Affirming the Sacrament

Chris King

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This video was taken last night on 3rd August 2026. Because Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is inspired by psychedelics and in particular sacred mushrooms, I have a responsibility to certify that the sacred mushroom is a good and life enhancing sacrament for humanity, to discover the deepest layers of conscious existence in a process where the living universe is able to come to know and experience itself in the flowering of conscious existence.

 

I do not take the sacraments lightly or at all often, but as part of the Western sacramental tradition of spirituality, I have a duty to affirm them as a safe and very powerful portal that can facilitate moksha samadhi and the universe coming to know itself naturally through the living species of the biosphere, transcending the Christian sacrament of Christ's flesh and blood in our coming of age as living transformative agents of the natural universe's ability to discover, know and experience itself immanently and transcendentally. This is a living sacrament. It is not a drug and not a poison.

 

sacrament(n.) late Old English, "an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace," especially "a sacrament of the Church, one of the religious ceremonies enjoined by Christ or the Church," and later specifically "the sacrament of the Eucharist" (c. 1300), from Old French sacrament "consecration; mystery" (12c., Modern French sacrement) and directly from Latin sacramentum, "a solemn oath" (source also of Spanish sacramento, German Sakrament, etc.), from sacrare "to consecrate" (see sacred)..

 

 

Traditionally used psychedelic species provide access to a first person visionary experience, deemed to be of genuine spiritual significance by researchers (Griffiths). Top row Maria Sabina the sacred mushroom benefactress, Gordon Wasson who discovered her. Sacred mushrooms, a Mayan mushroom stone with metate for grinding (1000 BC) Quetzalcoatal. Second row my roadman Tellus Goodmorning, deer with peyote in its mouth (500 BC Monte Alban), the Nierika, peyote's portal to the spiritual realm and Don Jose Matsuwa,peyote, containing mescalin. Right and bottom row My curandero Snr. Trinico, chacruna and the vine of the soul, UDV and ayahuasca, containing DMT dimethyl-tryptamine and harmine.

 

To do this I grew my own very potent fruiting bodies a couple of years ago which I keep dried and sealed in a safe place. There is a technique which can profoundly enhance the power of the experience, which is to grind the dried product in a mortar and pestle and then soak it in lemon juice of 15-20 mins. This aids converting the psilocybin to psilocin the active ingredient which can then be drunk as a mushroom tea with no gastronomic discomfort and produces a much more intense peak with a shorter duration leaving me completely overwhelmed by the initial peak visionary experience lasting from 5pm until 8pm , but feeling healthy and not fatigued, and sleeping a good night afterwards from 11.30 without stimulant insomnia.

 

I took a dose of mushrooms this week, both to make sure the evolutionary sacraments that I claim are of cosmic significance to our human future are what I claim and reacting with dismay to technological notions that putting people like lab rats into experiments using DMTx – continuously injected DMT – is the way for psychedelics to go.

 

We are living in an increasingly toxic world where wars are so rife that no one even cares about Sudan and the wildfires in Europe are telling a bad tale about what is yet to come from climate crisis. The sacramental tradition is the only kind of human tradition that can sustain humanity through to the distant future. No cultural initiative, no technological computational machine utopia and no belief system of a purely religious or spiritual nature can fix this. It needs a total biosphere fix, or humanity will crash course to Fermi extinction.

 

I don't need to put myself on a laboratory injection machine like Dune spice using DMTx to achieve realisation, so we all need to stop calling the sacramental psychedelic tradition DRUGs and using it as drugs! I can achieve transcendence on a quiet evening with lemon juice and mushrooms and have time to meditate and experience the All without damaging my health at 81

 

It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all.

From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend.

Split a piece of wood, and I am there.

Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." .

 

I want to state clearly that psychedelic visions, including entities like DMT "pixies" are not real agents. Those who don't take psychedelics know that they can meet people while dreaming. We can even have dreams of having sex and indeed younger people get sexually excited during dreams. We can dream we are in a room full of people doing all sorts of things, so we need to understand that people having waking visions on psychedelics can in a trance-like state have visions including visions of animated agents. But psychedelics also produce radical fractal phosphenes and fractal sounds that can become tornado-like. But people can still tell the difference between vision and reality. Sometimes ayahuasca shamans are moved to sing to the imbibers so they don't become lost or get worried, but there is a world of difference between this and the datura deleriants, where people can't tell what is real and later can't remember what has happened, because they have taken a toxic dose and become literally intoxicated.

