Psychedelic Extra Sensory Perception

Psychedelic Extra Sensory Perception

 In 1502, at the festivities accompanying the coronation of Montezuma II, the Aztec ruler of Mexico, the celebrants consumed specially pickled mushrooms. After ingesting a portion of these, some of the natives began to have visions, masses committed suicide, still others became psychic and had premonitions of the future events including

1) The arrival of the Spanish conqueror:
2) The subjugation of the Aztec ruler and
3) The death of the civilization.

It has been known that certain types of mushrooms, cacti and other plants (ancient Rig Vedic texts have incorporated the ritual of Soma Yaga. History abounds in such reference) can induce a certain altered state of consciousness on a human. The Shamanic culture, the ancient Yaqui Indians, all have from time immemorial sought the philosopher’s stone; the elixir of life in these magic portions. They could induce not only visions, but also marked changes in perception and the thought processes-

The celebrated Tales of Don Juan (the mystic YAQUI INDIAN) abounds in anecdotal reference to the ‘ green man’ the spirit in the hallucinogenic cacti named by him as ‘Mescalito’ Mushrooms such as ‘Psilocybe Mexicana’ can act as meta-programming substances on our behavioral pattern. (Welcome to chapel Perilons).
To a septic such tales will certainly be totally false and mere mystical blah- blahs. But consider’ Paracelsus’, the founder of modern medicine, who believed in such vegetative spirits and claimed to have had frequent commune with them. Weird and incredible as it may seem.

It was from psilocybe Mexicana, that the drug ‘psilocybin’ was synthesized by Dr. Albert Hoffman, a Swiss investigator. The most publicized of all the mind expanding drugs is L.S.D. (Lysergic acid diethyl lamide) a purely chemical non- organic substance discovered by Dr. Hoffman.

Mind expanding drugs jolts the tripper into a mysterious journey of the mind hither to unexplained. The tripper can enter into a mystical magical realm of nature. A collage of characters, painted in so many varied colours are cast in this cosmic fun house. Colours seem brighter ; Nature explodes into a sparkling clear life.

In the case of mushrooms and other vegetative ingestion, it has been found that each trip has an emotional content strongly projected as though the spirit in the mushroom decides the trip for the mind. It has also been found that when a group of people are ‘tripping’, they can converse among themselves without actually speaking.

When we say that “seeing is believing” aren’t we seeing what we believe all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe. “L.S.D. can take you out of normal space-time age- the mechanical mode of everyday casualty”. This is the verdict of the 60’s genie Tim Leary. Dr. Leary’s pioneering research in this interesting domain has been with held and suppressed by the establishment which has always behaved paranoical in its reaction.

Dr. Leary explained that the psychedelic drug experience is a synergetic product of three non-additive factors.

1) The dosage of the drug used.
2) The set (subject)-

             a) The subject’s expectations
             b) Emotional- status
             c) Personality profile.

3)The setting- i.e. the actual location in space –time dimension.

This has been established by Dr. Leary in an experiment conducted in 1967 (With the help of a qualified psychologist who assists in the trip); where- in he used L.S.D. with a clinical setting to cure a latent homo-sexual of his disorder by positive suggestion.

Aldous Huxley the celebrated English novelist & futurist have recorded his experience in the ‘Doors of Perception’. His explanation is mostly scientific rather than spiritual. Human brain is mainly concerned with survival. So out of the thousands of units of data fed in by the six senses, only the ones that are useful for survival are analyzed by it-others are filtered out. L.S.D. and other mind expanding drugs, when ingested, reduce the sugar content in the blood stream, thereby depriving the brain of its main energizer. This reduces the efficiency of the ‘filtering system’ and the brains get flooded with the information fed in by the senses- it begins to hallucinate. This hypothesis explains why the brain hallucinates- but it does not explain some of the other, more bizarre aspects of a trip.

Serious research has to be done before we can come to a definite conclusion. Till then, we can go on believing in the ‘green- man’ ‘ mescalito’ and the other spirits. That is, if at all anyone wants to believe.

Article By: Stephen Francis,St.Alberts College