Psychonaut Portrait of Kilindi Lyi by Rob Marsh

Kilindi Iyi and the Frontier of Supra-Threshold Dosing

I stumbled across a forty minute talk today filmed at Breaking Convention, a multidisciplinary gathering based around discussion of psychedelic consciousness, featuring a martial artist, mycologist and global traveler by the name of Kilindi Iyi.

The title of the talk, which I’ve included below, is High-Dose Mushrooms Beyond The Threshold, and it’s a succinct summary of the material presented.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with Terence McKenna waxing lyrical about the “heroic” dose of five and a half dried grams taken in silent darkness. Iyi takes this heroism to staggering heights, upping the dosage to twenty five dried, yes, you heard right, grams.

The first question that popped into my skull upon hearing this was, “What on earth would an experience of that magnitude be like? What qualities could it possibly exhibit?” 

In the past I’ve taken doses upwards of five grams, but never anything even closing on double digits. The highest dosage I was brave enough to risk was a tidy five and a half dried grams run through a lemon tek process, and needless to say the experience was overwhelming at the best of times.

Iyi describes these high ranges using a similar memetic lexicon as McKenna, describing the terrain as hyperspace and populating it with entities. Where McKenna describes only the tykes, bejewelled self-dribbling basketballs, Iyi speaks of spaces containing forms of the gods of ancient religions, the Egyptian pantheon, entities with motives less than pure such as insectoid mantises that purportedly feed on energy.

He sees his role as somewhat of an intrepid but uninvested observer, punting the boat of consciousness further and further out into the psychedelic lake to see exactly what manner of denizens lurk beneath its azure waters.

At this point your head is probably spinning, and more so if you’ve sat down to watch his speech. Mine certainly was. What to make of this? How to we even begin to approach these claims without simply rationalising them or explaining them away as the product of delusional cognition?

The very nature of these experiences precludes a scientific investigation at our current level of sophistication. What could we use from the toolbox of science to verify the claim that Yahweh is an extant being inhabiting a higher dimensional manifold? Neuroscience seems a viable option, but we’re only dipping toes in on that front and it seems to me that it’ll be decades before we can correlate neuronal activity to visionary consciousness with any degree of accuracy and/or complexity.

On the other hand it seems premature to accept this mans ideas on face value, being as extraordinarily bizarre as they are. They may be simply the product of irrationality, or poor thinking.

It seems the only way to determine the veracity of Kilindi’s experiences is to share them, and a more daunting prospect we may be hard pressed to find. Are any of us ready to push the boat out so far without an anchor? Are these spaces psychologically safe, and for that matter, what do we mean by “safe”?

As it stands, it seems that Kilindi’s ideas are likely only profoundly meaningful to the man himself. We are forced to mediate his experience through the symbolic veil of language, and in so doing we are surely missing countless aspects and facets of his meaning through this process of condensation.

That said, the notion of these far out spaces is fascinating. What insight into the nature of cosmos could we glean from such voyaging? What insights about our own nervous system, the structure and composition of thought and cognition may become apparent to us with a more concerted effort in exploration?

As psychedelics become more commonplace in the scientific discourse, as their medical uses become accepted and begin to sink into the zeitgeist, it’s likely that projects such as Iyi’s Marco Polo-esque escapades into the far reaches of consciousness will become a possibility, and a safe one at that, for more and more human beings.

I for one look forward to it.

Kilindi Iyi’s lecture can be viewed at the link below:

For more information regarding Iyi and his habits, shoot on over to the Facebook page,

- Rob Marsh