In that case, I would suggest working a bit on that first. Meditation can help, but "terrified" sounds strong enough that trying out therapy if available may be worthwhile.

Regarding substances, I found mushrooms to be easier than LSD, with a kind of warmth that softens the psychedelic experience (without taking anything away from it). The effects also don't last as long. A non-psychedelic which can allow one to face difficult emotions is MDMA. In some countries you can find MDMA based therapy. This could prepare someone to become more open to what psychedelics have to offer. (Edit: Also, all of these substances have effects that are not comparable to alcohol at all. Trying to understand the effects of psychedelics/empathogens based on experiences with alcohol is a category error.)

Based on my limited experience, I would roughly categorize the relation of these substances to the idea of control like this:

LSD: you might feel like there's some control, but you're actually the playball of the substance

Mushrooms: the substance draws you in some direction, and it's best to just lean into it, but it'll support you in doing so

MDMA: there's no need for control, things are okay the way they are

> having zero belief in the mysticism

That depends on what exactly this means.

Have some knowledge of "mysticism" or some eastern worldviews / philosophy, without taking it too seriously, would be a good basis IMO.

Actively rejecting any ideas related to mysticism while clinging tightly to a specific world view / metaphysics (and related beliefs like "I can only allow something if I understand / can explain it") may lead someone to have a really bad time on psychedelics.

---

Note that this isn't advice about whether to consume anything or what to consume, and experiences can vary widely between individuals, settings, dosages etc. (For both assumptions above, is possible to construct higly positive outcomes, where the substance helped overcome problems, opens one up, etc. and negative ones, horror trip, lasting trauma from the trip, ...) Having someone experienced present when doing something like this for the first time is highly recommended.

2. i never have and probably never will be a spiritual person. doesn't lessen the enjoyment or impact. i literally just think of it as a "reset button" - it makes you forget some previous anxieties, reframe others, let go of stuff that's dragging you down. it's not therapy but sometimes just shaking things up a bit gives you enough of a new perspective to really benefit you. or... you know, sometimes you just watch tv with your roommates for 3 hours. whatever.

Do you have good reason for this fear, like fantasies of hurting yourself or others? If so, yeah, you probably shouldn't ingest substances that can lower your inhibitions.

But I do know people which I would categorise as really terrified of loosing control.

Maybe “letting loose” was the wrong expression here, I meant “loosing control” rather.

For example, the average person will feel altered mood states and mild visual hallucinations (patterns on surfaces, think very detailed mandalas or fractals), in the 50-75μg range of LSD. They will not see pink elephants, they will not try to call their dog on the phone, they will not strip naked, they will not make growling sounds at trees.

Now, I do voluntary work in drug education, and there’s one important thing to say, it’s that everyone’s different, and it’s fine not to do psychedelics, or any other substance.

There are things I can’t control even when sober, that’s clear, but I’m used to it. Giving up the control over things I usually control is a different thing (for me).

Good, belief has nothing to do with mysticism. It's about experiencing the ineffable, something beyond yourself, which is often terrifying.

When I wake up the next day after taking it too far I'm riddled with anxiety and usually feeling sick, the whole day and maybe even the next day is ruined. And yes of course it's my responsibility to moderate my intake, it's just hard for me. The solution I've come up with is I try to never have more than 4-6 drinks in an evening.

I have experienced both myself and others saying and doing things while drunk that we never would have done or said sober. I have experienced myself and others being seriously injured solely due to alcohol.

There are other drugs that scare me the same way, particularly pills like benzos and such but I have never had a bad time with MDMA or LSD. It's much more of a "I love you man", "Everything is awesome" vibe. At least at the doses I use I'm completely lucid and in control, I'm just also having an amazing time.

Alcohol just makes me forget stuff, LSD and MDMA have given me some of the best memories of my life. I can't remember the last time I drank alcohol and woke up the next day thinking "last night was awesome". I've definitely had some good times with alcohol but the amount of bad times completely dwarfs them.

And again maybe this is all on me, maybe I just can't handle alcohol. But I'm definitely not alone.

If it wasn't for the social stigma and the fact that I generally don't want to associate with the people who supply drugs, I'd never drink alcohol again. I'd smoke weed and for special nights like festivals etc I'd use MDMA and maybe LSD.

The main thing to keep in mind if you want to try LSD is it lasts a long time. 8-12 hours, there is no off switch. Start with low doses, do half a tab or even a quarter tab. You don't need much, it's really powerful. A small dose will completely change your state of mind. If you like it, do more next time. Personally I don't really experience hallucinations, I'm completely aware, present and in control. Maybe patterns like wallpaper and leaves will seem to move and stuff like that, but aside from the dilated pupils you can't really tell I'm high. To me it's like seeing the world with new eyes, mundane things you pass by every day are suddenly interesting. Look at that beautiful tree. Look at your friends and loved ones, they're amazing. It makes me think differently, see things from a different perspective and be thankful for the things I take for granted in my daily life. It's awesome, I've done it maybe 20 times and I hope I get to experience it many more times. Just wish I could get it without buying from criminals.

Just to offer a counterpoint:

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

The more I experience, the more I think maybe that's a pretty good point, too.

If you choose to fart around, whatever that means, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since there's no salvation, farts are also meaningless, and at the same time totally meaningful given the circumstances.

A nihilist would say fart or don't fart it's all pointless.

That's begging the question. I'd argue that all meaning is in how we fart around.

If you don’t know what it is and don’t know what you want, you either fart around or resign.

For what I know, my "existence" could be an infinitely short moment, or even an entirely static endless "moment", or any of an infinite variety of other options.

So even most of existence is only assumption. It's a set of assumptions that makes sense to just accept because we have no way of proving otherwise, but they are assumptions, not "universal truths".

To me psychedelic experiences break through the inputs, they become fuzzy and integrate in ways they aren't supposed to in normal functioning, it's why we feel a different sense of connection to anything else, filtering in different ways inputs from our senses and experiences, including the sense of one's self dissolving.

So why do you perceive yourself, and if you aren't you, then who are you? These sort of thoughts eliminated any notion of nihilism from me and gradually pushed me towards a simulation hypothesis. Of course that's just religion for an agnostic, because it doesn't even answer anything - if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.

The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that. For instance what if you think the matter for a big bang was quantum mechanically poofed into existence then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics, the void of which emerged, or so on endlessly. You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.

It may be absurd, but we nevertheless can not rule it out, and so it means that our ability to know anything about existence for certain is limited to almost nothing.

Note that I'm not saying I believe this to be the case. What I'm saying is that I see looking for "universal truths" to be entirely futile, because we can't possibly know much of substance with certainty.

Instead we have to accept that unless someone "pierces a veil" and shows us that there's a reality past the one we observe, we are limited to talking about what is observable and measurable within our observable reality, knowing that we are dealing with assumptions and probabilities, not universal truths.

> I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions.

This seems fundamentally at odds with saying you were gradually pushed towards a simulation hypothesis...

> if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started.

A simulation hypothesis does not need to imply that there's anything to wake up from for anyone. Indeed, even if you were to wake up, by confirming that simulation is possible, this would seem to strongly suggest that you should consider the probability that the world you wake up in is simulated to be extremely high.

> The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that.

It may feel unsatisfactory to you. It doesn't to me. I accept that whenever we push the horizon of knowledge, we're likely to discover more things that we don't know, and for the set of things we know we can't know to expand as well.

