Mushroom Trip Quotes

Alice in Darkness Forget tears. Chasing white animals with timepieces in this drug-trip landscape can only lead to more of same. Hedgehogs, playing cards, paintbrushes: full of undisclosed danger. Didn't your mother tell you not to kiss strangers? That Cheshire smile shouldn't fool you. Pull your skirt down. Your nails are growing so fast you're hardly human. Alice, fight your version of Bedlam as long as you can. Sleep the sweet dream away from that gooey looking glass, or mushrooms, or the fear of your own body. Forget what the night tastes like. Stop wondering through the shadows, holding your neck out for the slice of the axe.

When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in the dirt until she felt China through her skin.

Frank went on to tell me that much of the premise of Dune—the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Freman (the cerulean blue of Psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserits (influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico)—came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.

Those are the moments I’m proud of. The times I saw through them. The times I made them work to break me, even though I knew they would. The times I questioned the lies being fed to me, though everyone around me believed. I learned early that if everyone around you has their head bowed, their eyes shut tight—keep your eyes open and look around. I’m reflexively suspicious of anyone who stands on a soapbox. Tell me you have the answers and I’ll know you’re trying to sell me something. I’m as wary of certainty as I am of good vibes and positive thinking. They’re delusions that allow you to ignore reality and lay the blame at the feet of those suffering. They just didn’t follow the rules, or think positively enough. They brought it on themselves. I don’t have the answers. Maybe depression’s the natural reaction to a world full of cruelty and pain. But the thing I know about depression is if you want to survive it, you have to train yourself to hold on; when you can see no reason to keep going, you cannot imagine a future worth seeing, you keep moving anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s hope. It’s a muscle you exercise so it’s strong when you need it. You feed it with books and art and dogs who rest their head on your leg, and human connection with people who are genuinely interested and excited; you feed it with growing a tomato and baking sourdough and making a baby laugh and standing at the edge of oceans and feeling a horse’s whiskers on your palm and bear hugs and late-night talks over whiskey and a warm happy sigh on your neck and the unexpected perfect song on the radio, and mushroom trips with a friend who giggles at the way the trees aren’t acting right, and jumping in creeks, and lying in the grass under the stars, and driving with the windows down on a swirly two-lane road. You stock up like a fucking prepper buying tubs of chipped beef and powdered milk and ammo. You stock up so some part of you knows and remembers, even in the dark, all that’s worth saving in this world. It’s comforting to know what happens next. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that no one fucking knows. And it’s terrifying. I don’t dream of a home and a family, a career and financial stability. I dream of living. And my inner voice, defective though it may be, still tells me happiness and peace, belonging and love, all lie just around the next corner, the next city, the next country. Just keep moving and hope the next place will be better. It has to be. Just around the next bend, everything is beautiful. And it breaks my heart.

FETTUCCINI “PORCINI” (Australian Fettuccini) Trudi’s 1st Note: We just returned from a trip to Australia. This is my version of a recipe we experienced in Sydney. It’s easy to make and a wonderful flavor. For the Pasta: Prepare a package of your favorite brand fettuccini pasta as instructed on the package. Use the size that serves 4. When the pasta is cooked, drain it, give it a stir to keep it from sticking together, cover it loosely with foil and set it aside on a cold burner to wait for its yummy sauce. For the Sauce: ¼ pound bacon (regular sliced, not thick) ½ pound (8 ounces) fresh mushrooms sliced, or chopped ½ cup chopped onions (regular yellow onions or green onions—if you use green onions, you can use up to 2 inches of the stem) 4-inch square of fresh salmon filet 15-ounce (approximate—if it’s a bit more, that’s okay) jar of prepared Alfredo sauce Pan fry the bacon until it’s crispy and lift it out of the fat with a slotted spoon to drain it on paper towels. Use the remaining bacon fat in the pan to fry the mushrooms until they are very well done. Add the onions to the pan and continue to fry until the onions are translucent and fully cooked. Cut the raw salmon into cubes and add it to the pan. Fry it until the salmon is fully cooked. Add the drained bacon pieces to the pan and add the Alfredo sauce. Stir everything together until it’s well-combined and heated through. Arrange the pasta you’ve cooked on 4 plates. Ladle the delicious mixture in the frying pan over the pasta and serve to rave reviews! Trudi’s 2nd Note: The porcini is in quotes because I’m sure the restaurant used them, but regular mushrooms work just as well and are easier on the budget. Fresh salmon works great but since it sort of falls apart in the cooking anyway, you probably could use canned or packaged salmon and get the same results. If you prefer, you could also use packaged Alfredo sauce mix and prepare it yourself.

