Taking shrooms has long-term benefits

I was so scared to do mushrooms at first, i expected all sorts of bad things to happen, madness hysteria, delusions, hallucinations of monsters etc cos that what our society made me believe would happen. when i took them it was one of the most beautiful experiences i have ever had on this earth. I have never known that kind of calmness and connection with the reality of my existence. i felt like a child again rediscovering everything and whats more, all the lessons i learned i carried with me back into my non mushroom experience, its made me a better person, the come down is a bizzare and lovely feeling like your defragging your mind, so many things which were screwing me up became clear, it taught me to deal with my suppressed anxiety about being an adopted child, stuff which i didnt even realise which had been affecting all my life! Thank you mother Earth for this gift!

Meant that re. western culture having relationship to Eleusinian Mysteries.

"the west is the best; get here and we'll do the rest"

true - but the point is, our western culture - the real one that is based in such things as you said, is not the one that is in influential charge. The culture in global dominance (made the economy dependant upon certain specific things) is the fundie one that says that human civilisation is only 6000 years old; it's not the enlightened western culture, it just lives and works out of many lands called 'the west' (which aren't 'western' anyway - they're mostly west of the GMT line (UK, the Americas, Australia, apparently New Zealand & Eire counts as western too) - what about Europe, and what about how only the USA and Canada out of all the Americas can be considered 'western'. Europe is east of GMT. Africa is on GMT......and it doesn't work if you split the world into north and south hemispheres either, cause then you put Oz and New Zealand in the 'thrid world' too, and poor places around former Soviet Union in the First. North Korea in the 'first world'...

Besides which - there isn't exactly any link with magical potions such a shrooms in the East today either. They're mostly all signed up to the witch-hunters global anti-drugs policies.
Russia - chop down their ancient forests, China - polluting their land and waterways, India - chopped down loads of their rainforest (though possibly as slaves when the Brits ran it), all those SE Asian countries that ruin their coastlines natural habitats to build resorts, all those Mid East countries where you can't even get alcohol nevermind anything else.

If you don't know your history you may be doomed to repeat it, but if you don't know your geography then you're even more fucked.

Yeah but - hardly anyone knows about that, plus it isn't taught or passed on educationally nor recreationally as a matter of course.

Or didn't you notice how such gnosis doesn't show up anyplace in the daily life of most westerners (or anyone elsewhere for that matter) - even if they do know all about it & think it's a grand idea.

9.9 times out of 10 - when you discover drugs your only option of trying them is to get involved with real nasty types of people who have no liking for life or any of the good things in it, or just having to go to really bad places to get them. Bad as in - treated like shit and left to ruin, because of the anti-drug policies of most governments.
(they are necessarily bad compared to 'suburban' energies however)
The nicer kids don't tend to have them, and the ones that often get access to them end up being the casualities of such things - because they tend to be the ones whose accepted world views taught them do not match up to how things really are, and because drugs tend to show you how things really are, they are more likely to go mad, or realise enough of the truth to get in trouble with their families - who don't want their kids telling it like it is.

A culture like this - that doesn't value facts and open-thinking, that is threatened by discussions of what actual freedom is, that has emotional reactions to certain topics of interest being raised because those topics existence conflicts with what they want you to believe - is not, under any circumstances, in any way having a relationship with anything near enlightened thought or beingness.

western culture does have a long-term relationship with magic mushrooms

helloooo
Eleusinian Mysteries!

Um, no, I meant that it's not possible for any culture here to not have that relationship to plants hardwired into their DNA and collective memorypool - because they are supposedly 'evolved' from cultures that do have that connection.
All over the whole planet, there's not only still-existing cultures with that direct plant connection, there's also a history of it that goes way back.

How can it be probable that if a way of life is so consistent over the entire planet (what you may term 'shamanism'), that we're meant to accept that some of those people wandered off and built 'western civilisation' and the whole time that was going on, those few miles separating any tribes and older cultures from the new 'western civilisations' were crossed by nobody back-and-forth, so as to maintain a link with the way of life they came from.
Clearly, if anyone left the tribes and older civilisations, it means that anyone else could also have reached the destinations of the newer civilisations, who entirely accept all of a sudden that nature is this separate thing from them that they are no longer able to communicate with..

So it proves that the culture that has not the connection to the fact that plants are conscious living beings etc - isn't from this planet, and likely isn't from any planet or any type of place at all where anything developed naturally. By that I mean they are not accustomed to being part of an interdependent ecosystem. They're a virus of sorts perhaps. Or a zombie plague maybe.

I agree, taking magic mushrooms is one of the most wonderful things I've ever done as well.

You're saying western culture does have a long-term relationship with magic mushrooms? Honestly, I don't see how that can stand up to scrutiny! Even if you take things like McKenna's speculations at face value you have the situation where any relationship is relegated to ancient history, if not pre-history. And even so such speculations are that -- speculation -- and not established history.

We are used to hearing things like western culture has no relationship with plant spirits, and it seems to just be an accepted statement. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny though. The only way a culture here could be that far removed from the cultures they 'evolved' from, is if - they never really came from those other people at all (the ones who - to this day, after thousands of years, continue to be fully aware of what life is), but are here via some other means.

It doesn't add up, those explanations that claim 'the western culture' just wandered off x amount of years ago from tribes they used to be part of, discovered how to do all kinds of manufacturing processes, and built cities etc - but never in all that time were people coming back and forth, between those who left the tribes and the tribes themselves, in order to maintain links and communications.
You're mad if you believe that could happen.

When it comes to drugs and a culture's reaction to them, there is no "of course," save perhaps for the predisposition of a culture on the whole to oppose any drug for which it has no long-term history. Western culture has no long term relationship with mushrooms, so it isn't surprising that they are opposed more than not.

It also isn't surprising that the posters of a drug-related blog would be luke-warm to the study. That is interesting, perhaps, is that this is being discussed more broadly, outside of drug-advocacy sites. [I also think that it is largely irrelevant, but that's just my pessimistic cross to carry.]

Of course shrooms are good for us. We didnt need to wait for a study to tell us this. What planet are these people from? Why else would it have been considered a sacrament for thousands of years. They aren't even drugs and they dont get you high. They serve a higher purpose.

Shrooms have a natural form of phosphorous present in them. This natural biolumin seems to be missing from many other foods.

I was wondering if the artifical presence of that (in acidic form, not LSD-acid but the chemical term) in coca-cola might be responsible for it's popularity (lots of stuff has caffeine in it); it sure isn't popular because it makes your urine burn your insides when it's expelled..