Magic Mushrooms and Martial Arts: A History

A look at the history of martial arts and magic mushrooms through the eyes of Kilindi Iyi, the world’s most renowned expert on the matter. You will be introduced to the life’s work of Kilindi Iyi, his connection to martial arts and psychedelics as well as the already existing connection between martial arts and psychedelics.

Traditional martial arts practice training of both body and the mind. Being in touch with the universe on a spiritual level as well as having access to the unharnessed energy of the universe are just some of the things traditional martial arts teachings share with the experiences people have on psychedelics. For most, violence of the physical manifestation of martial arts is what separates the two, but not for Kilindi Iyi.

Kilindi Iyi is an African American martial artist and a psychedelics researcher. He is the lead instructor and a technical adviser of the Tamerrian Martial Art Institute and a frequent speaker at psychedelic conferences. He has breached the barrier between psychedelics and martial arts and is now teaching the world about it.

According to Kilindi Iyi, his involvement into psychedelics started as a quest for deeper understanding of martial arts and its origins. Apparently, all martial arts have their power plants - ritual psychedelic plants used to attain greater prowess in the art, both physical and psychological - and Kilindi Iyi set himself on a journey of discovery.

Despite being faced with a lack of written evidence and knowledge, on his path, Kilindi Iyi managed to discover many formulas to secret power potions held by African martial arts masters, or magicians as some would name them. What he found is that most of them had a common ingredient - the magic mushroom or psilocybe semilanceata. In fact, Kilindi Iyi claims the oldest evidence of human mushroom use is in Africa, along with other compounds that are widespread in the various healing rituals, age initiations, dealings with apprentices and use by particular people of power; A very old and developed system still in use today.

THE HEROIC DOSE

In his work with the magic mushroom, Kilindi Iyi has reached a respectable dose of 30 or more grams. Amongst the psychedelic community, such dose is known as the heroic dose; it is not enough to cause physical overdose - it is virtually impossible to overdose on magic mushrooms - but it takes a skilled and trained psychedelics user to reach it and withstand the mental hardships it brings. The difficulties such heroic trips can put on a user are best described by Kilindi Iyi himself:

“One of the most challenging areas is the realization of the aloneness. The realization of the darkness, no light. The realization that those are constructs of the consciousness. Once you lose the primal consciousness and move into that primal darkness that's so dark it has no black to it. That's one of the hardest things.”

THE MARTIAL KNOWLEDGE

What such doses have allowed him is - in his own words - reach various psychedelic realms and hyperspaces. The knowledge he gets from his trips is mostly martial, meaning it is in some way connected to martial arts. This connection is not strange as most psychedelic users get access to the knowledge they have the most interest in; it is only natural that Kilindi Iyi’s interest and love towards martial arts led him to the exact realms he needed to learn about them. As the dosed increased so did the possibilities. Increases in the doses meant reaching new unseen realms; each realm featured its own reality and knowledge.

Unlike some psychedelic explorers, Kilindi Iyi does not advocate an idea of a peaceful and loving universe. He admits those sensations make a part of it, but also claims to have seen and experienced the negative sides too.

His trips have allowed Kilindi Iyi to observe and learn about the mysterious and magical forms of martial arts. The forms he claims possible are those of mythical martial artists like Hercules or characters in the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”.

While most will be content with the vision and knowledge, some dispute Kilindi Iyi’s work due to his inability to actually reproduce it. His answer is simple:

“What I'm working on, I can't physically put it on anybody but I've had my chances in real-life real-time I would have thought impossible that I could've done, that in my belief, in my understanding, that came out of the entheogenic training that served me in the physical realms. Be it guns or knives or police abuse or whatever way you like to look at it, it served me in the modern world.”

FINAL WORDS

If you find Kilindi Iyi’s perspective on martial arts and psychedelics interesting, you can find his lectures on YouTube. He is also working on his book “Towards an Organic Singularity”.

Some advice to all those venturing into the realm of psychedelics - not only martial artists - is to be careful how you approach psychedelics, take your time, and know what you are looking for. To end this post, I find it best to quote the man so many psychedelic explorers find inspiration in - Terence McKenna.

“My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out onto the dark ocean of mind, and let our nets down into that sea.

What you’re after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we’re looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, "Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril?”, and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle-sized ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they’re incomprehensible. Middle-size ideas we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have a fish dinner.

Every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It’s not for your elucidation, it’s not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea because our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

To whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that, after all, is what it’s really all about.”