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Magic mushrooms change personalities, study finds

Ismene, have you ever checked out this paper? Or any of the other material at this site? You may find it educational, at least you will have a clearer idea what people are talking about and will not treat it with your judgmental "it's all totally BS garbage" attitude.

The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death
by Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm
 
While I won't vouch for anything said here, this site may help elucidate the ***HUGE*** distinction between RELIGION and MYSTICISM that for a supposedly educated person, some people seem totally unable/unwilling to even ATTEMPT to comprehend:

http://www.theglobalmystic.com/InnerSanctum/The Way of the Mystic/mystic.html

What is a Mystic?

Throughout history there have been thousands of mystics and many mystical traditions. Mystics are people who through personal transformation, discovery and experience seek out the ultimate spiritual truth. They are not necessarily associated with a particular religion, although many are and use a particular deity or God as a focus for their meditation. Even so the mystic is on a spiritual quest, not a religious path.

The best way to define mysticism is to compare the behavioural patterns of both a mystic and a religious person.

The religious person follows his or her chosen religion according to scripture.
The religious person relies on and in many cases believes the only way to connect to their God is through another person - a priest or vicar.
The religious person believes in a separation from God where God exists somewhere else.
The religious person believes that heaven is a place that they can enter when they die.
The religious person believes in a God that is judgmental and loves conditionally.
Most non-mystical religions portray God as a patriarchal ruler.

The mystic is on a spiritual path and is open to the wisdom from many traditions.
The mystic knows they can connect to God themselves.
The mystic knows that there is no separation between themselves and the divine conciousness and that through this source they are connected to all life and are one with God.
The mystic knows that the "Kingdom of God is within."
The mystic understands God to be a creative energy that is eternal and who's love is unconditional. Man's own spiritual journey adheres to the laws of karma and is therefore a self judgmental series of tests and experiences leading to perfection and reconnection to God.
The mystic recognises the divine feminine within the universal consciousness.

Having read this page you now have to decide if you are a mystic already or feel compelled to take the next step on the mystical journey. Only you can decide. But rest assured if you do - it's because the time is right for you. You have been drawn to this page for a reason, and that is because your soul, your inner divinity is ready to continue its spiritual journey back to source.
 
And there's also this site, which, while rather abstruse, does attempt to clarify the differences between mysicism and religion. So to say that the "mystical experiences" people say they have while on mushrooms in the study is the same as RELIGIOUS bullshit... is just getting everything SPECTACULARLY wrong!

http://www.themystic.org/
http://www.themystic.org/crave/not-a-religion.htm
Spiritual, But Not a Religion

While mysticism plays an important — and often essential — role in all the world's religions, mysticism itself is not a religion.

There are Christian mystics, Jewish mystics, Muslim mystics, Buddhist mystics, Hindu mystics, Protestant mystics, Catholic mystics, and also agnostic mystics.

While mysticism is not a religion, it is practiced devotedly and in distinctive ways by members of the different religions of the world.

Mysticism Isn’t About

Sometimes people mistakenly confuse other fields of study with mysticism. To help clarify these misunderstandings, here's a list of what mysticism is not about.

Channeling
Fortune telling
Psychic readings
Life on other planets
Power over others
Black magic
Predicting the future
Communicating with spirits or entities
Psychic powers
UFOs
Horoscopes
Cults
The occult
Hypnotism
Surrendering your will to another person

A Mystic Is

You’ll find as you work with these precious, inspiring principles and techniques, that you can awaken your mystical faculties and develop spiritual awareness. You can realize the relationship between your individual life and the Infinite Consciousness which gives and sustains all life.

Mystics come from all walks of life, from all nations, races, religious and philosophical perspectives. A mystic may be a business professional, a child, a homemaker, a clergyman, a manual laborer, a devout member of any of the world’s faiths, an agnostic, an artist, an invalid.

A mystic is any person who realizes, and is fortunate to maintain, a conscious connection with the Infinite Consciousness — the Infinite Spirit — or any of Its attributes, such as Love, Wisdom, Power, Goodness, Transformation, Wholeness, or Creativity, to name the main ones.

