Micromegas

i definitely don't have time to read that now but it looks interesting. the point i was making and that you obviously got is you need to have some basis concept of reality before you can interpret psychic phenomena. If your concept of reality involves the formative action of knowledge/perception (rather than passive knowledge of fixed external objects), and especially that this might be socially/culturally constructed or consolidated, the question of the 'realness' of psychic phenomena is re-framed.

wiki. you can extrapolate from there.

read Immanuel Kant

i had no idea you could do that. awesome, thanks.

Some nice articles there Gimli. Nicholas Rothwell wrote a really accessible but informative article on tobacco use in the central desert: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/bush-tobacco-culture-revealed-by-western-desert-aborigines/news-story/38b508289846695ecdf5a19b4bba0be6

young hylocereus undatus ? maybe some kind of selenicereus? it's doing the job!

Good on ya man. I'll be keen to see how it goes.

Cool little research project you have going on there and some nice articles you've attached, i'm keen to give them a read. I think your letter may draw an interesting response. there is the possibly a slightly softer angle (like... i was recently in the museum of... and was very impressed by the interpretive display associated with the Xochicipilli statue and the range of floral identifications... I was curious about how this display was developed... i.e. curator/botanists... and how the floral motifs were identified ... etc... I really enjoyed seeing this statue in person, having had an interest for some time. I have undertaken some personal study and I am curious if there is some further reading material you could suggest to better learn about the botanical identifications relating to Xochicipilli and the exhibit) rather than directly asking if the experts are critical of previous work. in a way it is more important to understand how the museum display came about than raise the issue of shrooms, schutles and wasson, straight away. anyway don't mean to say how to suck eggs just i know people can get defensive really quick if their ideas are challenged too bluntly and may choose not to enter into a convo (i know because i am like that!)... good stuff!

Yeah it's a fair point. what works in one climate may not in another. i don't live anywhere particularly wet or cold so i didn't consider a different climate may need different soil. trial and error is the best method to find out of course and sounds like you're on to it. strictly this thread is for id'ing some various types of trichocereus. there's heaps of growing advice on the forums. happy gardening!

You've caught the cactus bug and I don't mean the infections on your plants! The wrinkling and yellowing at the base is normal for cactus seedlings. The base may have been below the soil line so the chlorophyll production may be reduced and now its exposed to the sun will green up again, and the wrinkling is just a consequence of growing from a tiny thing into a slightly less tiny thing. It will grow out. It seriously looks fine to me. Trichos are super forgiving, rich but well draining organic soil has worked best for me, i never bothered to do anything special for them. the mix you made sounds good for picky cactus but trichos are not in this category. I found the type of soil you describe can actually impede their growth. I have found large chunks of coir in mixes to be extremely counter-productive. Re: smaller pots you definitely don't want to encourage root binding, that is bad for anything. but if you think of your little plant its roots are sitting in an ocean of soil, there's not much stability there and the soil around the root ball may stay wet and cause the fine hairs at the ends of the root tips to rot, so the plant never grows and feels disinclined too. You could easily grow four same sized seedlings in a pot that size and they will grow as fast or faster and save you room (them do seem to like to grow together at first). ime a pot with enough room to fill out over one growing season, ready for repotting in the next season, is about right. eventually a large plant can be plonked into big pot, but especially at this age, smaller is better.

hey wes, i can't see much scale and looks healthy overall. did you recently repot it? it might benefit from being in a smaller pot until it's a bit bigger and more robust because that much soil will stay wet and will not encourage root development.

