Surviving Brain Cancer in a Precarious World

Part 17: Healing the Mind...

With all the adrenaline off the back of hearing I was in remission just a few months after I had been diagnosed with brain cancer, I experienced quite a crash.

It seemed like the months had flown by and every day had been like a surreal change, radically different from my life before. We had plans to go to Cosford air show on that Sunday after the scan results. I expected I would just be able to relax and enjoy the experience, but instead I just felt washed up like I just wanted to sleep after a marathon that had been going on for months.

Having been in the air cadets in my teenage years, it was very frustrating to feel this way while at an air show. Most of the day all I could do was lay on a picnic blanket and sleep. Towards the end of the day we were watching the Red Arrows and instead of being amazed as I was every other time I had seen them in my life, I was feeling so tired I just felt sick like how I felt at the end of radiotherapy.

The smell of the red chemicals landing down on us as they finished, just made me feel worse so on the way back to the car I was just struggling not to throw up. As soon as we got back to the car it bucketed down with rain and instead of being desperate to get inside, I felt refreshed and by the time we were stuck in all the traffic to leave, I was feeling like I was getting back to normal.

My fiancée generally was responsible for this with her humor and reliable patience with me. This is a gift that her whole family has, when I wasn’t myself, they never put pressure on me to snap out of it, they were always perfectly patient with me and always able to make me smile with their infectious sense of humor.

When I was back home at my parents I was blessed with the first heat wave that year. This gave me a brilliant opportunity to regain some fitness and take in some vitamin D.

Vitamin D is essential for human health and one of the best ways to keep your immune system strong, even when faced with confusing signals from cancer cells. Like Melatonin, it is one of the best natural ways to prevent cancer. There is a tricky balance which has been aggravated in society with any industry that wants to profit from sun cream sales.

Like the question of whether cannabis “cures” cancer, my friend in London often says “the truth is somewhere in between” and the same can be said for the link between sun exposure and the risk of getting skin cancers.

What’s meant by "tricky balance" is that human’s evolved to take in vitamin D from sunlight and avoid cancer but not to avoid cancer if you end up burning. So in my view, it’s essential to be out in the sun and be as exposed as possible to get your vitamin D levels up but retreat from the sun before you burn. The trick is knowing when! I would personally stick to cannabis balms, even mud would be better for the skin than suncream.

The problem in today’s society is that we are taught to slap on high factor sun cream full of chemicals before we go out on a hot sunny day. This means many people are out in the sun not burning, but most importantly, not taking in the essential vitamin D because the sun cream blocks most of it being synthesized by the lipid membranes on our skin.

It was around this time that I also found out about “Cold Thermogenesis” which to my understanding is that the skin is more prepared or optimized to take in vitamin D when exposed to Sunlight soon after exposure to cold temperatures.

To try this I would have a short cold shower before going out in the sun and when out in the sun I would ground as much of my bare skin to the Earth. The science behind grounding in the sun for more vitamin D is as much a forgotten gem of science as the Warburg effect.

As I was still too weak to start weightlifting again, I kept things light by doing Yoga in the sun. The experience of doing Yoga at this point in my life was the closest thing I had ever felt to a profound spiritual experience.

It helped me eliminate the post-traumatic feelings I was getting after hearing the all clear. It inspired me to research further into psychedelics which happened to be in the news at the same time as being reported an effective treatment against depression. The pleasurable experiences I had from using medicinal cannabis were more to do with relaxing me at night so that I could sleep but it’s not really a psychedelic plant unless it’s consumed in edibles with high levels of THC.

Because I was just vaping dry herbs, I wasn’t getting anything like that. My knowledge of psychedelics was poor, to say the least before this point. But what I found out about it made me realize how civilization has robbed itself of our most intimate individual rights.

Most of what happens with these misunderstood substances are things that were beneficial for our evolution and why we became the smartest species we know of.

I stumbled upon the teachings of the late Terence McKenna who is probably the most experienced teacher of psychedelics in modern history. Through his work, I learned about Stoned Ape theory which is that we evolved out of our primate form because unlike other primates, we had a diet rich in Psilocybin.

It makes sense when looking at ancient human history much before the ancient Egyptians where even Greek literature refers to North Africa as the basket of nourishment. So instead of the sands of the Sahara, it was more a land full of vegetation now long buried by the sands.

The majority of human evolution historians accept that we all originated from Africa and slowly moved North and outwards before we really thrived as a species.

