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The Nahuatl word for the complex of sacred mushrooms containing psilocybin is Teonanacatl. Naca means flesh, meat, subsistence, as in Tonacatecuhtli, Lord of Our Subsistence. In its reduplicative form, nanaca, it refers to mushrooms. Teo-, the combining form of teotl (god), means sacred, divine, wondrous.See Teonanacaoctli in glossary of The Spell of Hungry Wolf -- Aztec Visions by Frank M. Chapman and Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica by Gordon Wasson.
Now you will learn how the mushrooms are gathered. . . They are never exposed in the market-place but pass from hand to hand by prearrangement...The Aztecs before the Spaniards arrived called them teo-nanacatl. I need hardly remind you of a disquieting parallel, the designation of the Elements of our Eucharist: 'Take, eat, this is my Body...'...But there is one difference. The orthodox Christian must accept by faith the miracle of the conversion of the bread into God's Flesh: that is what is meant by the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. By contrast, the mushrooms of the Aztecs carries its own conviction; every communicant will testify to the miracle that he (sic) has experienced.--from Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets, Feb 17, 1961. Vol 19, No. 7 by Gordon Wasson
The Mexican Indian with his teo-nanacatl has no need for Transubstantiation because his mushroom speaks for itself. By comparison with the mushroom, the Element in the Christian agape seems pallid.--from Mushrooms, Russia, and History by Valentina and Gordon Wasson
The realization that life is a dream and the externality of relations an illusion.--from The Fane Constitution
Reception of spiritual light or wisdom; whether by spontaneous grace, naturally through ingestion of sacramental "Plant-Teachers", or artificially, via ascetic meditative and/or contemplative practices.--from The Angels' Dictionary by Jonathan Ott
The triple world resembles a hairnet
Or water whirling about in a mirage
It is like a dream or a mock show:
When that is distinctly perceived
One is emancipated--from Lankavatara Sutra
Awakening to the Timeless within time and to the Dimensionless within dimension: an Emptiness yielding to all things.-- Anonymous
I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung & lay so long on his right and left side? He answered, "The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise and is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification?"
--from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 13, by William Blake, (1757-1827)
When the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing, fine as hoarfrost on the ground. When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?"...And Moses said to them, "It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat."....Now the house of Israel called it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.
-- Exodus Chapter 16 Verses 14-15 and 31, from the Revised Standard Version
Look at your little finger, the emptiness of it is no different than the emptiness of infinity.
- The Scripture of the Golden Eternity by Jack Kerouac
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them....Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote."
--Plate 12, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by WILLIAM BLAKE(1757-1827)
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.--Plate 14, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by WILLIAM BLAKE(1757-1827)
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.-- Auguries of Innocence by WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)
Then he [The Lord] said to me, "See, I will let you have cow's dung instead of human dung, on which you may prepare your bread."
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment.... his sense, a dim rushlight. All that is body is as coursing waters.... all that is of the soul, as dreams, and vapors.
-- Marcus Aurelius
An Angel came to me and said: "O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career."I said: "Perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot, & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable."...
So I remained with him sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep.
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining...
--from Plate 17 and Plate 18, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by WILLIAM BLAKE(1757-1827)
There are no apt words ... to characterize your state when you are, shall we say, 'bemushroomed.' ... How do you tell a man born blind what seeing is like? In the present case, this is especially true because superficially the bemushroomed man shows few of the objective symptoms of one intoxicated, drunk ... [the mushroom] permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, even (as the Indians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape ... All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, the animals - they look as though they had come straight from the Maker's workshop. This newness of everything - it is as though the world had just dawned - overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum events of everyday are trivial ... What you are seeing and what you are hearing appear as one: the music assumes harmonious shape, giving visual form to its harmonies, and what you are seeing takes on the modalities of music - the music of the spheres ...
--from 'The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico', R. Gordon Wasson in The Psychedelic Reader, Ed. Gunther M. Weil et al, Citadel Press Inc., 1973.
..........................................................It was
The spirit's episcopate, hallowed and high,
To which the spirit ascended, to increase
Itself, beyond the utmost increase come
From youngest day or oldest night and far
Beyond thought's regulation. There each man,
Through long cloud-cloister-porches, walked alone,
Noble within perfecting solitude,
Like a solitude of the sun, in which the mind
Acquired transparence and beheld itself
And beheld the source from which transparence came;
And there he heard the voices that were once
The confusion of men's voices, intricate
Made extricate by meanings, meanings made
Into a music never touched to sound.......
--from 'The Greenest Continent (Owl's Clover)', by Wallace Stevens
"On a beach one night, under a nearly full moon on a double dose of psilocybin I walked across the pebbles near the water's edge and as I looked at them, they turned into smooth round rubies and emeralds and the water was molten gold. I looked back to where my friends were and my footprints were filled with lapis-lazuli blue eyes, blinking at me. I looked at the sandstone cliff behind me and the entire cliff was made up of full-maned lions and when they roared -- that was the wind..."
