Psilocybin, Reality & Me
In the year 2005, magic mushrooms were finally made illegal in the UK, ending a brief resurgence in their availability and popularity. Just before their status was changed, I decided that it would be an important experience to investigate the effect of psilocybin (the psychotropic element in magic mushrooms) and gain first hand experience of their hallucinatory effects.
As a psychologist and former parapsychologist I have always been interested in people's weird experiences and have heard many stories about hallucinations and ghosts, but have had no personal experiences to fully understand what the people where reporting. I have never had a lucid dream or hallucination (at least not under the influence of magic mushrooms) and for me consciousness falls into two distinct states: being awake and alert, and dreaming - where I am never aware I am dreaming until I wake up.
Despite the disapproving opinion that society now places on magic mushrooms, there is quite some precedent for its use within the annals of psychology and in the sixties, former Harvard psychologist, Timothy Leary gave many of his colleagues and students psilocybin and the related compound LSD. The discoverer of LSD, Albert Hoffman, in fact celebrated his 100th birthday last year and is also an interesting fellow.
So what was my experience of magic mushrooms? I took them maybe three or four times and each experience was initiated with extremely pleasurable sensations - amounting to being very drunk, but without any of the sick feelings (I am a terrible drinker and do not like alcohol very much). After an hour or so, this euphoria would die away, and I was left with a distorted version of reality. The best way of describing the experience would be like a waking dream. Reality was distorted by the chemical, so that part of what I was experiencing was real, but part of it was very unreal.
One experience I remember quite vividly, was engaging in conversation with a toilet. The toilet distorted to make it seem more life-like, and began to talk to me (nothing very deep) with it's lid as a top-lip. But instead of being horrified at the bizarre events taking place in my head (the toilet wasn't really alive) my mind took it perfectly within its stride and didn't think there was anything strange about conversing with a toilet. This was perhaps my oddest experience, though on magic mushrooms random things would occur in the room I was sitting in (such as pencils would get up and scuttle away) and it was very much like an Alice in Wonderland experience.
I have taken one other, also legal substance, called salvia divinorum. It is a type of mint plant originally found in Mexico. Its effect on me was very different from that of the psilocybin, and though its effects only last a matter of seconds (compared to the four hours or more of magic mushrooms) it reminded me of the moment that Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite. The substance made me feel as though my ego was dissipating, and freezing, until I was nothing - and then quickly I unfroze again. It was not what I would call a pleasant experience.
What did I learn from these limited encounters with psychotropic substances. That reality is very much constructed within the brain and that seeing is most definitely not a requirement to believing something is real. I didn't have a 'spiritual awakening', but it provided me with personal experience of the constructive nature of perception and illustrated the fact that it is wholly less accurate than people give credit for.
