Hello everyone,
I am usually fairly unassuming, so the idea of an essay selling my worth to the forum is fairly unappealing to me. However I do feel I have valuable contributions to make, which requires promotion, so perhaps some words of introduction are worth uttering.
My background is essentially that I am returning to the fold of psychedelic-mediated exploration after a hiatus of about 7 years (that milestone number).
What happened 7 years ago? My first child was born and I made a conscious decision to immerse myself in the biosocial sphere. Mostly this was brought on by feelings of fatherly responsibility to my daughter and her mother. A part of this was embracing my genetically determined biological and social reality. Major parts of that were being a) provider and b) defender, and with respect to a), taking a hands-on role in this as much as practicable while satisfying my wife's desires for a not-too-unconventional lifestyle. A deeply important transformation with respect to the latter, for me, was a shift from ethical vegan to ethical hunter.
I can see your eyes glazing over and your hands making masturbatory gestures, and I thoroughly sympathise... this is why I would rather not write self-indulgent navel-gazing essays...
Cut to 2012, I have been feeling more and more inclined back to the path which compelled me prior to the birth of my children, which was psychedelic-driven psycho-spiritual exploration. In those days somehow I was timid and although my interest was intense, I only had a handful of genuine experiences under my belt. I think I had a lot of fear back then, which never combined well with a predisposition to nausea from serotonergic substances, particularly from mushrooms, which were the most accessible psychedelics for me. To a certain degree (being very cereberally inclined in general) I compensated for a lack of direct experience with a voracious appetite for consuming the research literature.
On coming back as an older person now I feel drawn to the experience, without the anxiety/fear permeating each experience. I am more interested in the experience than the writings now, but now the limiting factor as a family man is opportunity and time!
Although I am, in a broad sense, an atheist, I do feel somewhat compelled by my recent discovery of local psilocybin mushrooms. I happened to notice some pins in a local park... checked them out every few days on my regular running route .. one day found a decent patch of Psilocybe subaeruginosa next to them. The pins that caught my eye were not P. subaeruginosa - they were half a metre away and of a different species. And yet of 6-10 species in that vicinity, here was the only small patch of psilocybes. (I have since found more but none closer than 500 m away.)
Anyway, there you go... if it's a CV you're after I could go down that path but would rather not!
I am usually fairly unassuming, so the idea of an essay selling my worth to the forum is fairly unappealing to me. However I do feel I have valuable contributions to make, which requires promotion, so perhaps some words of introduction are worth uttering.
My background is essentially that I am returning to the fold of psychedelic-mediated exploration after a hiatus of about 7 years (that milestone number).
What happened 7 years ago? My first child was born and I made a conscious decision to immerse myself in the biosocial sphere. Mostly this was brought on by feelings of fatherly responsibility to my daughter and her mother. A part of this was embracing my genetically determined biological and social reality. Major parts of that were being a) provider and b) defender, and with respect to a), taking a hands-on role in this as much as practicable while satisfying my wife's desires for a not-too-unconventional lifestyle. A deeply important transformation with respect to the latter, for me, was a shift from ethical vegan to ethical hunter.
I can see your eyes glazing over and your hands making masturbatory gestures, and I thoroughly sympathise... this is why I would rather not write self-indulgent navel-gazing essays...
Cut to 2012, I have been feeling more and more inclined back to the path which compelled me prior to the birth of my children, which was psychedelic-driven psycho-spiritual exploration. In those days somehow I was timid and although my interest was intense, I only had a handful of genuine experiences under my belt. I think I had a lot of fear back then, which never combined well with a predisposition to nausea from serotonergic substances, particularly from mushrooms, which were the most accessible psychedelics for me. To a certain degree (being very cereberally inclined in general) I compensated for a lack of direct experience with a voracious appetite for consuming the research literature.
On coming back as an older person now I feel drawn to the experience, without the anxiety/fear permeating each experience. I am more interested in the experience than the writings now, but now the limiting factor as a family man is opportunity and time!
Although I am, in a broad sense, an atheist, I do feel somewhat compelled by my recent discovery of local psilocybin mushrooms. I happened to notice some pins in a local park... checked them out every few days on my regular running route .. one day found a decent patch of Psilocybe subaeruginosa next to them. The pins that caught my eye were not P. subaeruginosa - they were half a metre away and of a different species. And yet of 6-10 species in that vicinity, here was the only small patch of psilocybes. (I have since found more but none closer than 500 m away.)
Anyway, there you go... if it's a CV you're after I could go down that path but would rather not!
.