yogaEQ

“In thinking about psychedelics, the first thing to understand is that there is a whole range of substances which share that name, and that they are of very different strengths. Some are mild; most marijuana, for example, falls in that category. Mild psychedelics open up the possibilities, but they don’t override the personality. Stronger psychedelics, on the other hand-things like mescaline, or psilocybin, or LSD–are likely to override our existing thought patterns in a very powerful way. If we aren’t prepared for that, it can get pretty hairy. If we don’t have a sufficiently deep jnana (wisdom) practice, some understanding of what’s happening to us, we freak when the entire structure of our existence starts to fall away. That’s why it’s important to do some reading and studying and contemplating in advance, so we’ll have some foothold in the experiences as they start to happen to us.” – From “The Yoga of Psychedelics,’ in Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita by Ram Dass, Harmony Press, October 2004.

Then he got interested in the sacred mushrooms, known in Mexico as Teonanacatl—“the flesh of the gods”; they are the psilocybe mushrooms, which, like a few other varieties, are able to bring about altered states of consciousness. After he started working with Teonanacatl, Wasson retired as vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust Company, and started traveling around the world studying mushrooms and their religious uses. He found that there were “mushroom stones”—stones carved into mushroom shapes—that were connected with very, very ancient religions. His thesis was that the original yogi mystics of India were mushroom eaters from the mountains in the north who’d come down into the Indus Valley; but the sacred mushrooms didn’t grow there, and so they then developed all the yogic practices—pranayama and hatha yoga and raja yoga—to try to reproduce the same states of consciousness to which the mushrooms had originally given them access.

Soma-like substances are mentioned in many Hindu systems. In Patanjali’s ashtanga yoga, for example, there are references to the use of chemicals for altering consciousness. Some have speculated that psychedelic mushrooms were at the very root of yogic practices. That’s Gordon Wasson’s theory, at any rate. Gordon Wasson is a mycologist, but before he was a mycologist he had been a vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust Company in NewYork City. – Ram Dass, Paths to God