Episode 47 – Simon G. Powell

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mr. simon g Powell in it we get into the history of Scylla Simon and its influences on history and culture we talk about reconnecting with the biosphere biomimicry so it’s certainly one of those wide-ranging conversations I certainly recommend you check out Simon’s work I found his book Darwin’s unfinished business especially interesting he’s also got a couple of books out on still Simon you can order copies of those below otherwise please

get to us on social media I try my best to keep things updated there we are in the process of getting giving the site a cleaner look so I spent some time this weekend working on that for you guys yeah find us on facebook twitter at the human XP subscribe to our youtube channel please spread the podcast out as much as you possibly can word of mouth style I mean I think that people love the show the only thing that is stopping us is that people just haven’t heard it

yet so if you’re sitting on sending me an email don’t hesitate I do my best to respond to those we’ve got a stack scheduled through March some really intriguing authors we are full steam ahead folks thank you guys so much for the snake you the human experiences in session my guest tonight is mr. simon g Powell his book is the mushroom explorer Simon welcome to hxp yeah nice nice to have thanks for having me on so Simon your your work surrounds this sort of idea of

silicide in mushrooms and their insights and you’ve created a couple books on this I mean what sparked this interest for you and how did you get into this that’s a good question why would anyone spend their adult life investigating a substance that’s considered this classed as a schedule 1 in America class a in the UK as always taboo around it yeah I became interested in silicide bean as I suppose many people do because the effects are so interesting anyone who’s

interested in consciousness and the potential realms of consciousness and what I would argue our authentic spiritual experiences not spiritual in inverted commas you’re going to eventually be led to plants and substances like suicide into psychedelic substances and I think approached in the right way with care and caution they can lead to very illuminating experiences and it’s because I had a number of illuminating experiences garnered

deriving from i should add from mushrooms that grow in the country in which i live in here in the UK you know i never no money was ever exchanged this is a natural resource that grows every autumn in the UK so it was a case of exploring this free natural resource from this generous biased view on which way in which within which we live it was through that those kind of nature based experiences with with a naturally occurring resource that inspired me and

I’ve stuck with it for about 25 years because it’s interesting so I mean what what was what was the conclusion of some of your research I mean because I’ve read read some articles and this is becoming I think more commonplace that these studies that are coming out that say that Silla Simon is able to repair brain tissue it’s helping with PTSD I mean there are these ongoing things that seem to be coming up where Sullivan is helpful so what is your take on that

well yeah there’s been a resurgence in scientific research with silicide been particularly over about the last 5-10 years I’ve recently interviewed some of the main researchers in America and yes I penis is proving to be a very useful therapeutic tool I’m primarily there it’s being used to alleviate anxiety in people suffering from terminal cancer but it’s also being looked at as a therapy to treat well in Alabama I recently met a guy a research scientist

from Alabama who’s doing research he’s looking at using silicide min to treat cocaine addiction so you can imagine if they get that it’s going to get a lot of headlines if they get positive results from that has been yet so it’s been used successfully in various therapeutic settings to cure addictions and to alleviate anxiety and to alleviate obsessive-compulsive disorder and this kind of thing I mean if you if you recognize that this compound has

benefits why do you think it’s illegal well that’s probably a leftover from the I I questioned a lot of the scientists about this well why it is illegal I’m there’s a whole that there’s a load of reasons for that mainly because of what happened in the the 60s and and then there’s a fear of sort of the losing control control of the populace or something I as an unfounded fear so there’s an unfounded fear because it’s an aspect these these psychedelic agents

they they cause to emerge an unusual potential within the human psyche and unusual kind of exotic experiences and we’re not were the they’re they’re alien to sort of modern culture although older cultures managed to integrate these substances so there’s a lot of fear there because we’re basically afraid of ourselves we reflected we think it’s like Pandora’s box Rowan but I don’t think we need to have fear but yeah it’s it it’s a slow

integration process and that their clinic cut their corded a schedule 1 or class a status because they believe not to have they believe to be extremely harmful which is not true they’re not they’re not a silicide bean is not addictive it’s not killed anyone and they’re considered not to have any medical utility well that’s been proven wrong recently because papers have been published showing the medical utility so things are set to change in the next 10

years of thing right I mean you you live in England god save the queen but do you find that the perception in England is different as far as the usage of these compounds do you find it’s different there versus in states well that the situation until 2005 the situation was silicide be it was different than America until 2005 it were in the UK it was legal to pick and possess unprocessed suicided mushrooms and that people have been using them for about 30

