Entheogen

026: Sacred Plant Retreats with Maxwell Wieland of Munay Medicine in Peru, Part 1

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is February 21, 2016, and we are discussing Sacred Plant Retreats with our guest, Maxwell Wieland of Munay Medicine in Peru.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

Topics:

• Max has been in a working relationship with wachuma (san pedro), ayahuasca, changa (dmt), psilocybin mushrooms, iboga, morning glories, salvia, and other plant entheogens for a decade.
• How did Munay Medicine come to be?
• What is a typical stay like?
• Munay is in the Sacred Valley of Peru, a wonderful location with a number of retreat centers, convenient to Machu Picchu and other sacred sites.
• San Pedro vs. Peyote, the sustainability and eco-friendliness of San Pedro – can grow up to a meter per growing season. Can be propagated easily.
• The word wachuma translates to “removing the head” (wach- meaning “remove” and -uma meaning “head”) which metaphorically might mean the death of the ego. The word comes from Quechua, the language of the indigenous culture of the same name in the central Andes.
• As Maxwell told us, “The name San Pedro was an adaptation that came as a result of Catholic contact via Spanish conquistadors.” This is fascinatingly similar to the Bwiti tribe in Gabon who use ibogaine in a syncretic Christian-tribal tradition; it seems that part of the Andean adaptation to missionary influence was to rename this sacred plant after Saint Peter, implying that the entheogenic cactus holds the keys to the gates of heaven just as its new namesake, Saint Peter, is said to do.
• “Breaking open the Head”, Daniel Pinchbeck’s book about his initiation with the Bwiti (using Ibogaine).
• Max shares some of his backstory including trouble related to the illegality of plant medicine in the United States, which led to his moving to Peru.
• San Pedro “Jeff Bridges” variety: Trichocereus bridgesii

 

Also, please check out this link from last show's guest, Kirk Rutter: Psychedelic Science Org UK – "Psychedelics could be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope for astronomy."

025: Psychedelic Medicine Trials with Participant Kirk Rutter

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is February 28, 2016, and we are discussing Psychedelic Medicine Trials with a participant in a recent psilocybin study, Kirk Rutter.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

Special thanks to our guest on today’s show, Kirk Rutter, who offers listeners a rare glimpse of what it’s like to participate in a psychedelic medicine trial. Kirk worked with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, David Erritzoe (who sat in on the sessions), Prof. David Nutt (who oversaw the project), and Mark Bolstridge at the Imperial College of London, studying the impact of psilocybin on depression.

Topics:

• Kirk shares a bit of background about why he sought out this study

• The screening process

• Kirk’s prior experience (none) and opinion of psychedelics before the study

• No interaction with the other participants during the trials, meeting these automatic allies after the conclusion of the trials.

• The benefit of the “dry run” of set and setting a week ahead of time. Compare this protocol to the DMT studies by Strassman – demonstrates the importance of a comfortable setting.

• Kirk offers the term “psychedelic turbulence”, and the analogy of taking off in a plane: passing through the clouds, there may be some turbulence, and then once you reach a certain height it becomes calm.

• Sanskrit text flashing in the darkness, faint geometrics, jewels, golden structures…

• Describing the session room: niceties like ambient laser lights, aroma machine, candles, fresh flowers.

• The music in the room. The care given to the playlist. The importance of the playlist as part of the protocol.

• Psychedelic lacrymation.

• The “psychedelic yawn”.

• We all share our deep cries.

• Using music to help embed the experience.

• The roles of David, Robin, and Mark and how they factored into the experience.

• Robin: “one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

• We all don’t like the zoo. (E.g. “Meerkats basking under sunlamps.”)

• Kirk’s experience of seeing “an Indian god ‘look in on me’ like a parent looking over a baby's crib”

• Kevin’s experience seeing the same deity as Kirk: Ganesh, the "remover of obstacles", the "God of wisdom, knowledge and new beginnings". He sounds like a good totem to have through the 25mg experience”

• Chanting, meditating

Check out Kirk’s blog for a first person description of what it’s like to participate in modern psychedelic research, including videos from your accommodations at the Imperial College campus in London.

