Title The Marriage of the Sun and Moon

Author Andrew Weil

Year Published 1998

Kind of Book Psychedelics/Consciousness

How strongly I recommend it 9/10 

My Impressions

Fascinating little book. Weil draws on his experience as a MD as well as his adventures around the globe to take a closer look at several substances and experiences which alter consciousness. Some of these are predictable (eg. drinking coffee, smoking marijuana and eating psilocybin containing mushrooms) and some are less predictable (eg. vomiting, belly laughing, witnessing a total eclipse.) This book has something for the whole family. **It is important to know that some of the claims Weil makes in this book are refuted by mainstream science.

Date Read circa 2017

Practical Takeaways

  • When vomiting, remind yourself that you are not moving material from inside of your body outside, but rather material already outside (since the stomach is the gatekeeper of the body)

  • Think of coffee/caffeine as the drug that it is and treat it with respect

  • Try taking mushrooms during the day as opposed to at night

  • Eat mushrooms to stimulate the unconscious an imagination

  • Do not ingest any substance through your nose

  • …the goal is to open the channels between the two minds [conscious and subconscious] and to encourage back-and-forth flow between the two without stifling either one.

Big Ideas

Vomiting

  • Vomiting partially functions to as a way to eject unwanted emotions from the mind

  • The nausea and vomiting many people experience during psychedelic experiences is symbolic of the kind of letting go of ordinary consciousness they are doing

  • Vomiting can be a pleasant sensation for people who have mastered the technique

  • Once food passes the stomach THEN it enters the blood stream (ie. The stomach is the gatekeeper of the body.)

So

  • When you vomit you’re not really removing food from inside your body.

Coffee

  • Caffeine is not considered a drug by most people in America

Because

  • In America we define drug use as a bad thing

but

  • Caffeine is a drug

  • The health of our nation would be better if we treated coffee as a drug

Because

  • If we thought of coffee as a drug we would treat it with more respect and thought

Mangos

  • Eating a perfectly ripened mango can be consciousness altering experience

  • Eating a perfectly ripened mango captures a person's entire attention (ie. It is impossible for them to be doing anything else while eating one)

Eating Chilies

  • Water making the burning sensation from eating chilies worse

  • the cure to the burning sensation felt by eating chilies iis to eat more chilies and build up a tolerance

  • Chilies are healthy not harmful to the body

  • The Capsicum found in chilies is beneficial for the stomach and entire digestive track

Laughing Hysterically (belly laughing)

  • In a fit of laughter there is no ego- no censorship of messages flowing back and forth to the brain

  • The loss of the ability to hold oneself upright during a fit of extreme laugher is evidence that the cerebral cortex is not about to maintain its usual function during laughing spells

  • the laughing response evolved out of the crying response-The Naked Ape Book by McGraw & Hill is cited

  • Laughing is contagious

Mushrooms

  • Calories are units of solar energy bound up by plants

  • Mushrooms have few calories

Because

  • Mushrooms don't their energy from the sun

  • Eating mushrooms stimulates the imagination and intuition

Because

  • Lunar energy is food for the unconscious

And

  • Mushrooms are full of lunar energies

  • Mushrooms are associated with water, the feminine, lunar, yin energy

  • Our fear of poisonous mushrooms is overblown

Because

  • We have a fear of the darker side of the human mind (ie. The unconscious/shadow)

Marijuana 

  • Any psychoactive drug is most effective when use infrequently

  • The greatest health hazard of marijuana seems to me to be its irritating effect on the respiratory tract

  • Marijuana may stimulate the development of breasts in some men

 

Things smoking marijuana can help with

  • Treat headaches

  • Insomnia

  • Stomach cramps

  • Menstrual cramps

  • Labor pains

  • Asthma

  • Glaucoma

  • Nausea

  • Spastic paralysis

 

  • The appetite stimulation people feel after smoking marijuana only happens because people expect to be hungry

White Sugar 

  • When we refine natural substances (like cane sugar into table sugar or poppy seeds into opium) we eliminate the nature's ways of protecting us from consuming too much of these substances

 

Coca leaves/ Cocaine

  • The high of chewing coca leaves is very subtle

  • Consuming Coca leaves is not addictive

  • The reason people get addicted to cocaine is because one feels let down after the drug wear off and wants to feel the energy boost again, not because Cocaine is addictive

  • People develop a cocaine tolerance develops rapidly and subsequent hits give a shorter and less intense high