years it was only in 2005 they were the fresh mushroom was illegal eyes but um yeah I’m in the city this the situation with with the drug situation in the UK is pretty much the same as in the USA is like a 02 alcohol is fine tobacco is fine but anything else any other changing consciousness is deemed to be a criminal offense you know so it’s just as crass here the situation with drugs as it is in America well that’s although I was recently in a liar sales recently

an American I was in Colorado actually in yeah I mean they’ve legalised cannabis there now so think that you know that you’re one step ahead and you got to wonder why something so readily available alcohol which turns most people into complete ass hats is legal and these compounds that kind of expand your car this make you think of you gotta wonder why the you know that that exists so moving on here you in your book magic mushroom explorer and you talk about you

mentioned terence mckenna and you talk about how kind of bringing the experience in using the darkness and silence how have you found that affects the experience well I talk about in my book that originally I the terence mckenna always said you should take silicide being in silent darkness and i used to do that in the early 90s but from the sort of mid 90s onwards until now i found it just as in my preferred mode of taking psilocybin is out in

nature in like a wild oak forest far from the from cities and far from from civilization and to take mushrooms that have been picked locally to take them around the campfire with a close friend with you know with eyes open some of the time and exploring the forest and exploring nature and and bonding with nature so i think that methodology is just as rewarding and just as a as interesting as taking it in silent darkness so i don’t think there are any

set rules you know there’s a the most important thing is set and setting to be in the right environment and to have the right frame of mind and the right intention mmhmm yeah you on your website you describe yourself as having a case of chronic by ophelia which is an awareness and love of the instinctive bond between yourself and other living systems what what does that mean exactly it’s just me joking when i say i suffer from chronic biophilia i’ve had people

write to me and say are you are you okay now no no it’s this joke is it’s a british humor but but but because of all these adventures i had out in the lake district and snowdonia the last in all these the last remaining wilderness areas in the UK where the mushroom grows and what I like to trek around and pick them and take them in situ you really commune with nature if you’re in a forest you really feel the kind of wisdom within the

within the forest and if the stars are out it’s fantastic and the sound of running water and looking at the trees and the insects and hearing birds and all this kind of thing it really stimulates by Ophelia and we got to remember we live in a time where there’s a they call nature deficit disorder because we’ve become so urbanized we’ve lost touch with the biosphere you know much to the biospheres detriment as we’re learning with as we’re feeling the

effects of this nature deficit disorder so I mean as a tool for for addressing nature deficit disorder and catalyzing biophilia which we need I think you know silicide bean is a it’s a great tool for doing that so um yeah chronic Biophilia that’s just when your bio figlio just gets ramped up to really high levels and you know you feel like you’re in love with with the biosphere you know so do you feel do you feel like you’re interacting with the plants and their

consciousness in some way the global consciousness I’ve written a lot about the what I call the paradigm of natural intelligence I think you can interact and feel and sense that there’s an intelligence within nature within living organisms within bio/logic but I don’t tend to see that as a conscious intentional intelligence as such I see it as an unconscious intelligence but it does it even if I could say it’s an unconscious intelligence it’s still

replete with wisdom and the whole point is is that we can learn from life and we can learn from ecosystems and we can learn about symbiosis and try and incorporate that into human culture so but there are different interpretations of what term of this intelligence which is undoubtedly within within the biosphere hmm okay well in your book the silicide in solution which i think you wrote after mushroom explorer right no no suicide in solution was a lot more

long way back in okay my apologies so so in so Simon solution you talk about the role of Scylla Simon and mushrooms and that the history of our culture and the connection and these creatures and organisms create around us I mean how did you get into that though can you tell us more about that please well it’s got a long if the history of the mushroom is fascinating because it’s been used in Central America in and around Mexico for

thousands of years the Maya used the mushroom we know the the Aztecs use the mushroom we know and various other cultures in and around Mexico it’s just a fascinating story because it was the West or Europeans and the West didn’t know about this until Gordon Watson in the 1950s discovered these secret mushrooms they’re our money’s going on in Oaxaca in Mexico so the other whole history of the mushroom is fascinating and what’s even more fascinating is that

when it was first when Watson wrote his famous Life magazine article about Scylla cyber mushrooms in nothing that came out in 1957 she’s still within living memory people would flock to Mexico to find these mushrooms and people just did not know that they were now know there’s there’s a about 200 species worldwide but they were not as far as we know they weren’t they might have been used thousands of years ago in Europe there’s no hard evidence of that

yet but they we didn’t we didn’t know about it was a new thing and people in the late 50s and early 60s would go down to Mexico to try and secure secure to kiss secure samples of this mushroom not knowing that they grow all over the planet you know they’ve been documented documented everywhere now so they hit the history of the mushroom where it grows and how it’s being used is fascinating what was your what was your connection with the mint here muscaria

