Weeelll, maybe not all of it? Awkward can be adorable (even in people who aren’t penguins!).
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A person close to me told me that it is the closest thing to a religious experience they have ever had; a deep-seated sense of interconnectedness coupled with profound insight.
They then went on to say that they wished there was a drug that was just like coming down off of shrooms.
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So it’s a bit like your first murder making subsequent murders a little easier? Some sort of psychological block cracking? A literal changing of mind? Or is it more about the decision to take the mushroom self-selecting a group willing to be more open? Or just like discovering one day you can crack your knuckles and it feels good so you start doing it regularly?
Moreover, in many instances the experience made listening to Ezy Rider by Hendrix blow one’s fucking mind.
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Naive optimists, perhaps I should just say ‘people’, tend to have formulated a model of their own mind. You live with your model and become familiar with it, it fills your mind and you tend to react to the model as if it were your mind. A strong does of mushrooms very quickly forces you to accept that the boundaries you had modelled, the structure etc, are all just that, a model.
RAW and Leary both talk about the ‘reducing valve’ function of psychedelics, and in a way I agree. I think psylocibin mushrooms impact your ability to maintain the constant upkeep of high-level model structuring and force you to deal with the substrate, the actual form of your mind, without the ability to immediately impute your thoughts and feelings into the nascent state of the model.
I’m not so sure that psychedelics really… ‘clear’ your mind, but they certainly impact your ability to maintain the fiction, the toy-model that has come to inhabit it.
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About ten years ago I tried it once and I don’t know about openness but I can tell you it was one of the funnest drugs I’ve ever done 
I remember feeling SUPREMELY calm and relaxed the next day, a completely foreign state of being for me. It’s a shame they were difficult to acquire in my area.
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Openmindedness. Mildly suggestible. Open to new ideas.
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My one experience was basically several hours of laughing (like when someone gets the giggles times ten) and immunity to heat. We had turned the heater up in the room we were in and forgot about it. It wasn’t til someone walked in and instantly started sweating that we realized we had turned the room into a sauna, that set of everyone laughing again. It sounds stupid but it was probably one of the most fun experiences I’ve had on drugs.
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While I am sitting here reading your post while wearing the new slippers I got as a gift this weekend:
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That should have been in larger font size, not smaller!
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(try reading it in that warp-speed voice they use at the end of those drug-pushing commercials)
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I pretty much agree with the points referenced in the article, EVEN IF IT WAS FROM 2011. I can also vouch for the Golden Teacher variety displayed in the BoingBoing cover photo.
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Something that can change your personality for a year or permanently sounds dangerous. From the article:
But this is a strictly do-not-try-this-at-home experiment, MacLean cautioned. The participants in the study were under close supervision during their session with the drug. Psychological support and preparation helped keep bad trips to a minimum, but many participants still reported fear, anxiety and distress after taking psilocybin."
But let’s ignore all that because it’s just fine print.
“Openness is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. They tend to be, when compared to closed people, more creative and more aware of their feelings. They are also more likely to hold unconventional beliefs.”
See Big Five personality traits at Wikipedia, the link keeps inserting a preview.
While magic mushrooms may be a shortcut to the same experience, openness seems to be the goal of psychotherapy and the religious experience as well. That is, to break the person out of an inward-focused viewpoint and make them open to a wider point of view. Joseph Campbell talks about this regarding the Hero’s Journey in his Bill Moyer interviews recorded as The Power of Myth. The Hero starts off ‘stuck’ in a behavior that is preventing them from achieving their goals, and through the course of the journey learns to let go of small selfish aims and join the wider adventure of life.
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I propose a compromise: you hominids characterize and synthesize the active ingredients, and we can call your version ‘technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-mushrooms’. Fair?
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I certainly don’t disagree with you RE:Caution when using basically any psychoactive worth using; but my understanding was that (among enthusiasts of the genre) psychedelics are well known to be a “use with care, with support, and not if you are currently in a state of mind that would be very unpleasant if intensified.” sort of drug.
Uniquely capable in certain respects; but not just a little pick-me-up suitable for all occasions. I was always given the impression that this is what distinguished them from the purely ‘recreational’ drugs, which, unless you are particularly immoderate or otherwise screw it up, are considerably less profound; but fairly reliably induce pleasurable experience.
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Most things that are effective and powerful, need to be handled with care. The best knife in the kitchen is the one that may take the end of your finger clean off one day.
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The danger with knives is rather obvious. There’s not a hint in Mark Frauenfelder’s post about the caveats mentioned in the article, which is both sloppy and irresponsible.
Too long, needs a street name. ‘Hey man, you wanna score some Clarkes?’
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