The stoned ape theory is that while we all lived in early Africa’s jungles we would feed on mushrooms and other plant life that was full of psilocybin. Because Psilocybin is converted to Psilocin in the human body, this has an intense mind-altering effect on the human brain. These include high levels of euphoria, changes in the perception of time and vivid fractal hallucinations.

Psilocin doesn’t just change the perspective of one’s environment but removes much of the noise and stresses on the brain being unable to stop thinking about the past or the future, leaving one’s mind to experience living in the moment which is the whole point of successful meditation.

This enables the human mind to heal itself during a trip. Many people report this state as spiritual and therapeutic when healing the mind from trauma whether it’s triggered from past abuse or life-changing traumatic brain injuries.
Some report that it suppresses their ego which can be a hindrance to rational thinking and lead to the mind being more vulnerable to stress or depression.

It was these discoveries in McKenna’s literature that made me realize how evolution is now much slower than it ever was. This is because our primate form lacked the large forehead that we have as modern human’s to comprise a very advanced neo-cortex where our sense of self and the majority of our intelligence is generated.

So the theory, in a nutshell, is that we are smarter than our primate common ancestor’s whose DNA is only around 1% different to ours (if not bigoted), is because we consumed food that required the mind to expand.

If true, it means modern society has negatively intervened in our own evolution by keeping the human mind from expanding further because our modern diet is commonly psilocybin free due to reactionary laws.

It’s arguable that the most innovative genius of our time is Elon Musk much like Leonardo Da Vinci, Newton or Aristotle would have been some of the most celebrated geniuses in past times.

Elon Musk is known to have said that humanities habit of placing reactionary blanket ban laws leads to problems when we want to progress because laws don't expire after a period of time, So we end up with a huge backlog of outdated laws that don't make sense anymore. Our habit of stalling progress can also be seen in human space exploration since the end of the Apollo Era which is Musk’s biggest inspiration for his work with Space X.

The fact is, since the Apollo era, humanity has never been further than 3 to 4 miles from the Earth’s surface in low Earth orbit. This makes me wonder what humanity would be like today if we had of embraced psilocybin in the 20th and 21st century instead of taking a blanket ban approach to any substance that alters the mind.

It is my view that we have forced our bodies to go endocannabinoid deficient by banning cannabis which has negatively impacted our immune systems evolution and also stalled the evolution of our increased capacity for intelligence by banning psilocybin.

It seemed the last generation or subculture to expand their minds were the “hippy” movement of the late 60’s/early 70’s. They were looking for a world of peace and harmony and opposed the war in Vietnam which had dragged on through many of their childhoods. The stall in progress seemed to really kick in once President Nixon started the forever failing "war on drugs"

The Hippy movement spread throughout Western culture before they were oppressed with both religious disdain and with political brutality by the generations above them who made up the bulk of governance and were afraid of the Hippies in case they created a generation that refused to advance the war industry that had become embedded throughout the Cold war.

It’s an industry that is still in existence today in the form of neoliberalism which links corporatism to perpetual war in the Middle East. The Neoliberals portrayed the hippies as reckless and immature when actually many of them were expanding their minds beyond the short term interest of corporatism and its barbaric side effects of perpetual war. Their Neoliberal opposition didn't really take hold until the Cold War was in full flow. 2 presidents warned humanity of their growing influence in the late 50's and early 60's first with President Eisenhower and then President John F. Kennedy.

Since I had to break the law just to stop myself from dying young and come to know many other families around the world faced with the same absurd situation. I had to completely rethink my political views because I realized it was the establishment that had put us all in this situation by removing a person’s fundamental right to give the human brain what it was evolved to have whether that be with exogenous cannabinoids for homeostasis or exogenous psychedelics to explore and expand the mind.

We are born into the world without clothes, a blank canvas brain ready to be filled with memories. It is where our consciousness exists and our mind or as some believe, our soul. They are all we have that is truly ours, our bodies, our minds however they are when they come into the world. But even these fundamental basics are taken from us by the hierarchy we are ruled by.

The body is just a vessel for our minds, its simply there to burn fuel to keep the mind alive. so to many people, like me, it's a strange situation that Its illegal to explore our own minds and seen as sinful to evolve them further through psychedelics just as it is seen as sinful to be seen as we are when we are first seen in the world without a single thread of clothing or any sign of status.

I never ventured into psychedelics but the meditation and study of them were enough to give me a radically changed perspective on the world I thought I was living in. My earliest memories of medicine are that doctors and hospitals are there to make things better when you are not well. It was an uneasy realization for me that the right to health is something you have to fight for in today’s world.