and Christianity I found that interesting in your book fly agaric mushrooms well i did i tried the first mushroom I ever tried was actually the fly agaric mushroom it’s the big red and spotted a red red white spot I never managed to get an effect from them from what I’ve read they shouldn’t be confused with silicide in mushrooms because they’re psycho activities completely different they’re not even classed as a psychedelic I think their class does a

hypnotic or something like that some my main area of focus is the silicide in mushroom and not the the fly agaric mushroom but you do you do mention a connection between Christianity and a link between Jesus and this I’m not sure I don’t remember the name of the person that you mentioned that started this theory but basically that uh the Holy Grail was actually this this fly agaric mushroom a Mantia muscaria and Christianity and Jesus is kind of

centered around around that yeah that’s not an area focus I steer clear that I don’t know there’s a lot of no comment no question no not no comment it’s just it’s not it I’m not I don’t buy into those notions of because that is because of the psycho activity of the fly agaric if you go on erowid and the final leg room yeah yeah if you go on erowid and look at people’s experiences for the fly agaric it’s often you know it’s often a

hand pleasant as a no unpleasant effects on the body and it’s totally different to the trip to means and the trip to means a silicide in things like set aside in an ayahuasca for instance then what I would call the true psychedelics and the fly agaric the active ingredient muscarine I think it is this is totally different to the trip to me so I’ve never bought into those theories that yeah a little that you just spoke about okay so let’s let’s move on here so I

mean where do you see yourself moving towards with with this work I mean how how do you distinguish yourself and versus other people who’ve done this I mean terence mckenna road food of the gods and so you’re kind of writing about sullivan but where do you see your work going within the next ten years or so well my main area focused now i’m what i’m interested in the most is this natural intelligence paradigm as I as I saying that the new book the thing I the

main thing I got from a about 25 years of research now surviving the main thing or the gift in inverted colors I felt in inverted commas that I think I received as it were is this natural intelligence para diamond I’m very keen to promote the notion that evolving life is is an intelligence and I think it’s important because we need to learn from that intelligence and we’re at a crucial juncture of human history and we need to if human culture

is to sustain itself right you’re you hear a lot about sustainability all the time now well life life’s been around for almost 4 billion years and it’s learned the art of sustainability so there’s a tremendous amount of wisdom within organisms within ecosystems and the relationship symbiotic relationships between organisms and I used to think about this and feel this a lot during my silicide burn experiences and that’s what I wanna I’m concentrating on it’s

the natural intelligence paradigm and yeah when I talk about natural intelligence I don’t even have to talk about suicide be no I can talk about silicide bean because it was a creative inspiration behind behind my current work but it’s a it’s a subject unto itself so that’s the the thing let’s define that what is what is natural intelligence well you can you can contrast it with artificial intelligence if you think of clever robots and that

kind of thing clever computer systems natural intelligence is what I would call it it’s the intelligence of life itself that life particularly the fact that life evolves and it’s so flexible and plastic but it’s an intelligence and it’s not just I mean it the traditional scientific view would be that life is pretty much mindless and essentially purposeless and that nature is essentially purposeless and that life is just interesting stuff but it’s not just

interesting stuff is in it is interesting stuff but it’s interesting stuff that behaves in a specific way in the specific way in which living things behave and bio/logic behave it’s it’s intelligent because the remember the root meaning of intelligence is to it means into this year which means to choose between so evolution through natural selection is the persistent selection of sensible choices so so when Darwin defined evolution as descent with modification I

would say it’s more a case of descent by way of sensible modifications and as soon as you use the word sensible that leads into intelligence and so my Maya what I’m claiming is is that the evolving life is an intelligence unto itself and it’s this is shouldn’t be confused with creationism because creationists when they talk about intelligent design they’re inferring in intelligence outside of nature i’m saying nature itself is an intelligent

system i mean was there is there anything in your experience that you would say is where that defined like perhaps to find your thinking but i mean was there any one experience that changed the way that you think about the nature of things what well it was mainly the natural intelligence think eight were derived from being in forests under the influence of silicide bin i picked in the vicinity so it’s just a matter of time spent in a an ecstatic blissful

state of mind feeling very very close with the natural environment feeling in communion with a natural environment and really sensing that the whole system was there was an intelligence to it so it’s yeah it’s from my sillas the inspiration but behind the natural intelligence paradigm that i promote came from my silicide and experiences out in nature so what I mean what can we do how can we connect back into the sense of nature

