Category Archives: Psychedelic Musings

MEDITATION IS PSYCHEDELICS IN SLOW MOTION

I often have people reach out to me who are interested in utilizing psychedelics for personal growth. I am able to instruct and guide them in this experience. I have an extensive background in the subject and my track record in utilizing this technology successfully, is excellent. psychedelics, if used thoughtfully and methodically, can bring about great personal transformation. However, psychedelics are not the be all and end all of transformation. They may not even be the best tools to transform one’s consciousness and its relationship to what is eternal and unchanging. The most effective tool for this undertaking is without a doubt, meditation.

Oftentimes when people wish to consult with me about creating a relationship with psychedelics, my first question is, “Do you meditate?” Whether or not, they do, at that point does tell me something about their orientation toward life, themselves, and reality. If they are in fact interested in transforming their experience of reality, it is meditation, not psychedelics that offers the greatest long term benefits. In my experience psychedelics present a doorway of experiencing oneself, and one’s inner landscapes in a new way. Meditation offers the propulsive system that can move one from perceiving the doorway, to moving through it.

The Macdonaldization of Meditation has brought us reams of books about mindfulness. Mindfulness moves one’s attention from one’s thoughts to one’s sensations. This is a good start. But it really is meditation for dummies. To be aware in the moment of what one senses is of course much more desirable than being inundated with thought patterns birthed of suffering, pain, history and neuroses. Mindfulness works to a degree, but it is a band aid, compared to what is really possible with meditation. What is possible is moving from one’s thoughts about life and oneself, and one’s suffering, into the awareness of the intelligence that forms one’s body, energetic systems, and origins. This is meditation’s great potential. It does all the same things that psychedelics do, and it does it at its own speed. Psychedelics can take over one’s consciousness, sometimes at an unwanted speed. Meditation can be risen out of, at will. It is entirely safe, and entirely manageable. Using these tools together increases each of their efficacy.

Psychedelics and Meditation overlap in their ability to peel away the layers of identity. In both cases, we leave our usual manner of thinking and perceiving, which is created out of a mish mash of our immediate environment, our social relations, culture, media, and the historical origins of our thinking and feeling state. As we leave this experience, and the habits it creates, we re-connect with the origins of our experience. As our breath moves through our sensate physical state we encounter structural systems based in history, biography, pain, trauma, and avoidance. Using just the breath, and the more important tool of determination, we can move through these states to what lies beneath. And what lies beneath can be as spectacular as anything one might ever experience on a psychedelic trip.

Beneath the thinking mind, in the realm of sensation, we contact our true origins. We may find our original structure, as created by nature, and the intelligence that gives rise to everything. Beyond history and biography and the sensations they birth, are the formative intentions of the intelligence that gave birth to us in this lifetime. Our actual raison d’etre. These are that kind of depths available in meditation, and they are not as far away as one might think. In the depths of meditation, one encounters one’s karma, the actual dynamics of what has created the structures and purpose of one’s life. The purpose that precedes all experience. The logos of one’s life. It is right there beneath the usual mind chatter and recycled habitual physical sensations. One may find in how they hold their body, a narrative they have spoken their entirely life. But lurking just below these habits is an eternal purpose that gives rise to all transitory experience. Connecting with this can be the most transformative experience available. It returns life to its origins in holism, after life has been experience only in the fractioned aspect of the origins of the ego.

For me, psychedelics are a cypher. People come looking for psychedelics, and what they find is their origins. And once they have discovered their origins, they will never again be confused about what their life is about. This confusion swirls around the illusion that ego is constructed only to maintain a cohesive narrative that begins with our first memories of our life, and will end in our physical system losing its integrity. Between these origins and these endings, lurking below our habits of thinking and being, is the eternal field of our existence. It is this field that has brought us into this life, and it is to this field we will return at its end. Meditation, and to a lesser extent psychedelics, grant us access to this field during this very life.

Recently Ayelet Waldman, who is the wife of Michael Chabon, an award winning novelist, wrote an entire book on her experience of microdosing LSD, and how the experience “transformed” her.  She was the loudest voice of many(many of whom are twentysomethings working in silicon valley) who are speaking of this experience.  She had compiled a laundry list of psychological problems that were aggravated by some trauma she chose not to discuss, that combined with the challenges of menopause.  She didn’t think of herself as a “hippie,” or a “druggie,” or a “deadhead,” or someone who was particularly interested in the history of the experiences that came before her. In fact, these people seemed strange to her.  She was someone who was in a lot of pain, and microdosing LSD alleviated it.  I admit I didn’t read her book.  After listening to her talk about it on public radio a couple of times, I didn’t wish to.  But, I know the process works, and I know why it works, so I thought I’d write a bit about it.