Mysticism Is About

Here’s a list of the various aspects and attributes of mysticism. One could spend years developing in these areas.

Mysticism Is About

The relationship between a person and the Infinite Consciousness
Transcendental awareness
Inner power
Love
Compassion
Awakening mystical faculties
Expansions of consciousness
States of supernormal awareness
Finding your true nature
Ecstasy
Creative imaging
Mystical prayer
Enlightenment
An aid to your religious path
Self-realization
Spiritual communication
Purpose
Kindness
Sympathy
Appreciation of other people, nations, races and religions
Life-realization
The meaning of life
Skill in action
 
DwayneHoover said:
If you replace "mystical" with "not understandable with normal sequential logical reasoning" it might be easier to parse. Psychedelics could lead to non-verbal mindstates not subject to description by words and rational concepts, but that are "purely experiential" sequences of multifaceted simultaneous emotions and multiple memories from the past, recent present, and projected future, all intermingled in non-linear ways, that are nonetheless EXPERIENCED by the "inner observer" as a coherent whole that ends on a feeling of having witnessed an entire tapestry of the contents of one's mind in on fell swoop, leading to feelings of deepened understanding of self and the world on an intuitional level, but that are still not relate-able in normal language, as having consisted of entirely novel sets of inner states for which there ARE NO WORDS. This is the sort of thing that people will typically describe as "mystical." That does not make them fake or non-existent. The people who had them had them, even if they cannot be boiled down to a linear sequences of logical words. By definition they are experiences BEYOND the normal bounds of experiences that are usually had. Why should there be proper words for them?

Instead of "mystical experience" substitute "indescribable subjective experiences deemed later to have great value to the subject."
Click to expand...

Good post. :)

The last two links about mysticism are a bit new-agey though, and certainly aren't going to make Ismene any more comfortable with the terminology.

I'll try to add more later.
 
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^ Yea I know, I dont care, I was just trying to emphasize that MANY people are able to comprehend that "Mystical Experience" does NOT = "religious nutcase", as Ismene seems determined to misinform.
 
Ismene said:
And the old chestnut that "Psychedelics are only temporary but studying Buddhism/hinduism/meditation is permanent". Obviously they're two entirely different things coming from entirely different mindsets and places.
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Well, I totally agree that there's no way you can have a psychedelic trip by simply meditating. And vice versa. However, I think that it would be unwise not to note some very interesting analogies between some of these Eastern spiritual/religious practices and psychedelic drugs. In my recent attempts to practice a Taoism-inspired meditation, I have achieved states of consciousness which rather shocked me with their similarity in many respects to LSD.

In retrospect, I don't think it should be terribly surprising, to be honest. After all, when you ingest LSD, you're not actually perturbing your neurochemistry to a great degree, considering the incredibly minute levels of the compound that are ingested. The LSD is just the seed for a phenomenon that is largely a result of your own biology, not the chemical itself. It just tickles the right spots, and everything else is your brain's natural response, like pushing a single domino and watching the rest of them fall as a result. Why couldn't we learn to intentionally push some of those buttons, so to speak, without the use of drugs?

I don't think that there's anything harmful about making this comparison, as long as drugs and meditation are not touted as being identical, or that one is better than the other. In fact I think there is a great utility in doing so. When you achieve a certain state of consciousness as the result of taking a drug, the state is of course achieved unintentionally and unwittingly. However, when you achieve the state during meditation, you are somewhat in control of the process, and so you have a basic understanding of how it works to bring you to the "mystical" state. Like seeing the gears turning in a machine. When you recognize that a similar process occurs under the influence of psychedelics, you can apply the same understanding and explanation of the process to the psychedelic experience. In other words, you can begin to better see how psychedelics do what they do.
 
Single dose of hallucinogen can create lasting personality change??

Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change
Thursday, September 29, 2011

[Moderator Comment: Same or similar article is in the OP of this thread already.]

