Have no idea what variant of LSD I last consumed, but I remember some deep feelings of profound thoughts and self-reflection quite almost instantly when the stuff "hit" (maybe 30-45 minutes after ingestion), I was still cognizant enough to be able to write it all down. Some of what I wrote was indeed stuff I needed to work on in my own life and it was pretty helpful.
I then spent the next like 12 hours on my couch realizing that the entire concept of time is a manmade construct that is absolutely meaningless and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. All this while watching golf on TV (which followed a golfer who posted the lowest final round score ever at a major). I have no idea how the TV turned on, and why I didn't turn it off.
I'd say causality and entropy are contingent on the (very compelling) assumption that time is real. We could be Boltzmann Brains, or something even weirder. Do I believe that the world is terribly different from what it appears to be? No, but ultimately our perceptions of the world are merely representation held in our minds.
Given that we fundamentally depend on our own, very human, sensory and cognitive apparatus to make any kind of judgement I have a hard time imagining a proof or even a convincing argument of this without falling back on “it’s obvious” (etc).
Yes, I am being obtuse. Sorry about that. Just for the record.
Sometimes it just hits in such a way that you have no idea wtf is happening. One time I couldn't read because letters just didn't have meaning any more. It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.
> It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.
That's how my iPhone keyboard looked when I took a moderate amount of shrooms. It was weird, I could still think and talk coherently, but the keyboard was an incrophensible, vibrating, round, green-energy-sparks-decorated mess.
That happened to me as well. Pretty cool effect. I also remember trying to order “human food” off my phone but couldn’t figure out what anything on the app was
It being scary is kind of the point. Or rather, if you’re going to do LSD, you need to be in the mindset that 1) this is temporary, and you’ll feel fine tomorrow, and 2) the experience you’re about to have will be extraordinarily novel and impossible to fully describe, even after having experienced it. It’s an intense hallucinogenic, and is the most potent mind altering substance that we know of. It’s also one of the safer ones, if you’ve done your research and aren’t predisposed to a certain category of mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety).
Knowing that it’s temporary is the best tether to this world that keeps me from having a bad trip, if it feels like that could happen. As others have said, an LSD trip is going to take you places you might not expect to end up. Meditation can be good preparation leading up to a trip.
LSD is one of those chemicals that gives you a glimpse at what it’s like to process the world with a completely different category of consciousness.
Microdosing (or rather 1/4-1/10th a normal dose) works quite well. You get much of the mental flexibility without serious disorientation and serious physical reaction (jitteriness and nausea, which is also why I avoid shrooms—too physical).
It's also worth noting LSD is quite pleasant on the come down. You're just very comfortable and calm. Typically self-soothing through the angst of the first half of the trip is straightforward. Also a great reason to be in good mental health before hand.... if you're not prepared to face something you've been avoiding or deluding yourself through, LSD is a very, very bad choice.
I suppose we could simulate tripping in that fashion but it would seem easier to affect a distributed activation function or other parameter to the simulation.
what basis would you recommend? Given the rate that chatbots engaging in making stuff up you can't just ask them. At least as humans we can take the substance ourselves to verify there's something happening. I think there will always be an insurmountable barrier to deciding if computers can be conscious, at least in our lifetimes. We're not even sure other humans experience similar consciousness.
Nope, but as others have said - you must commit and realize that once you dose you're in for whatever it is. You must assure yourself that this is temporary and will pass. As a matter in fact our lives are much the same, nothing ever lasts forever. Just gotta roll with it.
Anyway, it's not that the brain isn't working properly it's just that the brain is working differently. That's how I see it.
It's only scary if you try to hard to hold on. Relax and float down stream... In the moment, it does not feel like your brain is not working properly. I tend to feel more clearheaded (even when confused) than I am on alcohol.
HAving had a similar experience, I have found it somewhat useful.
I've often found that my brain hasn't been working or working properly, and it's good to know that a) that happens, b) it can be transitory and c) even when it feels like it's working, I might still be fooled.
As I grow older, it's been a lot more difficult speak in absolutes.
At the same time, the contrast to observing when my brain actually -does- do something useful has also been useful and I have felt a lot better about leaning into that feeling.
This culture is insane and will gaslight the hell out of you, as will many of its constitutive members, so having some data on what it feels like to vividly hallucinate versus to have a different view on something has been very validating.
I am sure that sounds dumb, and that there are plenty of folks (especially on this social media forum) who would say that I am probably worse off for feeling like I have a better handle on "correct" and "incorrect", but hey, "enjoy the water, boys".
> I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
Interesting. The main benefit I've gotten from psychedelics (mostly mushrooms) is that all of life / reality is impossibly miraculous -- even, paradoxically, when it seems dreadfully boring. And also that I've somehow always known this, even when it feels like I've forgotten. It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed. It's the ultimate cosmic joke.