> You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist.

You don't have to do anything. You can accept that we don't know.

As for natural explanations - what I am saying is that the natural explanations for 'why' seem, currently, to be far weaker than other explanations. And in fact the natural explanations rely on various ad-hoc constructions (like inflation theory) that are completely unnatural. A simulation hypothesis is, to me, the only hypothesis that doesn't seem to have glaring holes in it and/or rely on defacto magic.

And obviously I understand that magic of one millennia is the mundane tech of another. But we do not live in that other era, and there's no guarantee that such an understanding will ever come to pass. Assuming otherwise requires having faith that such discoveries will come to pass in the future, and essentially assuming your own conclusion, instead of looking at the evidence as available. And that's why I referred to natural explanations as religion for an atheist.

They are not trying to explain "why", but to iterate toward an approximation of "how" that explains more and more, knowing it will always be incomplete. If someone looks to natural explanations as an answer to "why", then, sure, that is religion.

But to me, simulation or not is orthogonal to the "how". The "how", if we are within a simulation would still be down to identifying which "how" fits the available in-simulation information.

It's irrelevant that this wouldn't be "real" because within our reality, absent someone "piercing the veil" we can only relate to that reality, be it real or simulated.

Why as in "what set of circumstances led to your existence" or why as in "what purpose did a creator have to want to create you"? Two different people can hear why, and there are two different (though possibly overlapping) questions. Even if there were a creator, only the first question is interesting.

You're all overthinking it though. If you want more people like you to exist in the future, if the thought of our extinction disturbs you, then there are some basic rules to live by or you risk that ending. Some of these rules are as much about attitude as they are about behavior, and nihilism is extraordinarily maladaptive.

>then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics,

Even if we substitute in non-biased language (perhaps "manifestation" instead of "creation"), this question assumes very much.

For example, consider Cogito, ergo sum. As Latin has no continues verb time, that phrase may mean I exist because I think. Or I am existing because I am thinking . The latter implies that when one stops thinking the existence stops, the opposite of the former. Philosophers still debates what exactly Descartes meant.

Or consider the notion of time flow. In 1908 John MacTaggart published a paper arguing that the feeling of time flow is unreal. Again, there are heavy debates about the validly of his arguments without any conclusion with quite a lot of philosophers accepting the argument and even arguing that the time flow is an illusion.

All of these trite axioms nihilists use immediately refute themselves if they are true. Lol

> Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

I know some folks in the HN audience will not like this example, but Elon Musk is one.

An older cannonical example is Timothy Leary.

No names are coming to mind, but I feel like there have been plenty of psychedelic informed cults, with cult leader narcissists who continue to abuse people despite experiencing psychedelics.

It may open some doors and cause you to consider more angles, and for many people it helps them with empathy and connectedness, but in another sense it's amplifying what you've already got. A "bad" input can get amplified too.

Manson would dose himself and his followers to, IMO, lower inhibitions and make them more receptive to his ideas.

Isn't he also a ketamine junkie? Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, although some call it psychedelic, it's not exactly the same thing.

In addition to other, unrelated drugs.

Would it make a difference if it was a 70 year old who is still open minded and curious about life, the universe, and everything? (given that I'd guess that any 70+ year old willing to do LSD is likely to be as per this description).

Legitimately interested in your answer / reasoning (mainly because my plan was to experience a number of different drugs once the rest of my life, that could have been put at risk by drugs, is kinda setup and done well enough).

Some drugs increase heart rate dramatically - the older you are the more susceptible to atherosclerosis or other circulatory diseases. There’s more medical risk the older you are for sure. However, you may find you only need a little bit. Some drugs are funny. Some work on first try, other takes a couple tries before your brain understands the chemical.

If you're a US male, average life expectancy ~76 years, then hurting/killing yourself in your 20s you lose ~50 years of life. Hurting/killing yourself in your 70s, you lose an order of magnitude less.

I hope to remember this in my 70s! Seeing most people don't, so not having particularly high hopes...

Having a mini stroke at 26 like I did, I was able to bounce back. Having a mini stroke at 81 like my father did, resulted in his death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiU96IEr0jU

A better delivery would have been: “Don’t settle down with one woman until you find the woman you can’t live without. Until then, keep searching. While you’re out there, remember to enjoy yourself and life as you’ll never be as young as you are today.”

This isn't to discount your experience but rather a general warning: all drugs aren't for everyone. It's easy to take away from these threads that psychedelics are universally positive and that negative trips are generally the result of misuse.

Which isn't true. Before going into this doing some deep introspection about yourself and your abilities is really important. Use these drugs with extreme caution.

I think many pro-psychedelic and pro-drug people in general underestimate how much these drugs vary with people. I have a friend who will make a gram of weed into cannabutter and eat the whole thing in 1 sitting, getting about 200mg of THC at once, and not have any major problems. He was a big proponent of "there's no such thing as too much" until he saw another friend of ours have an incredibly intense panic attack on 10mg of THC. My wife has intense anxiety on as little as 2.5mg of THC, regardless of CBD and CBG levels (whether via gummies or straight plant matter); no dose can be thereputic for her.

Based on the number of people I know who have experimented with these drugs, I think there's a smokescreen effect where people who have bad experiences don't talk about it nearly as much as people who have good experiences, so it seems significantly less risky than it is. Of the 10 or so people I know personally who had a psychedelic experience, about a third of them have had bad ones. They just don't really talk about it and never want to try it again. I wouldn't say that most people should try psychedelics at least once unless I knew what the actual numbers were, otherwise I'm pushing many people into having a horrible nightmare for hours on end.

Maybe I'll go back to normal eventually, or maybe I had a latent anxiety disorder that was triggered by the mushrooms and I'll just never be able to enjoy weed again. I don't know. My friends didn't have experiences as bad as mine, but they did have a bad time. Most of my friends love psychadelics, and I'd never take them away from them, but before we all tried them, they were talking the same way, and it's what made me excited to try them. I wasn't expecting it to do to me what it did.

Had one once. It was not a pleasure at all. Best I can say is that it was interesting and that I did 'experience' interesting stuff. But that has no profound effect on me, since I consider it, like a dream, to have no basis in reality.

Generic statements like this are dangerous since different people may respond VERY differently to the same substance. This can depend on long term traits like personality or short term like the current state of mind. People reading such statements might think there's no way it can go wrong. If it isn't a profound experience, they might also think there's something wrong with them, which isn't the case.

But then he noticed that the results really depend on who is taking it and what their world view is. If you do not have any inclination towards that mystic space, you will not get the ego death. It is as Eckhart Tolle said "just your senses turned up to 11", that is if there is nothing else you can get out of it.

As Douglas Rushkoff said "If you give tech bros a hit of psychedelics, all you get is tech bros on psychedelics." There is no higher sense achieved.

In any case, this is why I think philosophy is the required work to be done so that we can invite spiritualism and mysticism into our lives and potentially experience them with these reality altering drugs.

This is only true at the physical level. At another level, the only thing that “exists” is a mind. If all you have is a bunch of rocks floating through space with nothing to perceive it, the universe is indistinguishable from emptiness. Experience lives at the intersection of instantiated reality and thought / perception. You need both.

You can also imagine travelling along the axis of an idea or an archetype through time and space. For example, the idea of lovers or warriors or something. Each instantiation of that idea in someone exists along that axis. The idea can only come into being inside a physical reality or simulation. But the idea itself is eternal. The idea of the number 1 doesn’t “need” the universe.

