I got interested in these again many months ago after hearing about some of the benefits of psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics like: increasing the psychiatric trait of openness to experience, helping depression, anxiety, quitting smoking and making mental breakthroughs.
I may have heard about them from a few places, but one of them was from Jordan Peterson talking about the studies being done on them at John Hopkins university.
I’ll show you a video later on that too.
So…
I spent the last month or maybe 2 looking for and studying psilocybin mushrooms.
It was amazing when I found them!
Finally!
I had looked all over San Francisco: in just about every major park, in the mountains near Berkeley and in South San Francisco on San Bruno mountain.
I did lots of hiking and saw lots of cool plants, ate some berries and even some uncool ones like poison oak – which was horrible and I got a rash for like a month on various parts of my body.
I didn’t find any psilocybin mushrooms and lots of people online were saying that it’s not the season for them as it’s too dry which is true, but I found them.
I found them where I wasn’t expecting them either. Well, kinda, they weren’t in the places other people where saying either like in: wood chips or in cow shit as they are not any cows in nearby.
I was hiking in the “secret location” looking around and I felt a little tired and decided I needed a little rest so I went sat down and meditated for 20 minutes and asked for some help finding them and then not long after that I found them!
Amazing how I found them.
I was walking in the grass in a sort of somewhat dampish area.
Then I pushed aside some grass and there they were. I am not exactly sure what species they are but they are either psilocybe azurescens, cyanascens or cyanofriscosa.
It’s also possible that in that location I found several types. I did find some more later which were smaller gold-brownish and resembled cyanascens as they had somewhat of a wavy cap.
The ones in the pics above did not have a wavy cap and most resemble the azurescens.
Anyways…
I had been studying mushrooms since I started looking for them. I also learned about the poisonous ones too, because some can kill you or make you very sick like: galerinas, death caps and amanitas.
I would take some home and try to figure out which ones they were. I had looked at a lot of pictures and almost immediately I could tell these were psilocybin mushrooms as they had the characteristic bluish bruising on the stems.
Initially you couldn’t see them walking by I had to push the grass aside to see them and there they were.
They are very cool looking. I picked them, set them aside and tried to make a spore print for 30 minutes. I was thinking that if they had a purplish brown spore print then they definitely were.
I waited and looked around some more.
After 30 minutes I checked and there wasn’t any spore print yet, but I decided I was very confident that they were psilocybin mushrooms.
It was 5:23.
And I ate 3 little ones and waited. Then at 5:45 I ate the 2 bigger ones. And thought hopefully I won’t die ;-).
They taste much better fresh as this was the first time I had eaten them fresh.
I had previously eaten magic mushrooms dried only a few times before. Once about 10 years prior and a few other times in my early 20’s.
What were the effects like?
Not sure when exactly I felt the first effects. I hadn’t eaten that much that day – only some berries I had found and some pure dark chocolate without any sugar.
So maybe about an hour later I started noticing some things.
I had been looking exclusively in the grass and then I looked up and I noticed that the trees looked a little different.
They were more vivid and more alive looking. More 3-D like.
Then there was that sort of wave or two of the mushrooms kicking in and a fear that came over me or I am not sure how to describe what came over me. It might have been a fear that I ate the wrong mushroom and that I would die, but I just told myself to relax and that I would be o.k.
And I was.
I was reminded of a book I read recently by Albert Hoffman, the guy who discovered LSD and also studied “psilocybin” mushrooms. One of the things he said was that mushrooms were a little “darker” than LSD.
I was definitely spooked for a bit.
It’s hard to describe the feeling, but it was kinda sudden and intense. Time seemed to slow down. I am pretty introspective and I guess the mushrooms bring up some emotional things. One of the ways they are being used is in therapy.
And that’s part of the reason I wanted to use them – to help figure some things out.
Anyways…
I spent the next few hours walking about the small area talking to myself, thinking about things and looking for more mushrooms. Talking to myself isn’t actually that bizarre as I do it often when I walk which to some might seem weird, but hey we are all always talking to ourselves, just usually it’s going on silently.
Some little things became more challenging and scary. There were some areas that were covered in prickers that really looked challenging. Everything slowed down.
I was hyper vigilant about poison oak, but there was none.
It was really great.
I found this sort of hidden path that was running alongside the main path and started to walk down it. It was getting cold and dark out.
The trees looked so cool although you can’t really tell in that shaky picture. I felt pretty grateful and happy. Then I saw this massive slug. it was like 8 inches long!
Did I hallucinate a friend asked that I saw later at the grocery store?
Not really.
But maybe a little as I said things looked more vivid and watching the trees move was cool and another thing I noticed was that somethings like plants and leaves on the ground took on a bluish kind of color like the mushrooms had!
It was like the mushrooms not only bruise blue, but colored me blue too :-).
I mean it could have been the light or it could have been the mushrooms!
I walked very slowly back towards the grocery store. I also saw this family of raccoons digging in the playground trash.
They were really cute.
I got to the store before they closed and home walking the whole way after 10:30 or so.
I hadn’t eaten much like I said earlier, but I just kept telling myself that I would be fine. When I got home music sounded really great!
Then finally I ate and went to bed late. I think all that cocoa kept me up though. The mushrooms didn’t leave any hangover or bad effect like alcohol or the heaviness that marijuana does.
It was a great experience and I look forward towards finding them again.
Studies
Here’s video about those John Hopkins studies.
Another interesting thing that Jordan Peterson talks about is serotonin and how a lack of that can really bring you down. And not just figuratively, but literally like it can make you slouch like the defeated lobsters in his book.
Psychedelic drugs like mescaline (from a cactus), LSD, DMT and psilocybin mushrooms primarily stimulate the serotonin pathway in your brain and not the dopamine pathway like cocaine or heroin do which are addictive drugs.
Learn more:
- Psilocybin is structurally similar to serotonin
- Here is a video I found of Jordan Peterson talking about the research on psilocybin mushrooms which is similar to the above video.
Or do a search for:
psilocybin mushrooms research