined by history and geography, but some thing writ in the language of the flesh it’s self. This is who you are, this is truly nakedness, you are not naked when you take of your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of you own psyche.

Shamans Can Repair Our Corrupt System

The Shaman is in possession of certain facts about plants about, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about local geography, about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of, the client is running culture light, the shaman pays for the registered and licensed version of the software and is running a much heavier version of the software than the client.

I think we should all aspire to make this upgrade.

It’s very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your operating system, otherwise some bodies going to get a leg up on you. Well, what’s wrong with the operating system we have consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is… well… its dumb, its retro, its very non competitive, its messy, it waste the environment, it waste human resources, its inefficient, it runs on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate which is what creates stereotypes.

Low sample rates make everybody appear alike when the glory is in every ones differences, and the current operating system is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as we’re cutting the earth from beneath our own feet, we’re poisonings the atmosphere we breath. This is not intelligent behavior, this is a culture with a bug in its operating system that’s making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior.

Time to call a tech, and who are the techs?

The Shamans are the techs!

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Psychedelics is Our Bond to a Living Planet – Excerpts From Terence McKenna’s Food of The Gods

Psychedelics is Our Bond to a Living Planet - Excerpts From Terence McKenna's Food of The Gods | Third Monk image 1

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna explains how the ancient ritual use of psychedelic plants altered our states of consciousness.

He exposes the roots of commercialism and how governments have followed a basic set of strategies to promote alcohol, coffee and tobacco as mainstream drugs over mind expanding psychedelics. 

Mckenna wanted to make people curious about the role of psychoactive plants in human development, here are selected excerpts from his epic work:

Psychedelics Dissolve the Ego Culture

Terence Mckenna

How, specifically, might the consciousness-catalyzing properties of plants have played a role in the emergence of culture and religion?

What was the effect of this folkway, this promotion of language using, thinking, but stoned hominids into the natural order?

I believe that the natural psychedelic compounds acted as feminizing agents that tempered and civilized the egocentric values of the solitary hunter-individual with the feminine concerns for child-rearing and group survival. The prolonged and repeated exposure to the psychedelic experience, the Wholly Other rupture of the mundane plane caused by the hallucinogenic ritual ecstasy, acted steadily to dissolve that part of the psyche which we moderns call the ego. Wherever and whenever the ego function began to form, it was akin to a calcareous tumor or a blockage in the energy of the psyche.

The use of psychedelic plants in a context of shamanic initiation dissolved, as it dissolves today, the knotted structure of the ego into undifferentiated feeling, what Eastern philosophy calls the Tao. This dissolving of personal identity into the Tao is the goal of much of Eastern thought and has traditionally been recognized as the key to psychological health and balance for both the group and the individual. To appraise our dilemma correctly, we need to appraise what this loss of Tao, this loss of collective connection to the Earth, has meant for our humanness.

 

Western Dominator Religion Numbs the Soul

Terence Mckenna

We in the West are the inheritors of a very different understanding of the world. Loss of connection to the Tao has meant that the psychological development of Western civilization has been markedly different from the East’s. In the West there has been a steady focus on the ego and on the god of the ego, the monotheistic ideal.

Monotheism exhibits what is essentially a pathological personality pattern projected onto the ideal of God: the pattern of the paranoid, possessive, power-obsessed male ego. This God is not someone you would care to invite to a garden party. Also interesting is that the Western ideal is the only formulation of deity that has no relationship with woman at any point in the theological myth. In ancient Babylon Anu was paired with his consort Inanna; Grecian religion assigned Zeus a wife, many consorts, and daughters. These heavenly pairings are typical. Only the god of Western civilization has no mother, no sister, no female consort, and no daughter.

Modern religion in the West is a set of social patterns, or a set of anxieties centered on a particular moral structure and view of obligation. Modern religion is rarely an experience of setting aside the ego.

Since the 1960s, the spread of popular cults of trance and dance, such as disco and reggae, is an inevitable and healthy counter to the generally moribund form religious expression has taken on in Western and high-tech culture. The connection between rock and roll and psychedelics is a shamanic connection; trance, dance, and intoxication make up the Archaic formula for both religious celebration and a guaranteed good time.

The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through plant hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.

Life Without a Psychedelic Experience is Like Dying a Virgin – Terence Mckenna

Life Without a Psychedelic Experience is Like Dying a Virgin - Terence Mckenna | Third Monk

The idea of someone going from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience is like someone going from the birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience. It means you never really played in the game. You were a spectator, a silent witness. It means that you never figured out what it was all about. – Terence McKenna

Sex provides a shared state of mental and physical euphoria, a psychedelic experience provides spiritual euphoria by opening the third eye and destroying all previous judgments and conditioning. Both experiences are necessary for living the story of a stoned ape on planet earth.

Terence McKenna – DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video)

Terence McKenna - DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Terence Mckenna – DMT Revelations, Usage and Experiences


Terence McKenna describes a method to getting the most out of your DMT experience along with an anecdotal composite of over 40 of his DMT trips.

 

Terence Mckenna – DMT Hypothesis

Okay hypothesis one, DMT is not a drug, it is an extraterrestrial communication device. These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan but in drug molecules that are dinky. So we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology and these are true aliens of some sort. And God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis.

Okay second hypothesis. There is a parallel universe, unsuspected by most human beings. It’s right here, all the time. It’s inhabited. These things have their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth. And somehow this drug just erases this boundary and then you find yourself in the elf nest.

Next hypothesis. These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating, perhaps they are human beings from the distant future. Perhaps this is what we are fated to become. You know, there’s always, since we were kids, the cliché ‘beings of pure energy’. Well it’s always been a little hard to wrap your mind around what that would look like, but, low and behold here appear to be creatures of pure energy. But there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human technological breakthrough which would allow them to actually manipulate the past. Logical paradoxes and that sort of thing.

Well so then here’s another possibility. They are human beings. But they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past. They are in the pre-natal and post-life phase. In other words these are either the unborn waiting in some limbo like dimension to descend into matter. Or they are in fact people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence, and now have moved on. Let me not kid you, we’re talking about dead people here in that case. Well if you go to the shamans who access these places through Ayahuasca or the Virola snuffs or something like that. They will say ‘Well these are our ancestors. Didn’t you read Mircea Eliade. Don’t you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?’ Well “ancestor” is a tremendously sanitized term for “dead people”. And if what is actually happening here, is that the much argued about soul is actually made visible by this pharmacological strategy… I mean god knows why, but god knows why anything else is the way it is…. Then this is truly big new. This is the confounding of rationalism. If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead, then this is a 180 degree turn on the evolution of culture that not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate. And over time, I’ve sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on. And the reason it’s so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because at the center of the flash you find out something so unexpected, so appalling, and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it, that you simply immediately block it out and obliterate it.

Terence McKenna – DMT Vs. 5-MEO-DMT

This clip is taken from a talk titled “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism -Part 5” Podcast 191. In this clip Terence gives us his take on the difference between 5-MeO-DMT and nnDMT and his preference for nnDMT.

Some people do not prefer 5-MeO-DMT, I imagine this has to do with the ego death aspect of it…but the potential of both in a spiritual symbiosis may be exactly what the shaman ordered.

From Terence Mckenna Food of The Gods

“The DMT Experience”


What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about it?

What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The experience that engulfs one’s entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one’s eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one’s birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data?

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.

The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there — the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. What we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension — frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.