Lsd Nature Quotes

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware." Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts.

Desire is alcoholic, desire is the greatest drug possible. Marijuana is nothing, lsd is nothing. Desire is the greatest lsd possible – the ultimate in drugs. What is the nature of desire? When you desire, what happens? When you desire, you are creating an illusion in the mind; when you desire, you have already moved from here. Now you are not here, you are absent from here, because the mind is creating a dream. This absentness is your drunkenness. Be present!

It is helpful to refer back to it, to reconnect, have a daily practice of some kind, whether it’s getting out in nature or doing artwork or any other way, but at the same time it can turn over into grasping and worrying about losing it. It’s about letting things happen, not grasping. You can trust that the same inner healing intelligence that gave you that experience, if you create space for it, it will keep working for you.

The rapid rise of drug use, which had its beginning in this country about twenty years ago, was not, however, a consequence of the discovery of LSD, as superficial observers often declared. Rather it had deep-seated sociological causes: materialism, alienation from nature through industrialization and increasing urbanization, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanized, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, saturated society, and lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life.

In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature. Not me, little ol’ Russ, tossed about on turbulent seas; these distinctions were engineered.

Satan's masterpiece of counterfeiting is the doctrine that there are only two choices, and he will show us what they are. It is true that there are only two ways, but by pointing us the way he wants us to take and then showing us a fork in that road, he convinces us that we are making the vital choice, when actually we are choosing between branches in his road. Which one we take makes little difference to him, for both lead to destruction. This is the polarization we find in the world today. Thus we have the choice between Shiz and Coriantumr-- which all the Jaredites were obliged to make. We have the choice between the wicked Lamanites (and they were that) and the equally wicked (Mormon says "more wicked") Nephites. Or between the fleshpots of Egypt and the stews of Babylon, or between the land pirates and the sea pirates of World War I, or between white supremacy and black supremacy, or between Vietnam and Cambodia, or between Bushwhachers and Jayhawkers, or between China and Russia, or between Catholic and Protestant, or between fundamentalist and atheist, or between right and left-- all of which are true rivals who hate each other. A very clever move of Satan!-- a subtlety that escapes us most of the time. So I ask Latter-day Saints, "What is your position frankly (I'd lake to take a vote here) regarding the merits of cigarettes vs. cigars, wine vs. beer, or heroin vs. LSD?" It should be apparent that you take no sides. By its nature the issue does not concern you. It is simply meaningless as far as your life is concerned. "What, are you not willing to stand up and be counted?" No, I am not. The Saints took no sides in that most passionately partisan of wars, the Civil War, and they never regretted it.

Experience of the world as matter, as object, to which man stands opposed, has produced modern natural science and technology—creations of the Western mind that have changed the world. With their help human beings have subdued the world. Its wealth has been exploited in a manner that may be characterized as plundering, and the sublime accomplishment of technological civilization, the comfort of Western industrial society, stands face-to-face with a catastrophic destruction of the environment. Even to the heart of matter, to the nucleus of the atom and its splitting, this objective intellect has progressed and has unleashed energies that threaten all life on our planet.

[Hallucinogenic drugs] now formed a circle, one could almost say a magic circle: the starting point had been the synthesis of lysergic acid amides, among them the naturally occurring ergot alkaloid ergobasin. This led to the synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. The hallucinogenic properties of LSD were the reason why the hallucinogenic magic mushroom teonanacatl found its way into my laboratory. THe work with teonanacatl, from which psilocybin and psilocin were isolated, proceeded to the investigation of another Mexican magic drug, ololiuhqui, in which hallucinogenic principles in the form of lysergic acid amides were again encountered, including ergobasin—with which the magic circle closed.

Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was born in New York City on October 6, 1924. He died of cancer on January 2, 1999. Dr. West served in the U.S. Army during World War II and received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1948, prior to Air Force LSD and MKULTRA contracts carried out there. He did his psychiatry residency from 1949 to 1952 at Cornell (an MKULTRA Institution and site of the MKULTRA cutout The Human Ecology Foundation). From 1948 to 1956 he was Chief, Psychiatry Service, 3700th USAF Hospital, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas Psychiatrist-in-Chief, University of Oklahoma Consultant in Psychiatry, Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Hospital Consultant in Psychiatry. [...] Dr. West was co-editor of a book entitled Hallucinations, Behavior, Experience, and Theory[285]. One of the contributors to this book, Theodore Sarbin, Ph.D., is a member of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). Other members of the FMSF Board include Dr. Martin Orne, Dr. Margaret Singer, Dr. Richard Ofshe, Dr. Paul McHugh, Dr. David Dinges, Dr. Harold Lief, Emily Carota Orne, and Dr. Michael Persinger. The connections of these individuals to the mind control network are analyzed in this and the next two chapters. Dr. Sarbin[272] (see Ross, 1997) believes that multiple personality disorder is almost always a therapist-created artifact and does not exist as a naturally-occurring disorder, a view adhered to by Dr. McHugh[188], [189], Dr. Ofshe[213] and other members of the FMSF Board[191], [243]. Dr. Ofshe is a colleague and co-author of Dr. Singer[214], who is in turn a colleague and co author of Dr. West[329]. Denial of the reality of multiple personality by these doctors in the mind control network, who are also on the FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board, could be disinformation. The disinformation could be amplified by attacks on specialists in multiple personality as CIA conspiracy lunatics[3], [79], [191], [213]. The FMSF is the only organization in the world that has attacked the reality of multiple personality in an organized, systematic fashion. FMSF Professional and Advisory Board Members publish most of the articles and letters to editors of psychiatry journals hostile to multiple personality disorder.