This framing never made much sense to me. It's incredible to be alive at all of course, but miraculous compared to what? I've found it best in these situations to quietly appreciate rather than trying to reify some ontology for contemplation—which is, after all, a distraction from appreciation itself in the moment, something largely akin to meditation.
The easiest way to experience some of the feelings you get from tripping is, in fact, meditation. The LSD mostly just forces you to be more honest with yourself by smashing barriers you would normally dismantle through allowing your mind to rest.
Granted, I've never experienced anything like eg a blurring of the sense of self with meditation. Theoretically it's possible. Maybe I'm just too content with myself to pursue it.
A lot of people are well aware of how much they are deluding themselves (into thinking they are happy and deserve to be so) that they should avoid psychedelics at all costs. It's like their ego knows it's in danger.
Also, your website (https://www.lifeismiraculous.org) is awesome. Echoes of Bertrand Tolle and Alan Watts. Thanks for publishing it and putting it in your profile!
I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni.
Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :).
The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently.
I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together.
But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.
I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight.
When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!
I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics.
Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life.
Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool.
PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
This is baffling to me. I recall this comment from the last week but it currently reads "4 hours ago". Algolia also shows it posted "4 days ago". Some sort of reposting functionality?
Considering the topic, it made me consider if I was having intense deja vu.
That sounds pretty amazing. What a metaphor that is. Hope you fully recovered but kept some valuable mental souvenirs from your trip. I do think people underestimate the dangers of LSD. It's amazing but I've known people who permanently injured their cognitive capacities using it.
Artists put themselves through various experiences (sometimes extreme) to portray the ineffable through abstract art. Works at both personal and societal level
When I was in my 20s I tried salvia (Salvia divinorum) several times as tincture and by smoking dried leaves, and I'd like to share my experiences:
The first time was with tincture. My entire left body half became intoxicated in the exact same way as when drunk on alcohol. The left half of my body had difficulties with balance, coordination and motor functions. The vision on my left eye was impaired by the eye refusing to stay on target. Most interestingly, the left half of my brain was also influenced, giving me problems with speaking fluently and thinking straight. My right body half was completely unaffected, instilling me with a sense that humans were composed of two distinct halves rather than one body.
The second time was also with tincture. Nothing happened. No sensations of any kind.
The third time was with tincture and by smoking. It was a profound experience. I dozed off and dreamt that I was a nut on the branch of a tree. The wind swept me away and threw me onto a meadow where I sprouted and began to grow. I experienced life as a sapling, growing for years and years until I was an old tree, and I had vivid and fresh memories of seeing countless springs, summers, autumns and winters coming and going. When I came out of it I had an exhausted feeling in my chest reminiscent of waking up from long and deep sleep, and in my mind I had the memory and feeling of having lived for a hundred years, and a strong sense of an incredible amount of time having gone by since I smoked the salvia.
The last time I used it was by smoking. I experienced merging with things I touched. I sat on the floor and leaned back against a sofa, and felt my back sinking into the sofa and becoming part of it. I laid down on the floor, and felt my back fusing with the floor. I drank water from a glass and felt as if the glass didn't want to "let go" of my hand.
Smoking salvia hit almost instantly. With tincture, which was to be kept in the mouth for 10+ minutes but not swallowed, it took close to 20 minutes before the sensations begun. All of the trips lasted no more than 15-20 minutes and I never had any kind of hangover or lingering effects other than the (positive) emotional and psychological phases of reflecting on the experiences.
Used to take quite high doses of LSD, and often had incredible visual hallucinations. Things like watching a large plant sprout flower buds all over it, which slowly expanded to full bloom and then retreated back to small buds; the whole experience went on like that for 20 minutes. Another time I hallucinated that a neighbor's house was on fire, until my friend said she was hallucinating the same thing. Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
> Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
imagine calling them like "my friend and i are both on lsd and we are both seeing that house on fire so could you check it out please in case it's real"
a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing
until you hit the generative AI camera mode because, well, you're tripping, and it hears your description of the fire and adds flames to your image. In the words of Neo, "whoa!"
Just remember: There are a lot of chemicals that produce LSD-like effects. The farther away you are from the chemist, the less likely you know the actual drug that you're getting. This is especially the case at concerts / festivals, where the "game of telephone" might mean that you don't really know what you're taking.
After reading many trip reports on Erowid for LSD, I suspect that the authors often unknowingly took something else. A classic case is STP/DOM, which often comes in paper / tabs and is visually indistinguishable from LSD. If you ever hear the familiar, "I took some crazy acid. At first it didn't work, so I took another, and then I finally came up after an hour and had an intense trip," it was probably STP/DOM instead of LSD.