As she’s scrolling through her feed, a picture from the ski trip pops up. Haven’s in the Charlottesville Youth Orchestra, so she knows people from a lot of different schools, including mine. I can’t help but sigh a little when I see it--a picture of a bunch of us on the bus the last morning. Peter has his arm around me, he’s whispering something in my ear. I wish I remembered what. All surprised, Haven looks up and says, “Oh, hey, that’s you, Lara Jean. What’s this from?” “The school ski trip.” “Is that your boyfriend?” Haven asks me, and I can tell she’s impressed and trying not to show it. I wish I could say yes. But-- Kitty scampers over to us and looks over our shoulders. “Yes, and he’s the hottest guy you’ve ever seen in your life, Haven.” She says it like a challenge. Margot, who was scrolling on her phone, looks up and giggles. “Well, that’s not exactly true,” I hedge. I mean, he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in my life, but I don’t know what kind of people Haven goes to school with. “No, Kitty’s right, he’s hot,” Haven admits. “Like, how did you get him? No offense. I just thought you were the non-dating type.” I frown. The non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

Coming back to the village through the snow, under the dark cloudy skies, Belle felt like she had been away for a lifetime. She had, in fact, never left the village by herself before this. There were a couple of overnight trips to fairs with her father, and once or twice during mushroom season they got swept up in the fury and spent a few nights in the forest, gathering morels and truffles and camping out. But that was all, and always with Papa.

When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way,

I also love mushrooms! I think they are truly magical, and I have had some delightful weird experiences of perceiving the world’s aliveness while tripping on mushrooms on multiple continents.6 In general, the role that fungi play in nature is wonderful—they are communicators, they process toxins, they break down dead material and make it serve life.

I had been told that God works in mysterious ways. Now I saw that the Mystery works in Godly ways—you know, spontaneously creating itself and all—and a metaphor was as close as we could get to understanding that. These things, like my mushroom trip, weren’t meant to be labeled and sorted easily in our minds. The word Campbell uses for this type of thinking is “transrational.” It’s not irrational, it’s beyond rationality. It’s not blueprints to build a bridge, it’s crying at a song that doesn’t have any words. We’re like dogs trying to understand the internet. And the best way we can touch the unfathomable mystery is with a myth.

Emily? Those mushrooms aren’t real mushrooms. I mean, yeah, they’re real but they’re hallucinogenic mushrooms. I was storing them in the cupboard because I didn’t want to lose them the next time I tripped out. So… unless you want to see fantastic colors and feel just as amazing, I would suggest ordering pizza.

Psychedelics, at best, could never do more than airlift me to the tenuous and swaying peak of the tower of Babel, an unsound piecemeal stack of children's blocks, of man's spurious attempts reach heaven. Jesus and Jesus alone can lead us into the true kingdom, the one that never perishes, the one that satisfies and gives us more than we could have ever asked or imagined, the one where our tearful, anxious questions, like mine on that final mushroom trip --'Does anything mean anything at all?' — are answered conclusively, and abundantly, and in greater affirmative measure than we could have ever hoped. (p. 261)

The last time I ever tripped, I ate mushrooms I'd grown myself.

all of the traits associated with openness, like “sensitivity, imagination and broad-minded tolerance of others’ viewpoints and values,” are powerfully positive and predicative of an emotionally mature and well-functioning person.

I don't have the answers. Maybe depression's the natural reaction to a world full of cruelty and pain. But the thing I know about depression is if you want to survive it, you have to train yourself to hold on; when you can see no reason to keep going, you cannot imagine a future worth seeing, you keep moving anyway. That's not delusion. That's hope. It's a muscle you exercise so it's strong when you need it. You feed it with books and art and dogs who rest their head on your leg, and human connection with people who are genuinely interested and excited; you feed it with growing a tomato and baking sourdough and making a baby laugh and standing at the edge of oceans and feeling a horse's whiskers on your palm and bear hugs and late-night talks over whiskey and a warm happy sigh on your neck and the unexpected perfect song on the radio, and mushroom trips with a friend who giggles at the way the trees aren't acting right, and jumping in creeks, and lying in the grass under the stars, and driving with the windows down on a swirly two-lane road. You stock up like a fucking prepper buying tubs of chipped beef and powdered milk and ammo. You stock up so some part of you knows and remembers, even in the dark, all that's worth saving in this world.

Richard began to experiment with hallucinogens. LSD was still popular with America’s youth, and he tripped many times on acid. He also took magic mushrooms and peyote, which were both plentiful and readily accessible in El Paso. High, he’d go out to the desert at night and hunt by the light of the moon, imagining he was in touch with Satan, that Satan was communicating with him.