Ideas aren’t made out of atoms.

Ideas are mental concepts, thoughts, or notions that exist in the mind.

As far as we know, there’s no evidence of mind-independent ideas. We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without minds.

> We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without minds.

Its symmetric. We can also only access the physical world through our minds too. We have no way to verify it exists without a mind. Actually we have no way to verify it exists at all in the form we perceive it - since it might just be a big simulation.

In that sense, I have more direct evidence of my ideas than I do the world, since I can perceive ideas directly. (I say "my ideas" not "our ideas" because I can't tell as easily if you exist.)

If you see a large enough, dangerous-looking enough animal in person and up close, you will respond physically without a single thought or idea. If you didn't, evolutionarily you wouldn’t exist.

This is because you are parallel systems. Ideas are not primary experience.

The physical responses that could save your life are pre-mind, and testably extant within you.

> I have more direct evidence of my ideas than I do the world, since I can perceive ideas directly.

Also, and perhaps to be considered separately, you have no evidence that your ideas are directly perceived, only that they are qualitatively different from what you have been educated to second-order understand as sensory input.

> The physical responses that could save your life are pre-mind, and testably extant within you.

Yes you’re right. There’s a mountain of things that we do that we don’t have conscious control over. There’s multiple ways to think about that.

First is that we simply aren’t masters of every corner of our minds and bodies. But so what? Nothing I said requires us to have full control or full knowledge of ourselves. The existence of reflexes doesn’t directly counter any of my claims.

Another way to think about it is by changing the definition of self / mind to only include the things in our direct perception and control. After all, the boundary of self and world is incredibly fuzzy at the best of times. Are your fingernails “you”? If I accidentally touch something hot with my hand, “I” don’t choose to flinch my hand back. I could consider that reaction part of the external world, not part of me. Interestingly that definition implies self mastery makes “you” bigger. When children stop having tantrums, they bring their emotions under control of their mind. In the process, the part that is them gets bigger to encompass their newfound control.

My physical reaction to tigers also in no way disproves the simulation hypothesis. None of us can directly perceive a tiger.

> you have no evidence that your ideas are directly perceived

Interesting! What do you think we do have evidence of directly perceiving? Surely not a tiger.

I perceive thoughts. I don’t perceive my sensory data - but I do perceive my interpretation of my sensory data. (I don’t see pixels or sound samples. I see blue chair, door, ... I hear dog barking (low pitch), I feel headache feeling, etc). I think that’s good evidence that a pattern of “chair” and “dog” exists in my mind. And I can think about the number 4. When I do that, something happens in my mind. I don’t think I’m perceiving “four” with my sensory system. But the thought has to exist somewhere, right?

This is a big conclusion to state with no justification and no definitions.

You seem to equate simulation hypothesis with solipsism. Are you actually equating these?

> I perceive thoughts. I don’t perceive my sensory data — but I do perceive my interpretation of my sensory data. (I don’t see pixels or sound samples…

You are missing the fact that in your view all of that sensory information, and all of what you learned about how it works, is simulation. You cannot rely on the fact that pixels are something you have observed to tell you that pixels should be your fundamental light sensory units.

It seems also to be mistaken reasoning that a simulation should emerge from present-era computing and electronic sensing principles.

> And I can think about the number 4. When I do that, something happens in my mind. I don’t think I am perceiving “four” with my sensory system. But the thought has to exist somewhere, right?

Yes, but think about how you got there. You thought about 4. How is that critically experientially different from looking at the door handle. Or listening to the rain.

To answer your question, without having considered the answer much: I think the only things I actually do are perhaps observe, explore and exercise volition.

Their instantiations are based on either some physical hardwiring (instincts) or cultivated though observations. If an idea has the appearance of being eternal, it's because either there's a process in place for that physical structure to be replicated though time, or because new minds are making essentially the same observations.

I suspect even some of the most "eternal" of ideas are less so than you might think. If we were capable of communicating with a human from 100,000 years ago, in detail, how many identical ideas would we share? I think it would be very few, given that many people's ideas already differ subtlety even when they live in similar environments.

Obviously humans perceive 2-ness. And if you crushed all our minds to dust, nobody would remember 2. But would that really destroy the number? If an alien civilisation in another universe counted things, I think it might be the very same number 2 that they use to count.

Numbers show up in a lot of different cultures. If we all independently reinvented / rediscovered the same thing, that’s interesting - don’t you think?

It's not hard to see why the same useful inventions emerged in similar environments.

And again, the physical cannot be perceived except through a mind of some kind. To play devils advocate, we can imagine the universe existing without a mind to observe it - but it’s just that - an imagination.

This is an amazing line. I must admit: the first time I tried LSD I had some code open on my laptop. Before the trip I was curious what programming on LSD would be like, so at some point dutifully I sat down in front of my editor. I was immediately utterly transfixed by the colours of the text cursor as it pulsed. Then I lost myself watching hover states as I moved the mouse around. Needless to say, I didn’t get any programming done.

I remember thinking how strange and hilarious it was that, while sober, I care at all about programming. It all seemed so hollow.

A lot more happened on the trip - the whole thing was incredibly profound and insightful. But all these years later, I still have a crystal clear image of that pulsing cursor etched in my memory.

And I also had my laptop close by to maybe take notes, but the screen was really stressfull.

Watching wild nature in the sun was much more enjoyable.

One time I played CSGO on acid, my brain might be exaggerating the memory but I swear I played like a master. Maybe I just had easy games but it really felt like I was playing much better than usual and I was dominating.

Also played satisfactory once, though with that I just ended up painting my factory in neon colors and stuff like that. It looked pretty cool though, I kept the color theme I made.

Ram Das said lsd didn’t do anything to him (though I find that an amazing claim). I think one of the Indian gurus said the same thing. I’m not sure if I believe them though.

It's not every trip but some of them really feel extremely profound and inspire me to change my life for the better.

One of the first psychedelics I tried was psilocybin mushrooms, made tea and I think we made it quite strong. I must have been around 17-18 or so, and what I remember most clearly isn't the crazy visuals, it's what came after. After the peak when I started coming back to reality I experienced this mental clarity where I felt like I saw my life from an outside perspective and I was ashamed of who I was. My parents didn't want me experimenting with drugs so I distanced myself from them and we always argued, had a really bad relationship. My two younger brothers were just annoyances to me, I just wanted them to leave me alone. But during this trip I thought back to when I was their age, chilling on the couch with our dad watching nature documentaries and stuff, and I just felt so incredibly bad about the brother I was to them.

Before that day I was on a pretty bad path, I was doing a bit more than experimenting with some pretty serious substances and i really think that trip changed my life. I turned things around, it was a bumpy road and it took some time but after that trip I started trying to do better and it worked. 15 years later I'm pretty proud of the person I am and I don't think I would be where I am today if not for that mushroom trip.

A lot of people make psychedelics seem like it's some kind of amusement park ride or just some druggie fun time, ooh pink elephants and blah blah. To me it's not about that at all. It's about the profound ways they can reveal things about yourself that you're too blind to see.

I am as agnostic-atheist as they come and would go as far as to say I find mysticism offensive to good sense. But I've experienced the ego death parts of LSD, and consider I have come to know myself more through it. I don't think it reveals some fundamental truth outside myself so much as being simply a phenomenon of the action of psychedelics on my brain.