I wasn't really making an argument that it is prejudice, just raising the possibility, and schultes and his disciples seem pretty sensitive to indigenous beliefs and involved native people in their research. Wasson's work is perhaps a little more sensationalist. I think the fact the mushroom-xochipilli connection is made in a grungy bar not in one of the world's most important museums might be saying something. next to no-one knows about the hallucinogenic properties of rivea relative to 'shrooms and i think overall the museum exhibit is focused on flowering plants. I think the Wasson article is the first western document to identify the plants on the statue as it indicates he brought schultes in for the job and as you say does not reference any earlier work. But who knows what material is in the museum's archive. a whole sleuth of mexican researchers might have a had a go in all sorts of unpublished documents. In any case on closer inspection the motif Wasson/Schultes identify as profile psilocybes arranged around a circle, the museum gives as dahlia sp. so fundamentally it appears to be a case of different interpretations. interestingly wasson questions why a butterfly would be attracted to a mushroom and provides a speculative theory, which is sound but requires a leap of faith so to speak, but if the motif were in fact a dahlia then the butterfly would be involved in the course of natural events. given that museums need to parse their information down i don't know how they could really engage with the idea of it being a shroom, if they had identified it as a dahlia. shrooms being identified in monumental art has a history of being in the grey zone, since the general shape can be identified in multiple ways. it is an interesting question to ponder and ultimately it could be both a shroom or a dahlia, or both, or neither! i'd be interested to hear if you come up with any further conclusions yourself. why don't you write the museum or if you are there maybe go an ask them about it?

That's awesome you got to see it in person. The botanical identifications of the tello obelisk in the museum at chavin also differ from some western description of the same plants, the latter of which depict them as being hallucinogenic. native researchers or museum curators may have good reasons (or bad reasons) for questioning or omitting references and conclusions made by 'outsiders' some 40 years earlier, during which there has been a very strong push to reclaim patrimony of sacred objects (and rights over their interpretation). it could be a simple case of curators not wanting to draw attention to something that might get tourists revved up; they may not agree with the original interpretation; or the association with mushrooms may skew the interpretation toward an imposed outside view of a culture which is not arranged in that way from the inside; and any variation of the above. I am not convinced the mushroom motifs are as obvious of the floral motifs (see attached p.312) but Wasson's insight into the importance of 'flowers' overall to the nahuatl is intriguing. anyway what a super cool thing to see in terms of 'botanical' sculpture that is as good as it gets. as an aficionado of monumental sculptures of the Americas i always kick myself about missing the The National Museum of Archaeology, and teotihuacan. Good for you. Xochipilli also features in small portable artworks where the flowers are not depicted and in some of the codices. oh yeah, the first reference to Psilocybe on the statue is I believe in Wasson (1973), attached, but partially accredited to Schultes and others and this document contains all the botanical identifications and is a great read; followed by Plants of the Gods (Schultes 1979). wasson-the-role-of-flowers-in-nahuatl-culture.pdf

i don't think you are grasping what eightseven is saying it has nothing to do with rape lol. he means determinism in the sense that consciousness is a by-product of physical evolution, which is controlled by physical processes, which does not bear on the question of free-will, which a metaphysical question. for example some scholars believe that the development of cooking kicked cognitive evolution along in humanoids in the early pleistocene. whether we had 'free will' to decide to cook is metaphysical, but physical changes in the brain are 'determined' by other physical processes that obey certain types of biological law over which humans have no control (ironically biological laws that consciousness has 'invented' way to talk about in order to understand itself). in any case consciousness as a 'delusion' has nothing to do with the 'realness' of reality because as i already noted we are not in a position to understand 'reality' separate from consciousness, we always have to produce it through some type of 'work'. once awareness of being conscious is gained (as opposed to simply 'having consciousness'), even determinism becomes an idea after the fact, and reality itself then is only what you produce. Immanuel Kant established as much. But the reality of consciousness is 'worked up' by consensus of consciousnesses in relation. delusion was probably the wrong word. consciousness is the vehicle of its own self-revelation, the foundation of which can only be the unarticulate-able opposite of itself, which is what eastern religions are driving at. but consciousness in relation produces a 'solid' type of work through the production of conceptual frameworks of high objective determinancy and only in relation, which to some extent is administered through law, as in court cases involving rape if you will. Someone going to jail because they are a rapist is a part of conscious reality by the application of knowledge of consistent structures of intersubjective consciousnesses working together (i.e. to produce community ethics); as is the consensus of the scientific community a portion of whom argue that consciousness is a by-product of physical evolution and find proof to this effect; as the is the consensus of those who determine the universe is alternatively God or dark matter or whatever. Someone going to jail because you imagined they raped you would have to match with the products of the work of a vast number of intersubjective consciousness in concordance, which is hard to do (i.e. the function of law would 'investigate' that case to seek consensus). We function by virtue of consensus in consciousness which is part of what subtleascention was saying. consciousness does not function outside of relation very well, if at all, and conscious without company as it were produces nothing, which bears on the idea of what sound a tree makes falling in a forest.

