HOPKINS SCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN IN MUSHROOMS CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE

Johns Hopkins Medicine
Media Relations and Public Affairs
Media Contact:  Eric Vohr
410-955-8665; evohr1@jhmi.edu
July 11, 2006

Rigorous study hailed as landmark
Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in “sacred mushrooms” can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.
The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.
The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown.
An account of the study, accompanied by an editorial and four experts’ commentaries, appears online today in the journal Psychopharmacology. 

Cited as “landmark” in the commentary by former National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) director, Charles Schuster, the research marks a new systematic approach to studying certain hallucinogenic compounds that, in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception.  “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.”
“A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
All of the study’s authors caution about substantial risks of taking psilocybin under conditions not appropriately supervised. “Even in this study, where we greatly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, about a third of subjects reported significant fear, with some also reporting transient feelings of paranoia,” says Griffiths. “Under unmonitored conditions, it’s not hard to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior.”
The researchers’ message isn’t just that psilocybin can produce mystical experiences. “I had a healthy skepticism going into this,” says Griffiths, “and that finding alone was a surprise.” But, as important, he says, “is that, under very defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what’s called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person. It’s an early step in what we hope will be a large body of scientific work that will ultimately help people.”
The authors acknowledge the unusual nature of the work, treading, as it does, a fine line between neuroscience and areas most would consider outside science’s realm. “But establishing the basic science here is necessary,” says Griffiths, “to take advantage of the possible benefits psilocybin can bring to our understanding of how thought, emotion, and ultimately behavior are grounded in biology.”
Griffiths is quick to emphasize the scientific intent of the study. “We’re just measuring what can be observed,” he says; “We’re not entering into ‘Does God exist or not exist.’ This work can’t and won’t go there.”  
In the study, more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a “full mystical experience” as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.
Two months later, 79 percent of subjects reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction compared with those given a placebo at the same test session. A majority said their mood, attitudes and behaviors had changed for the better.  Structured interviews with family members, friends and co-workers generally confirmed the subjects’ remarks. Results of a year-long followup are being readied for publication.
Psychological tests and subjects’ own reports showed no harm to study participants, though some admitted extreme anxiety or other unpleasant effects in the hours following the psilocybin capsule. The drug has not been observed to be addictive or physically toxic in animal studies or human populations. “In this regard,” says Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist, “it contrasts with MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines or alcohol.”
The study isn’t the first with psilocybin, the researchers say, though some of the earlier ones, done elsewhere, had notably less rigorous design, were less thorough in measuring outcomes or lacked longer-term follow-up.
In the present work, 36 healthy, well-educated volunteers-most of them middle-aged-with no family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder were selected. All had active spiritual practices. “We thought a familiarity with spiritual practice would give them a framework for interpreting their experiences and that they’d be less likely to be confused or troubled by them,” Griffiths says. All gave informed consent to the study approved by Hopkins’ institutional review board.
Each of thirty of the subjects attended two separate 8-hour drug sessions, at two month intervals. On one they received psilocybin, on another, methylphenidate (Ritalin), the active placebo.
 In designing the study, researchers had to overcome or at least, greatly minimize two hurdles: the risk of adverse side-effects and the likelihood that the expectations of getting the test drug or the placebo would influence subjects’ perceptions.
To lessen the former, each subject met several times, before drug sessions began, with a reassuring “monitor,” a medical professional experienced in observing drug study participants. Monitors stayed with them during the capsule-taking sessions. Actual trials took place in a room outfitted like a comfortable, slightly upscale living room, with soft music and indirect, non-laboratory lighting. Heart rate and blood pressure were measured throughout.
The researchers countered “expectancy” by having both monitors and subjects “blinded” to what substance would be given. For ethical reasons, subjects were told about hallucinogens’ possible effects, butalso learned they could, instead, get other substances-weak or strong-that might change perception or consciousness. Most important, a third “red herring” group of six subjects had two blinded placebo sessions, then were told they’d receive psilocybin at a third.  This tactic-questionnaires later verified-kept participants and monitors in the dark at the first two sessions about each capsule’s contents.
Nine established questionnaires and a new, specially createdfollowup survey were used to rate experiences at appropriate times in the study. They included those that differentiate effects of psychoactive drugs, that detect altered states of consciousness,  that rate mystical experiences and assess changes in outlook. 
The study, Griffiths adds, has advanced understanding of hallucinogen abuse.

As for where the work could lead, the team is planning a trial of patients suffering from advanced cancer-related depression or anxiety, following up suggestive research several decades ago. They’re also designing studies to test a role for psilocybin in treating drug dependence.
The study was funded by grants from NIDA and the Council on Spiritual Practices.
Una McCann, M.D., William Richards, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and Robert Jesse of the Council on Spiritual Practices, San Francisco, were co-researchers. 
The commentaries on this study that appear in this issue of Psychopharmacology are available at: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/GriffithsCommentaries.pdf
and include remarks by:
*Hopkins neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience, Solomon Snyder, M.D.
*Former NIDA head Charles Schuster, Ph.D., now Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Wayne State University School of Medicine
*Herbert Kleber, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a former deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
*David Nichols, Ph.D., with the Purdue University School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
*Harriet de Wit, Ph.D., at the University of Chicago  Department of Psychiatry.  DeWit is the editor of Psychopharmacology.