Frankly I think this idea that you have to be studied in philosophy or open to mystic woo-y nonsense to fully appreciate or even fully experience psychedelics is hilarious and self-aggrandising.

How come?

The mystics of all the religions are the most approachable to agnostic me. Mysticism to me means mainly, the universe as its whole is a great mysterium and those who claim "it is exactly like this and this, because this holy book says so!" are rather the aggressive fools to me. So genuinly curious, what do you perceive as aggressive from mysticim?

Mysticism usually seems to me to imply a poor grasp on reality and can be accompanied by all sorts of baseless claims to knowledge and (often naturalistic) fallacies. It often goes hand in hand with silly beliefs about crystals, alt-med and all sorts of other crap.

"We don't know" is fine. "We don't know, therefore these specific lines of bullshit" less so.

But I didn't post the above to say that my views on mysticism are correct or even to provoke a discussion about it. I posted it to provide a counterpoint to the bizarre notion that one must be into mysticism to experience aspects of the psychedelic experience.

We may interpret the experiences very differently, of course, but the claim that part of it is closed to those who don't subscribe to witter about "the goddess" is ironically very egotistic.

We know what we can observe. We know about gravity and astronomy and subatomic particles and how they interact etc, we know a lot of stuff. There's also a lot of stuff we don't know, and as far as I'm concerned we should try to figure those things out but until such time as we think we have figured them out we should leave them alone. The way to even attempt to know things is science, and if you can't use science to prove or at least support something then you're almost certainly wrong.

To me it's that simple. I don't believe in things, I either know or I don't care. Was the big bang just a spontaneous event that happened for no reason? Did some sentient being trigger it? I don't know, I can't know, there's nothing more to talk or think about. I do not respect people who pretend to know because i know they can't know. And the reason I know they can't know is because the people who believe in this type of crap typically know less about any given scientific topic than I do, which isn't a particularly high bar. If you don't even bother to learn the things we know then I don't know why you're speculating about stuff we'll probably never know.

Also none of this crap even makes any sense. The bible has more plot holes than a sieve. It doesn't explain anything, it just defers to "god works in mysterious ways". Not to mention that the god described in the bible seems like an absolute tit. Killing and torturing people for nothing, even killing a man's family and ruining his life just to win a bet. The people who believe in this crap are either indoctrinated from a young age, otherwise forced into it, or just plain stupid. I can't rationalize it any other way. They tried to indoctrinate me and it almost kind of worked in my mid teens, I really wanted to believe just to fit in with my friends but I just couldn't get past all the nonsense.

I vividly remember being on a church camp for our confirmation, the camp leaders told us their stories of how they found their faith and one guy stood up on the stage and said he was in a bad financial situation so he prayed to God for help and the next day a man he'd never met knocked on his door and gave him a briefcase with exactly as much money as he needed.

That was a pretty defined moment where I went "yeah these people are completely full of shit". I was 15 and ever since then it's only become clearer to me that religion and superstition is complete crap. There's prizes put there, James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who can prove supernatural ability in a scientific setting, like psychics or mediums or any other quacks like that. it was first offered in 1964 and stood until 2015, in that time over a thousand people tried it and none succeeded. To me that's proof enough. If you make supernatural claims you're a quack and if you believe in them you're gullible and that's all there is to it.

Your decision, but other people do think and wrote papers about it.

https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/space-cos...

And mysticism isn't the same as superstition. In its broadest sense, it is a individual experience of the mysterium of the universe.

Just don't make shit up and present it as facts that's all.

If you're not that way inclined but are interested in experiencing psychedelics, then yeah - don't let them put you off. My subjective experiences of it, when it was good, were that it filled me with a childlike sense of wonder as I watched things melt and flow in enhanced colours, as I had weird and wonderful thoughts about all sorts of things. Everything was new again.

It did make me feel connected to the world, to the universe and to other people in a different way to something like MDMA, with some of the love but also through a blurring of sense of self. It can change your perspective on some things, and as others have said it often feels afterwards like you've had a bit of a reset on your stresses and worries. And I did get to watch my stereo do a little dance...

When it was not good, by the last time I tried it which was probably at least 20 years ago now, I just got bored and slept it off, though YMMV on ability to sleep because it is a stimulant.

I guess maybe I'm lucky never to have had anxiety or a 'bad trip', though there were a few occasions where the group of us would sit down and ask "so ... uh... anyone else find this is dragging? How much longer?". Usually it's when you're towards the tail end anyway, but it's just not tailing quite as much as you might want.

You describe it in terms that make sense to your culture. Perhaps the term mystic has been contaminated for you by all the nonsense and bullshit.

The experience is very difficult to communicate, generally relying heavily on metaphor. Those who are uninitiated often wildly misunderstand. We see this in other areas of life too, cargo culting for example, but the deep and very personal nature of the mystical experience pretty much ensures confusion.

A perpetual motion crackpot probably describes themselves as a "physicist", but that's nonsense and bullshit too.

You are a mystic in the real sense, having an esoteric experience and then integrating it into your worldview.

Psychedelic drugs are just one way of doing this, but one of the more accessible.

I think your attitude is completely appropriate, by the way.

This translates well to psychedelic drug use.

But yes, I do feel (in my limited experience) that for most people the thoughts they carry are more important to work on, than the environment they are in.

Even if everything we've learned through LSD were false, I wouldn't even really care because we've still uncovered and figured out so much through this (much of it we've discussed with various others who were there during past events) that we are incredibly grateful to now know. So overall I think the experience for us has been positive, that we have gained much from it, and that we may stand to gain more over time since we are a regular user.

The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real and vividly detailed that it “must be correct.”

> The claim is that LSD gave you access to long-locked up memories that happened to corroborate with what you are going through now.

I think it's more like it gave us different perspectives on the same memories. We've had those memories but we couldn't see them that way before.

Also, uncovering this stuff randomly is what starts these paths of discovery for us. It's not that we're working through something and conveniently happen to find apparently useful things in past memories, it's that something (anything) triggers a flashback to a past memory that upon closer inspection reveals something that turns out to have had real apparent effects because it resulted in obvious behavioral patterns that multiple other friends have confirmed to us and are only now being placed in proper context with what feels like a proper explanation. This isn't somewhere the proper explanation could be just anything and this isn't schizophrenia where completely unconnected ideas are considered together. The stuff we find in flashbacks can completely surprise us and often has nothing to do with what we think we're looking for or think we're going to get out of it. It sometimes just somehow alludes to something far bigger that we really can corroborate with multiple external sources. Our brain and the others in it play so many tricks on us and on me, I know not to trust any single experience as a source of truth, but it can show me where to look.

> The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real and vividly detailed that it “must be correct.”

I don't really know how to properly articulate that I've verified anything because it's hard for me to even verify to myself that I know any of the things I've discovered for quite sure, and not just trusting something that very well could have been made up. I know the specific experience of recall is very fabricated, I know that what I see and what I think I identify as different parts while recalling those memories could be completely made up, but I'm not deriving everything from that experience. I use it as a suggestion to guide actual research that is not grounded in flashbacks and feelings and we have discovered actual patterns that are consistent with our theories and that couldn't possibly just be convenient explanations. Past a certain point all of Dissociative Identity Disorder is technically made up in some way (neuroplasticity!) and it's damn near impossible to know with certainty how things work or have worked, but I am taking the same approach that I have always taken and that is using the best explanations and the best theories that I currently have at my disposal and constantly testing and looking for improvements I can make to our understanding of ourselves.