 

What this week’s trip affirmed for me is that sacred mushrooms are a trustworthy agent. They can be trusted for a variety of reasons, but a critical one is that even if they can be overwhelming, they aren’t harmful and lead to restorative healing by freeing the psyche from the slough of despond, so I felt invigorated and renewed afterwards. Their activity is independent of body weight because psilocin locates selectively to the 5HT2a receptors in the cortex and their activity is inverse quadratic like many receptor types because two molecules need to bind, so a mild dose can have a very good effect.

 

Inverse quadratic dosage curve for psilocin.

 

DMT is a wonderful sacrament too. Ayahuasca is DMT with Harmine which is a MOA (monoamine oxidase) inhibitor so it stops one’s stomach destroying the DMT. I keep the chacruna plant cultures alive to preserve the heritage. I also used to keep the vine of the soul or rope of the dead which has harmine but it succumbed to the NZ winters. But ayahuasca is nauseating and smoking DMT is very harsh. Peyote is also nauseating. But DMTx raises a different spectre of laboratory controlled psychedelics again trying to control the doors of perception in another culturally objectionable way. I am intentionally focusing on mushrooms because they can be experienced wholesomely, sumptuously and naturally as good wine in new bottles.

 

Maria Sabina the mushroom benefactor took sacred mushrooms in abundance as a child:

 

’Maria Anna and I were taking care of our chickens in the woods so that they wouldn't become the victims of hawks or foxes. We were seated under a tree when suddenly I saw near me within reach of my hand several mushrooms. "If I eat you, you and you" I said "I know that you will make me sing beautifully". I remembered my grandparents spoke of these mushrooms with great respect. After eating the mushrooms we felt dizzy as if we were drunk and I began to cry, but this dissiness passed and we became content. Later we felt good. It was a new hope in our life. In the days that followed, when we felt hungry we ate the mushrooms. And not only did we feel our stomachs full, but content in spirit as well. I felt that they spoke to me. After eating them I heard voices. Voices that came from another world. It was like the voice of a father who gives advice. Tears rolled down our cheeks abundantly as if we were crying for the poverty in which we lived.' She had a vision of her dead father coming to her. ‘I felt as if everything that surrounded me was god. Sometimes grandfather and at other times my mother came to the woods and would gather us up from the ground on which we were sprawled or kneeling. "What have you done?" they asked. They picked us up bodily and carried us home. In their arms we continued laughing singing or crying. They never scolded us nor hit us for eating mushrooms. Because they knew it isn't good to scold a person who has eaten the little things , because it causes contrary emotions and it is possible that one might feel one was going crazy' (Estrada 39).

 

Entheogens are a key instrument providing the subjective conscious equivalent to the LHC’s role in physical cosmology. The key here is that samadhi is emptiness and bliss but has no experiential discovery value. Psychedelics are empirical. They don’t have to be used just for moksha samadhi. This is a good artistic rendition of DMT “pixies”!

 

Psychedelics have gone from being classed as a schedule 1 threat to consumer capitalism, to being the subject of scientific studies on deranged people with terminal illness, intractable depression or PTSD. One might ask at this point, why is something regarded as driving one over the edge of sanity has become a successful treatment for the very conditions society thought would be least able to cope with such threats? The core reason is that the class 1 penalties were caused by an immediate rejection through fears in the US that materialistic consumer society would implode if the truth were out. “Turn on, tune in and drop out” became a metaphor for the 20th century version of the witch hunts and gnostic repression.

 

A key thing that psychedelics provide, as many participants state, is experiential access to "ultimate reality”, particularly those who aren’t already religious. This experiential access, when taken in the context of letting go is like turning ones conscious exisence into the mental equivalent of the LHC large hadron collider, reaching to the ultimate generators of conscious experience. These experiences can be very different in differing cultures and contexts, but they do have a common factor in immanent immersion in a form of natural spirituality that is as different from traditional religious belief as science is different from doctrine. The last trip took off like a rocket because I was taken by surprise but it still has had a healing effect, by restoring my existential faith in the foundations of my existence. This is the remedy that people in terminal conditions also experience, because the experiential dissolution affect centres like the precuneus in ways which restore the immanent psyche from its dysphoria.