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What

No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature.

I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo now—now!” And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved—never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought—it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain. For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum—but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display—lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth—and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists! During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce—no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.

Even a third-rate science fiction writer out of his nut on LSD couldn’t contrive the real nature of matter.

The experience induced by psychoactive substances is often surprisingly similar to a near-death experience, especially in the case of DMT although, depending on the dosage, confusing or frightening perceptions may also occur. These substance-induced experiences include the following elements: a sense of detachment from the body, out-of-body experiences, lucid and accelerated thought, an encounter with a being of light, a sense of unconditional love, being in an unearthly environment, access to a profound wisdom, and wordless communication with immaterial beings. Sometimes the characteristic post-NDE transformation, including the loss of the fear of death, is also reported after administration of DMT or LSD.22 It is a new and surprising hypothesis that DMT, which occurs naturally in the body, could play an important role in the experience of an enhanced consciousness during near-death experiences. Perhaps DMT, its release triggered or stimulated by events in our consciousness, lifts our body’s natural inhibitions against experiencing an enhanced consciousness, as if it is able to block or disrupt the interface between consciousness and our body (and brain).

What this suggests is that ‘widely used’ obstetric and infant drugs such as phenobarbital dysregulate the infant’s dopaminergic (dopamine-activating) system, permanently reducing his potential for pleasure and creating an imbalance he later seeks to redress through dopaminergic compulsions – substance-use disorders involving drugs such as cannabis, heroin, or LSD, say. Or sexual addiction. And, while the nature of pornography is determined by the culturally sanctioned birth abuses of mothers and babies, the impact of pornography is determined by the susceptibility created by drugs given to mothers and children.

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware". Fiat logos I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. *** Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven't filtered it away, nor pushed it to the background. It's become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition.

Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore, I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness-change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other, deeper, areas of human existence, so that we, again, become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and of being one with nature. LSD and related substances are not "drugs" in the usual sense, but are part of the sacred substances which have been used for thousands of years in ritual settings.

In the golden age of interval training, Norpoth—and by extension, Van Aaken—recommended a training method based on long, slow distance, still well known as LSD. He defined LSD as running a long distance at a steady, conversational speed and heart rate below 150 beats per minute (130 beats per minute on average). Van Aaken recommended the same method for almost everyone, from children to the elderly. In 1960, he founded the Western Germany Elderly Long-Distance Runners Association.

There is no such tiny “Cartesian Theater” in the brain; conscious experience is generated by a vastly complex, distributed network that synchronizes and adjusts its activity by the millisecond. As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory information. The experience you have right now is a unique creation of your brain that has transformed data from your body into something closer to a hallucination. To break down this seemingly obvious point that we will deal with very often in this book and that I myself struggle to understand: the existence of our experience is real, but the contents of this experience exist only in your brain. Some philosophers call this “irreducible subjectivity,” which means that no totally objective theory of human experience may be possible. The contents of your experience are not representations of the world, but your experience is part of the world. By altering this process with molecules like psilocybin or LSD we can become aware of different aspects of our perceptions. By perturbing consciousness and observing the consequences, we can gain insight into its normal functioning. This is again not to say that consciousness is not real; there can be no doubt that I am conscious as I write this sentence. However, it is the relationship between consciousness and the external world that is more mysterious than one might assume. It is often supposed that cognition and consciousness result from processing the information from our sensory systems (like vision), and that we use neural computations to process this information. However, following Riccardo Manzotti and others such as the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, I will argue that computations are not natural things that can cause a physical phenomenon like consciousness. When I read academic papers on artificial or machine intelligence, or popular books on the subject, I have not found anyone grappling with these strange “facts” about human consciousness. Either consciousness is not mentioned, or if it is, it is assumed to be a computational problem.

