“First and most important is the experience of light.
Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within.”
-Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell, 1956.
We are, every one of us, tied together by an ancient biochemical link; one that predates the divergence of all major kingdoms of life. What began two and a half billion years ago in the primeval waters of the Archean Eon would one day come to be involved in almost all aspects of animal life. What might the origins of serotonin and its chemical cousins reveal about the nature and function of psychedelic experience? How might the processes of psychedelic experience help us find meaning, learn from the past, gain insight, and find a way forward? Could they even help us strategize, innovate, re-orient out priorities, and more effectively allocate our resources? Psychedelotropism addresses these questions in a compelling combination of evolutionary biology and neuropsychology along with a multitude of modern but also frequently overlooked findings from classical psychedelic research.
“The psychedelic-induced mystical experience is just one helpful tell of future therapeutic outcomes—a single pearlescent peak of the strange yet familiar folds in the neural landscape through which the psychedelic journey unfurls.” (p. 30)
Read and excerpt (pp. 47-50):
“Whether by regulating the organization of the central nervous system in an ever-changing world, etching the cortical maps we use to think and navigate it, modulating the scope of sensory experience, assessing how to best invest our time and energy, or by safeguarding priority access to resources, the implications of the serotonin system go far beyond measures of mood and into stewarding the sacred underbelly of everyday life and society. ” (p. 22)
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