It has often been said that Western cultures are visually oriented whereas "traditional" cultures are auditorily oriented. Whereas this dichotomy is obviously somewhat simplistic, there is some truth to this idea. Various authors, such as Walter J. Ong, for example, have suggested that the invention of writing and the proliferation of literacy are some of the more important changes which pushed Western cultures towards the emphasis of the written and the visual... The end result is what Westerners, or at least Western scholars, for the most part have suppressed the auditory component of the [psychedelic] experience in favor of the visual, whereas; the Amerindians have interpreted this experience with their greater auditory propensity, which is, of course, culturally determined. It is for these reasons that the ideas of morning glories that speak or mushrooms that sing sound rather strange to our ears, but are perfectly natural to the Nahuatl or Mazatec.--- From In Xochitl, In Cuicatl: Hallucinogens and Music in Mesoamerican Amerindian Thought (pages 117-119) by Caceres, Abraham D. (1984), Bloomington, IN, Indiana University. unpublished doctoral dissertation Available from UMI, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI. ISBN: none
"There is a great misconception about LSD and a great deal to explain....I used it about one hundred times before it became illegal. Each session lasted about six hours...I ran the gamut of emotions, from deep pain with tears to light-headed laughter. For me, it was an experiment, and it was always monitored under Dr. Hartman's care... I had become dissatisfied with me. I took LSD with hope it would make me feel better about myself. I wanted to rid myself of all my hypocrisies. I wanted to work through the events of my childhood, my relationship with my parents and my former wives. I did not want to spend years in analysis. I found it extremely valuable. It did me a great deal of good. It brought up all those guilts, all the nightmares I'd been holding down."
"We come into this world with nothing on our tape. We are computers, after all," Grant said in later years. "The content of that tape is supplied by our mothers, mainly because our fathers are off hunting or shooting or working. Now the mother can teach only what she knows, and many of these patterns of behavior are not good, but they're still passed on to the child. I came to the conclusion that I had to be reborn, to wipe clean the tape. When I first started under LSD...I found myself turning and turning on the couch, and I said to the doctor, 'Why am I turning around on this sofa?' and he said 'Don't you know why?' and I said I didn't have the vaguest idea, but I wondered when it was going to stop. 'When you stop it,' he answered. Well, it was like a revelation to me, taking complete responsibility for one's own actions. I thought 'I'm unscrewing myself.' That's why people use the phrase, 'all screwed up."
Grant said that "the first thing that happens is you don't want to look at what you are. Then the light breaks through; to use the cliche, you are enlightened. I discovered that I had created my own pattern, and I had to be responsible for it. I had to forgive my parents for what they didn't know and love them for what they did pass down - how to brush my teeth, how to comb my hair, how to be polite, that sort of thing. Things were being discharged."
Grant believed that he had gone through rebirth. "The experience was just like being born the first time; I imagined all the blood and urine, and I emerged with the flush of birth," he said. "It was absolute release. You are still able to feed yourself, of course, drive your car, that kind of thing, but you've lost a lot of the tension..."
"I have been born again," Grant said. "I have just been through a psychiatric experience that has completely changed me. It was horrendous. I had to face things about myself which I never admitted, which I didn't know were there. Now I know that I hurt every woman I loved. I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated boor, a know-all who knew very little...Once you realize that you have all things inside you, love and hate alike, and you learn to accept them, then you can use your love to exhaust your hate," Grant continued. "That power is inside you, but it can be assimilated into your power to love. You can relax. Then you can do more than you ever dreamed you could do. I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities. I had to get rid of them layer by layer. That moment when your conscious meets your subconscious is a helluva wrench. You feel the whole top of your head is lifting off."
With his eyes flashing brightly, Grant described his reactions immediately after the therapy. "First, I thought, 'Oh, those wasted years!' Second, I said, 'Oh, my God, humanity please come in!' For the first time in my life I was ready to meet people realistically. Each of us is dying for affection and we don't know how to go about getting it. Everything we do is affected by this longing. That's why I became an actor. I was longing for affection. I wanted people to like me, but I went about it the wrong way," Grant said. "Almost all of us do. Every man is conceited, but I know now in my earlier days I really despised myself. It's when you admit this that you're beginning to change. Introspection is the beginning of courage. I was always professing a knowledge I didn't have. If I didn't know about a subject, I would disdain it. I was very aggressive, but without the courage to be physically aggressive. I was a bad-tempered man, but I hid it."
...I encouraged him to tell me precisely what he felt LSD did for him.
"Well," he said, warming to the subject, "let me put it this way - I'm now seventy years old and I have lived a lot longer than you have, Maureen. And I know that two things changed my life: First, there was LSD, which helped me look within myself. It was painful and there were days I literally could not get off the floor, it hurt so badly. But once I faced what was inside me, I eventually forgave myself and the mistakes I'd made, and I forgave my parents and the mistakes they'd made. The second thing was the birth of Jennifer. LSD was my rebirth. Jennifer was the birth of a new me, the one who was forced to stop thinking of only me, me, me, and to extend his boundaries a great, great deal...far beyond me, do you understand?"
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