and we’ve disconnected from it we suffer from technology and this urban sort of crisis how do we connect back into nature and how do we move towards this reconnection well I mean I mentioned a few you can have arguments and you use rhetoric but education is very important at the end of my latest the magic mushroom explore a book I mean I talk about things as simple as seeing the seeing the Milky Way I mean I think I read somewhere once

at about fifty percent of people now because most of us live in cities never see the Milky Way so something as basic as seeing which our ancestors would have seen it all the time you know they would have been connected to the bigger picture because they would have been perceiving the bigger the splenda splendid that the glory of the bigger picture every night so because of you know we need to do something about light pollution and I think children need to

be taken out to places where they can you know on school trips or whatever in the early evening and in this at certain times the year so they can go stargaze so things like that and we need more parks we need more roads shut down and convert it into strips you know like I was in Central Park recently in new york i love central park i mean it’s beautiful you’ve got this park with beautiful birds slap bang in the middle of New York City but it needs to be

extended you know you need like larger roads shut down and converted into strips of woodland or whatever so we need more green greenery we need more green roofs you think of all the roofs of buildings you know that they’re just bare we need it you know if you looked if you’re in a aircraft flying over a city it looks doesn’t look very organic so we need to turn make cities more organics I think green roofs having living living walls and living roofs is

a good idea basically culture needs to become more organic if it’s to fit in with the rest of the biosphere it needs to become more organic and we you’re right we have an obsession with human technology at the moment we’re just buried in our looking at all you know I’ve my own phones and stuff and you know people tripping over the mess we’ve created kind of thing you know so um yeah it’s important we get back to nature because we have to I’m

sure one day all being where we will go to the stars and human consciousness consciousness will spread out but we need a firm footing you know the ladder has to be kind of strong a base that we set off from needs to be solid and healthy only one you’ve got a solid and healthy that’s the keyword base can you leap forward kind of thing so we really need to repair our relationship with a biosphere in that that’s why I bang on about this natural intelligence paradigm

because part of the problem is the way we conceive of life on earth we don’t see it in the right way I don’t think so there’s a lot of things that can be done just even just talking about it as a good thing right right so you you wrote and I found this interesting you wrote in your book Darwin’s and unfinished business you wrote about how evolution is not just about survival of the fittest but also must include clever and sensible behavior what is I mean what

does that mean what would be an example of clever and sensible behavior be well that’s that’s what I was saying earlier on it’s sensible like a set Darwin defined evolution as descent with modification but it’s really too sent via sensible modifications the genetic changes the changes in the genetic code that are selected by nature that are nourished by nature and preserved by nature which is the larger environment are those changes that lead to some kind

of life affirming behavior in the art of living and being and to improve the art of living and being behavior has to change in a sensible way this is why and at the moment human culture doesn’t is not sensible in the context of the rest of the biosphere so this word sensible is very important but as a basic example of intelligence think of a slime mold is this organism and they found that if you put it is it’s like a mushroom but it’s

not it’s like a fungus but it’s not a fungus I found you can put it in a maze with food in the middle and it will explore it will send out tendrils to all parts of the maze there are tendrils that don’t lead to anywhere sensible there’s no food there they kind of wither this tendril that makes it to the center and explores the center where the food is that Pro comes preserved and the the the slime mold will concentrate its structure into a

direct route to the food at the center of the maze and when they they did these experiments recently and it was hailed as an example of intelligence without a nervous system and it was made headlines in nature magazine you know intelligence you know really primitive organism but that’s an a good example of sensible behavior that doesn’t need to be conscious but it’s sensible behavior so what nature constantly preserves is sensible behavior you know better

metabolism better vision better hearing better running ability better ability to find water if you’re a plant better ability to synthesize enzymes it’s always to do with sensible life-affirming changes and when you think about that you embrace that idea that leads into this notion that it’s intelligence and that’s what intelligence is we are intelligent because we can make sense of our environment and the life is the same life has learned to make sense of

gravity to make sense of the laws of physics to make sense of the laws of chemistry the whole thing is in it is in intelligence so human intelligence is the latest offshoot of this human human consciousness and human intelligence is built on our a huge pyramid of already existing intelligence which is the biosphere so how much how much would you say that our lack of understanding of this processor or maybe we forgot that we were connected to the biosphere maybe

through all this technology and all this advancement that we’ve we’ve disconnected from nature or somehow we have it’s nice that’s not like a suggestion we have disconnect disconnected from nature that’s why we’re suffering from global warming and all these environmental crises you know this is there’s no that’s not new at this we’re waking up to this more and more that we live in a human culture is totally the way I think about it’s like we’ve