Same thing for ecstasy: Can be anything from filler scam, to an MDMA dosage that will probably send you to hospital, to drugs that work very similar to MDMA and can also be called ecstasy to weird ass hard drugs that are something completely different.
In Vienna we have an organization that checks pills or powder from the batch you bought and tells you what exactly it is.
even LSD doesn't usually work immediately. it usually takes something like 30 minutes to an hour to start having effects.
i think one of my records is something like 12 hours after dosage to start feeling the effects. which i think happened because i also ate a bunch of food before taking
Checking out your profile, did you already have dissociative identity disorder before finding your way to LSD? How do you think the two interact? No judgement or implications, curious.
I frequently eat before taking LSD and it never takes 12 hours to hit, after 1 hour it's always live and peak will occur within 3-4 hours. With a light meal or empty stomach it comes on a bit faster to a noticable state (but the hidden hunger can interfere with well being during the trip )
At Bonnaroo, one of our party got STP instead of acid and we had to babysit all frickin weekend. Of course, I had already taken my mescaline so it was not fun at all.
I tried 2C-E a couple times a long time ago. I think it was a relatively low dose. It was really interesting how mentally I felt mostly sober. But the visuals were so intense I got motion sick. It started out with tracers as I waved my hand. The textured paint on the walls looked extra 3D and the walls started to breath. The swirly pattern on the bathroom linoleum looked like chocolate milk. My posters turned into cartoons. And when it was all overwhelming and the motion sickness really kicked in, I closed my eyes and was greeted by fractal machines that built the molecules of the world.
I don't recall any really profound thoughts, introspection, or feelings of intoxication. Which was a strange difference to me compared to things like 4-ACO-DMT and LSD, but I liked it.
2C-B never had any headspace effects for me except in very high insufflated doses (and even then it was minimal), taking normal doses orally would just give me a couple of hours of visuals. For me it was nothing like LSD in terms of headspace.
I only ever vaporised 2C-B. usually I would get a full intense trip that lasts about 30 minutes and then very little after effects. A hit was also about $10 at the time (decades ago). Quality was good considering I was at one the top chemical engineering schools in the world.
Yeah, I think it didn't come on for a while. I spent probably the 2nd half of my trips just laying down watching the closed eye visuals because my stomach hurts and I felt nauseated when I walked around or looked at stuff for too long.
I once took Ketamine, "fell through the bed" and spent half an hour in a different dimension, peacefully floating above and close to incredibly detailed, dull and dark colored patterns while unable to form language-based thoughts until I suddenly snapped out of it. The music I was listening to (HUSBANDS (Run Along, Son, etc.)) helped a lot and was just incredible, though I am still not sure if I could have had the same great experience with different music.
It was THE single most amazing and out-of-this-world thing I ever experienced and I highly recommend it to everyone.
I don't know if it helped me in any way with my depression though. No hangover. No lasting changes.
I had a similar experience with ketamine listening to different music. It felt almost like I was engulfed in the music, in a very positive and beautiful way. Having experienced opiates, MDMA, 2C-E, 2C-B, LSD, shrooms, and DMT, ketamine is still the experience I am most fond of. I sometimes wonder what certain music would feel like to experience on ketamine.
I experienced severe depression in my teenage years. Towards the end of them, I had this ketamine experience (well, a few sessions, but this one stands out in particular.) My depression has never come back nearly as strong as before (it's been over 10 years.)
One time I snorted ketamine with a bunch of hairy middle eastern guys on a club toilet in Tel Aviv and the next day I was courageous enough to rent myself a car and drive to the dead sea, when I had given up navigating the shitty bus booking websites for dead sea transports the day before.
There might be something to it. Unfortunately, the last few times I tried to buy Ketamine I got scammed with Cocaine, which I abhor.
Idk how people do ketamime recreationally or in public. I did one little bump and was couch locked, managed to do two more and was laying on the floor with the world spinning, eyes closed, trying to manage motion sickness
You might want to seek out a formal therapist who uses medication assistance. They will have a series of regular sessions first to prepare/prime you for treatment. Set and setting matter a lot with these drugs!
When I did my only two Ayahuasca sessions and closed my eyes I saw some kind jungle scene with the eyes of a big cat looking at me. It was really interesting. With mushrooms I usually see abstract patterns. I never have mach hallucinations with eyes open. I just notice more things that I usually wouldn't notice. That's why I believe a lot movie directors took some kind of drugs because of all the details they can see.
all i know is that once you see the eyes looking back at you, and realize that it is the eye of nicholas cage, the universe and reality begins to make a lot more sense and it shows that even the gods reuse assets
The first time I took shrooms I had a very "thing in itself" moment where I realized that, because every time I thought something, all the sudden it became true, my perception must be affected by my cognition and that there were things outside the boundaries of my cognition that I could not necessarily perceive. Worst part was I still had to get up the next morning to teach, I started saying the weirdest shit in my practical anthropology course...