But like I said, I wouldn't even care if it was merely a convenient filling of the gaps, because it has resulted in material good for us, it has resulted in material advancement of our understanding of our own past actions and in discussing them with those who we have hurt in the past, and it has also given us direction on how to better ourselves for the future. It really doesn't seem like that'd be the case unless the gap filling was so good that it correctly accounted for everything we hadn't even figured out yet, everything that we hadn't even heard of from others yet, and basically all of the ways we've been testing and testing the theories and the explanations that we have now.

Even if whatever it gave us access to was not something already stored in our brain, whatever it did was sufficient to allow us to figure things out that could otherwise have taken us months to years or even longer, and we know that they are material things that impact others because they have helped us work through emotions with others who formed those emotions independently of any LSD, based on those past actions of ours which we now better understand.

So I choose to believe we have gained valuable insight as a result of these experiences, not based on the experiences themselves which I know take great creative liberties, but based on everything we've done informed by the experiences to figure things out the old-fashioned way, too.

I’m well aware through my own testing

EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed

Doesn’t this effectively hand wave away the hard problem of consciousness?

i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth can even be comprehended — much less mapped wholly onto humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article of faith.

It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must by definition acknowledge that a statement like “the truth is fully reasonable” is untenable at worst and at best just a prediction.

For sake of argument, let's say the simulation hypothesis is true. Would you acknowledge that the implications of such a thing being true would have vastly different metaphysical properties than other hypotheses, e.g. "consciousness is a fundamental property of existence and all matter is conscious"?

The mind is literally the only thing we can be certain exists. We've made so much progress scientifically mapping the territory available for us to explore, that I think many people have lost sight of the vastness of the gap between what we actually know and what we have yet to understand.

Then you’ll find out the truth

It seems like you've taken a system of reasoning that was built through careful consideration (Kantianism), called the conclusions it meticulously built 'presuppositions' and hand-waved it without making substantive counterpoints.

The problem then, of course, is that burning down previous philosophy and starting 'without presuppositions' will lead inevitably to conclusions again, which you can once again call presuppositions and hand-wave.

It is itself an assumption. It is assuming that it’s possible to have no external assumptions, that being wrong requires external assumptions, and that this principle is true. You’ve already violated your own standard.

Even basic logical reasoning requires assumptions. Like the principle of non-contradiction, or that our cognitive faculties can distinguish between valid and invalid inferences. Hegel’s work doesn’t actually proceed without assumptions either; it starts with the concept of “being” and builds from there using logical principles.

If you truly had no assumptions, you couldn’t even begin to reason or make any truth claims. You’d have no framework for distinguishing truth from falsehood, valid from invalid reasoning, or meaningful from meaningless statements.

You might avoid being wrong about empirical facts, but you’d also avoid being right about anything.

The real philosophical task isn’t to eliminate all assumptions (which is impossible), but to identify foundational commitments, examine them critically, and build carefully from the most defensible starting points we can find.

But those starting points are still assumptions, and at least for the time being, there’s no reason to believe we’ve sufficiently closed the knowledge gaps necessary to operate on anything but a base set of assumptions.

Look, this has come full circle and we’re both just restating our positions at this point.

If you’re not just trolling, I’d highly recommend you go read some of the criticisms of Hegel’s work.

You keep dismissing/side stepping the counterpoints raised here without providing substantive arguments to back up this dismissal, so I’ll leave it there.

On what basis? The metaphysical substrate matters and can’t be simply hand waved away.

Your position here closely resembles religious faith, and that’s a bit of a problem if your goal is to convince other people of its correctness.

Yes it must be waved away, since the categories of metaphysics themselves must be discovered

Hegel’s work could be described as a hypothesis at best, yet you’re treating it as gospel truth despite the fact that most philosophers find his conclusions untenable and most scientists conclude that he couldn’t have had a proper understanding of science to reach the conclusions that he reached.

Your arguments up to this point are indistinguishable from the claims made by the religious folks in my life who say they have the absolute truth because of their belief in the Bible and relationship with Jesus.

Your only defense of Hegel’s work to this point amounts to “I believe it’s true” and have been entirely circular.

Our reason is a highly flawed instrument that we have pushed far past what it was designed for.

We have done an amazing job though as these social machines that live in various collective social delusions.

Seeing these collective delusions and the unreasonableness of reality is exactly the point of taking psychedelics.

Forget LSD, ask anyone who has taken salvia divinorum to describe how unreasonable reality can be lol.

I’m a Hegelian though so I’m biased

For example, we don't only care about humans having an understanding of, say, a moral choice. We also care about whether or not a given human can/will make a moral choice.

The latter happens in a different part of the brain. Sharpening one's teeth on the mere understanding of a moral truth is unlikely to improve one's ability to carry out even a well-understood moral act if that same person doesn't have experience doing it. On the other hand, personal experience-- say, with a mentor from a similar background, or even just grooming horses with a group of similarly cantankerous teens while talking about their feelings-- can sharpen a person's ability to make that moral choice, even on a consistent basis.

I'm not a fan of psychedelics, but people have told me they were instrumental in guiding them to make better choices-- sometimes choices that they knew were right but couldn't bring themselves to make.

It is of course totally reasonable to categorize all of this-- neurology, human self-knowledge, behavior, and socialization-- under the heading of reasonable truth. But for some reason, HN fans of reason of generally exclude it. So when you say, "The truth is fully accessible through reason," I agree in this larger sense. But the larger sense isn't the common usage, so it's often easier to just say you're wrong. :)

Edit: clarification

This cannot be accomplished, and the conclusion that such a feat leads to absolute truth is philosophically untenable.

Like everybody loves being told that they are smart, and Hegel tells the reader that they can be superlatively intelligent. It’s a hella thrilling idea to entertain, and the best way to keep that feeling going is by believing that it’s true, and the best way to convince yourself of that is to write defenses of Hegel.

We would also lose everything that makes us human and will find no satisfaction in knowing.

But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives.

Wish you all the best truthfully.

It very much IS set and setting and the powers that be really want to fuck up the set. Try it. You won't regret it.

My advice has to be very careful in order not to incentivise unprepared people who would otherwise have a great trip. We have to be responsible, even if it'll only gonna negatively affect a very small percentage of them. Applied philosophy of care 100%

Other than that, I totally agree.

When I was in college, I tracked down some mushrooms, bought em, and ran away on my own to trip out. I found myself on a bench, next to a river surrounded by trash in a mixed industrial area. I saw cig butts and empty beer cans on the ground. Looked at my ripped jeans and thought "Am I trash? Why am I here?" It was a shitty feeling and I got really down. I realized that getting fucked up for its own sake was stupid, and it's about sharing time with others that's actually important, no matter what drug you're on. I started crying and felt horrible, but the next day, I had a new sense of worth and a new frame of reference for the world that has persisted for 20+ years. I'll always remember that shitty trip on that shitty bench.

How did you come out it after those 4 years?

There seems to be quite the story around this one sentence and a very rough time. Though I think there are perhaps some learnings for other people as well if you're willing to share.

