"Psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin - the active ingredient in magic mushrooms - are powerful, able to transform the way that people who use them perceive the world."
For me, there was a transformation of my perception and connectedness to nature.
From one day existing without any acknowledgement of nature, even a complete contempt for it, to noticing every shimmer of the moons reflection, on every leaf of a gum tree. To having a natural tendency to seek out the relaxing sound of birds amongst the trees over idle chit chat and the people pleasing of my day to day life.
"Psilocybin does in 30 seconds what antidepressants take three to four weeks to do," David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London
"Researchers have found that a single dose of psilocybin accompanied by therapy can have a transformational effect on mental health - like a "surgical intervention" - able to treat even cases of depression and anxiety that resist standard treatment."
This does not mean that there is no effort by oneself to improve ones well-being. This part for me was the experience of observing myself in a state of complete detachment. Immensely profound at the time yes, though would have an effect on all my experiences from that point onwards with consideration of the gained perception.
"On a basic level, a part of the brain that seems to coordinate mood and is very active in cases of depression seems to basically quiet down for a time, allowing connections to form between regions of the brain that rarely communicate with each other. This mimics an effect seen in the minds of long term meditators. Something in this experience seems to cause the "trippy" effects of the drug, which participants in this research undergo while listening to music and sitting with trained observers.
"In terms of whether these agents cause hallucinations, they're a little bit misclassified, a hallucination is an experience in some sensory phenomenon based on a stimuli that doesn't exist in reality, it's internally generated," says Stephen Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, in an interview in the film. "Versus an illusion would be looking at the wall and the wall is melting, that would be an illusion, and these drugs tend to cause more illusions than frank hallucinations, they alter how we perceive real stimuli."
"But something about this experience - the brain activation, illusions, and hallucinations - seems to do something more profound that's harder to understand. It's able to reliably cause what researchers call a "mystical experience." That experience is strongly linked with lasting effects.
"It was like you're at the top of a roller coaster and you're about to go down and I remember inside myself saying, 'I'm taking my mind with me, I don't know where I'm going but I'm taking my mind with me' ... and I felt okay and off I went," says Sandy, one of the healthy volunteers who tried psilocybin for the first time, describing her experience.
People return from that journey changed."
The use of psilocybin should always be done with a certain amount of awareness and caution to what it does to you mentally. But the biggest understanding of myself that I have gained from these experiences, is summed up perfectly by boy and bear. "I'll keep my soul, my head's not coming back." The journey never ends.