  • When we put a drug in our stomach, we all the body to decide how fast to admit it into the bloodstream

  • When we snort a drug the drum enters our bloodstream immediately

 

Health benefits of eating coca leaves

  • Clear mind

  • Elevates mood

  • Energy boost

  • Remedy for indigestion and stomachache

 

MDA

  • MDMA helps to show people that the state of boundless love for others is possible

However

  • MDMA doesn't provide users any information on how to feel boundless love towards others

Iridology

  • The iris is a direct extension of the brain

  • The eye both brings images of the outside world within as well as showing images of what is within to the outside world

Total Solar Eclipses 

  • Viewing a total solar eclipse is not dangerous to your eyes

  • Viewing a partial eclipse can lead to retinal burn in your eyes

  • People taking pictures/filming an experience enjoy it less than those just watching

  • The Government makes people afraid of Total eclipses and eye damage

  • One can feel a kind of high from viewing a total eclipse

Sweat Lodges

  • Sweat can purge people of anxiety and depression

Chanting

  • Chanting alters consciousness

Because

  • Chanting occupies the ordinary mind which is usually busy thinking and paying attention to various stimuli

Misc.

  • The experience of an altered state of consciousness is intrinsically more valuable than any amount of theorizing about it

  • Ordinary consciousness is symbolic of daytime

  • The question "do psychic phenomena exist?" is unanswerable

Because

  • Psychic phenomena's existence is dependent on who the person looking at it is and what point of view they are viewing it from

  • In order for psychic phenomena to "exist" a person must believe in its existence

  • Extreme circumstances like a child being pinned beneath a car can make people go into a trance state where they can do extraordinary things like lift cars and they are not effected by pain

  • A state of fear or an effort to defend oneself against a perceived threat can create a condition of neuromuscular tension that would impair or prevent peripheral nervous receptivity (and lead a person to experience more damage/injury than if they were not bracing themselves or fearful of injury)

  • The reason some people are able to walk unharmed across hot coals is because of a change in relationship between their solar and lunar (conscious and unconscious) mind

  • Children enjoy altering their consciousness by spinning in circles

  • Children enjoy altering their consciousness by holding their breath

 

Surprising Facts

  • Vomiting is performed by some people as a healthful practice to remove toxins from the mind and body

  • “Most babies do not cry emotional tears until they are a month old.”pg39

  • The iris is the only muscle that can be observed directly from the outside.

  • The tongue and anal sphincter can be observed from the outside, but they are hidden behind epithelial tissue.

  • The main job the iris is to regulate the size of the pupil

  • How Iriolgy was discovered: “A delightful story about the origin of iridology is that the initial discovery was made by a ten-year-old boy, who while playing with a pet owl, accidentally broke one of its legs. Soon after, he noticed the appearance of a dark stripe in the lower portion of the owl’s iris on the same side of the body as the injury, a change that regressed as the leg healed. That event took place near Budapest, Hungary, and the boy, Ignatz von Peczely, grew up to become a medical doctor. Intrigued by his chance observation, he continued to look at irises, first owls (easy) and then of people (harder), and eventually was able to establish a map correlating different areas of the body with specific parts of the iris.”

  • In order to avoid getting burned in a sweat lodge you have to continuously wipe the sweat off your skin, because water conducts heat faster than skin.

  • “…generally scientists have sought materialistic explanations of the phenomena. Some have proposed, not very imaginatively, that Asians have tougher feet than non-Asians or that fire walkers are simply deceiving Western observers in one way or another. Others have suggested that perspiration forms a thin insulating layer that protects the skin from the heat.”pg254

 

Unknown Terms

Mycophobia: the fear of mushrooms (note the word origin as mushrooms are fungi). The most common cause of _____ is that some mushrooms can be poisonous if consumed. People who fear mushrooms would avoid eating mushrooms as well as not touching mushrooms. Eating or even touching mushrooms would result in symptoms like sweating, crying, screaming, elevated body

Iridology : 1)the study of the iris 2) “The basic postulate of _____is that all disease changes in the human body are reflected in the iris and can be read there by someone

who knows the signs.”pg182

Symbols

Daytime: ordinary waking consciousness

Mushrooms: yin energy, lunar energy, the unconscious

 

Dates/Timeline

  • “In 1860, Albert Niemann of Gottingen, Germany, isolated cocaine from coca leaves.”