Lots of intense therapy, I still go 3 times a week

I had no suicidal feeling before the drug. I suppose one way to put it is that seeing into the void made me take suicide seriously as an option

Other than being a psychedelic, LSD is a stimulant and vasoconstrictor, so while physically unsafe doses are quite high (yes I've read about 'thumb print' doses), it's probably not wise to say that there is no unsafe dose of LSD.

It is unlikely you'll ever come across that much LSD, but LD50 is estimated at about 100mg, which is about 500-1000 ordinary doses.

What I'm saying is that it's not the same as insuline for instance. If anyone takes too much insuline it'll kill him, universally. It's not the same with LSD.

If LSD is dangerous then it's situational which sets it apart from other drugs.

My advice to people who haven't tried it tends to be that if you're scared, you should abstain. Your presuppositions of what the experience will be, will in themselves shape the experience. If you expect a bad time, you're likely to get one.

There's also a group of people who are curious about using psychedelics to treat mental disorder. My advice to those people is to find a way to do it in a clinical setting. Psychedelics have enormous potential for effectively curing anxiety disorders, but it's not just a matter of taking the drugs. The experience must be guided by a psychologist who knows what the goal is. And then integrated and processed afterwards, also with expert help. Psychedelucs are not a treatment in and of themselves, more like an accelerant of psychotherapy. The therapy is still necessary, it's just that psychedelics allow you to do in a handful of sessions what could take years in a sober patient. As a case in point, I have a severe anxiety disorder myself, and my many self-initiated experiments with psychedelics haven't magically cured it. If combined with therapy, it might have. I'm still waiting for clinical practice to catch up, so I can have psychedelic therapy.

There are some interesting videos on YouTube from people experiencing this.

A friend of my brother was doing shrooms with a couple other guys, had a bad trip and actually offed himself as part of the trip.

Please don't try to convince people that all of this is completely safe.

Just because everyone in your sample size has been fine doesn't mean everyone will be or even that your group will continue to be. Contrary to simplistic thinking, the law does exist for a reason and these substances are also scheduled for reasons other than conspiracies around free thinking.

Please spend some time reading about drug induced psychosis and educate yourself of the risks.

And they are right. Give these drugs to these people, they will turn into manchildren because it's their reality, and it's true for them.

There is no special 'truth' in LSD, certainly no truths outside the self - while you can learn some things about your internal experience from it, it also repeatedly provokes in its users a false sense of the profound. People experience 'realisations' which are pure nonsense when recalled or examined later.

It makes your brain go haywire in all sorts of fun and interesting ways. But if you're looking for the meaning of life in there you're doing it wrong, and I dread to think what you might find.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pif-1bTmQZc

Cool. I think it's very important. I'll think really hard about philosophy when on drugs, you go do your thing ;)

> There is no special 'truth' in LSD, certainly no truths outside the self

What is the "outside of the self"? Isn't that smuggling in the assumption that there is an essential separation of the self and the rest of the world? What if everything is world? And what if everything is self? Does it make any difference?

> while you can learn some things about your internal experience from it, it also repeatedly provokes in its users a false sense of the profound

What is the correct sense of the profound and who is going to be the gatekeepers of the profound?

> People experience 'realisations' which are pure nonsense when recalled or examined later.

I have all my notes and they still make a lot of sense to me so I don't think this argument hold by experience.

> But if you're looking for the meaning of life in there you're doing it wrong, and I dread to think what you might find.

Is there a meaning to life to be found? I always thought the meaning of life is something you never stop pursuing, every day all the time. So please, tell me the right ways so I don't dread you. I'm being sarcastic in the same proportion you are being arrogant.

Ah and thanks for proving my point about the necessity of philosophy.

Yeah sounds great. It's the imputation that it's the only way that got my back up. I don't imagine 5% of people who've taken and enjoyed LSD have taken the time to understand the basics of existentialism or done "the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants..." and all that guff.

And we still had an absolute blast.

> Isn't that smuggling in the assumption that there is an essential separation of the self and the rest of the world?

There is, it's called your body and other humans generally recognise yours as distinct from themselves and from other objects.

> And what if everything is self? Does it make any difference?

Acid-like thinking detected.

> What is the correct sense of the profound and who is going to be the gatekeepers of the profound?

Well, given the nature of the 'profound' realisations people on acid tend to have, I think "a modicum of common sense" would suffice.

That fascinating plastic lemonade bottle you're contemplating so hard probably isn't going to have much impact on space travel, no. Or on a larger scale, many of the proclamations that LSD will fundamentally change society when people 'realise' one thing or another that they 'learned' while under the influence turn out to be hopelessly naive - see the various late-60s to early 70s hippie communes in the US that generally fell into disarray and outright collapse when it turns out optimism and LSD weren't going to solve everything and someone still has to do the dishes eventually.

> I have all my notes and they still make a lot of sense to me so I don't think this argument hold by experience.

Your experience is certainly a data point, I would be surprised if this is as widespread as "I wrote it down and now realise it's all nonsense, it felt so meaningful at the time", but I don't imagine anyone's done a study.

> Is there a meaning to life to be found?

That's an interesting question, but looking for it in psychedelic experience seems to me a path that could lead to all sorts of odd places, mostly concerned with weird echoes of your own mind.

> Ah and thanks for proving my point about the necessity of philosophy.

The necessity of philosophy to an internet argument is one thing. Its necessity to a fulfilling life is arguable, given so much of it is navel-gazing bollocks, and the necessity of deeply studying philiosophical principles before dropping acid even less clear.

You do you, but your original post was full of pretty arrogant assertions about how everyone else should do them. I agree, I shot back with some of the same.

I'm coming from a personal point. I don't care about space travel or these enormous projects. I'm a simple guy with simple needs, and I like people and serving people. I am grateful there are people out there like you that spend time on this so I can focus on alienating myself with things I find interesting, like drawing and philosophy of consciousness.

It's just that not everything has to be a data point or a general abstraction on a larger scale. You can meet people in their own grounds so you can find common ground without imposing yourself.

And about drugs, I reflected on what you said and I think I could have expressed myself better, because I don't actually think there's a universal imposition of having to learn philosophy to take drugs, even though I agree with Simone Weil when she says philosophy is the required work so we can become vessels of God (hope this doesn't trigger your acid-like thinking detector). I only think drugs are tools we have the option to use and have the control over how we are going to direct them.

I find my contentment and meaning in digging and planting these days, managing trees and general manual labour surrounded by birdsong and small animals. And in my relationships with my partner and my friends.

In many ways this is as irrational as any other path :)

> time in my life has passed and I’ve come to view them as maybe overhyped

It's overhyped for sure! But everything nowadays is overhyped. People treat technology as a panacea where it's just an extension of ourselves. If the self isn't balanced, nothing will be fulfilling (the meanings of a balanced self and a fulfilling experience I'm leaving intentionally open, because it varies from person to person).

Therefore for some people it will show them their "truth", its not that lsd or mushrooms contain the truth.

This goes from very practical truths in where you see patterns of yourself that are not very useful but even more important you will see & feel the impermanence of your being & experience the world in it's totality making your impermanence a joyful feeling of being part of the world instead of being seperated from it. This is why in some studies people fear death less.

PSA: 100-150 micrograms of LSD is a medium to strong trip. For beginners its good to start low, perhaps 75 micrograms or lower.

Edit: Also testing your reaction psychedelics in more controlled and calmer settings is highly recommended before doing in it raves or other public places. But also note that the effects may vary significantly even in the same person at different times and settings.