     Microdosing is exactly what the world implies.  It is taking a microdosage of a psychedelic material(usually LSD or psilocybin) at 1/10 to 1/20 the dosage of what you would take to experience a full blown psychedelic experience.  The operative word in microdosing is “sub-perceptual.” Nothing psychedelic occurs. None of your senses are affected.  At this level of psychedelic use, none of the what is traditionally associated with psychedelics occurs.  You can do all the things you usually do during your day, without being compromised, or altered.  What you will notice, however slightly, is a difference in your state of consciousness.  Your brain, and your nervous system(and often your body) relax as you find the exit off ramps from your usual neuropathways and take in the sensations, feelings, and insights that are available to you in the other areas of your brain that usually exist outside your attention.  Think of it like traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco.  The most efficient way to get there is on Highway 5.  It cuts right down the center of the 330 miles between the two cities.  It’s not particularly aesthetic, or inspiring, and very little perceiving, or actual driving is required using this route.  That is how our brain functions most days.  If you are goal oriented, you could take this journey to the exclusion of all others for a lifetime.  There’s an alternative way to get to San Francisco though.  This journey requires using Highway 101, and even taking the lesser utilized(but much more beautiful) Highway 1 that will take you by Hearst Castle in San Simeon, through Big Sur and Monterrey, and past their inspiring vistas.  This is a brain on psychedelics, and also a brain in deep, long term, meditation.

     In recent years, brain scans of psychedelic users(whether they be using LSD, Psilocybin, or DMT), and long term meditators have been discovered to be functioning in the exact same way.  While neuroscientists were not surprised by the observable quieted brain functioning of long term meditators, they were extremely surprised to see that the brain scans of someone undergoing a psychedelic experience showing nearly identical functioning.  They anticipated seeing an overstimulated brain responsible for altered experience of sights sounds and self, and what they found was a vastly quieted brain in communication with parts of itself that it usually ignores through habit.

        It has long been an open secret in the American Buddhist Teacher community that every single Buddhist Teacher of the first wave of the 1960’s and 70’s, found their way to their meditation practice through their use of psychedelics. Psychedelics are a rigorous and demanding path, and can be exhausting and destructive if used incorrectly.  I once heard a Buddhist Teacher refer to meditation as “psychedelics in slow motion.”  All that is available through the use of psychedelics is available through meditation, but it is slower and requires a lot of will, determination, and patience.

     Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD among the hundred of chemicals he synthesized during his accomplished career, believed LSD possessed qualities that had greater mass utility at much lower dosages.  He thought LSD at sub perceptual doses increased focus and creativity.   Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953, had said that microdosing LSD helped him map DNA’s structure.  Hoffman believed LSD at low doses far superior to ritalin and other stimulants in its ability to increase focus and attention with fewer physical side effects.  The stigma associated with the drug because of its use by the counterculture in the 60’s kept a lot of these uses from being realized.

      While the affects of LSD at perceptual dosages(say above 100 micrograms) are said to be attainable to advanced meditators in the Tibetan Tantric Tradition, and Zen traditions,  for most people who meditate, the experience of unpacking reality isn’t available, necessary or desirable.  However the things that happen in initial states of meditation are.   As you can see in the photograph that accompanies this article, the brain scans at the top of the photo are brains in their usual state of functioning.  Below, in the second line,  it is possible to see both the psychedelic and meditative brains are quieter.  Their centralized chatter has decreased significantly, and areas of the brain that have been awash in a unified wave of activity, are now separate and in finer communication with other parts, that were camoflaged to it by its usual state.   Both instances demonstrate the neurobiology of insight into ones circumstances, recovered memory and sometimes trauma, lost creativity and capacity, become exposed when the tsunami of everyday consciousness recedes and reveals the finer functions of consciousness that have been there all the time,  un-experienced and unknown.  This is the revelation of both psychedelics and meditation.  A quiet brain reveals the previously unseen relief of its content, un-obscured by the fog of everyday consciousness. No CNN, no bank account, no Trump Presidency, no historical emotional traumas to be avoided.  A brain at peace is engaged, relational, insightful,  and freely gives up its visionary treasures.

