This is a good translation of the title of OP: neural plasticity is always active but never nearly as much as during major life events. Psychedlics are a shortcut to that sort of plasticity.
"open mind" is a hollow phrase, because you need an open mind to take the risk in the first place.
The only up side is that reason cannot overrule the nervous system at great length, which will sooner or later go into intoxication mode, and that the immune system can handle even chronic infections to some degree.
I would argue that some of the mental activity is caused by placebo effect, because I once experienced someone pranked, told to have been slipped MDMA, trying to embrace the situation and turning irrationally exited and happy for no substantial reason. Certainly some side effects may enhance the placebo effect, like weird after taste, alcohol or just staying up late and creating a suitable atmosphere, but believe is a strong cognitive bias. Otherwise one might just feel ill or poisoned.
A lot of the first experience involves sanity checks, so, if psychedelics have an effect on the currently running processes, so to speak, the ability to judge the situation will suffer first and inhibition won't kick in, or overreact. Then anything can happen with whatever one is liable to think about. Certainly nobody will dispute that normal productivity greatly suffers on a trip. So you can't really trust the self evaluation.
There are people who have rosy anecdotes about each of the therapies you call toxic and destructive. There are also people with horror stories about LSD. You are inappropriately extrapolating your own personal experiences to everyone else.
It's ironic to say this to someone who's advocating mind expansion, but... you need to be a bit more open minded.
Not long ago I found a shop that had CBD eliquids, they gave me a sample (3 strokes). A little bit after my brain was a minuscule amount lighter, but at layers that I never really had a control over (unlike the sensation I get when meditating, I can feel some parts of my brain going off). As usual, may be placebo, but still another thing that cause that itch for a little psychoactive help to regain my previous life quality.
[1] a side effect of fubared cardiovascular system is that I had to monitor my breathing and heart a lot so I would naturally have sessions of calm slow breathing exercises.
Then, one day, I decided to try something and I felt like that fog lifted. That was about 5 years ago and things have been great ever since then.
But if you have the drive, and are willing to take a small risk, you venture into the dark web and locate one of the handful of chemists/dealers who provide the world with its supply and buy in bulk.
Or you find a friend who has already done this work.
put differently: the barriers to experimentation with psychedelics are the ones that you have constructed for yourself.
First time product, dosage, aquisition method and protocol ?
Anything to read or other things to know ?
These medicines are far more powerful than you could possibly comprehend. Once you are in it, expect to have zero control, so you need a safe, experienced environment.
Also there are services that offer legal facilitated offerings: https://psychedelicsociety.org.uk/experience-retreats
While he was no guru, he had some experience, and he was one of the few and first people that had access to real LSD-25 (he was from a hippy town in CO). At the time, I was extremely interested in being able to see the world differently. I was suicidal, and desperate to escape from this internal mental hell that I had been living with for years, and trying to escape by more destructive means.
The first experience entailed a sleep over. We each took one hit. It wasn’t that potent.
It really didn’t do much. We talked about life forever. Girlfriends. Family. Just life. Laughing. Listening to stories.
I was expecting mass hallucinations, but there was none.
Just colors. Everything had more potent color. Vivid. Almost a halo of rainbow. I had a giddiness.
But no hallucinations like I was expecting.
We walked some suburban woodlands for a bit and everything was magical and exciting.
I couldn’t sleep, and was hoping for the marshmallow dinosaurs and electric zebras to manifest, but they never did.
The whole experience changed what I thought of psychedelics. I thought it’d be a more visual experience, but it ended up being much more psychological.
8-12+ hours in total.
*
My first time on mushrooms I was in a group of best friends. My friend and I had ventured into Florida cow pastures, donned in camouflage, the days after rainfall and had picked a pound or more. The Internet was crude back in 05, but we found resources for safely identifying them.
As a group of 7, we divided evenly and consumed. Probably 5 shrooms a piece of varying size. They were not dry. We ate with brownies and milk.
It was intense. Hilarious. Colorful. At times overwhelming. Smiling. Laughing. Confusing. We walked, we talked, we looked at the moon and stars, examined frogs and flowers and grass and trees.
All in all, a lot of bonding. It was an amazing experience.
4-6 hours in total.
*
Dosage is approximately 100-150mcg per tab. If it’s older, and not well kept, potency will diminish. Liquid is harder to determine, but one drop is approx the same as one tab.
If you take 1 tab, don’t expect anything dramatic. Mostly a body trip. But depends on mindset.
If you take 2 tabs, you will have a more powerful experience. More visuals.
As you take more, the trip is more intense. With that intensity comes a lot more unpredictability.
Your mind produces all kinds of images and connections, and you can get absorbed in those manifestations, for better or worse.
*
For any trip, set aside the day.
For LSD, it takes about 30-90 minutes for the initial effects to begin.
There is a period where you begin to peak— anxiety heightens, excitement peaks, things begin to jitter and perceptions loosen. There is usually an uneasiness, a giddiness.
This state is dose dependent, but usually lasts between 2-6 hours.