Though biological products like psilocybin (or weed etc) are harder to measure and control by producers, in strength than purely chemical products like LSD or MDMA. It's hard to trace what mother nature did exactly when producing this particular mushroom cap, but it could be possible to trace what the chemist did when producing this particular blot. If only it were legalized and we could have actual control, tracability, and prosecution of malpractice...

The only thing they don't test are things you can somehow get legally, if I recall correctly (so whatever you can get for any psychological condition).

Also, these tests are set up in a way that they are anonymous in a way that e.g. even if prosecutors could subpoena a test-location or lab to hand over administration, this administration won't contain any PII or even pseudonymous information.

With LSD it's always a solution (either in paper or in liquid), so you can only trust the producer.

People who long for the old days must realize there were serious mental issues in society. It wasn't a simple case of the dids and the didn'ts. People were batsh*it insane, and I don't mean hallucinogens, especially not LSD that is not directly toxic at all. People were literally driven to hysteria by the ~thought~ of LSD.

The juggernaut opposing LSD and set the stage for the endless war on drugs. It was the boogeyman that could justify any legal atrocity. Lives could be destroyed, tripping teenagers were treated as if it was a life threatening medical emergency, which is trauma and sadism. The monkey brain slides that implied chromosome damage was deliberately not replicated after the mistake in handling was found, and the study was cited for a decade after author retracted it. Just too convenient to repeat the lie.

It is not surprising that G. Gordon Liddy a toady in Nixon's cabinet, spoke up at a meeting briefly to suggest putting LSD on opposition journalist Jack Anderson's steering wheel. As if it's presence would cause an instant accident that flipped the car 5 stories into the air. He was showing off his ignorance and trying to boost his reputation as a 'fixer'.

But far more dangerous than LSD, a few impaired people here and there was the mass hysteria to the 'plot' and 'scandal' that wouldn't work anyway and 3/4 of the country was consumed by it. That was in 1972.

Then along comes fentanyl that is really scary and not much serious pushback, until 'recently'.

brilliantly put

One dose would be tricky, but you could process twenty doses of "MDMA" via column chromatography and end up with a sample of MDMA which your scale can actually measure. There's nothing scary about twenty doses of MDMA except that maybe you'll get caught with it. If you dropped it, nobody would get hurt.

If you tried the same with LSD you'd have to process tens of thousands of doses before your scale would be of any use. That much LSD in solution is an accident waiting to happen. I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

Heroin is not legal in the US, although it is in the UK at least as a hospice med (under the generic name diamorphine).

When I began my residency at the UCLA Department of Anesthesiology in the fall of 1977, I was instructed on how to use cocaine.

First, one requested a 2cc glass vial of cocaine hydrochloride solution (4-10% strength, prepared from cocaine powder).

The patient in the O.R. was then sedated heavily to both eliminate fear and anxiety and decrease the stinging and discomfort resulting from the imminent application of the cocaine solution against the nasal mucosa.

Cotton pledgets on thin wooden sticks about 6 inches long were submerged in the cocaine solution until saturated, then very slowly and delicately introduced into both nostrils simultaneously and rotated while being advanced deep into the nasal cavity: usually they went in about half their length.

A nice aid to successful intubation: As a rule, we chose to intubate via the nostril which most easily and deeply accommodated the pledget.

We then waited for 15-20 minutes for maximum local anesthesia and vasoconstriction, then removed the pledgets and proceeded with nasal intubation.

I continued to use cocaine for nasal intubation until I moved to the University of Virginia in 1983; for whatever reasons, the drug wasn't part of our therapeutic armamentarium there, rather lidocaine with epinephrine was employed in the same manner as cocaine solution and produced equivalent results.

1P-LSD was something of a breakthrough IIRC (never tried it but I was still following the scene at that point) because unlike the others it is a pro-drug for LSD, being quickly metabolised to the parent compound, rather than a different but closely related compound as the others were.

Never heard of the rest of those though! I stopped paying attention sometime around then.

Ah, I see someone else already mentioned it. I'll still keep this here for increased visibility. Drugs testing in NL is solid.

Source: trust me bro ;-)

Second source: go see for yourself! It's anonymous.

[1] https://www.drugs-test.nl/ (use google translate)

That's what drug prohibitionists would love to happen, so they should encourage such a "wrong" experiment instead of prosecuting it. :-)

I had expiremented with moderate/recomended doses of lsd and psilocybin before participating in an auahuasca retreat... and the doses were shocking.

This was a relatively tame centre in western Europe that had trained psych nurses in attendance. Still, the Shaman handed out monster doses... and offered a second one a couple of hours in... and again the following day.

Many traditional practices conceive of "levels" corresponding to doses, and the lower levels are not the ones associated with transformative spiritual experience.

I have no recomendations of my own.

Unexpected things happen, mental states swing, and now you're in a mentally compromised state in-between reality.

There are some other commenters on here that seem to implicitly be talking about what I'd consider hero doses. I don't need high doses to experience notable differences in my ability to sense and self-reflect.

Chemically and physically, LSD for example is gone in a few days and certainly weeks. But taking two days in a row needs "insane" amounts to get you the same (physical, chemical) effect. MDMA is almost entirely gone in months, after which a normal dose will get the same (physical, chemical) effect. Good documentation with even calculators for this can be found online (be aware that it may not be allowed to even visit such sites in some countries!)

I deliberately emphasis the "physical and chemical" because the experience itself may be something you get used to. First time MDMA is wildly different from any time thereafter for many people. For many this is even stronger with LSD or Psilocybin. Many people report that the (first) experience opened up their mind and being profoundly and lasting. The more one gets used to the feeling the more this feeling itself becomes routine.

The intense love and euphoria from e.g. MDMA may be the same on an objective level, after letting the chemicals disappear over months, so technically one can achieve this level a few times a year. But the feeling itself is something one could get "used to" and "become bored by". Similar to how experiencing a rave sober for decades, or even how after decades of traveling it could get boring and a routine.

My point is: indeed first times are important. Even if the textbooks say that tolerance is gone after X time.

MDMA comes to mind. I've also heard (though not tried, nor will I) the harder narcotics such as heroine and meth are almost never as good as the first time.

The first time being the best time is often exactly why people become addicts.

Not to downplay all obvious and less obvious hazards of these 'harder' narcotics, just saying the whole 'first time being the best time' as an explanation of why exactly people become addicts relies very much on hearsay. It's the sort of language that came with the whole war-on-drugs-thing, and does not reflect reality.

Now, an important factor here is that a first time often comes with anxiety, insecurity, and even fear. With many substances these feelings get amplified so that makes the entire experience be mediocre or even bad. Especially for that, I think it's very important to experience this in a safe, loving, caring and depending on the type taken, controllable, silent, busy, energetic, dark, light etc environment.

You just open the door for many more first times to come

Did you get that from a government "risk prevention" website? 100 micrograms is a base, standard dose; There's a reason that that is the most common amount to a piece of blotter paper.

A medium trip would be something like 220(also a common dose), and "strong" can go anywhere from what, 500 to 1000?(1000 and above being commonly referred to as "heroic dose" and fairly rarely taken)

I do agree that a beginner might want to try sub-100 micrograms, but you rub up against the lower border of real perceptible effects around 50.