 

The quietening of the precuneus (–>) under
psilocybin (left) and meditation (right).

 

But what of the experience in 2021 that resulted in SEC? Then I fell into the epiphany of being and met what I perceived as Brahman because I had let go and had what evolved as a classic near death experience in which Brahman as Ishvarai compassionately implored me to save life throughout the universe because "He" was as vulnerable as I was. You can see this as a vision or hallucination, but IS IT? Or is it a kind of access to reality when my brain state is freed from both ego and sensory constraints and has become asymptotic both to a free running edge-of-chaos dynamic manifesting as a spiritual disembodied vision transcending the cycle of birth and death. And is Brahman’s warning actually how reality is, raising deep questions about the whole religious paradigm from idealistic samadhi and transcendent monotheism?

 

So what I am raising as a question is that is this a way that biospheric evolution can bring about the healing of the biosphere, from a condition of mass extinction of the diversity of life, by a dominant exploitative niche building species, that has come about, because our sappy brain’s neurotransmitters, like serotonin, dopamine and nor-epinephrine, going back to the first eucaryote cells, can be modulated to cause the conscious members of this species, to experience a form of extended reality, which brings them face to face with the very cosmic process that has brought about life in the universe?

 

The transposable element producing psilocin became a fungal symbiont.

 

People can speculate that the natural sacraments evolved from plants and fungi warding off insect predators, but the story with mushrooms is very provocative. The genes for psilocin arose some 40 million years ago as a transposable element that has become incorporated in unrelated species of fungi putatively to reduce the hunger of insect predators by affecting their serotonin expression. Thus it is only a matter of time before humans will come upon it and the biosphere strikes back serendipitously to protect nature and humanity with the sweet vengeance of illumination!

 

John Kineman: I went a bit farther and looked into evidence of improved life and "fitness" resulting from DMT or other psychedelic use, and the relation to meditation, spiritual practice and religious following. It seems the positive evidence is strong for the experience, while weak for the chemical itself, and strong for the experience combined with long-term cultural/spiritual practice and weak for just the experience without integration into one's life (although it is hard to separate effects).

 

Chris: That's all quite correct and SEC has links to the lab studies. If you use AI you get an opinion seen through the eyes of lab studies and partial access to people like Michael Pollan who is a good read because he has positioned himself to be perceived as a contextual observer rather than an advocate.

 

The psychedelic experience is not driven by spirituality as such, although religious people will respond with devotion, but have to watch out for messianism. The key phenomenon is called quantum change. It doesn't need religious or spiritual beliefs but they work quite well, particularly and explicitly meditative states. The key for QC is something that brings us to the existential nub and causes our precuneus, the centre which processes self and other, to experience incarnation outside the inside out. If people just want to have an entertaining time they still get an afterglow.

 

I always just want to meditate, but people delight going out into natural surroundings. Paul Stamets the arch mycologist first mushroom experience, he nearly got struck by lightning in a thunder storm and had to cling on for dear life. But the key thing is that psychedelics open wider deeper vistas than spiritual beliefs do, which are quite stereotyped in both Eastern and Western traditions.

 

I'm positioning it as the spiritual destiny of the Western sacramental tradition, so I am coming straight on spiritual, but the Tao for me is to be a biocosmologist in the scientific tradition, rather than a religious messiah, but that's not the issue either, it's getting the ferry boat across the Styx to avoid Fermi planetary extinction of life's diversity and future evolution.

 

I'm suspicious of tying psychedelics to spiritual experience because it's another kind of doctrinal filter on the doors of perception. Aldous Huxley himself put the LHC view clearly long before the LHC:

 

"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large" … "In the final stage of egolessness there is an 'obscure knowledge' that All is in all — that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to 'perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."

 

Remember, he is commenting after writing the Perennial Philosophy!