we don't know what the laws of the universe are, we first have to make them up and then fit phenomenon into these structures of thought. talk about consciousness is always in human terms, so we are already boned. the universe is a concept; we are talking about the 'universe' in this thread as as if it were something already absolute, but it isn't. there is no underlying property we could ascertain once the distance from subject and object is sufficiently advanced to have the concept 'consciousness' in our minds. from that point, we can't get out of the problem. this is why 'consciousness' is fundamental to 'universe' because 'universe' requires the distance between subject and object inherent in consciousness to make something known objectively - the universe, that is. this is actually a very beautiful situation if what we create is magnanimous but instead consciousness wreaks havoc.

pretty sure SG red spine is originally from an old member reville, no longer active. i can't remember what name it had back then. when it grows well it's a beaut, especially when sunlit, red spines.

the 'universe' in any of its manifestations (theoretical, religious, mythic, metaphysical) and anything inside it (including consciousness itself) is a concept of consciousness. consciousness is unable to know what is fundamental (viz. absolute knowledge) but nevertheless consciousness is itself fundamental to - that is, a fundamental property of - what it considers (viz. constructs) to be 'universe'.

There is absolutely no way this is Trichocereus Tulhuayacensis and neither is my plant which i'm certain is identical.

For the record I am not nearly convinced Bruce's current condition is due to over-cutting by cactus collectors, who would be unlikely to leave high quality pieces (that appear to have been snapped, not cut) to lie and rot on the ground. The garden overall is run down and I think this is more likely to be the cause. I have seen many cactus plants fall into disrepair. One time I found a spachianus the owner had been using for what appeared to be sword-fighting practice, he told me I could take the whole thing and demonstrated his machete-wielding abilities. But yes, Bruce is certainly out there far and wide, my original bruces and goliaths are now 10yrs old.

I found the bruce mother plant in 2008. I did not know at the time it had already been found, but blackdragon pointed that out to me. The first pic in this thread shows Bruce in 2008, considerably larger than 2005, and if you scroll down you can see that is HUGE compared to 2005. I had the chance to revisit Bruce in January of this year, for the first time in almost 10 years. The poor fella was hacked to pieces, it was a shock. I won't speculate to the cause, it might simply be neglect, as cactus can deteriorate over time. There was a lot of fallen debris and snapped limbs, stumps on stumps on stumps, and in total was smaller than the original 2005 photo in this thread. Note that whatever I have called by some other name in my thread, the two other impressive trichos turned out to be already named as 'sausage plant' and 'Goliath'. Long story short a picture now would not do justice to Bruce. My 2008 photo shows his full splendor.

forum did not work for me either as stu says, pages didn't load. seems to be fixed now.

Another good one Alchemica. If you are interested in 'the rest of tobacco's medicine', you might enjoy this excellent article about pituri use. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/bush-tobacco-culture-revealed-by-western-desert-aborigines/news-story/38b508289846695ecdf5a19b4bba0be6

aloe distans. not sure about use some aloes will burn you and should not be used on skin. very hardy and can grow very large outside (i.e. will eventually cover many square metres).

I spent some time with this plant back in my jungle dayz. I was told that to those who have the vision (and not under the influence of anything) ajo sacha appears as an old man of the forest (sacharuna) surrounded by children, and this is a spontaneous experience one might have when walking in the forest. I met one non-indigenous (whitefella) person who confirmed this, said he'd seen this old man walking along with a bunch of children, and was later told it was the spirit (genio) of ajo sacha that he had seen. I don't know how consistent this belief is but it was a story that stayed with me. A number of the plants had a spirit figure associated with consistent attributes.

Mate, some of the stuff you are producing is pure gold, the mixture of personal stories and in depth research. And you seem to be producing quite a bit of it. I would encourage you to collate this into one place, make a blog or something, it doesn't matter how many people look at it. In many forms of social media things just disappear after a while but some of this deserves to be retained somewhere easily accessible. Maybe you have collated it yourself anyway. Great contributions to the forum!