About http://dopecast.libsyn.com/psychonautica088 The Secret Life of Mushrooms

[zezt]

I have just been listening to the Dopecast podcast The Secret Life of Mushrooms, and was looking around at a forum at the podcast to give views but there isn't anything. The only feeback possibility is the 'join the conversation' which is Twitter and you can only type about a few characters. Did this podcast used to have a conments section...? It should do. I think THE most important thing about the Web IS feedbak anc onversation. I hate it where people uploar youtube vids and disable the comments. It is just so like mainstream crap. Try and feedback to the 'expounders of (dis)information' and you will get NO REPLY. Theyyy have spoken. They have spoken, and do not have to interact. It is so monarchal. Web should allow all forms of two way communication

But anyway, maybe here, I dont know. I was interested in this podcast but was frustrated they didn't go into areas that interests me like eg the Catholic influence on Mazatec sacred mushroom rituals, etc....ALSO, don't know if any of you are aware but there's been some drama in the psychedelic world between two authors, Simon G Powell, who has made the film Matanoia, and wrtten books about how magic mushrooms have given him insights into the intelligence of nature, and Jan Irvin, also an author of books like The Holy Mushroom. Whereas Irvin is claiming that the psychedelic movement was created by the elite as a psyop, Simon disputes this, and sees it as paranoia and the denigration of early psychedelic pioneers like Wasson, McKenna, Watts etc.
In the podcast there was no mention of this, but one of the filmmakers said how there could be a case that the reason the magic mushroom story was introduced into culture was to cause a spiritual introspection which would diffuse political activism. Well hmmm I dont see it that psychedelics do that---think about the mass youth protests against the war in Vietnam.

What do YOU think about all this?

 

[ararat]

I haven't read much of Irvins stuff, and I think I won't. I know it is easy to put a "psychotic" or "paranoid" sticker on people and cease to take them seriously, but I have a hard time taking this guy seriously. the way he slenders Simon Powell (who I don't know well either) is ridiculous and childish, alone by this he discredits himself well enough. he seems like an egomaniac with a good portion of a messiah complex playing out. his ideas seem completely absurd and have a peculiar stamp of paranoia on it.

I don't think at all that mushrooms were introduced to diffuse political activism. quite to the contrary, spiritual introspection is the beginning of a real revolution, not one of the left or right, both of which tend to be merely reactionary and in some way adherents to the same worldview, albeit with different permutations of it. the experience empowers individuals, it lies open the fallacy of our cultural metaphysics*, upon which the current structures of our society are built. the metaphysics are crumbling anyway, and the mushroom plays a role in that. so does LSD, meditation, eastern philsophy and all the crises that are converging in the individual and in society at large.



*that of the seperate self, of the lifeless and uncaring cosmos, of nature being red in tooth and claw, the anxiety born from that, and the resulting urge to control nature and everything else for that matter.

 

[Mrjelly]

I think that the drug revolution may have been a tactic to infiltrate our society by outside big money. Essentially those that are opposition to the big money guys who have the interest in the USA. I do not think that it was a mind control experiment on the culture of the USA or anywhere else for that matter. I think that it has worked to a certain extent. The largest killer to the people of western civilization is marketing. We market so heavily that everyone is tied to the dollar. It keeps people working so they can have all that cool stuff.

I recently heard somewhere that most of the great minds have had experience with psychedelics, I think that this was on a right wing news program, but I cant remember now. I would not be surprised if taking psychedelic drugs increased creative thinking and pushed people out of the box. I would be shocked to find out that it did anything but that! Just a few of my thoughts though.