The general public may be waking up, once again, to the healing and restorative power of plant medicine, thanks in part to “psychonaut” pioneers, like James Jesso, who push the social and cultural boundaries around the topic of psychedelics, hallucinogens and entheogens.
First, an important distinction. Psychonauts use hallucinogenic substances for spiritual religious or shamanic experiences, rather than as drugs. The intended use and outcome is a critical part of the experience, often leading to insights and lessons that may not be realized when explored recreationally. But as Jesso reveals in his latest book, The True Light Of Darkness, the journey can prove to be anything but an escape.
From the author of Decomposing The Shadow: Lessons From The Psilocybin Mushroom, comes a captivating and vulnerable exposé into the dark recesses of the human psyche. The story follows the author as he recounts three of his most turbulent and dark experiences with visionary mushrooms. Through the retelling, he takes us along his journey through depression, self-loathing, inadequacy and feeling unable to love and out the other side into confidence, courage and inspiration. From day time trips with friends gone sour, beyond a night ripe with psychotic breaks, and into the watery confines of facing depression in a sensory deprivation tank, The True Light Of Darkness is a vehicle of insight on what it means to ask to be broken in the hopes of finding wholeness.
A cautionary tale told with artful precision, The True Light Of Darkness ultimately suggests that there is much to be learned from plant medicines.
Hear more from James Jesso on his journey in writing this book:
“Part psychological thriller, part meditation on the transformative potential of psychedelics, at heart this book is a spiritual autobiography revealing Jesso’s quest for healing, integration and forgiveness.” – Richard Meech, Director of Ayahuasca: Vine Of The Soul
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Images, discounts and content courtesy of James Jesso. Learn more about the author here
Saw things in a very different light, the world is different from what I previously perceived.
Universal timing.. I don’t understand it. The other day I was having a serious conversation about the use of psilocybin for depression…. and here it appears in my email.. a totally different email account than this person has for me, so they couldn’t have signed me up for something. I shouldn’t be surprised.. there is a lack of human ability to understand coincidence. Maybe it’s just the new “in” thing that found its way to my inbox. Maybe it is just.. the Universe.
I got a box of sage for Christmas one year, so I decided to look it up and what it did other than cleansing of your space. It was supposed to be very relaxing, so I lit a bundle and waved it around my room. I felt very happy, relaxed, and anxiety free. It was one of the best feelings I’ve had.
One time I listened to music. I listened and and went down alley after alley seeing all these cool cats playing music. Different ethnicities came up vividly and I became one with the music.
Once I was barefoot on earth and I was connected to the ground and the plants waved and flowers smiled. Once again I became one with everything else.
Having tried several psychedelics including lsd, research chemicals, DMT, salvia and psilocybin; I found that experiences derived from natural ingredients are most welcome by our body. THe last two experiences I had were with truffles and salvia respecitvely. The truffles were a good reminder of the psychedelic feeling, after a long pause from ingesting mind altering chemicals; but the salvia was a full blown 20 minute trip into a new dimension, which I never knew existed. There I was being swept on the floor of a primary school classroom by one of the janitors who told to me to wake up because I was late.. There I was listening to the class of farm animals, being cultivated for their meat and a voice breaking the truth to me that I soon too will be subject to the same fate of those animals, a butcher. THere I was listening to the wisdom of the walls, their patience and calamity. It was such a meaningful experience, an enlightening 20mins which effects persisted for many more days in a much calmer way. Do not take alone, but do not be afraid. You won’t be disappointed.
It was years ago since I had my last trip on LSD or Magic Mushrooms (the latter mostly collected in the fields near the big city where I lived at that time). I always preferred mushrooms since its effects always ended after 3 hours. Which felt safe (especially compared to stuff like LSD) and even though some trips transformed into nightmares (always around unreliable people and/or surroundings) I knew I had to be in them just for three hours and then they were over. Once, in one of these nightmares a friend of mine gave me a wonderful massage, a cosmic massage: It felt like she was massaging the inside of my body, like one of those miracle surgeons you read about in papers, the ones that remove sick tissue without any other instrument other than their bare hands. Her hands moved my focus from my thoughts to my body, and boy, did I feel it!
Psilocybin forever changed my world and my understanding of who and what I am. Being consciously connected with All That Is, is an experience that has deepened my compassion, empathy and ability to love beyond what any words can express. I am eternally grateful.
