The doors of perception, slightly ajar
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
The visions the Andes kept secret: Two thousand years before the Inca, the elite leadership of Chavín de Huántar in the Peruvian highlands carved tubes from hollow bone to inhale DMT (aka ‘The Spirit Molecule’) but only in tiny private stone chambers, a handful of people at a time. Archaeologists now believe that Chavín’s rulers deliberately controlled access to these altered states to convince people that their leadership was mystically bestowed.
A mind-bending view: Astronauts who see the Earth from orbit often come home changed. The effect of seeing our small, fragile marble suspended in inky dark. Borders erased, nations and nationalities almost nonsensical constructs, everything achingly connected. Psychedelics offer the same sense of expansive connectedness, just like astronauts have felt looking back to Earth from space without leaving the ground.
Science gets closer to understanding how a psychedelic trip changes the brain: A new study found that a single dose of psilocybin left first-time volunteers with measurable changes in brain "entropy" — the diversity and richness of neural activity — that lingered for up to a month and tracked with lasting feelings of insight and wellbeing. The trip itself, it seems, may be the point rather than a side effect.
Podcast: Wondermaker of the week: When Marcus Capone, a Navy SEAL of thirteen years, came home from war racked with depression and on the edge of suicide, his wife Amber refused to give up. Their story of finding healing through psychedelics and helping more than 1,300 other Vets in the process, is told in the Netflix documentary In Waves and War.
I hope you enjoy some psychedelic wonderbringers inspired by the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research!
With wonder,