024: A Microdose of Alex & Allyson Grey

Brad, Kevin, Joe

Today is January 24, 2016, and we have for you a microdose of Alex & Allyson Grey.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

We’ll begin with a quote from the New York Times: "Alex Grey's art, with its New Age symbolism and medical-illustration finesse, might be described as psychedelic realism, a kind of clinical approach to cosmic consciousness. In it, the human figure is rendered transparently with X-ray or CAT-scan eyes, the way Aldous Huxley saw a leaf when he was on mescaline. Every bone, organ and vein is detailed in refulgent color; objects and space are knitted together in dense, decorative linear webs."

Psychedelic, inspired by entheogens

Best known for the Sacred Mirrors series

CoSM, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors: “The Mission of the Chapel of Sacred  Mirrors,  CoSM,  is  to  build  an enduring sanctuary of visionary art to inspire every pilgrim’s  creative path and embody the values of love and perennial wisdom.”

Alex’s art is featured by Tool, Nirvana, The String Cheese Incident, Meshuggah, and the Beastie Boys

Alex and Allyson’s shared journey, visioning the same image, painted by Allyson as Jeweled Net of Indra and by Alex as Universal Mind Lattice

023: Why We Entheogen

Today is January 24, 2016, and we are discussing why we make the show.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

Submit your comments for the show by text or voice message and send to [email protected]!

Entheogen: What is it

Quick recap on genesis

What is the point?

•     Information
•     Community
•     Personal Journey
•     Save your soul and the world?

Where we are

Referrers: Tool, Erowid, Facebook, Twitter

Subscribers:

How can you support the show?

Sign up for our newsletter: EntheogenShow.com

Submit your comments for the show by text or voice message and send to [email protected].

022: Response to A New Understanding- The Science of Psilocybin

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is January 7, 2016, and we are discussing A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook. Thanks for listening.

We discussed this film and interviewed its producer, Robert Barnhart back in August 2015 before the film’s release. Since then, the film has been released and you can rent or buy it on online. We’ve all had a chance to watch it again and we wanted to reflect on our impressions of the film.

We’ll start with a quote from Alex Grey:

"A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin puts an original face on psychedelics. Not the typical faces in the media of delusional drop-outs associated with drugs, but the faces of normal Americans, some suffering from the final stages of terminal cancer. After one dose of psilocybin the face of joy, relief and peace is nothing short of miraculous. A medical mystical miracle is in our midst, and this film beautifully describes the facts! Bravo to Robert Barnhart and all the production team, the courageous chemists, doctors and patients who are helping our society re-evaluate Psilocybin as a medicine for the Soul." ~Alex Grey

Hofmann discovered LSD, creating the modern psychedelic movement; not many people know he also isolated and synthesized psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.

Shutting down of research. Schedule 1. “No medicinal value, addictive”

Kevin purports that Maria Sabina had given Albert Hofmann an “academic boner” over his successful synthesis of the active alkaloid in her magic mushrooms, psilocybin.

“Throughout history, people have been able to have this mystical experience. The drug is a reliable way of getting one, but it's not about the drug, it's about the experience.” - Anthony Bossis

Ann Levy’s son’s eulogy for her

How does the experience help you confront death?

“We’re all star stuff.” - Carl Sagan

Bill Richards: 6 basic categories of a "core religious experience":
1. Unity
2. Transcendence of time and space
3. Noetic / intuitive knowledge
4. Sense of sacredness / awesomeness
5. Deeply felt positive mood / joy / peace / love
6. Ineffability / paradoxicality (difficult to put into words)

Psilocybin and LSD as aphrodisiacs

Why not? Why can’t we provide the relief these treatments offer?

Brad: “word.”

Wikipedia: List of Schedule I drugs and Schedule II drugs

Rent or buy the film on Vimeo

When you rent you can also watch DMT The Spirit Molecule

The film’s website has a convenient “who’s who” of psychedelic researchers on the participants tab, with names, titles and photos, and a short bio when clicked

021: Psychedelic First Aid with Special Guest, Sara Gael of MAPS and the Zendo Project

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is December 14th, 2015, and we are discussing the Zendo Project with special guest, Sara Gael, Harm Reduction Coordinator for MAPS.

Find the notes and links for this and other episodes at EntheogenShow.com. Sign up to receive an email when we release a new episode. Follow us @EntheogenShow on Twitter and like EntheogenShow on FaceBook.