 

John: I think this fits the evidence that the direct vision is not produced by us or by chemical agents, but that it is possible to turn off normal awareness limits to experience what is already there. It can happen spontaneously, and often in times when it is needed, or we can induce it by other means, not just chemical. The danger I see, like getting lost in partial yogas, is getting lost in the experience without having it transform life. So the studies are showing a real phenomenon, that the lasting transformative effects require both the experience, which we do not control, and the personal/societal work which we do until control becomes meaningless.

 

Chris: Please remember that, although you are making great progress here, you are still using multiple massive filters on the experience itself via AI summaries, while the process of illumination is the sheer abandonment of throwing the doors of perception wide open. It’s possible to use AI to make a summary of human investigations, even into exotic visionary states, but it’s not possible to glean any idea of what the direct experience is by reading reports about reports. And the experience itself is pivotal as the universe knowing itself without which the whole exercise of saving conscious life is meaningless. We are not here to avoid the challenges and choose only the paths that fit our comfort zone or we will be the lesser for it.

 

John: So I think this fits the evidence that the direct vision is not produced by us or by chemical agents, but that it is possible to turn off normal awareness limits to experience what is already there. It can happen spontaneously, and often in times when it is needed, or we can induce it by other means, not just chemical.

 

Increase in complexity of brain excitations and a reduction on lower frequent alpha power on taking psilocybin.

 

Chris: Psilocin is not a reactive chemical. Many psychedelics researchers fall into the trap of thinking psychedelics show consciousness is just a chemical process. Psilocin is a key which fits into a vast number of simultaneous locks – receptors in the conscious brain, which are key to how consciousness is generated. The massive effects are due to the fact that they cause the 5HT2a receptor to set off a chain reaction that alters neuronal firing in a way that is different from the effects of serotonin itself and causes the mind to become able to see the effects of brain processes becoming “aware of themselves”.

 

As Google AI puts it, "psilocin alters consciousness by binding to serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, increasing overall cortical firing rates while decreasing low-frequency oscillatory power (alpha and theta waves). This desynchronizes local neuronal populations, breaks down rigid functional brain networks like the Default Mode Network, and hyper-connects disparate sensory and high-level brain regions”.

 

Since we have no idea about how conscious is generated at all, that is a major and critical paradigm-shifting window. It’s utterly weird and there is no way to describe or explain it except to do it, and that is why my last trip was about safety and trustworthiness, because the sacamental path, which the Western tradition has embraced through Christianity, needs to be fully trustworthy.

 

Changes in functional coupling for five psychedelics.

 

Put frankly, all the efforts of meditation to reach the sort of samadhi in the Upanishads are just simple stories of bliss in union with the all when the precuneus idles in neutral, with little actual experience, leading to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. There are no rich details of the terrain or the deeper discoveries about consciousness made – just “I am Brahman”. There is more to reality – confounding fullness and deep knowing, not just bliss. Turn for a minute to Western monotheism and we have an archaic view of God as a jealous anthropomorphic agent. Neither of these views are empirically verifiable, or a truthful description of the cosmos in which we consciously exist. The mere fact that all the Eastern paths embrace reincarnation is because almost no one gets to anything more than figurative satchitananda "existence, consciousness, and bliss" in this life, so it’s a beautiful deceit.

 

 

 

Now turn to the discoveries of science and particularly biology and every step of the discovery process has been utterly counterintuitive. Life is magnificently confounding and  in its labyrinthine exotic organic detail confounding our whole idea of the entropic universe.

 

John: The danger I see, like getting lost in partial yogas, is getting lost in the experience without having it transform life. So the studies are showing a real phenomenon, that the lasting transformative effects require both the experience, which we do not control, and the personal/societal work which we do until control becomes meaningless.

 

Chris: We need to learn to accept that, even though we will come back to normality and the life of hearth, home and family, that there is no way back to Ixtalan, as Carlos Castaneda (1972) said. Everything is there, but everything is changed. And we know also as we are known, no longer through a glass darkly, but now face to face. So now the chips are down and the nitty gritty is saving the whole living conscious universe, while the flesh is still warm and the blood runs salty in our veins.

 

Hoffman D & Gallimore A (2026) Traces Of The Other – Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology In The Framework Of Conscious Realism .