Michael Pollan’s New Yorker piece on the medical benefits of psychedelics is well worth a read: As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and … Continue reading The Promise Of Psilocybin
The Dish has long covered and investigated the medical and spiritual dimensions of psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms.” Its potency for mental health, depression, PTSD, and the trauma of end-of-life treatment of cancer. Read it all in one place here. But today, there’s news of new research that examines the use of the … Continue reading Psilocybin vs Nicotine
Greg Miller reports from the third annual Psychedelic Science meeting in Oakland, California: [Brazilian neuroscientist Dráulio Barros de Araújo and his team] found that ayahuasca reduces neural activity in something called the default mode network, an web of interconnected brain regions that fire up whenever people aren’t focused on any specific task. It’s active when people daydream or let … Continue reading After Medical Marijuana, Medical Psilocybin?
Dr. Stephen Ross's research uses "psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to treat end-of-life distress in people with cancer." The results: In my fifteen years as a psychiatrist, I’ve seen some profound things. Here I’ve seen decreased death anxiety, decreased depression, greater integration back into daily life, improved family function, and increased spiritual states. Half of our patients had … Continue reading Psilocybin At The End Of Life
A reader writes: I’ve been followingBill Hicks clip in the thread, but I feel compelled to write to say how odd it is to read Bill classified as an atheist. I was a close friend of Bill’s and in fact was one of the two friends hementions in this clip who tripped with him, which … Continue reading The Spiritual Power Of Psilocybin, Ctd
A reader writes: It seems to me that the debate between spiritualist and scientific interpretations of the psilocybin experience depends on a false alternative. It’s true that a scientific perspective rules out witnessing supernatural facts. But that’s not the same as ruling out witnessing spiritual facts, at least not in the sense that most people … Continue reading The Spiritual Power Of Psilocybin, Ctd
Bill Hicks – an atheist – recounts his experience of “unconditional love”. It gets great about 51 seconds in:
It’s an old debate, but this reader makes the point for me: At the risk of oversimplifying, what things like Psilocybin may bring home experientially, and therefore powerfully, for those that partake is that qualitative states matter. That the world as we know it is shot through and through by our qualitative experience of it; see Kant’s “Critique of … Continue reading The Spiritual Power Of Psilocybin, Ctd
Materialists return fire. One writes: The from inside the brain with a voice emanating from a cell phone is completely flawed. Of course a reasonable person would not believe that the voice originates from the cell phone, because a person using a cell phone knows that he or she is talking to another person. We … Continue reading The Spiritual Power Of Psilocybin, Ctd
Andrew Sabl adds his voice to these dissents: Give mushrooms to a bunch of hippies and they’ll gain a new appreciation for yoga; give them to a heterodox Catholic and he’ll ponder the Incarnation. Give them to me and I might start to (wrongly) believe that I can understand complex mathematical proofs or conceive (wrongly) … Continue reading The Spiritual Power Of Psilocybin, Ctd
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