The Psilocybin Solution

quest to find his place in the Universe, and these drugs can be important tools both in understanding this quest, and in gaining meaning about ourselves as conscious creatures.^{25}

Whether or not these speculations about mushrooms are correct is not the main issue. The main issue is the conceptual paradigm that sees a naturally occurring psychedelic agent of some kind lying at the heart of humanity’s sacred traditions. As it is, there is certainly some intriguing evidence that human civilization has been using psychedelic mushrooms since the earliest times. Dating from before 6000 B.C. (a long, long time before the Mexican use of psilocybin mushrooms described in chapter 2), rock paintings found at Tassili in Northern Algeria show mythical shamanlike beings covered in mushrooms. These Neolithic mushroom motifs are very distinct. Some have therefore argued that the Goddess-worshipping peoples who inhabited Tassili consumed locally gathered psilocybin mushrooms (such as the large species Stropharia cubensis) and that this practice influenced their spiritual beliefs. Whether the inferred mushroom use at Tassili was novel or derived from an even more ancient tradition is an open question yet to be resolved.

While the debate on the prehistoric relevance of psilocybin and its effects continues, we can end this chapter with a comment by Dr. Strassman. The comment concerns the value of researching the entheogenic experience to aid our understanding of human consciousness. With regard to the mystical claims made by native peoples who employ entheogens, Strassman says:

Scientists ought to take all claims about the mind seriously. The DMT and psilocybin states… are basically non-material. They are not dependent upon the body moving through space, or interaction with other material objects. Thus, they are windows into consciousness, which, while it may have structural underpinnings, is essentially a movement of energy, rather than of matter…. So, at the very least, any claims by non-Western people about consciousness might prove very valuable… for speculation about how the mind works. In addition, these “non-literate” cultures are how we found out about DMT and psilocybin in the first place.^{26}

FIVE The Mushroom and the Synapse

Now that I have acquainted the reader with the distinctly mystical nature of the psilocybin experience, it is time for us to focus our attention on psilocybin’s physical modus operandi. If we can come to grips with how alkaloids like psilocybin work their spectacular effects within the brain and mind, then we will be one step closer to a preliminary understanding of the nature of consciousness and the underlying factors governing the switch from normal awareness to the mystical perception of an intelligent Other.

At this point, consciousness lies smack-dab at the center of our inquiry. All our paths of investigation lead directly to it. The psilocybin cultural history covered in the first few chapters of this book arose solely because of the radical change in consciousness induced by the mushroom in the Mayan and Aztec psyche. The pre-LSD investigations at Harvard were likewise galvanized into action by psilocybin-induced states of consciousness. Indeed, the whole 1960s thing happened, in part, precisely because of the new ranges of conscious experience originally kick-started into existence by the mushroom. The growing second wave of psychedelic research has likewise appeared on account of the compelling nature of entheogenic states of consciousness. One cannot escape the mystery of consciousness. Psilocybin simply highlights the boundless nature and mystical potential of the human mind lest we allow this fortunate state of affairs to pass us by.

As I pointed out at the very outset of this book, if we are interested in apprehending the ultimate nature of the reality process, it makes sense to focus on consciousness because consciousness represents the interface that links us to the “world out there.” If we can understand what consciousness is, we might also understand how consciousness is able to be transformed and whether such a transformation can yield bona fide insights into the subtle nature of Nature. Nothing less than reality is up for grabs.

In the chapters that follow, I hope to develop a new, nontechnical, and user-friendly theoretical framework that can explain both normal consciousness and entheogenic consciousness. Essentially this conceptual framework derives from Aldous Huxley’s reasonable assertion that the psychedelic experience results from an influx of information not normally available to us—hence the “doors of perception” being opened after ingestion of substances like, in Huxley’s case, mescaline. What I eventually hope to show is that consciousness is actually a form of information; that physical matter can be described in terms of information also; and that reality ultimately consists of a flow of self-organizing information, with human consciousness occupying a significant functional role in the entire process. However, before we can explore the exciting ramifications that an informational model of reality yields, we must start from the beginning, that is, we must look more closely at the obviously important physical relationship between psilocybin and the human brain.

Neuromancing with Neuroscience

In any serious attempt to elucidate the brain processes underlying the psychological effects of entheogenic agents, one must utilize whatever relevant scientific data is at hand. In our case this means neuropsychological data, of which much has become available since the 1950s era, when Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception.

Neuropsychology is a modern scientific discipline based on the study of the nervous system, which consists of the body’s entire network of nerve cells. These nerve cells, or neurons as they are more formally known, allow us to sense, transmit, and process information. Whereas other cells in the body are designed to form tissues and organs, neurons exist solely to transmit information in the form of discrete signals, or impulses. We are able to see, touch, smell, hear, taste, feel, and think because we possess a vast network of these neurons, which manage to continually process and communicate information about both the external state of the world and the internal state of the body.

Of particular interest to neuropsychologists is the detailed study of the brain (one component of the nervous system) and the way the brain’s particular neurons function to produce thinking and behavior. Because psychoactive substances are known to influence the way brain neurons process information, neuropsychology has made some headway into understanding the chemistry of the brain and the actual way in which psychoactive substances work. Thus, we now know something about how common psychoactive substances like coffee, nicotine, and alcohol interact with the brain’s neuronal architecture to cause their desired psychological effects of stimulation or stupor.

However, the study of psychoactive substances is far from being neuropsychology’s key research area. Of perhaps most prominence is the study of the effects of brain trauma, a condition in which parts of the brain are damaged. A brief look at the rationale governing this kind of research reveals that we can approach the phenomenon of the entheogenic experience in much the same theoretical way.

For instance, medical patients with brain tumors and a corresponding psychological deficiency are, despite their misfortune, of great interest to neuropsychologists because a causal relationship can be ascertained between the area of the tumor and the particular psychological disturbance. This is equally true of brain-damaged victims of accidents, for where there is localized brain damage one invariably finds psychological disturbances of a definite kind that are associated with that area of the brain.

As an example, damage to the part of the brain known as Broca’s area often leads to language problems associated with speech production. Patients of this type have no difficulty in understanding speech but have noticeable difficulty in producing speech, even to the point of being mute. The point of interest is that a specific