"Seeking the Magic Mushroom"

[Xicano]

http://www.imaginaria.org/wasson/life.htm




We were left in darkness and in darkness we remained until dawn. For a half hour we waited in silence. Allan felt cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A few minutes later he leaned over and whispered, "Gordon, I am seeing things!" I told him not to worry, I was too. The visions had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night, and they continued at that level until about 4 o'clock. We felt slightly unsteady on our feet and in the beginning were nauseated. We lay down on the mat that had been spread for us, but no one had any wish to sleep except the children, to whom mushrooms are not served. We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens--resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens. Three days latter, when I repeated the same experience in the same room with the same curanderas, instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun. This time a human figure appeared, a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic, beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored garments. It seemed as though I was viewing a world of which I was not a part and with which I could not hope to establish contact. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.

The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.

-- R. Gordon Wasson

From this 1957 Life magazine.

[rcrush]

1. Yeah shrooms are fun.

:hippie:

[Echo In Light]

7. It's been some yrs since I've had any - but yes, VERY fun

[LunaSea]

2. Telepathic mushrooms on the TV...1961

http://www.archive.org/details/OSB-3x18_012461-The_Sacred_Mushroom

Google the researcher featured in this episode of "One Step Beyond" and things get really weird.

[RandiFan1290]

5. That is an amazing story

I saw a film online that goes into further detail. It is called 'The Pharmacratic Inquisition' it can be found on YouTube or http://gnosticmedia.com

[LunaSea]

3. Cool article

Thanks. I particularly liked this illustration-



MEXICAN drawing of 16th Century shows three mushrooms, a man eating them and a god behind him, who is speaking through the mushroom.

Reminded me of this article I read earlier today-

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/960407.html

""Hypotheses have been around for 20 years connecting the beginning of religions with psychoactive materials," Shanon says. He believes the Israelites used two plants in Sinai and the Negev: one of them is wild rue, a hallucinogen used by the Bedoin to this day. However this plant is not identified with any plant mentioned in the Bible."

[L. Coyote]

8. That is not Mexica, it is Spanish and depicts the devil.

[Echo In Light]

9. Your avatar?..Brothers Quay? David Lynch? Where do I know that from?

[greyl]

10. Either from Georges Melies "A Trip to The Moon", or the Smashing Pumpkins video.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2008/11/20/ridiculously-awesome-music-videos-the-pumpkins-tonight-tonight/

[Roon]

4. My shroom story

My friends were in Wyoming and exploring a cave that they stumbled on. Inside, they found all this black fungus and one of my friends said..."Do you guys know what this shit is?!?!"...they took a bunch back to denver..I came over and my friend made a drink of this powdered dried up shroom dust..he put it in a glass, shook it up...the water turned blue..he told me to drink it and then i did...five minutes later i was tripping BALLS!!!! I was seeing crucifixes coming out of the ground..pretty wild.

[L. Coyote]

6. DO NOT BELIEVE IT! This was a CIAfunded enterprise.

Wasson is a bad source, unreliable, involved in a cover-up of the facts.
This article is a mass of disinformation, part of mind-control research.

For some facts read "Acid Dreams: The CIA LSD and the Sixties Rebellion."