The Psilocybin Solution

by Simon G. Powell

From the Publisher: A veritable tsunami of unstoppable information. Fifteen years in the making. Fizzing with radical new ideas and radical new concepts. Heralding a new relationship with Nature. A cracking foreword by Graham Hancock. Full of honest natural ingredients. With love from your biosphere.

This book explores how psilocybin mushrooms change some users’ perceptions about life and nature, examines the neurochemistry underlying the psilocybin experience, and reviews the research on psilocybin’s ability to dispel anxiety in the terminally ill and its helpful effects on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It has been more than 50 years since R. Gordon Wasson plucked sacred mushrooms from shamanic practices in Mexico and presented them to the Western world. After sparking the psychedelic era of the 1960s, however, psilocybin mushroom use went back underground. Today, the mushroom’s extraordinary influence is once again being felt by large numbers of people, due to the discovery of hundreds of wild psilocybin species growing across the globe and the renewal of research into psilocybin’s therapeutic and spiritual effects.

In The Psilocybin Solution, Simon G. Powell traces the history of the psilocybin mushroom and discusses the shamanic visionary effects it can induce. Detailing how psilocybin acts as a profound enhancer of consciousness and reviewing the research performed by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Johns Hopkins University, and the Heffter Research Institute on psilocybin’s beneficial effects on anxiety in the terminally ill and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Powell examines the neurochemistry, psychology, and spirituality underlying the psilocybin experience, revealing the interface where physical brain and conscious mind meet.

Praise for the book: “A worthy successor to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Powell takes the reader behind the grand curtain of reality with a compelling hypothesis that approaches a unified field theory of human consciousness in an intelligent and interconnected universe.”– Bill Linton, CEO of Promega and a Director of the Heffter Research Institute

“Simon G. Powell has crafted a magnificent, multifaceted argument for the reintegration of psychedelics into science, culture, psychotherapy and religion, to inspire our unbalanced species before we push the biosphere into total decline.”– Rick Doblin, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

“This book provides a clear and up-to-date picture of what goes on in the brain during the visionary psilocybin experience, and comes tantalizingly close to the bridge linking mind to matter. Those interested in consciousness and its modification will gain from reading it. The author’s intrepid speculations, centering on information as the fundamental stuff of the universe, are clearly signposted. The writing is lucid and a joy to behold. An important contribution.”– Jeremy Narby, Ph.D., author of The Cosmic Serpent and Intelligence in Nature

“In this fascinating and provocative book, Simon G. Powell speculates on the nature of reality. He posits that Nature is a deliberate and intelligently behaving system, and he proposes that psilocybin, by altering the neurochemistry of the brain in specific ways, enables novel patterns of information to emerge, allowing the psyche to become a sort of conduit to the Other. If in fact that is what actually happens, then entheogens (psychedelics) are much more important to the human species than has been realized.”– David E. Nichols, Ph.D., president and cofounder of the Heffter Research Institute

About the Author: Simon G. Powell is a writer, musician, and filmmaker with an avid interest in the biosphere and psychoactive fungi. He lives in London.

ISBN-10: 1594774056    –    ISBN-13: 978-1594774058