Humphry Osmond

So wherever you find yourself, this episode is for you, because it is ultimately an exploration of the many ways we can come to know ourselves more deeply.

And the word psychedelic was coined by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond in the 1950s from the Greek word psyche, meaning mind or soul, and dilune, meaning to make visible or reveal.

So he meant mind manifesting.

And I love the more poetic possibility held in those same roots too.

How does it go? He...

Humphrey Osmond, the guy who turned on, uh, turned Huxley onto mescaline, and they were corresponding trying to come up with a name for this thing.

Psychedelic hadn't been coined yet.

Mm-hmm.

You had Aldous Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, and that was about his mescaline trip.

The way he found out about it was through a psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond.

And Humphrey Osmond was really interested in mescaline and he was writing about it and talking about the ideas that he was having about using mescaline for, you know, connection, getting people to connect, to communicate differently and assist with therapy.

And Aldous Huxley gave him a call and said, Hey, I want to try that and write a book about it.

So Humphrey Osmond flew out to California, gave it to Aldous Huxley.

for the first two hours of the experience, Aldous Huxley was thinking, Oh, this is kind of useless because mescaline is, um, it's gentle.

It's, uh, it's doesn't completely obliterate your ego and send you off into space.

So it's a very commonly misunderstood term.

Psychedelic is a term that was coined in the 1950s by Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond to describe what we call non-ordinary states of consciousness that we enter when you take a psychedelic medicine or you experience an unusual phenomenon in your mind, like a dream, that is different than what you would experience in your normal day-to-day waking life.

And psyche means mind, and delos means to show or to reveal.

So this term is really describing experience where parts of our consciousness that we're not normally aware of during the day, we start to become aware of those parts of our consciousness during that time that we're in the psychedelic state.

The word psychedelic hasn't even been coined yet.

That would come from Humphrey Osmond in the same year.

And here comes this article in one of the most mainstream respected publications in America, describing a Wall Street banker participating in an indigenous mushroom ceremony in Mexico.

the article is accompanied by stunning photographs colour images of maria sabina in her ritual garments of mushrooms growing in the mexican highlands of wasson himself looking transformed what made it explosive wasn't just the content it was the source This wasn't some beatnik poet or fringe character.