When Nick started the label, he put us in Pink Floyd’s studio in Britannia Row,” says Del incredulously. “It was massive, and when you went upstairs, they still had that big pink pig up there. It was phenomenally expensive, about £500 a day, maybe more, which was a lot of money in 1983. We had the studio block-booked for a month, and we never used to go. It was always empty; we’d be back in Brighton doing loads of mushrooms and acid! I’d be tripping all night, get up about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, go to the pub, and suddenly remember I should be in the studio doing guitars, and I’d just blow it out and go back to bed.

When the Johns Hopkins team followed up with participants a year later and asked them to fill out a standard personality test,35 they made a significant discovery: Most criteria remained the same, except in the category of “openness.” What they found was those who had mystical experiences were now statistically more open,36 which is meaningful for two reasons. The first being that the average person’s personality doesn’t evolve much past age 30, and so finding a substance-induced experience that could change people is radical. Second, all of the traits associated with openness, like “sensitivity, imagination and broad-minded tolerance of others’ viewpoints and values,” are powerfully positive and predicative of an emotionally mature and well-functioning person.

what’s most curious in clinical trials with psilocybin is that participants who have the most mystical experiences, as defined by the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), a peer reviewed psychological scale,52 also seem to benefit the most from psychedelic therapy, no matter if the study is for addiction53 or end-of-life anxiety.54 But why?

in the 2018 Anderson, et al. study, researchers tested microdosers and found them to score higher on “open-mindedness,” which they hypothesized considering recent findings on increased openness with higher-dose sessions.120 They also found microdosers to score higher on tests of “wisdom,” which they defined as being able to “reflect learning from one’s mistakes, consider multiple perspectives when facing a situation, being in tune with one’s emotions and those of others, and feeling a sense of connection and unity.

The main prescription mix that experts warn against is combining psilocybin with antidepressants like SSRIs and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) (some popular brand names include Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro, Cymbalta, and Effexor). That’s because these drugs also affect the serotonin system, the main receptor system that psilocybin interacts with. Giordano explains that these types of antidepressants already make more serotonin available in the space between nerve cells in the brain. And so, when psilocybin also acts on that system, there’s a risk of essentially “overdosing” on serotonin, known as “serotonin syndrome.

a main theme for many of the participants in these trials is realizing how important their relationships are, how their response to their illness is negatively affecting the people they love, and that they want to spend the last chapter of their lives enjoying the presence of others.45 “It helps people live until they die,” Richards tells me, “not just lie in their beds, feeling sorry for themselves and preoccupied with pain. It could transform palliative and hospice care dramatically in the next few years. It’s a very exciting frontier.

Functional plasticity is the brain’s ability to redirect functions from a damaged area of the brain to a healthier one. Structural plasticity, on the other hand, is the brain’s capacity to change its physical structure often as a result of learning. And scientists at the University of California, Davis, found that psilocin and other psychedelics are able to promote both kinds of plasticity in cortical neurons.

I would also exercise caution when mixing SSRI antidepressants and microdoses of psilocybin because they both affect the serotonin system in the brain. While an adverse reaction combining SSRIs with a microdose isn’t likely according to Fadiman’s site, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 14, these kinds of antidepressants can lessen the effects of full-dose psychedelics and will likely do the same with microdoses.

2A signaling has been shown to play a role in cognitive flexibility.71 There have also been links between “trait pessimism,” like “pathological brooding” and deficient 2A receptor stimulation.72, 73, 74, 75 Both of these roles of 2A receptors make sense considering how people use psychedelics for personal growth, but some of the most interesting links between the serotonin system and psychedelics have to do with neural plasticity. Essentially, researchers have found evidence that 2A signaling may enhance neural plasticity, meaning that psychedelics may be able to promote brain plasticity by acting on those receptors.

Watts warns me over the phone that she doesn’t know if it’s healthy for people to go into a psilocybin experience expecting their brains to be biologically reset, because that’s not exactly how it works. She emphasizes the analogy of a clinically controlled psychedelic experience being like 10 years of therapy in one day, because it’s more about the insights and realizations, the new perspective you have access to, and how you’re going to use that to change your everyday life.

What people specifically should not take them?” like this: “People who are mentally unstable, under enormous pressure, or operating equipment that the lives of hundreds of people depend on. Or the fragile ones among us—those to whom you wouldn’t give a weekend airline ticket to Paris, those who wouldn’t expect to guide you out of the Yukon. Some people have been so damaged by life that boundary dissolution is not helpful to them. These people are trying to maintain boundaries, their functionality. They should be honored and supported, and not encouraged to take drugs. If because of genetic or cultural or psychological factors it’s not for you, then it’s not for you.