It was a Birthday Party, and almost a dozen people had the idea to 'dose him' without knowledge of the others. After the party it was obvious this was an extended journey and those who had done it came clean to the others. The dosage was off the charts. They cared for him in shifts and the ordeal lasted almost three days. But he was fine after, apparently only some people experience flashbacks.

These days there are other drugs that are effective in such small doses, but are not common to encounter unless you specifically look for them and are usually significantly more expensive than LSD to start with.

Also glorifying large doses especially when discussing first times in a forum with inexperienced audience is rather stupid. Too large doses for beginners is a recipe for unpleasant experiences and subsequent negativity about drugs in general.

>discussing first times in a forum with inexperienced audience

This is HN, not Club Penguin. We don't have to baby our fellow users. They are fully able to make choices based on their own risk profile/tolerance without needing to be misled into being inappropiately cautious. Making such a big fuss about it has as much of a chance of negatively affecting peoples' experience by making them anxious.

Cool. And good for you, but this has honestly ruined 'raves' for me.

I'm a huge fan of different types of electronic music and really, really enjoy it. The music itself is a spiritual experience and allows me to 'disolve into the Great Void'. But these days when I go to a festival or something, I'm surrounded by people I can't share this feeling/experience with, since everyone seems to be on some type of drug and either in their own world (X, LSD, etc) or think the world is in them (coke).

I recently prematurely left an artist I was really looking forward to because of exactly this. It was incredibly disappointing, though not surprising.

It's really hard to maintain a healthy state of mind when there is a dude overdosing with several paramedics trying to stabilise him. I still remember that time and it hurts me every time I think about it.

But there are smaller raves, with 50-500 people, where I think this feeling is maintained.

I'd maybe recommend avoiding what we call here "commercial raves" and go to "pvt's", private raves, which are not private, just with more modest economic goals.

This reminded of Deep Space Nine’s Great Link. The drop becomes the ocean, and the ocean becomes a drop.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Link

Some recent studies suggest that there is no increase in risk of psychosis from psychedelic use, and at worst, it causes symptoms which would have surfaced anyways to surface sooner. This isn't a reason to take psychedelics of course, it's better that one goes as long as they can without experiencing some sort of schizo-affective disorder.

My point is that people are misunderstanding the risks when they look at psychedelics and go "No way I'm taking that, I don't want to make myself schizophrenic", and then don't bat an eye when they drink a glass (or two) of wine or smoke a joint.

Is this adjusted by amount of use? As in, is it possible that it's more likely to trigger latent mental illness with alcohol and cannabis not because they trigger it more effectively, but because they are significantly more widely available, significantly more widely used, and people who consume them consume them in significantly greater amounts?

If you get drunk once, I get high once, and our friend trips on psilocybin once, what is the comparative risk of activating latent mental illness for these events alone?

I had to quit drinking, because I couldn't moderate my intake. I struggle with cannabis craving and use.

I have taken a number of psychedelic drugs, but never due to craving, and not more than a handful of times. I have had profound and life changing experiences (for the better), it's not always fun.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure regular use of psychedelics is not a great idea. These substances can be hard on the body and brain. Respectful and intentional use can have benefits far beyond the risk. Indeed, I may be alive today as a result of my use.

Single dose use is more likely to be harmful with ethanol at a comparable degree of intoxication, it is strongly disinhibitory in comparison, but a particular person might be more sensitive one way or the other.

We hope to push most the bad stuff beyond or as far towards death as possible, and death as far away as possible so long as not too much bad stuff is already happening. The question then becomes at what rate slow the delay of schizo-affective disorder or some other mental illness. It's coming for all of us, given enough time.

Over the course of a few weeks he began to slide into what was clearly schizophrenic delusions. He became obsessed with what he presumed was a vast conspiracy to murder him and take his money, interpreting ordinary events like someone cutting him off on the highway as being part of this.

Thankfully he's got a good partner and support network, got into therapy, and now is doing fine.

I have a pretty live and let live attitude over psychedelics, but I do hate when aficionados pretend there aren't risks or downsides.

On a less dramatic scale I know people who've tried it and hated it, and that's very much a possible outcome as well. It's crappy when aficionados flip that around into somehow being a square or whatever.

So called microdosing of psychedelics is generally rubbish, the way they're distributed means you have no idea whatsoever what dose you're actually taking and if you want to live with a 5-HT2a tolerance, just go on a trip dose and you're good for a few months.

Edit: And with some of these substances one should expect cardiac toxicity if dosing every day, due to serotonin receptors in the heart.

The others can really get you..

I've experienced what I thought was being at the gates of hell on all of them at least once.. The gratitude I felt at the conclusion of those trips lasted for months =p

Do you want to "feel" yourself more, or do you want to feel yourself less?

Many people are not interested (or ready) to feel themselves more. And when they do, they might not like what they find.

Ask your doctor if placebo is right for you.

...something that likely never happened (and if it did, it wasn't the LSD)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21256914/

You're doing everybody a disservice by spreading FUD that is contradicted by real world studies and data. It's no better than what Nancy Regan tried (and for the most part succeeded) to do.

The pendulum has swung so far left from the Reagan propaganda to the point that people attempt to downplay any cautionary perspectives and act like these things are purely harmless spiritual panaceas.

Over 15 years at burning man, I have seen many people injured and maimed doing stupid things while high.

That said, the type of intentional self harm described above is basically unheard of. Mostly dumb accidents and some suicides.

To the extent there is any unique risk, it is more about long term psychiatric issues

The nutshell quote: "Jumping from heights under psychedelics is possible but statistically extraordinary—orders of magnitude rarer than popular mythology suggests."

https://www.cdc.gov/lightning/data-research/index.html

Let’s not pretend it’s perfectly safe (what is?) but this is hardly ‘normal’.

Let’s not pretend it’s 100% safe and foolproof, but that’s very far out of the ordinary.

Logically, drug use should be mandatory to reduce the prevalence of such self-harm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJuwNxNUWQ

Kind of suspect it'll make for a extra trippy trip. ;)

Is that what kids who are born into starvation and poverty think ? Or just white guys with money ?

I don't deserve so much, not more than these people that are starving, and yet I'm here. And I know that if I renounce everything I'll just be another starving person, albeit white.

So I enjoy my life and you won't be able to make me feel any worse than I already feel about it. But I dedicate myself to charity and to serving people whenever I can. It's important to use your privileges to care and serve. There is always someone that your abilities can help and renouncing them, renouncing your condition is a disservice to society.

Now answer me. How many people did your comment feed now? Which revolution did it fuel that will feed the masses?

The point of my comment is to point out while that's your opinion on what the meaning of life is to sit around high, on couches contemplating philosophy (and good on you), it's very very far from a universally shared view, especially if you're born into starvation somewhere in Africa...

I then get all my insights, because my mind never stops thinking about philosophy, and I write them down. Rinse and repeat.

It has profound effects in my life. Full disclaimer, I also exercise a lot, I have a fulfilling job in tech, I go to therapy, I dedicate myself to arts, I dedicate myself to my partner and my pets (which are almost like familiars for me).

Is it placebo? Is it my lifestyle? Is it the drugs?

I just apply non-interpretation to all these things that happen in my life and I go with it.

The "out of body experience" ppl describe in near death always seemed to me to be a glitch of the brain's 3D perceptual space, i.e. a forced linear transform of 3D coordinates or something.

And all you see

Is all your life

Will ever be