Our guest, Sara Gael, has been involved with the Zendo Project since its inception in 2012. Since then she has helped coordinate harm reduction services at festivals all over the world including Burning Man, Afrika Burn, Envision Festival, and Lightning in a Bottle. She is also an intern investigator in the Boulder, Colorado Phase II Clinical Trial of the Safety and Efficacy of MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy. Sara works as a psychotherapist in private practice and received her Master’s in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology at Naropa University.

Topics:

• What is the Zendo Project?

• Zendo is billed as Psychedelic First Aid for Festivals & Events: “The Zendo Project provides a supportive environment and specialized care designed to transform difficult psychedelic experiences into valuable learning opportunities, and even potentially offer healing and growth. In turn, our work reduces the number of drug-related hospitalizations and arrests.”

• Safe Space

• Talk through, not down

• Sitting, not guiding

• Difficult is not bad

• What type of training does the “sitter” or “facilitator” receive?

• Benefits of human contact, touch

• How to volunteer with Zendo

  • Volunteers are needed for Burning Man, Afrika Burn, other festivals

• Sara discusses experience in the field at Burning Man, BOOM, Cannabis Cup, etc.

• How does Zendo work with medical and other support services

  • KosmiCare at BOOM in Portugal, where drugs are decriminalized, provides a glimpse of a post-prohibition future: their efforts are sponsored by the local government and festival, and they include onsite testing of pills.

  • Erowid Center helps bridge the gap with EcstacyData.org which features pill testing results database, in addition to the psychoactive vaults of Erowid.org.

• What’s the deal with folk remedies (bananas, oranges?)

• Nice things that smell good, art supplies, beautiful space, pillows, blankets, tea – your Psychedelic Grandma’s house

Resources:

• Watch Zendo Training Video on YouTube

• Donate to Zendo

• Zendo Training Manual

• Zendo webinar

• The Manual of Psychedelic Support

• Handbook for Therapeutic Use of LSD

• Zendoproject.org

• Zendo Project Year End Review: 2015

020: Interview with Earth and Fire Erowid, second half

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is December 9, 2015 and we are very excited to feature a special interview. This is the second half.

It is our great pleasure and honor to welcome Earth and Fire Erowid!

Topics:

• Kevin and Earth reminisce about Burning Man 2007, the “Eclipse/Man-Burn-Early Year”

• What was Burning Man like in 1995?

• Fire tells the story of a Burning Man purist in 1995 who had stopped going since there were people there she didn’t know

• “radical self-reliance” and community reliance

• Earth asks Kevin: “did you carry out your own poop?”

• When they moved to California in 1994, Earth worked remotely for his dad’s tech company; what was working remotely like in 1994?

• Earth started New College in Sarasota, FL, the same year Rick Doblin graduated; Fire joined the next year. (Rick’s wild time at New College in the ‘80’s described in Acid Test by Tom Shroder)

• Earth and Fire discuss their friendship with Sasha and Ann Shulgin and the famous Friday night dinners

• Erowid becoming an educational nonprofit in 2008

• Erowid’s Library

Support Erowid!

• Donate money, choose a gift

• Become a member or monthly supporter, receive the excellent and beautifully designed Erowid Extracts newsletter

• Donate your books, used or new

• Volunteer to triage experience reports or for other projects, e.g. foreign language help

And be sure to catch the first half of the interview.

019: Interview with Earth and Fire Erowid, first half

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. Talk about tools for generating the divine within.

Today is December 9, 2015 and we are very excited to feature a special interview. This is the first half.

It is our great pleasure and honor to welcome Earth and Fire Erowid!

For context, Joe reads a quote from Michael Horowitz, personal archivist for Timothy Leary:

“Powerful descriptive writing about personal drug experiences mimics the effects of the drugs themselves. Reading Aleister Crowley on how hashish aided his meditation, or Mezz Mezzrow on playing in a jazz band on marijuana, or Gordon and Valentina Wasson’s otherworldly mushroom journey in a curandera’s hut in Mexico, or Anais Nin describing how LSD turned her body into liquid gold can be mildly psychoactive in itself. Especially so if you’d had your own prior experiences. We also collected books and studied the rituals of the peyote and mushroom cults, the history of the opium wars and laughing gas parties. We learned that drug literature is endless, and drug-taking was one of the earliest and most common activities of mankind.” - Michael Horowitz, from an interview about the Tim Leary Archives