Related links:  Q&A is with Roland Griffiths, the study’s lead researcher:http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/GriffithspsilocybinQ

Psychopharmacology:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/GriffithsPsilocybin.pdf

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press_releases/2006/07_11_06.html

Terence McKenna on Skepticism, Culture and Aliens (1-3)

Terence Mckenna.

BLOOM AND BURST: MUSHROOM ECONOMICS

Originally titled "WORD PIECE" i wrote this JULY 17’th, 2008 in Amsterdam, Netherlands after my friend Bogus Magus turned me onto the video "6 ways mushrooms can save the planet" by Paul Stamets. Like many other things i write, this "mushroom banking" article lay dormant in my laptop. So now due to the increased interest in BANKING, ECONOMICS and CREDIT i now present the article, with some re-writing and editing as BLOOM and BURST. (BOOM & BUST of mycelium entities)

This, lay readers and gentilemen, is perhaps the commonest
of all cases arising out of umbrella history in connection with the wood industries in our courts of litigation. D'Oyly Owens
holds (though Finn Magnusson of himself holds also) that so
long as there is a joint deposit account in the two names a
mutual obligation is posited. --FW, Page 575

Your words our words and their words of air-sound-sutra. Binding air-sound-power patterns. Why is money? and how did it get that way? who issues it and how? A coin for a cow? Paper for Gold. Silver? Our money > their money overnight. Who has the magic wands, and is fond of the funds? Who has the rite words and the rote blank cheque? Disorder of things and stuff, multi-ordinal terms fed like helpless worms to herds of hungry birds of pray, each day feeding after the rain storm.

Where is the source, the root and the well spring of your knowledge, our Nohledge and their Scholledge? Who issues it and how? What is a cash cow? Money exchanged for words. Language and economics cow-MING-LING. Money does not grow on trees, psychoactive mushrooms do grow on trees. The bees bring honey to each branch though. the Branch hanging over the bank, the river bank and its dependency on the moon goddess via her rising and falling water levels, bursting and then blooming river banks. In 2008 a river BANK maybe the only Bank you can trust.

Owens cites Brerfuchs and Warren,
a foreign firm, since disseized, registered as Tangos, Limited,
for the sale of certain proprietary articles. The action which was
at the instance of the trustee of the heathen church emergency
fund, suing by its trustee, a resigned civil servant, for the
payment of tithes due was heard by Judge Doyle and also by a
common jury. No question arose as to the debt for which vouchers
spoke volumes. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

And the underground fungi decomposes rotten money theory anyway, a natural fungi force consumes carbon dioxide and releases carbon monoxide. More valuable than cash? A KNU natural economic order will start with mycelium a as the ceiling limit of the fizzcool roots, and financial fibers that, maybe, in the buginning fed all the MONEY TREES. Feeding trees with funky nutrients using the process of decomposition, using calcium and lots of other magic biology.

The truly regenerative and maximum GREEN interests inherent in the fungal feeding of the planetary and inter-planetary bio-sphere make most but not all forms of banking and international financial doo-doings on this planet seem deceptive at best and damned sadistic and apocalyptic at their worst. Now we have the means to communicate more scientifically how and why mycelium networks have spread themselves throughout planet earths biosphere so we can tackle the problems related to fungal-economics (which for me fits in well with the Animal and Plant kingdoms propensity for doing more with less and maximizing their biological connectivity, collective output to the benefit of all. No dropping, carcass, seed or shell goes to waste. The whole biological world recycles itself as in a regenerative Universe, its energy freely flows between species and kingdoms).

The fund trustee, one Jucundus Fecundus Xero
Pecundus Coppercheap, counterclaimed that payment was invalid
having been tendered to creditor under cover of a crossed cheque,
signed in the ordinary course, in the name of Wieldhelm, Hurls
Cross, voucher copy provided, and drawn by the senior partner
only by whom the lodgment of the species had been effected but
in their joint names. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

Human Banking beings however seem to have a new propensity for hoarding life support to their own gene pool. Life support resources in all their forms are stolen and kept for a few special chosen people or a few International syndicates who claim divine banker child status. Hoarding at the expense of the many--the Majority of humanity on planet earth. And hoarding in contrast to the natural abundance of nature, omnidirectional distribution, maximal connectivity, cooperative banking on change and transformation of states. (Taoist economics?)

The rather simplistic idea of imitating natural systems and natures means of distribution very generally, and then abstracting these general principles to human Economic systems remains a simply floored ideology. The classic Garbage IN/Garbage OUT law springs to mind. And the GREEN economic fungal metaphor of BLOOM and BURST maybe the most eloquent and beautiful metaphor to employ in 2008, pitched against Unrestricted Global Capitalism driven by private interest and crooked double crossed intelligence tsars. (Since writing this passage, Unrestricted Global Capitalism in its most virulent form of unrestricted American Capitalism has rapidly decayed worldwide started by the housing mortgage securities market over estimating how much virtual horse-shit they can shovel at one time).