Even the 1960's drug LSD is synthesized from a natural rye fungus called ergot. Incidentally, it's been proposed by some historians that the European witch hunts may have been a result of so-called witches hallucinating after eating ergot-molded rye. The theory is that their antics were caused by inadvertent "bad trips," which resulted in these unfortunate wretches being branded as witches, with up to one hundred thousand burned to death. Some might argue that heroin and LSD are examples of biomimicry gone wrong, but I believe the fault is with humans choosing to synthesize and distribute these molecules without consideration and management of their consequences.

I hate narcotics. Clue is in the name: a drug that makes you sleep. Enough people sleep their lives away. Sleep through school because it’s boring, sleep through college and first jobs because the other kids are mean, sleep through a marriage, a divorce. Sleep through their own death. Fuck narcotics. And fuck meth and cocaine while we’re at it, which make you too hyper to know that you’re awake. Fuck LSD unless you are using it for all the medical applications we’re not allowed to know about because that is a goddam hippy counterculture drug and we all know that drugs are for the one per cent not the fucking Occupy Movement. That’s just the law of nature. Fuck all of those things. Give me booze and coffee and adrenaline and sex and I will give you a real person and I will give you a fucking Dalai Lama Gandhi Einstein of living from one instant to another and amen.

Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other deeper areas of human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and of being one with nature. LSD and related substances are not drugs in the usual

As unpredictable as the content of the LSD reaction is its intensity; the individual responses to the same dosage level vary considerably. My experience indicates that the degree of sensitivity or resistance to LSD depends on complicated psychological factors rather than on variables of a constitutional, biological, or metabolic nature. Subjects who in everyday life have the need to maintain full self-control and have difficulties in relaxing and “letting go” can sometimes resist relatively high dosages of LSD (300 to 500 micrograms) and show no detectable changes. Occasionally, a person can resist a considerable dose of LSD if he has set this as a personal task for himself for any reason. He may decide to do this to defy the therapist and compete with him, to demonstrate his “strength” to himself and to others, to endure more than his fellow patients, or for many other reasons. Usually, however, more relevant unconscious motives can be found underlying such superficial rationalizations. Another cause for a high resistance to the effect of the drug may be insufficient preparation, instruction, and reassurance of the subject, a lack of his full agreement and cooperation, or absence of basic trust in the therapeutic relationship. In this case, the LSD reaction sometimes does not take its full course until the motives of resistance are analyzed and understood. Occasional sudden sobering, which can occur at any period of the session and on any dosage level, can be understood as a sudden mobilization of defenses against the emergence of unpleasant traumatic material. Among psychiatric patients, severe obsessive-compulsive neurotics are particularly resistant to the effect of LSD. It has been a common observation in my research that such patients can resist dosages of more than 500 micrograms of LSD and show only slight signs of physical or psychological distress. In extreme cases, it can take several dozen high-dose LSD sessions before the psychological resistances of these individuals are reduced to the point that they start having episodes of regression to childhood and become aware of the unconscious material that has to be worked through.

Hofmann says: “Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.” This to me indicates that LSD has the ability to create awareness of different kinds of perceptions, in which we encounter the fact that our perception of everyday life is a creation of our minds. Hofmann continues: “I analyzed the mechanisms involved in the production of the normal world view that we call the ‘everyday reality.’ What are the factors that constitute it? What is inside about what is outside? What comes from the outside in and what is just inside?

Albert Hofmann lamented the use of LSD as an inebriating drug rather than a therapeutic treatment or spiritual tool, which made serious research on the drug impossible. He called the recreational use of LSD “careless and irresponsible” and felt it to be a tragic misunderstanding of the nature and meaning of these kinds of substances. He believed that we should treat LSD with the same reverence indigenous peoples have for these substances.

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term “self-aware.” Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Godel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts.

Ergine (LSA) Ergine, or lysergic acid amide (LSA), is structurally similar to LSD with vaguely comparable effects. Users tend to find it more sedating, often nauseating, and generally less potent than LSD. However, at microdoses, it can boost mental clarity and focus while relieving anxiety and depression. It’s also naturally occurring and, while the compound itself is widely illegal, ergine-containing seeds are not. Morning glories and Hawaiian baby woodrose are among the best known plant sources, and both are legal to grow in the U.S. (except Arizona), the UK., and mainland Europe (except Italy). Common microdoses fall in the range of 5-15 morning glory seeds or 0.33-3 Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds. Usually, they’re chewed for about 20 minutes and held under the tongue to absorb the ergine sublingually. Mescaline Cacti are well known as some of the easiest plants to grow, practically taking care of themselves given the right conditions. And mescaline-containing cacti, such as peyote and San Pedro, are legal in most countries. Although peyote cultivation is restricted in the U.S. to members of the Native American Church (or Peyote Religion), San Pedro can freely be grown for ornamental purposes.