I was never big on drugs as a teen or in my twenties. I had to baby sit too many of my friends while they were tripping. Plus I lost many to drugs through death or worse.
But I did smoke a LOT of pot in my day. The thing is, I would love to win this book because my boyfriend ate a LOT of Psilocybin when he was in high school and beyond back in the late 70s and early 80s. He has a lot of emotional blocks and fears and he constantly wonders if it’s due to all the drugs he took. He would eat these mushrooms ALL DAY LONG, instead of once in a while. I don’t know how he functioned as a human being but he finally joined the Navy as he said he knew he was going to kill himself if he didn’t.
I want to learn more about this drug via this book so that I can have a better understanding of what he went through. I love him dearly and would like to help him anyway that I can.
Thanks!
In my thirties I went to the park with a friend and fell totally in love with a female tree with moss growing in the space between her two leg branches. My parents are very religious so it took another ten years to come out as a lesbian but this very positive experience with this tree was enough to know my inner goodness no matter the messages being received in the outer world. The experience has carried me through the years, the memories of touching a true essence of myself. By the end of the afternoon my face was painted with mud and I never felt happier or bigger!!
I had 12 months of experiencing and experimenting with different plant medicines a few years ago with my partner of the time….(I had had a 17 year break and had a bit of fear come up around it) but my Journeys actually deepened my connection to the Earth, Sacred Ceremonies, and deeply feeling my Heart!! All sensations, sounds, sights etc were more intense….I could feel the birds and animal sounds in my body!! I helped to facilitate a few Mushroom Journeys which my partner had taken too many and that was an empowering experience for me to step into…..I still feel the effects in my body in a positive way!!
During the sixties, I didn’t really “do” the drugs common in student circles of the time, but I did have one experience with peyote, which was in some ways transformative and in others reaffirmed the sense of self I already had. I describe the experience in a book titled “The God that Says I AM, A Scientist’s Meditations on the Nature of Spiritual Experience.”
http://www.amazon.com/God-that-Says-Am-ebook/dp/B007B4X6M2/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
I’d taken Psilocybin several times in my twenties, had a few ok trips, one bad one (don’t we all) but the one I most recall left a life long impression on me.
I had – what I consider a small amount – about 20 mushrooms, and it being late in the night before t hey came on I went and lay down on the bed. I began to slip into the pre sleep stage as they came on and so for the next few hours I lay there in the dark tripping. Colours danced on my eyelids, patterns span. Thoughts swam in an out of my mind, I decided to try and channel the trip, and began thinking about the Universe, my place in it, what was the reason for it… lines of poems popped up from memory “what remains of us is Love” and suddenly there it was, my answer: Love. The most powerful force in the Universe. I opened my eyes, looked up to see the plants on the window ledge glowing with their auras. The Universe was alive in me, and I in it; and all powered by Love.
After this experience I decided not to use them again ; I didn’t want to devalue what insight they had given me that night. I had friends who would take many more mushrooms than I, far more often and go out to parties. They were just hallucinogenics to them. To me, they were always something more sacred, something of the Earth for special purposes only; for when we needed to learn something deep, something we could not normally reach.
Would I do them again? More than likely not, but who knows what future awaits us .
Were they good for me? Undoubtedly.
As an artist, interfaith minister and a human being with ADD….my experience has been most profound and grounding. Several times a “channeling” occurs that I have learned to work with and use to heal. What a blessing to have been shown this medicine and to experience the affects of it. My hope is to offer workshops in a healing space where people can awaken through plant medicine and express their journey and awakening through art.
I am grateful for the people who have shown me the path….the plants that were gifted to us from our Source, and the process of getting to that place where we have the opportunity to awaken!!
Namasté
Tammy
My experiences with Psilocybin have always been humbling and illuminating, knowledge and feelings revealed were not want I went in search of but what, in retrospect, I needed to know at the time. Once I had this overwhelming sense that there was no need to search for God as that presence was already in me. This was accompanied by kaleidoscopic visions of rainbows, light and dancing figures… In another vision I felt as if I had crossed over to another world of beings that showed me how intuition was their way of communicating with each other and with the material world… Hard to explain in words, perhaps that was the point, there is a reality that is beyond our current ability to communicate with directly or convey to each other.
