”Experimenting with psychedelics” is really, really far from that reality.
I do hope to live in a world someday where informed consent is sacrosanct and legally protected; and people don't feel the need to split hairs like this.
"Unclean nastiness"? And wriggling around on the floor on a big dose of LSD for 12 hours is casual clean fun? Getting psychosis from shrooms is not a big of a deal as getting hooked on heroin?
Romanticizing psychedelics is a good starting point for abuse.
Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to settle addictive pressure (e.g. popping one’s codeine pills for the day)
Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to gain psychological or insight or have spiritual experience (e.g. taking psilocybin with an appropriate setting)
While the lines can be blurry, these are distinct use cases each with their own risks and considerations so they’re worth separating out.
For example, weed can be used for all five of those purposes. But what's the value you see in separating them?
My point was in response to the parent's 'is it so much different really' question - when you insist that all varieties of reasons that people might be ingesting psychoactive substances stay under the same banner it's a fair bit harder to have a useful conversation about it.
Yes.
Few years back I had my series of experiments with LSD & psilocybin. No enlightment was obtained, but one of the major realizations was that some serious psychotherapy is needed to understand and fix my warped self-image and the way of living originating from it. Been dissecting myself in a psychodynamic setting now, feel better.
I also often find myself using biblical terms in describing my actions and feelings. Sin, hell, heaven. Maybe this is some integration, maybe I watched too much Jordan Peterson videos in my dark days, heh.
One of the major takeaways is this near mystical feeling of awe about life. Having the education to understand things from the most fundamental building blocks just increases this. Protons and electrons, balls and springs, entropy maximization, phase spaces. Wiggling and docking macromolecules, interacting in the realm of low Reynolds number. Machinery using fundamental particles and photons, juggling photons, protons, and electrons to power the infinitely seeming finite complex machinery, molded by evolution. Freaking emergent properties arising from this - life, consciousness. And we have the capabilities to understand and actually fix some fundamental problems with this knowledge - eg. getting cryo-EM structures of covid spike proteins, docking millions of molecules through the computational methods created by the collaborative effort of our advanced cognitions.
This stuff was always cool, but now I look it like the most beautiful work of art, and feel the upmost priviledge to have the ability to pay my bills thinking about these things.
THC alone makes me all spiritual feeling, and often in a good way. I think psychedelics would just take me to a scary spiritual place, not a euphoric one.
The churches can be difficult to find as well, at least in the US: It isn't unheard of for folks to travel an hour or so to their church of choice.
If you can't get to that, a gnostic mass will probably give a similar experience. It is, of course, Much more occult-theme religion, but it will keep some of the charm (possibly mixed with a bit of catholocism)
Any brief, reflective, perspective-shifting phrase is adequate -- there's no need to invoke any particular mythology.
Some phrases are more useful than others. Some have negative effects.
Almost like they could be utilized in a way to provide a religious fervor for your adherents.
You think? Jeebus! Terrance McKenna would call 10mg of psilocybin a heroic dose. Some of the most intense visuals I have ever seen were on 10mg of psilocybin.
So if close relative means that it requires 2.5x more, then okay, but if they are anywhere near 1:1, then that was a freaking monster dose.
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/4-AcO-DMT
In writing this message, I went back to my notes and see that I had taken 20mg, not 25mg, that first time.
I abbreviated my history of experiments in my original message, but I had actually had first tried a different tryptamine in a series of ramped experiments a few weeks apart. It was 4-aco-det, aka ethacetin or ethylacybin. 4mg, then 10mg, then 18mg, then 30mg. I chose that one because my reading indicated it was less intense than 4-aco-dmt. All were underwhelming, with little body load, no open eye visuals, and mild, gossamer closed eyed visuals.
When I switched to 4-aco-dmt I should have ramped as well, but the previous experiments led me to believe that I was a low responder to tryptamines, so I started at 20mg. That is when I learned my lesson to not make assumptions: always ramp with a new substance from a very low dose.
There's not anything quite like it (and it's cognitively mild), either phenethylamine or tryptamine.
Potency isn't quite as much as crystalline psilocybin (4-HO-DMT).
Didn't it also confirm that what you perceive is not reality, but a model of reality?
It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.
I think it's a mistake to think we have it all figured out just because we've had an experience that either reinforces or contradicts our per-conceived notions of what constitutes reality.
The actual chemical is different and the way you take it (orally, by nealing in front of a shaman and drinking about a shot glass of it) has an affect on the duration and intensity (like a lot of drugs).
You can smoke dmt purified or a yagi mix and have different more intense experiences but that might only be 30 minutes.
As for integrating your thoughts, I can definitely put that down to the chemical. It's called "abuelo" by the native people because it's like your grandfather giving you advice. Mushrooms are known as the "ninos" because they're a lower level in comparison.
Understanding the sacredity of plants and developing a respect for native medicine has been a great part of my experience in South America.
Have yet to have anyone indigenous try and sell me on this
There are also the "passing through want to try it" attendees.
However, given the power of this substance to have a positive effect on someone's life, I'm not going to build walls around it. Also, it's a very challenging experience and anyone that goes through it deserves a bit of respect.
It's said that some of these drugs can make one more social, more emotional, which imo is a better existence than other paradigms.
Your experiment is very personal to your own mindset, and your focus on materialism likely influenced the outcomes.
Instead of doing your own controlled experiments, you should try doing ayahuasca, peyote or shrooms in their natural setting, with local people leading the way.
I bet you’ll have a completely different experience.
It is still better than the lowest for the study, the sample size of one: "Well this is what I experienced". Yet here I go.
I have always been a materialist, and I've also never done drugs (I'm in my 50s). A few years back I bought some lysergamides and tryptamines online, and over the course of two years did between 20 and 30 experiments, though never of high doses (at most, 200 ug LSD). I found the LSD to be quite interesting, but not the least bit spiritual.
The first time I did 4-aco-dmt (aka psilacetin), a very close relative to psilocybin, was a different story. It was a 25mg-ish dose, taken orally. It was far more intense, and dreamy, and soporific than LSD (for me), and it gave me a glimpse of what something I was hoping to experience: spirituality. It was unfortunately fleeting -- I was lost in "the light" but then became aware that I was actually lying in a bed, and without thinking, opened my eyes for a moment to confirm. I closed my eyes but that moment in the light was gone for good.
I've tried a few more times, but it has mostly been uncomfortable and confusing way to spend a couple hours.
Anyway, I came away from those experiments even more of a materialist than I was before. If a hundred micrograms or a few milligrams of small molecule can so disrupt one's mind, if it can profoundly change your perceptions, if it can induce a feeling of being in a divine presence, it confirmed to me that the brain is all just chemistry.