After the peak, the come down and “reintegration” can last another 6 or more hours. This period the mind is no longer “peaking” with energy. It’s making sense of the new perceptions, and integrating them back into a functional whole.
There are major perception changes on a trip. Senses. Time. Space.
Things and perceptions warp, and you gain an awareness of how flimsy and unreliable our perceptions really are.
When you go to sleep, you wake up as though nothing happened, except that you have memories of this experience that resemble a powerful dream.
There are no negative side effects, other than how powerful the experience was, how deeply it affected your notion of reality.
I usually feel very refreshed, as if the world was anew. Like the cobwebs have been cleaned and the fog lifted. There is a clarity.
*
One thing I always tell others and remind myself is that the entire trip is a manifest of my mind.
It’s not outside me, it’s inside me. As a result, there is no reason to lose control.
Do not react hastily to thoughts and feelings and perceptions. Accept them. Embrace them. Reflect on them. They are you. They are apart of you.
You possess them. Do not let them possess you.
Do this, and you will never have a bad trip.
I have safely tripped more times than I can count. Well over 100, with dozens and dozens of people.
(I've always been keen to try, but have avoided so far due to an unpleasant childhood experience when administered an opiate painkiller, which resulted in nightmares with conscious flashbacks for months.)
Find a nice time: for example, leave one-two days after your week-long vacation for a trip. You’ll have a clear mind and will be well-rested, so nothing to remind of a possibly stressful job.
Trip with the person from the first paragraph. One thing that I find is way more highlighted in people who are fond of psychedelics is knowing that people change when they trip and they expect that. So should be not many questions asked.
I would say approach the setting the way you would approach your therapist: personal stuff should remain in Vegas; and it will be a better trip if you can expose yourself.
Also the most imprtant part: don’t expect to feel “better”. It’s a two-sided experience, where it may swing you towards both depressing and incredibly positive. You learn how to manage that, but one thing that psychedelics are not is an escape.
https://www.maps.org/resources/responding_to_difficult_psych...
It’s all about mindset and setting.
We could discuss what that entails, but that’s a long conversation. Good attitude, good vibes, safe setting, comfortable and familiar. In your home. In familiar nature. I’d avoid public places and people.
And it’s preferable for the first number of trips to have a safe and understanding “sitter” or “guide” there who is reliable and calm and supportive.
As you get more experienced, you can explore the bounds of set and setting, to push your mind to places for therapeutic purposes.
Psychedelics amplify whatever thoughts or surroundings you’re in. They turn up the volume, so to say, for good or ill.
The bad trips are the most therapeutic. You’re working through repressed thoughts and feelings that otherwise go unnoticed or denied or suppressed as a natural psycho response to pain.
Ridding self deception is the root of all therapy.
When that negativity comes to mind during a trip it’s often uncomfortable as hell. You work through it. You accept it. You embrace it. You see it in the right light, with the right perspective.
What you don’t do is resist thoughts or feelings or experiences. That only causes more problems.
You can’t run from yourself.
IMO MAPS are irresponsible promoters of psychedelics.
If you are on a high-dose trip, you lose much control of your thoughts. I have read that some medical experts administer high doses in the hope to avoid bad trips often encountered with low doses.
What if your unwanted thoughts and tendencies must be resisted to prevent further misery ?
Examples:
- Try to stay calm and refuse to succumb to overwhelming terror and panic as reported on this web page.
- Try to stay calm and refuse suicide as reported on this web page.
- Try to stay calm and refuse thoughts about murder as reported here: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/29599/1/a...
Do not use psychedelics to solve problems on your own. https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Set_and_setting
Let medical experts (therapists) use psychedelics as medicine as they see fit.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/the-ps...
https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personalit...
I was massively depressed and suicidal growing up (I had family problems, and two of my best friends killed them selves at 13 and 17).
I dropped out of high school.
I experimented with LSD and mushrooms around 17/18 years old.
And while I didn’t realize it then, my life massively changed for the better. Maybe I grew up. Maybe I took responsibility for my life. Or maybe... there was a synergistic effect that accompanied my psychedelic use. My religious family thinks it was all their prayer and god’s work... because it’s a miracle.
As I got older, the more I believe that it had a profound impact on my mind, and my ability to perceive the world and my sense of self differently, in an empowering way.
I now am an evangelist for psychedelic use. I share it with whomever I feel would benefit, educating them on the research, on the negative stigmas, and emphasizing how necessary it is to respect the substance and approach it with care and good intent.
I ended up attended a top 12 university. I worked hard.
Most of my friends at that university experimented with LSD. None of them are crazy. They all are doing amazing things. They’re all deep and insightful.
Psychedelics have gotten such a terrible reputation.
I believe it is immensely helpful for anxiety and depression.
I believe it needs to be adopted as a therapeutic alternative to current psychiatric therapies which are toxic and destructive and deadening by comparison. (I was on countless drugs growing up, dozens, prescribed by psychiatrists... they did nothing. Just made me more dead inside.)
I also believe psychedelics open the mind in ways that only radical life experiences can.
I think this mind expansion can be useful for learning, creating, and perceiving new ways of looking at the world.