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***See below for a complete topic breakdown.***

Join us on Reddit at r/ATTMindPodcast to discuss this episode.

What does it mean to be a psychedelic person?

Alternatively, what does it mean to live psychedelically? Of course, this is a question that different people will answer differently, depending on their culture and relationship to psychedelic plants of fungi.

The manner in which that question is explored in this case, though, is from the perspective of a white-presenting, non-indigenous, politically active, North American person, whose relationship is primarily with the magic  psilocybin mushroom... Or, I guess more accurately, two people fitting that description as it is a conversation with me, your faithful host of Adventures Through The Mind, and the award winning queer writer and psilocybin aficionado, Bett Williams.

Bett Williams is a literary writer and psychedelic explorer, and the author of The Wild Kindness; A Psilocybin Odyssey  (Dottir Press Fall, 2020), a memoir about growing mushrooms in the high desert of New Mexico. Her other works include The Wrestling Party and Girl Walking Backwards (St. Martin’s Press), which was named as one of the Ten Best Young Adult Queer Novels by Vogue Magazine. She has written for several publications including DoubleBlind, OUT Magazine, Flaunt, Lucid News and Lenny Letter.

During the interview we explore a number of issues facing the modern politically switched on psychedelic person. We do so with special reference to the damaging impact of social media technologies on our perception, identity, and behavior; cultural appropriation within psychedelic ceremony building; and the Dark Side of leftist psychedelic politics. All of which grounded in a discussion around what it means to live psychedelically, as a psychedelic person in relationship with the psilocybin mushroom.

For context,  this interview was recorded a couple months ago and it’s actually just a coincidence (or accidental synchronicity) that it is being released during the week of the 2020 US presidential election. I’m definitely holding a particular curiosity as to how much the ideas discussed in this episode will be relevant or illuminating to the events that are going to follow in the next coming weeks. But that is a topic for larger wanderings beyond the podcast. I will leave it to the r/ATTMindPodcast subreddit.

In the meantime, though, enjoy this interview with Bett Williams

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discuss this episode on our subreddit

Episode Clips

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Episode Breakdown

• There is no psychedelic without culture
• The satanic trinity of Facebook Reddit and Instagram
• How mushrooms can help us break out of social media reality
• James’ first psilocybin experience 
• Social media becomes our mind : our mind becomes social media 
• “Psychedelics and the internet go hand in hand”
• The importance of discipline with psychedelic practice
• Building ceremony culture as a non-indigenous person
• How culture defines what comes of our psychedelic experiences 
• Are mushrooms have wisdom or do they just connect us to wisdom
• “The mushroom contains multitudes”
• The mushroom experience is build by our relationship to them
• Mushrooms revealed the ego saturation of social justice outrage politics
• What does it mean to engage politics ‘psychedelically’?       
• The politics of the history or Maria Sabina 
• Getting beyond party line politics to appreciate the good work being done 
• Bett Williams’s criticisms on Micheal Pollan 
• Growing mushrooms | What it means to be in relationship with the mushroom 
• Respecting the risk being taken by those who grow and provide psychedelics
• Respect your drug dealer!
• The potential (and failings) of the psychedelic left to be leading the political conversation in a good way
• The moral obligation of breaking unjust laws 
• There is something gained by psychedelic being illegal 
• The unknown unknowns of the history of traditions
• Will more people eating more psychedelics help us with the crisis we are fading?
• What it means and what it takes to live a psychedelic life 
• Psychedelic mushrooms are serious work, but won’t work if you take it too seriously
• How to live life with psychedelics without hurting yourself 
• Working out your buffalo problem 
• How does age impact our ability to access depth with psilocybin
• The wild kindness 

The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odessy

The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey is the lyrical, unforgettable memoir of Bett Williams’s relationship with psilocybin mushrooms, otherwise known as magic mushrooms