     Which brings us to a brain not at peace.  A brain awash in worry, or just overstimulated increases the production of the stress hormone cortisol.  Not only does cortisol do things like make it harder to sleep, and stimulate hunger, it suppresses the production of serotonin, the neurochemical that makes the brain work at an optimal level.  A brain that is low in Serotonin is like a car engine that is low on oil.  There is friction, and function(as well as focus)decrease.  A brain that is under producing serotonin gets trapped in a cycle of lowered performance and the increased anxiety it causes.  Serotonin allows brain signals to shoot the gap between neural receptors that are not physically connected.  When it is low, these gaps are not crossed, and thought patterns tend to reoccur and stagnate.  This is the reason SSRI’s(anti-depressants) are the most prescribed medication on earth.  Neurobiology posits that if we can only increase the amount of serotonin that the brain produces, it will be a better brain.  However the brain is not a machine, it is a living organ, and a system.  Once you begin to alter its homeostasis with catalyzing chemicals, you risk effecting the levels of other neurotransmitters, and its overall operation.   This is why SSRI’s are sometimes not effective, and can also affect other bodily systems like sexual libido. While in some instances raising serotonin may be helpful and necessary, in almost all instances when SSRI’s are prescribed to affect neurotransmitter levels, they are being prescribed as an educated guess.

      It is this reason that meditation has been so effective(far more effective than SSRI’s) in the treatment of depression(coincidentally so is surfing). Meditation(like psychedelics or surfing) settles the brain down.  It quiets the usual overused neural pathways and allows the brain to build and utilize other pathways to other parts of the brain.  This experience whether through meditation or through microdosing, lowers the level of anxiety by the brain reconnecting regions lost to the tyranny of the ego, and its entrenched thinking patterns. This reconnection lowers cortisol creation.  The brain gets closer to its original state and broader experience, and is less panicked by its alienated regions. The brain goes from Friday night rush hour congested traffic, to Sunday morning open lanes with lots of options, and lots of possible off ramps to new neighborhoods that you may not have even noticed were there.

     So is microdosing a panacea? No. I believe that meditation is a more dependable, consistent, and safer process. I am sure that Ayelet Waldman and the twenty somethings of Silicon Valley would be better served investing themselves in a long term meditation practice.  But that takes time and effort and discipline, which are all important investments to make.  But does microdosing work by altering consciousness and integrating parts of the brain(and subsequently consciousness) that have become alienated.?  Yes, it does.  it takes the brain from a conditioned, sub optimal state, into a slightly vaster and wider aperture of function.  The long term goal is for microdosing to create new neural pathways that remain operational after the cycling is finished.  Today, it is a unregulated and mostly under researched undertaking.  James Fadiman, a long term psychedelic advocate and researcher, has created a microdosing research bank containing the self reporting of volunteers that have followed his guidelines. He suggests microdosing twice a week for six months.  Like the heretefore mentioned Buddhist teacher, his suggestion is really, “psychedelics in slow motion.”  Microdosing emphasizes that your state of consciousness ultimately repairs your brain chemistry which is inverse to what Neurobiology thinks.  Five thousand years of meditative technology have proven this to be true, and microdosing may very well be chemical shortcut to of this exact same state.

II solutio.  The solution.  It is such an essential part of the alchemical process.  It dissolves with water, which has become calcified and hard.  Il Solutio wears away the stalactite like physical structures in our bodies and in our consciousness that seem to be so real, and that create the boundaries of what is possible in our experience of ourselves, and of life. II solution gradually dissolves physical and emotional limitations for access to the endless  beyond.

But what is II Solutio in everyday terms?  Tears.  All kinds of tears.  Your body is continuously creating tears.  Tears to keep your eyes lubricated and bacteria free. Tears to keep your mucous membranes moist. Tears to release emotions that feel overwhelming.   Interestingly, not all tears are the same. Tears of grief, tears of joy, tears of relief,  all have different chemistries.  Your body, the master alchemist, releases toxins, stress hormones, and antibodies through your tears.  Tears keep you healthy and relieve stress.  Tears release your traumas. Tears release your disappointments. Tears break down the defensive structures of a lifetime that  no longer serve your well being.   There is no substitute for this process.  Nothing frees oneself from emotional and physical restrictions like crying does.  Yet, it is one of the most discouraged forms of self expression in western culture, especially for men.
My father died when I was sixteen, and when i was in Graduate School, I was required to undergo psychotherapy as part of my training to become a  therapist.  What I found in that process was a well of uncried tears.  Maybe they hadn’t been cried, because I didn’t know how to, or knew that they weren’t welcome, or because I felt that if they’d started, they wouldn’t stop.  So for a year I’d go to my Jungian Analyst’s office and cry about nothing in particular. It just gave me a container for the release.  I’d leave the office crying, then ride the BART crying all the way to San Francisco, get home, make some dinner and go to bed.  For a year, I  I cried every day, and came to accept that as a normal state.  It was incredibly cathartic.  It probably saved my life. One day, to my surprise, it stopped.