NSFW:

Psilocybn

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn't usually change significantly.

"Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older," says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The research, approved by Johns Hopkins' Institutional Review Board, was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

The study participants completed two to five eight-hour drug sessions, with consecutive sessions separated by at least three weeks. Participants were informed they would receive a "moderate or high dose" of psilocybin during one of their drug sessions, but neither they nor the session monitors knew when.

During each session, participants were encouraged to lie down on a couch, use an eye mask to block external visual distraction, wear headphones through which music was played and focus their attention on their inner experiences.

Personality was assessed at screening, one to two months after each drug session and approximately 14 months after the last drug session. Griffiths says he believes the personality changes found in this study are likely permanent since they were sustained for over a year by many.

Nearly all of the participants in the new study considered themselves spiritually active (participating regularly in religious services, prayer or meditation). More than half had postgraduate degrees. The sessions with the otherwise illegal hallucinogen were closely monitored and volunteers were considered to be psychologically healthy

"We don't know whether the findings can be generalized to the larger population," Griffiths says.

As a word of caution, Griffiths also notes that some of the study participants reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their daylong psilocybin sessions, although none reported any lingering harmful effects. He cautions, however, that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.

Griffiths says lasting personality change is rarely looked at as a function of a single discrete experience in the laboratory. In the study, the change occurred specifically in those volunteers who had undergone a "mystical experience," as validated on a questionnaire developed by early hallucinogen researchers and refined by Griffiths for use at Hopkins. He defines "mystical experience" as among other things, "a sense of interconnectedness with all people and things accompanied by a sense of sacredness and reverence."

Personality was measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, which covers openness and the other four broad domains that psychologists consider the makeup of personality: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Only openness changed during the course of the study.

Griffiths says he believes psilocybin may have therapeutic uses. He is currently studying whether the hallucinogen has a use in helping cancer patients handle the depression and anxiety that comes along with a diagnosis, and whether it can help longtime cigarette smokers overcome their addiction.

"There may be applications for this we can't even imagine at this point," he says. "It certainly deserves to be systematically studied."

###
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Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org
Thanks to Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions for this article.

How about you?
did your first trip change you permanently?
any thoughts, experiences and opinions welcomed.

Thanks

DJ
 
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We were drinking MD 20/20 the day we took our first acid trip. We were so excited; we were finally going to take the acid test! Dan, who was genuinely intelligent and hence had something to lose, had reservations. He looked suspiciously at his tab of blotter and said, ‘How long does it last?’ It was obvious he needed reassurance. So we said, ‘Oh, anywhere from six hours to the rest of your life.’
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"Ripple", Unremitting Failure
 
Ah....when I say things like this people look at me like I'm crazy. Maybe I should've been wearing a lab coat...not sure if that would've helped convince others or not. I feel that exploration in psychedelics is the most important thing I've ever done for my mental health. I deal with a great deal of depressive and possible co-morbid psychological disorder and mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD/lysergic acid amines help regulate my depression like a fresh fallen layer of snow. It is my religion.
 
Good post Apple, I'm just a little pissed after reading that book "Zig zag zen" where every monk and his uncle says "Buddhism is permanent but psychedelics are temporary and not real".
 
The view is the same whether you climb the mountain or take a helicopter, but who is the richer for the experience?
 
DwayneHoover said:
^ Yea I know, I dont care, I was just trying to emphasize that MANY people are able to comprehend that "Mystical Experience" does NOT = "religious nutcase", as Ismene seems determined to misinform.
Click to expand...

Why not just call it a "psychedelic experience"? Then there's no confusion is there.
 
Vader said:
The view is the same whether you climb the mountain or take a helicopter, but who is the richer for the experience?
Click to expand...

I don't think taking LSD and meditating are the same experience. If someone came to me and said "I've been meditating for 20 years so I know what tripping on LSD is like" I'd tell them to think again.
 
Neither do I, I only posted that to wind you up, but your response was disappointingly calm ;)
 
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