I grew up in a sheltered and confusing environment. I experienced multiple religions, from Southern Baptist to Roman Catholic, and I felt limited by the answers and non-answers these religions provided. I wasn’t very happy with myself, and I experienced a lot of sadness.
Only when I began to experiment with plant-based medicinces was my mind opened to the beauty of the world and the beauty of who I am. These world-expanding, mind-blowing experiences opened me to happiness … and to love … and to the reality that everything is connected. I feel more confident and am able to translate that confidence to real life, too. I feel awakened, as if it’s meant to be, as if these substances are supposed to be used by us and are meant to be a part of us becuase they are us.
When used properly and intentionally, I believe these substances can bring us higher yet ground us while infusing us with truth and wonder and joy. We are so powerful and that power is so often neglected and stifled, but we must open up and realize how amazing we really are, how amazing existence really is, and how we are limited by nothing, by no one. We are exactly what we need, and only we can bring our potential into reality.
After a long and difficult illness my partner died. For a long time I was lost in grief and not really emotionally available to my children, who were trying to cope with their loss. My eldest son offered me some cannabis knowing I had used it when I was younger, thinking it may help. It did. That evening for the first time in many weeks, I sat on the sofa with them, fully present and open to them and living in the moment. We fooled around, laughed and chatted, enjoying just being together. I know the healing from the trauma we had all just been through started then.
I have some sort of musical limitation. Not one that interferes with my enjoyment of music listening, but something that makes it next to impossible for me to remember notes and pitches even in Happy Birthday. So of course, my head-on approach to this is “why not learn piano”. My ability to distiguish and consciously name musical intervals has gone from no better than random to maybe 75% and it continues to improve fairly rapidly now. This after 2.5 years of on-again/off-again interval training during which I made next to zero progress on the identification.. Microdoses of psilocybin – about a peppercorn size – seem to have been the key. Still, there’s no control group – only one of me – so who knows, but I’m going on the theory of using the mushroom to rewire myself.: in a way, healing what might even be close to some sort of trauma. (This isn’t 100% my idea; it’s a spin-off from MAPS and work at Johns Hopkins – neither of which are involved in my personal discoveries.)
Which leads to another avenue of exploration – choreography. Can I get a kickstart on rewiring myself to learn choreography. Flamenco is frigging hard!
First time I tried mariguana I went to the top of the highest mountain In Ecuador. I went with my girlfriend and I smoke it. Few minutes later my eyes set on like a bump that explodes, and I could saw thing in different layers. Then my girlfriend touch my shoulder and it was so pleasurable, that was like if my skin had been never touched before. Then we make love and I could feel and see all her body with my eyes closed, my mind just drawn her with yellow lines and I felt connected with her in a way that had never felt, it was astral it was beautiful. That was the most amazing day in my life, and I’m still in love with that women.
I thing marihuana could help people marriage, making them remember the special connection they used to have.
I wish my parents could tried this without judging this medicine in a such a bad way like they do,I wish that could be possible, but it’s kind a impossible for them.
I have so many experiences with plant medicine — from burdock leaves healing a co-worker’s poison ivy rash to the sudden appearance in my garden of white avens, a plant used in Native American medicine for toothache — the summer before a serious tooth infection hit me.
The story I’ll share is when I visited an island off the coast of Maine. Grand Manan is part of Canada. A woman I knew had a summer house there and she invited to stay for a week, by myself, for free. I did, and was so moved by her generosity that i looked for ways to thank her. In gratitude I harvested many bunches St John’s Wort flowers. I put them in a glass jar, poured olive oil over them, screwed on a top and left it on a shelf in the kitchen.
I left after my week was up and forgot about the jar. The following year my friend told me she was at the summer house cooking in the kitchen when she burnt her hand. Looking around her for something to put on it, she saw the jar, opened it and stuck her whole hand in the jar. When she took her hand out, there was no sign of the burn.
Mushrooms have helped me in shifting perspectives and focusing more outside me, renewing empathy and the desire to connect with others instead of withdrawing inside and getting overwhelmed with depression and chronic pain. While it hasn’t eliminated either, both are much more bearable.
I asked Salvia divinorum to open the Universe to me. During the experience, I felt myself rip open and rotate inside-out, folding into myself, where I ceased to be. It felt utterly real, and truly insightful in retrospect.