On and off for many years, I occasionally cried.  At the births of my children, during the dying process of my dog, reading about the suffering of others,  seeing a moving film. When my eldest son was seven, a classmate of his died from the complications of chemotherapy.  At the funeral I cried freely, because I could empathize with his parents, whose child had sat one seat over from mine on the first day of preschool.   I saw many men around me keeping a stiff upper lip through the service, and I felt grateful that I didn’t feel that obligation.  A couple of the mothers came up to me afterwards and told me how pleased they were that I was there.  I knew that they were thanking me for not being ashamed of my tears, and I wasn’t.

I have for a long time practiced meditation.  Probably for twenty five years or so.  Sometimes with great diligence and sometimes with less.  There is always a workmanlike feeling about it.  Meditation is not an airy fairy escape.  It is the engagement of one’s experience in the moment.  A recognition of what is actually going on, beyond the details of the day, and the workings of the mind.   For me that begins with a physical assessment of my body.  I experience, where I am tight, where I am tense, where I am hard. Over the years, I have found that all I have to do is breathe into this tightness and bring attention to it, and very gradually, it will un-clench.  That is my only practice now.  Going deeper into tension to its most subtle states. What I always discover in the physical tightness, no matter how subtle it is, corresponds with emotional release.  Memories, habits of experiencing myself and the world, emotional pain that I’ve never faced.  Sometimes these experiences seem preverbal, and free of self cognition.  Some are very old.  Always as the opening happens, there are tears.  Some burn like vinegar, some are sweet like honey, and some are bitter like salt.  I always feel better afterwards.  Crying it turns out, produces endorphins in the body, just like exercise or sex or many addictive substances do.  But you don’t have to chase these endorphins, they are built into you.  You need only to access them with an engagement of your actual emotional state.   I always feel healthier, lighter, and as though the structures I am bound by,  have slightly dissolved,  are a little less fortified, and less permanent after I cry.   I think it is the thing that I do that is the most healthful.

Frustration, anxiety, disappointment and sadness are all difficult emotions to endure.  To allow  oneself to be vulnerable to these emotions is a hard thing to do.  But whether you chose to engage them or not, they are still within you, like an undigested meal.  Il Solutio is a kind of emotional digestive process.   There is something peristaltic in it.  The limbic system where unprocessed emotion is stored heals itself through experience.  It is a razors edge that almost always cuts in the direction of healing,  even if it opens old wounds that have been covered over.  If seemingly healed, but lingering wounds are creating restriction in your consciousness, in your body,  or in your life, and need to be opened in order to be free, than by all means open them.  There is no tool that will open them to be digested and released with more care, more concern or more intelligence than tears will.  Il Solutio indeed.

In our culture we are so encouraged to be heroic.  Brave, strong, and enduring. Never more so than in the age of Trump, a man who has never felt anything but his need to cover up his suffering with bluster. He represents something so sick in our culture. Rather than meeting bombastic stupidity with aggression, we can resist by welcoming of our vulnerability, now, and in times past, so that we no longer have to defend what is sweet and soft and healthy in us, with what is hard, restricted,  and calcified.  We can enter those seemingly intractable parts of ourselves, with compassion for our own suffering and a knowingness about the wide open spaces beyond the suffering that we have clamped down on to  separate ourselves from where we have been vulnerable and hurt.  There is an infinite space beyond those structures. An ocean of love and compassion, and nothing to fear.  It is not our courage, or our fighting spirit that accesses the place beyond the known hard boundaries of ourselves, but our willingness to trust the vulnerable emotional release that we may not have not trusted before. Il solutio.

