Paul Stamets on Mushrooms, Religion, and Psychotherapy

And that is the mushroom that was documented in the Sacred Mushroom in the Cross where John Marco Allegro alleged that he alleged that the entire Christian religion was essentially a misunderstanding and it was really all about the consumption of these psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals and that these were all sort of captured in stories and tales and parables. Yeah, it was academic suicide for him to come up with that statement and still very controversial. Have you read his work? Yes, I have. What do you think? Well, linguistically, the guy is way over my head. If you read his book, it's all about linguistics and one of the translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls way beyond my ken of knowledge. It's so far beyond my ken of knowledge, I can't make rhyme or reason out of it. That seems to be the problem with it. Most people can't. But there are threads of truth in all of this, but I don't buy it on its face, on the grandiose conclusions that he made. But clearly mushrooms have inspired religion. And I teach these workshops on gourmet medicinal mushrooms and one of these workshops, this very spiritual guy, he's very quiet, but very definitely looked like the real deal. He waited until everyone was gone. And he said, Paul, I've been sent here. And I said, really? And he says, I'm a devout Christian. I'm in Billy Graham's inner circle. And a bunch of us take soul-side mushrooms as sacraments. And it's brought us closer to Jesus, closer to our religion. Now, I don't care if you're Muslim or Christian or Hindu, the idea of these mushrooms making you feel the spiritual universe, more spiritually connected, giving your cultural heritage and your reference points. But he said these are extremely important. Now, my mother was a charismatic Christian. I met some people in her group who came to their religious beliefs through psychedelics. Don't do psychedelics now. But that was their portal. They had their big revelation through psychedelics. So the connection between soul-side and magic mushrooms and religion, I think, has a lot of credibility. And there's lots of great examples of that. The specificity of some of the arguments people make, I have great doubts about. That's interesting. What about in the ancient Hindu religions? The ancient Hinduism and some of the ancient books speak of various sacraments that have sort of never been defined, right? Yeah. And why is that? Brahmin cows are sacred. When the psilocybe kivensis grows out of cow poop in India, and yet they won't eat cows. And Buddha supposedly died from a mushroom. And he was given a mushroom by a peasant and just the mushroom and died. So there is that connection. I always thought curious that psilocybe kivensis is such a religious provoking mushroom, and yet cows are highly revered as being sacred. I would think you would keep the mother of the mushroom sacred. You know, you want to protect the resource. But again, these are at times when fables and parables and religious rights were controlled by the cognoscente. And they were the gatekeepers of knowledge that was too powerful for the general population to understand or appreciate. And so they protected that knowledge. And that's the rule of most religions, is that the inner circle holds the keys to the kingdom. And what's happened with orthodox religions is they create institutions where you have to pay titings in order to have a gatekeeper to have a contact with God. And that I think is the problem of monotheism versus polytheism. Mack Harrer before he died was working on a book about psychedelic drugs, specifically mushrooms and religious experiences. And he had some really crazy old paintings that he had found that showed people that were naked seemingly dancing in ecstasy with a translucent mushroom around them. And the idea being that this is supposed to, this image was supposed to represent someone who was tripping. There's a lot of really interesting books that have been published that show art going back hundreds of years, even into the late 1300s showing Christian art where mushrooms are pretty easily seen. So there's a lot of history to that. But it becomes the unfathomable. I mean, maybe you can imagine it to be true, but how can you prove it to be true? Right. How can you? So a lot of that is like, it's great historical information. Probably a lot of it's true, hard to say which is true and which is not. But it seems reasonable, right? Yeah, but in modern times now, Johns Hopkins, the clinical studies are on mysticism, spirituality, showing that these are some of the most spiritually significant experiences of people's lives. The interesting thing about the Johns Hopkins studies is that 70% of the people had positive experiences and 14 months later, they still described these experiences as being significantly positive. Their friends, their colleagues, their fellow workers also say that it materially changed these people's personality. But the 30% of the people had negative experiences. The negativity of the experience did not extend more than the experience itself. So this speaks to re-remembering. And what's been determined is when you have these really profound spiritual experiences, it sits with you. And when you re-remember it, you rekindle that thought. And this may be a way of overlaying PTSD. Rather than having the reference standard that's associated with PTSD, you supplant it with a positive experience. But the people who had negative experiences during tripping did not have a negative – that negative consequences didn't extend more than the experience itself. So this was – this was a profound insight. And so John Hopkins, Roland Griffiths just emailed me recently. They have other clinical studies that are ongoing looking and one of which has got published on meditators, given placebos versus getting high doses of psilocybin and then measuring the consequences of those experiences months or a year or two later. And again, the same thing is reinforced. These psilocybin mushroom experiences create a positive reference point that you can capitalize on by re-remembering them subsequent from this experience by not even having to take the mushrooms again. That is profound. When you have a happy memory that you can anchor your personality on, it's a game changer. Yeah. I just wonder if we're ever going to see in our lifetime centers where you can go and a trained professional can guide you through something like this. It's happening now. Is it? Yes. The California Institute of Integrative Studies based in San Francisco are just training therapists. In Canada, there are therapists. In Europe, there are therapists. There are training programs now on psychedelic therapy. This is something that has a tremendous momentum. Those peoples have a really nice structure. Many of them do, not all. But many have a really good structure for the responsible use of these substances. Us are displaced peoples. I would call us European-based people and many other people are displaced. We don't have the same constructs historically that we can operate within. And so the psychedelic therapist movement is huge right now. Canada is leading the way. The Canadian government is very, very positive towards psychedelic therapy because of the opioid crisis and because of significant results. In the movie, this has come out called Dost. It attracts heroin addict, a young lady in Vancouver. It is a heroic movie. It is not one of these – you kind of feel good at the end of the movie, but it is intense. She's doing a boga and she also does high doses of mushrooms. But the opioid crisis is so pervasive. There are so poor treatments available that through the psychedelic therapies in several days, they're seeing a tremendous success and people breaking decades-long opioid addiction within a week. So the psychedelic therapists are integral to that success. So there are clinics now arising all over the world for this. In Portugal, in Mexico, in Spain, in Jamaica, the clinics are arising specifically to meet the needs of people who are trying to get these legally so they don't get in trouble with the law. So in Portugal, in Spain, in Jamaica, for instance, these are legal. Many of these substances are. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So.