Autorentext
Baba Masha, M.D., is a pediatrician and OB/GYN with a doctorate in medicine and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. She has hosted the Radio Psychedelix podcast, in Russian, since 2013. She lives in northern California.

Klappentext

Masha’s study shows not only how Amanita can help with many health conditions but also how it activates the ability to feel the value and the significance of your own life experience.

Leseprobe
From Chapter 2: Project Amanita muscaria Microdoses Development

Psychedelic plants crossed my path at a later point in my life. My early adulthood was dedicated to the professional study of classical piano, chemical engineering, and medicine. My prefatory opinions and beliefs on psychedelics were based on erroneous observations made by my mentors and professors. During my fifth year of medical school, my professor, while suturing a patient’s stoma, very casually said to “never try LSD since the option after the reception will be unambiguous. . . . You will grind iron rods of a cage for the rest of your life.” Of course, I believed the professor. Why wouldn’t I? After all, he was my teacher who could skillfully penetrate a patient’s stomach and save his life. I did not seek further clarification. Life in Soviet Russia did not provide a rich palette for openly questioning authority or rank.

One day I decided to quit my warm, cozy position at the Science Research Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology and follow my childhood dream to go around the world, which had already been blighted significantly due to my stealthy rebellious run-ins with the Soviet authoritarian system. Fate was on my side. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the wind of change brought me to the United States.

Significant life experiences followed. I discovered new culture, new thinking, new artists, and other personalities that were prohibited in Soviet Russia. By immersing myself in a new environment, I encountered culture shock, but I also had the chance to learn new skills and learn more about myself. My own culture has shaped my views, whether I realized it or not, and learning new points of view substantially enriched and refreshed my mind.

In three years, I achieved my American dream--a house, two cars in the garage, chicken in the pot, and a corporate nest egg that generously paid for my expenses. But something was missing in that picture. Several years later, I dropped all that, married my long-haired Bohemian musician boyfriend, and moved to the foggy embrace of Big Sur, California.

The Pacific West graciously offered even more enlightening experiences--yoga and a chorus of Tibetan voices. Later, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, and Terrence McKenna joined these voices. Mysterious stories about the medicinal properties of some plants attracted my attention, and I devoted the next ten years of my life to the dense study of the therapeutic potential of plant psychedelics through my own self-induced experiences and in-depth study of all available material on this topic.

Growing up, I learned to live in the material world and disregarded my ethereal relationship with the universe. The system had me believe that the transcendental world was irrelevant and did not exist. This perspective made the world around me empty, gloomy, and difficult. The world was a dangerous place, and enemies surrounded my motherland. Communism was my only hope. I had to subjugate myself to authoritarian rules in order to survive. My psychedelic experiences had a profound impact on my psyche and liberated me from this dazed and confused state. My first ayahuasca journey was a turning point in my life, so much so that I started going to the ceremony twice a year to experience a sense of calmness, divorced from such influencers as propaganda, ideologies, and politics. I felt a sense of spiritual awareness and tranquility, healing feelings I did not believe existed. During these self-induced journeys managed by trusted shamans, I could observe my psyche without age, gender, given name, culture, language, stereotypes, dogmas, and even knowledge of the species I belonged to. My conditioned view of myself and the universe blew up into a million pieces.

As I tried psychedelic and nonpsychedelic shamanic remedies, I gradually started noticing positive changes in my physical and psychological well-being. The results were far superior to what I had noticed during my years of study, research, and practice in the medical field. I cured serious conditions I could not correct with official medicine. When I tried to share with my former medical colleagues the knowledge I had gained through my study of and experience with plant psychedelics and nonpsychedelic shamanic remedies, they thought I had turned into a charlatan and a quack. They labeled me a substance abuser. I could not convince my fellow medical professionals that the medical training we had received, which was based on specialization and predefined disparate learning modules, overlooked the human body as a whole. Instead, I was met with skepticism, and I was ridiculed.

After studying psychedelic plants for a decade, I created a video podcast in Russian called Radio Psychedelix. It helped me organize my thoughts and provided me with an effective way to release the overwhelming burden I was carrying with all the knowledge I had gained.

Discussions on psychedelic plants, including discussions of medicinal properties, are considered propaganda for narcotic usage and are crimes in Russia. In order to produce my podcast, I had to be creative and hide my real identity. I created a character with a funny voice to convey the narrative and used a pseudonym--Baba Masha, my grandmother’s name, and Some as my last name. The video format was simple: a psychedelic-colored mouth speaking out of blackness, constantly giggling and whispering the incredible adventures of the Psychedelix Kingdom.

Comments on the video podcast had to be shut down the first year. From the start, I was declared a sneaky foreign agent working with a group of trained individuals to infuse insanity among the communities living in Russian-speaking territories. Podcast subscribers had all kinds of questions--had I had sex with aliens and in what positions, and so on. However, Baba Masha Some did not give up. Between giggles and stories about her visits to strange worlds and meetings with spirits, Baba Masha inserted translations of modern scientific articles, chemistry and medical research, book translations, podcasts, and lectures on psychedelics by world-renowned gurus. Camouflaged by jokes and equivocations, my podcast addressed the medicinal benefits of cannabis, ayahuasca, iboga, San Pedro and peyote cacti, magic mushrooms, sananga, rappe, and kambo, among others.

Even though some viewers demanded that I show my face to the public, accept charges for betraying the motherland in exchange for American sausages and drugs, and conduct and reveal the results of my sanity test, the brilliant minds that Baba Masha had translated into Russian had already captured part of the audience. Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, R. A. Wilson, T. K. McKenna, Ram Dass, S. Grof, James Fadiman, Rick Strassman, David Nutt, Paul Stamets, J. Rogan, B. Lipton, J. Peterson, G. Hancock, Rick Doblin, and others had already leaked into the consciousness of the crowd, and clearly the layer of “ours” had been marked.

Subscribers formed Masha’s first secret group, Radio Psychedelic, on a social media outlet. Masha was admitted as a guest of honor to the underground Russian Central Committee of Psychedelics. She finally made her appearance to an audience in the form of a cartoon with a joint in her hand. She was flying through the universe on a tiny rock covered with magic cacti and mushrooms. Terence M…