This past weekend, I saw, “Coco”. It was as inspired a film as I’ve seen in a long time. It was constructed around the Mexican holiday, Dia de la Muertos.  A night when the dead return to the land of the living, through memory and ritual.  The European version of this is of course, Halloween, derived from the Celtic festival Samhain.   As Halloween has its roots in Celtic Paganism, Dia de la Muertos , which most people think of as a Mexican holiday, reveals itself through its imagery to be rooted much further in the aboriginal Aztec and Mazatec religions of the Americas.

Each celebration supposes that there is a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and in the proper circumstances that bridge may be crossed. This identical archetypal imaginative creation rose up from the deep unconscious of two separate aboriginal cultures on two separate continents. It reveals a model for understanding reality that transcends the bifurcation between life and death, an ontological question that is really about the reality of consciousness beyond the ego, which we will all be released into when our biological nervous system no longer contains us.

Dia De Las Muertas is an American Aboriginal mythology birthed out from a native consciousness, that has inhabited the Americas for between ten and fifteen thousand years.  The migration that originally populated the Americas took place across the Bering Strait land bridge that over time brought a nomadic procession from Northern Asia into Alaska all the way down to the bottom of South America.  The “Native Americans” were actually genetically and linguistically more like Mongolians and other inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau. What we think of as “Native Americans,” are actually the Americas original immigrants from Northern Asia.  The religious mythologies they brought from Asia most resembled the pre buddhist influenced Bon Shamanistic land based tradition that existed throughout Northern Asia.
Just as they had in Northern Asia(that’s another story) the migrants found visionary plants to support their religious rituals.  In the Northwest North America and in Central Mexico, they found Psilocybin Mushrooms.  In the Southwest United States and Northern Central Mexico, they used Peyote, and when they populated the Amazon they discovered and utilized Ayahuasca.  All of these were part of the local fauna and were consumed in religious rites to bring the individual into accord with their physical and non physical environment.

These medicinal plants  sprung from the Americas ground.  In many ways, they were composed of the land.  When Europeans brought the second wave of migration to the Americas in the eighteenth century, they brought Christian Sects, that despite their own (forgotten) mystical origins, tried to douse the fire of the established religions that the American Aboriginals.  One needs to only examine how thin the crust of Christianity in Nazi Germany was burst through by the Wotan Forest Cults that had been the native religion for thousands of years.  In the Americas, the best the second wave of migration was able to accomplish was to have the native religions merge their rituals and mythologies with the Christianity that was forced upon them.  They forbade the use of local sacramental plants, yet in in the places where indigenous religions were wholly replaced by Christianity, alcoholism replaced the native mysticism and medicinal plants and decimated the native populations.

As history marched forward the consciousness of the land, always lay psychologically, and spiritually dominant below the feet of the American migrants, no matter what superficial cover of customs, histories, and family stories, were laid over the indigenous soil. The land of the Americas North, Central and South America, according to physics, isn’t just a physical place but a state of consciousness.  The present day religion of the United States is Keynesian Free Market Economics.  The election of Donald Trump, a real estate investor, is the purest expression of this .  He has no values, or consciousness, or concepts about reality that are not rooted in free market commerce.  For a population to vote him into the Presidency, his values are recognized as the most sensible for rule.  His call to “Build a Wall,” that was chanted at his rallies was the ipso facto proof of what his constituents seemingly fear the most: Mexicans.  But what they are talking about really is indigenous consciousness, the consciousness of the land.  What the followers who chant build a wall, wish to have a wall built for, is to keep out the native consciousness of the land beneath their feet, which doesn’t recognize the abstraction of Keynesian Economics.
Ignoring the land, is ignoring the quantum consciousness that we all spring from. But this consciousness continues to speak to each and every one of us, and it speaks a lot louder than the chants of “build a wall, or even, “lock her up.”   While Trump and his cronies continue to harp on about the economy and national security(and deny that global warming poses a threat) all of California has been on fire for three months, with no end in sight.  The plan is to hypnotize the population with an ideological war in the media between the right and the left, or between those who recognize Trump’s criminality and those who choose to ignore it.  But what is really going on, is occurring all around us.  It isn’t coming to you on the internet, it isn’t on television, it is right outside. your door and inside the room you are in right now.