Topics:

• What role did the “mildly psychoactive” effect Horowitz attributed to some drug literature play in the founding of Erowid?
• Feeling it before taking it – hours (or days) before
• Imagination, memory, DMT, neurotransmitters, hallucinations
• lucid dreaming
• Oneirogens (dream generators); list of Oneirogenic substances on Wikipedia
• dream pillows
• Calea zacatechichi (the "dream herb")
• the physical expression of one’s intention, e.g. the taking of a substance, can be just as powerful as the substance itself
• What is it like having a New Yorker reporter in your home for three days?
• Reflecting on Emily Witt’s profile of Erowid from inside the mirrored bubble
• Kevin preaches: “drug education about marijuana was the gateway drug itself”
• What could responsible drug education in school look like? Abstinence, fear-based approaches are the norm. What could be the alternatives for young people?
• Earth introduces the concept of electroceuticals
• Brad is hopeful about the psychedelic research renaissance
• Special thanks to Earth and Fire Erowid for their tireless efforts for over 20 years, and huge thanks to Erowid’s noble crew
• Erowid Experience Vaults: edited, curated alternative to “wild west” internet forums like bluelight.org; other contemporaries: lycaeum.org, deoxy.org
• statistics about trip reports submitted, triaged, reviewed, and posted
• Earth clarifies something in the New Yorker article: “we are in fact ‘the weirdos among the straights and the straights among the weirdos’.”
• Fire live-edits the Entheogens page on Erowid to add LSD after our observation
• [email protected]

FOLLOWUP FROM PREVIOUS EPISODE OF ENTHEOGEN, HONORING THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF EROWID:

• Earth and Fire helped 17 year-old Brad avoid jail time
• Earth and Fire helped Kevin get through high school and college
• Joe got Erowid blocked from the network at his corporate job

SUPPORT EROWID!

• Donate money, choose a gift
• Become a member or monthly supporter, receive the excellent and beautifully designed Erowid Extracts newsletter
• Donate your books, used or new
• Volunteer to triage experience reports or for other projects, e.g. foreign language help

018: Honoring the 20th Anniversary of Erowid

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. We talk about tools for generating the divine within. It's Nov 25, 2015. We're talking about the 20th Anniversary of Erowid.

But first: check out our Entheogen t-shirt, just in time for the holidays!

Reference:

The Trip Planners – article in the The New Yorker by Emily Witt

Topics:

Erowid’s mission: “Documenting the complex relationship between humans and psychoactives.”

Thanks to Earth and Fire Erowid for their hard work over the last two decades.

Our personal experience with the page:

• Joe got Erowid blocked from his corporate job 15 years ago

• Erowid helped 17 year-old Brad avoid jail time

• Erowid helped Kevin get through high school and college

The accurate, honest information from Erowid vs. the limited, outdated info supplied by anti-drug programs.

Informing doctors.

Erowid precept: don’t take anything without first researching it.

Does this information make people more likely to try drugs?

Is there a double standard for psychedelics? Alcohol, pharmaceuticals, football?

The Shulgins’ Friday Night Dinners, attended by Earth and Fire.

Donate to Erowid, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

017: Modern Shamanism

Brad, Kevin, Joe

This is Entheogen. We talk about tools for generating the divine within. It's October 15, 2015. We're talking about Modern Shamanism with special guest, Micah.

We would like to thank our 3,000 monthly subscribers for listening to the show. We want to hear from you! Visit EntheogenShow.com and subscribe to our newsletter to receive show notes by email when new episodes are posted. Get in touch on Facebook or Twitter. And spread the word about Entheogen!

And check out our first Entheogen T-shirts! Show your support of Entheogen and start a conversation at the same time.

This episode we are grateful to be joined by special guest, Micah, to discuss the use of Ayahuasca in a modern context, as well as in the traditional setting.

Background:

Erowid Ayahuasca Vault: Basics

Topics:

- the traditional preparation vs. a chemical extraction

- the traditional context vs. modern comforts

- shaman vs. therapist

- jungle fauna, icaros vs. modern metaphors and music

- other psychoactive plant medicine: tobacco, chocolate/cacao, wine, sassafras, black pepper

- creating a container for deep experience

References:

Santo Daime

União do Vegetal

Controversy Brews Over Church's Hallucinogenic Tea Ritual