Depreciating currency imitates the fungal process of breaking down biological matter, making more room at the bottom by recycling, transforming and keeping the processes moving along. If you stay in one place too long with your savings (chemical compound interest) you will rot at the bottom of the pile, without jumping into a new state of energy by the magical trans-formative process. See transmutation, Holy Communion and the U.S Federal Bank of England.

The bank particularised, the national misery
(now almost entirely in the hands of the four chief bondholders
for value in Tangos), declined to pay the draft, though there
were ample reserves to meet the liability, whereupon the trusty
Coppercheap negociated it for and on behalf of the fund of the
thing to a client of his, a notary, from whom, on consideration, he
received in exchange legal relief as between trusthee and bethrust,
with thanks. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

The deception and trickery of the global banking fraudster gamers is also mimicked, on a global scale within fungal communities. BOOM and then DECAY. BLOOM and decomposition In fact mushroom mycelium provide nutrients for germination of most vegetation matter and some very rare Orchids; like the ones that so many Banksters are infatuated with. Penicillin and most of its synthesized drug relatives is another FUNGAL entity, claimed patented and exploited as a Global Pharmo-corp’ dream-drug. In its well known Penicillin incarnation FUNGAL intelligence has already penetrated the MONEY MAZE. Not to mention all the other medical applications and drugs synthesized from mushrooms and/or Fungal bacterium found in nature, while our melting leaders tighten restrictions on the source MUSHROOMS of the healing psychoactive varieties around the world in 2008.

But the poet with honey his mouth does not stop at that. Mushrooms and fungus being used as metaphors for a more synergetic human financial intelligence is just the sprouting TIP! of the underground fruiting body of evidence, spilling billions of its viral meme spores into earths atmosphere every second of every day for a billion years. There mush more to come.

Once the poet has sharpened his gaze, and the haze of terrestrial primate politics and economics vanishes in the life-mazing puzzle views, we can begin to revision our future, past present and perfect days, all-at-once. A galactic Fungal Languaging Entity. (FLE) A self-replicating fungal blogjects through me. A new solid banking practice has come--nourishing the sheep with the farmers profits, so that they grow strong, intelligent and have happy lives. Bah naught.

Since then the cheque, a good washable pink,
embossed D you D No 11 hundred and thirty 2, good for the figure
and face, had been circulating in the country for over thirtynine
years among holders of Pango stock, a rival concern, though not
one demonetised farthing had ever spun or fluctuated across the
counter in the semblance of hard coin or liquid cash. The jury (a
sour dozen of stout fellows all of whom were curiously named
after doyles) naturally disagreed jointly and severally, and the
belligerent judge, disagreeing with the allied jurors'
disagreement, went outside his jurisfiction altogether and ordered a
garnishee attachment to the neutral firm. --James Joyce, FW, Page 575.

Our collective cultural symbol systems, yours, theirs? Who issues languages and how? How did language get that way. This way to the museyroom. The trick to solid banking is to nourish the people on their children’s corpses, so they Wall street vampires say. Who would have thought that when you open a bank account they might take your son or daughter off to a foreign country to defend their elaborate symbolic betting shop?

discounted Mr Brakeforth's first of all in
exchange at nine months from date without issue and, to be strictly
literal, unbottled in corrubberation a current account of how
she had been made at sight for services rendered the
payeedrawee of unwashable blank assignations, sometimes pinkwilliams
(laughter)-- James Joyce, FW, Page 576.

REALITY? who issues it and how? J.P Perky Pat Morgan Skysoft? David Attenborough. The Pope? The Forrest's and fields and mountains and wild mushroom rich terrain of earth? The Oxford English Dictionary? Finnegans Wake? well, I banked with Dr. Robert Anton Wilson while he was incarnated here on planet Earth. Bob’s high interest rates, tragic/comic balance sheets and compassionate magic made his “Bank Of Maybe” (BOM) the model for a new, timeless, immortal banking practice. A Bank without savings. A bank with total investment in each moment, and a bank with the rare and brilliant promise to give away treasures and valuable stocks to strangers for free, in the interests of imitating natures banking practices and its maximal distribution of energy and information as defined by Buckminster Fuller and Claude Shannon respectively. The BOM even has some RAW PATATOES to show that we mean business.

jock and jarry in that little green courtinghousie for her
satisfaction and as a whole act of settlement to reamalgamate herself,
tomorrow perforce, in pardonership with the permanent suing fond
trustee, Monsignore Pepigi, under the new style of Will
Breakfast and Sparrem, as, when all his cognisances had been estreated,
he seemed to proffer the steadiest interest towards her, but this
prepoposal was ruled out on appeal by Judge Jeremy Doyler, who,
reserving judgment in a matter of courts and reversing the
findings of the lower correctional, found, beyond doubt of treuson,
fending the dissassents of the pickpackpanel, twelve as upright
judaces as ever let down their thoms, and, occupante extremum --James Joyce, FW, Page 576.

The Jury is still out on Finnegans Wake.
How about the worlds economic financial crash? WHO's ON TRIAL? Whats the CHARGE?

--Fly Agaric 23.
9th October 2008.