Dissidence cannot just be political.  Dissidence begins with perceiving the reality around you, that is giving birth to your experience in every moment, without any intermediaries. It preceeds the information you are getting through media and social interaction.  It  speaks to you, and has an opinion about you, that is a priori before any information that you are receiving through channels that are less primary than the source of your own consciousness.  The physical reality around you shares the same source that your own consciousness does.  Relate to it, sense its’ experience of you, feel inspired to care of it, as it cares for you.  Achieve this,  and no wall can keep you from the experience of your indigenous reality, which will nurture you, communicate with you, and inform you in every moment.  Fight for it.  Share it with others.  This intelligence lives when it is alive in you and shared with others.  It dies, when you lose contact with it.  We are all birthers of this indigenous intelligence.

(AYA)PSILOCYBIN(HUASCA)

“ Psilocybin is Orally active DMT.”- Dennis Mckenna

It has become a progressive businessman’s rite of passage to head to the Amazon to use Ayahuasca. Luxury Ayahuasca retreat centers have popped up to accommodate the demand for the experience. Yet this adventure travel and experience is built on a fantasy of the exotic. DMT, the active ingredient in Ayahuasca, and Psilocin, the metabolized chemical that Psilocybin Mushrooms deliver to the brain, are virtually identical molecules. The only difference? Psilocin contains an extra hydroxene leg(see the image that accompanies this essay) that does not allow it to be metabolized in the gut. Psilocybin is Orally active DMT. The brew of Ayahuasca requires an MAOI inhibitor that keeps DMT from being broken down in the digestive process before it can pass through the blood brain barrier.. The “vine of souls” that everyone imagines is the magical catalyst of the Ayahuasca brew doesn’t even contain psychedelic DMT. It contains the MAOI inhibitor. The plants that contain DMT, looks like common houseplants and would inspire nobody to fly ten hours to drink it.. In fact, many common plants, vegetables, and fruits contain DMT, including oranges and lemons. Orange juice and lemonade don’t cause Ayahuasca like hallucinations because your stomach breaks down DMT before it can travel to your brain and introduce you to “Mother Ayahuasca.”

The identical nature of these molecules are not just chemical, but experiential. At comparable doses, the same experience is catalyzed by either. I discovered this in a fairly humorous way. When I was in graduate school I was frequently invited to see the Grateful Dead perform by a friend who supervised float building for their New Years and Mardi Gras shows at the Oakland Coliseum. Her frequent partner in these excursions was a man named Howard Rheingold, who was a publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue, an expert on Virtual Reality and Lucid Dreaming(and current Stanford professor). Because of their standing in the Grateful Dead Universe, the seats they had at the shows were amazing. I had never gone to Grateful Dead shows before this, and never after this time. I had one experience during this time, where I was invited by a Grateful Dead civilian whose seats were nearly at the back of the Coliseum. The Dead were so far away, that I swallowed a few mushrooms that I was offered, lay back in my seat and closed my eyes for the entire show. It was a unique experience, but not so unique that I didn’t access to the same realms of consciousness the first time I went to an Ayahuasca Ceremony. When the brew kicked in, I returned to the closed eye state I had last experienced at that Grateful Dead Show with bad seats. My “aha!” moment was that the states were identical, and that “Ayahuasca” was a Quechua(and later Spanish) word for Psilocybin.

Since then, I have been an Ayahuasca apostate. “La Purga” the highly anticipated and desired vomiting inspired by Ayahuasca, results from the high acid content of the brew, and and not some metaphysical expulsion of bad juju.. Some people’s stomachs can handle it, others cannot. I have drunk Ayahuasca five times and never vomited. The one real Shipibo Shaman whose ceremonies I attended was a very powerful performer and singer. He called his thick brew “chocolata” and assured me it would make me purge. It didn’t. He’s now in jail for some undisclosed form of sexual abuse.

Psilocybin Mushrooms grow throughout the Americas. Mexico itself has 24 different species of psilocybin mushrooms. Forty different species grow in North America. Two hundred species grow worldwide. Wherever you live, Psilocybin Mushrooms probably grow nearby. They are the organic intelligence of the land. There is no need for a nine hour flight from Los Angeles or a ten hour flight from New York City to Peru for what you seek. There is no reason to release the hydrocarbons that these flights create. There is no reason to believe that Icaros sung in Spanish and tobacco smoke blown at you are superior in any way to sitting with a trained professional who speaks your language, and knows you. It makes as much sense as deciding you have to travel Bali or Goa to meditate. Every weekend people fly “Shamans” from the Amazon into their cities, who are carrying Ayahuasca as their sacred elixir. People sit in living rooms with strangers who are vomiting, or crying or laughing at a ratio of 10:1. This is not holistic. This is not environmental stewardship. This is not valuing where you exist.