cocooned ourselves in these urban environments that are just full of you know the value system that is nourished within these urban environments all to do with making money and advertising and you know it’s just human ideas everywhere we’ve got basically mankind has his head up his own ass you know we don’t we’ve lost this connection with the life-support system because not only is the biosphere naturally intelligent it’s a life-support system the air that

you’re breathing now in the air that I’m breathing now well you know the you know Apple don’t make that air you know Sony don’t make it these big corporations don’t make fresh oxygen you know it comes from huge forests that are still around its third that circle the Northern Hemisphere and there you get algae in the ocean you know that the the biosphere is is a life-support system it sustains itself and there are all these very complex cycles that we don’t

understand yet sand symbiotic relationships huge webs of symbiotic natural intelligence that we were only beginning to acknowledge and we’ve just like I say we’ve just cocooned ourselves away from that we think we can just do anything we like build anything we like burn as much fossil fuel as we like without realizing where fossil that fossil fuel was produced by naturally the natural naturally intelligent activity of photosynthesizing plants

we’ve just used we like immature children but you know blundering about and you know pulling up things and that we can do this we can do that without any any awareness of the larger life-support system which even now is sustaining us as we destroy that life support system so we really need to wake up to the the wisdom that is inherent within the rest of life and within the rest of the biosphere and asked if you can’t grok that then take some silicide

bin mushrooms and maybe you can you know I agree completely that we are kind of trapped and I think we’ve we’ve laid out the problem and we’re kind of we’ve we’ve demonstrated that and we’ve built that so what is the solution I mean how do we move towards more green things around us I mean how can we consciously not just by talking about it but how can we practically how can we use action to do these things well I think one that one of the good

was signs in the right direction is the bio mimicry movement you where the biomimicry movement no the biomimicry movement they’ve got a an institute biomimicry Institute biomimicry means they’re their definition of the biomimicry movement is the conscious emulations of nature’s genius which is natural intelligence in it in other words the conscious emulations of nature’s genius so they’re looking at engineering solutions by looking at how

nature does things so that’s the step in the right direction we need to look to nature to learn how nature does things how life does things how life uses energy how life recycles our input become our output becomes input and this kind of thing so there’s a lot there’s a lot of people working on this and yeah I mean energy we need to check it was still addicted to fossil fuels and in the UK they recently gave the go-ahead for the first fracking operation and I

was thinking man it’s like a it’s like a cigarette addict who’s dying of lung cancer instead of switching to a electronic cigarette or giving up to back all together is ripping up the floorboards to try and find little bits of tobacco down there you know so fracking is the same it’s a desperate attempt to squeeze as much fossil fuel out of the biosphere as possible and that’s not the right direction you know so our energy you know we we really have

to switch to you know green renewable forms of energy and such so yeah there’s all kind of green movements working on this you know you’re aware of this and you’ve got a an interest in permaculture now and people getting off the grid and yeah I just I I quickly looked this up and I guess velcro is an example of biomimicry yeah the way that there’s all manner of things they’ve you know you can look at a thing how much energy is

used in air conditioning in hot countries you know there’s a tremendous amount of electricity used and therefore as a high carbon footprint but you know you look at a termite mound it remains air-conditioned in a relatively low temperature because the termites would die otherwise and you know it’s not plugged into into anywhere it’s all done through water evaporation and you know the actual structure and stuff so like life really is ingenious it’s dice is

figured out all kinds of wonderful ways of using energy and you know and achieving homeostasis and a healthy a healthy Constitution so and we we need to be looking to we can learn there’s what is there’s wisdom in the rest of life we’re not the only species you know there’s a life has been around for four billion years so it must be doing something right you know Forest you get forests that I’ve been a Philippines I’ve visited forests that were

apparently about 60 million years old and it they weren’t messy anything how did this survive for 60 million years without without humans with clipboards overseeing everything you know it works on its own because life that’s what evolution does it it works out how to do things so we really need my point is it’s at my point is that our relationship was the biosphere with a rest of nature at the moment is wanting and we need to redress that relationship

because it’s not healthy at the moment Simon we’re approaching the end here man where can people find your work well you can just was my website simon g Powell calm all my stuff’s on their books and interviews and films I’ve made of stuff so is there anything you’re currently working on yeah I’m not it’s been eight years since I made a film I’ve just begun filming some people to make a making a I said earlier I’m natural intelligence is my main thing but I’ve

got a last film I want to make about silicide been looking at the reefs the resurgence in suicide been research suicide in science i’m making I’ve just begun filming for a new documentary about the the mushroom right Simon well I really really appreciate your time sir thank you so much for being here this is the human experience we are going to get out of here we will see you guys next week thank you so much for listening