The inside. A decade of journeys, a record that held them, and the oldest teaching there is about change: you can’t force it, you can only build a room where it can happen, and then let it. Start here if you have never done any of this and want to know what it is for.
Collection 03 · A reading collection
Psychedelics, From Both Directions
A collection · four pieces and two teachings · the same experience, read from the inside, the outside, the past and the body politic
Two brothers grew up in Paonia, a small town on the western slope of Colorado. In 1971 they went into the Colombian Amazon together and tried an experiment with mushrooms whose instructions one of them later called mostly nonsense. They came out on two different roads.
Terence became a bard. He spent the rest of his life talking about the mushroom, wonderfully and sometimes wrongly, and one sentence of his named this site: the body politic, when it feels itself to be sick, produces antibodies. Dennis decided he had to learn how to do science before he could reject it. He became an ethnobotanist, and the institute he helped found in 1993 paid for the 2016 psilocybin trials at New York University and Johns Hopkins.
Same town, same night, two directions. This site has never managed to choose between them, and this collection is the place where it stops trying.
The experience at the centre of it has been written about here four ways. From the inside, as a practice. From the outside, as evidence. From the past, as a history of being forbidden. And from the body politic, as an antibody the body keeps attacking. Each piece stands on its own. Read together, they keep running into each other, and the lines where they meet are the reason this page exists.
The pieces
Read the dispatch →
The outside. Twenty years of trials, told as stories: what held, what shrank, what failed, and the question the whole field is now fighting over, the one this site came in with. Is the experience itself the medicine? It ends where the instruments stop.
The past. Eleusis, soma, the Aztec feast and the Inquisition’s edict, María Sabina and what it cost her to be found, and the laws of the 1960s. Then the hard question, why the door keeps being closed, graded claim by claim. It ends underground, with the network every mushroom grows from.
4
The Antibodies, Named · The Antibody Suppressed
The body politic. McKenna’s 1994 sentence, with the list that follows it, the list that includes psychedelic use, jazz and dance. And what the body did next.
The warning, and a kinship. An Inquiry about metaphor and felt meaning, which finds that an insight is its own kind of metaphor, two things suddenly carried across into one. It also turns up the finding the other pieces need most: a flash of insight can make an unrelated statement, even a false one, feel true. Read it before you trust any feeling of revelation, including the ones described above.
The lines between them
The room. Every piece arrives at the same discovery from a different side: the experience depends on where it happens. Let It Happen calls it the Nest, a pile of blankets and one record, and finds its opposite in a loud arena at the wrong moment. The clinical trials built a living room with a couch, two guides and a playlist that ends with “Here Comes the Sun” and “What a Wonderful World,” and called it set and setting. The Mazatec held their ceremony at night, led by a healer who knew the way. McKenna wanted silent darkness, and warned that you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic at a concert. They disagree about what the room should hold. None of them thinks the room doesn’t matter.
More real than real. The phrase is the Edge’s title, and it runs through everything. A cancer patient in New York said she felt, for the first time, part of the world instead of separate from it. Sophocles called the initiates of Eleusis thrice blest. The Inquiry tests the claim with a different chemistry altogether, salvia, which never touches the serotonin lock and still produced, for me, another life as real as this one. And Carrying Over supplies the caution: the feeling of truth can be produced on its own. The pieces leave the question open, and they leave it open together.
The door kept closing. The history thread follows the suppression from Athens in 415 BCE to Schedule I. The Inquiry tells the same story from the laboratory’s side: the research stopped for a generation. The Body Politic teaching asks why a body would turn on its own antibodies. The three don’t agree on everything, and they don’t have to. They are three views of one door.
One process. People come back from these states saying everything is connected. The Mycelium thread ends with the organism itself: the mushroom is the fruit of a network, and its relatives link whole forests. The Map’s Indra’s Net is one of the oldest pictures of the same idea, a jewel at every knot reflecting all the others. The reading, the Inquiry and the thread each reach it by a different route. Whether the agreement means anything is the one question none of them can settle for you.
The last thing
Terence McKenna said no one could find out whether an intelligence was inside the mushroom without being willing to take it. Dennis spent his life building the instruments that try to find out without asking anyone to believe anything. Both were right, about different things, and this site is named for one and owes its evidence to the other.
You don’t have to choose a direction. You can read these pieces as a practitioner, a scientist, a historian or a citizen, and each one will let you. What the collection asks is only that you notice where the lines cross.
Nothing in this collection recommends that anyone take anything. It describes what has happened, and what has been found.
These pieces sit inside a larger map: 177 teachings across 20 traditions. The site’s founding teaching is The Antibody.