He slips through the rabbit hole into the mystery of consciousness itself, into the indivisible oneness of people and nature, and asks: could the transformational healing that psychedelics can bring on the personal ego level translate into cultural healing that could address the greatest issues of our time? If you want intricate details on how to do what nature does without you, then read this book and devour your results.

A shroom trip lasts from 4 to 5, and its primary active ingredient, psilocybin, is about 100 times less potent than LSD. Successful application of these identification principles also sometimes requires discerning between subtle slightly variant shades of brown and green (not good if you are red-green color blind like me! It documents the many ways psychedelics have guided and advanced human consciousness and played an integral part in our species’ evolution. As the narrative progresses, Pollan provides his own “mental travelogue,” discussing his firsthand experience with consciousness-expanding psychedelics as a person who formerly had little to no spiritual inclinations. This leads her not into a Fear and Loathing-esque spiral but to brighter, more productive days and a happier home life.

Im sure my Norwegian ancestors did also back before my family started recording the family tree 1600s. The trouble is most people with mental health problems are unable to access psychedelic therapy under medical supervision. Indeed, we began to imagine how hard it would be to print out such a leaf using conventional printer technology.

If you are new to psilocybin mushroom, this book is a comprehensive guide to all your needs to know about magic mushrooms. By “neural diversity” Pollan seems to mean a broad, embracing experience of the human mind and its links to the universe at large, an experience largely unconstrained by “heuristics,” the cognitive shortcuts that allow us to solve problems and make quick judgments but that also sometimes lead us astray. We offer an exquisite collection of mushroom foraging books, wild mushroom cookbooks, and guides tailored to the passionate mycologist in you.At one point, he tells us, his only option was to seek funding from Channel 4 to run a live TV trial of MDMA. Nutt has said that the risks of psychedelics have been “grossly, grossly exaggerated and the benefits … deliberately minimized”.

Surely you cannot be serious that one needs all this complex stuff just to do what happens naturally everyday! With this book, he transforms our understanding of the innerscape, the unbounded world we occupy every conscious second of our life experienced by thoughts, suffering, awareness, joy, and reasoning. We hear about psychedelics for depression, addiction, anxiety, anorexia, pain, OCD, end-of-life anxiety and ADHD.This description should convince any hunter of psilocybin mushrooms that mushroom identification must be approached seriously and with the utmost caution.

Featuring images of over 100 fascinating species, sourced from the archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Magic of Mushrooms shows that from saving lives to expanding the mind, the potential of these fascinating organisms should not be underestimated.If you’re interested in cultivating mushrooms or are very curious about fungi, I’d recommend this book. One of the major challenges presented in the book is keeping mold and other undesirable species from growing on or amongst one’s mushrooms. Other works by Paul Stamets include Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies (out of print), Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, MycoMedicinals: an Informational Treatise on Mushrooms, and many articles and scholarly papers.