Here's a novel AI safety thought: Will AI need medicines to remain mentally healthy and sane? Will it enjoy tripping? Will it eventually fix itself to remain in touch with reality in all circumstances?
also, chemical substances like entheogens seem not relevant to AI now but this connection could unlock enormous educational potential once bio cell and "omnimodal" hybrid computing goes mainstream.
Interesting times ahead : )
"We also looked at different types of psychedelics and didn’t see any systematic differences there."
This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn't have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they're all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.
This. There’s obvious differences in salvinorin and psilocybin effects and both are well represented in the data. But keep in mind the current paper only looks at existing categories of visual effect. The second study might include a finer taxonomy.
They don't, they are drastically different in character. There are close similarities within classes between some of the lysergamides, substituted phenethylamines or tryptamines. But even closely structurally related analogues can be extremely different (ex. 2C-E vs DOET vs 2C-C).
LSD is almost nothing like psilocybin or mescaline or DMT. And nothing is like salvinorin...
Interestingly, there is a drug call datura, a beautiful white flower you can find all over suburbia, whose seeds when drank in a tea are an extremely powerful deliriant.
If you read the trip reports of it (which are pretty fascinating tbh) you notice a common trend of people hallucinating that they are smoking a cigarette, and then they drop it, only to search around and be unable to find it. This is usually one of the first tip-offs they have that something is happening before they totally get lost in the void. Really fascinating how many people on there had this same common experience while taking datura specifically.
Absolutely no one should even be entertaining the thought of experimenting with datura without first performing in-depth research, and having come to an understanding and acceptance that the result may likely be a multi-week violent psychotic/deleric episode culminating in involuntary hospitalization or incarceration. I have NEVER heard of anyone having an enjoyable experience with this substance, and I've been around for a while.
I meant to add that at the end. Like you said, basically no one ever has a good time on this drug. The trip reports seem to be almost entirely kids looking for a free high, and virtually no one who knows what they are doing purposely taking it.
The difference between an effective dose and a damaging or deadly dose is also pretty small IIRC. Between that and the stories of "I had no idea what was real and what was not for three days," it's a hard pass for me. There doesn't seem to be any insight to be gained from its use, or even recreational entertainment.
i think it's probably bad that this made me more curious
i think someone in my head wants to try it even if it's universally unpleasant
edit: jk i read literally anything about what the experience is actually like and i don't know if i feel like boiling the body with dehydration that bad, and apparently the other way you know it's working is that your mouth and throat get so dry that it becomes impossible to swallow food without choking
When the Soviet Union fell, lots of military first-aid kits escaped in the wild. Some of them (small plastic ones colored in bright orange IIRC) contained this thing:
(sorry, you'll have to rely on Google Translate, there's very little info on it in English)
It's a powerful anticholinergic agent used to treat poisoning by organophosphorus compounds (like Sarin).
Like many other anticholinergics (including Datura), if taken without first actually experiencing the poisoning, it results in a deep delirium with complete loss of control over one's actions. There are lots of interesting/disturbing stories out there on the internet, most of them written in late 1990s to early 2000s before all the stockpiles had been found and used up.
Take my word for it, Datura and Dramamine aren't worth fucking with. If you are determined not to take my word for it, Dramamine is pretty similar and a lot safer.
Take too much Datura and you're dead. How much is too much? It's very difficult to know, because it varies plant to plant. I'm sure you can die from taking too much Dramamine, but at least you can accurately gauge the dose.
Nothing I ever experienced on these drugs was interesting or enlightening. Some of it was horrifying. Typically I ended up curled up in a ball waiting for the madness to end (which took hours). 0/10 would not try again. Reliable source of bad trips.
>Take my word for it, Datura and Dramamine aren't worth fucking with. If you are determined not to take my word for it, Dramamine is pretty similar and a lot safer.
Dramamine the over-the-counter medicine to treat nausea and motion sickness?
You can get all kinds of (very questionable) highs from tons of OTC drugs: diphenhydramine (benadryl/zzzquil), dextromethorphan (Robitussin), doxylamine (NyQuil)...
A friend-of-a-friend took it and did the same thing. He was pinching his fingers in the blades of grass and putting them to his lips in a smoking motion. Then he ran straight into a wooden fence and took down the entire panel. Nothing about datura is good, nobody has ever had a good trip with it. Stay away.
Ha, thats sort of my experience too. Or often like looking through paper roll or grooved gun barrel which keeps twisting on subspace level. Or Van Gogh' Starry night pattern.
Good thing is salvia is very short acting, maybe 5-10 mins for me and intensity is somewhere around mushrooms. But I talk about at least 10x extracts, raw one is just tons of very biting smoke and comparatively little effect. The kick is literally within seconds, I barely managed to put down bong after a single hit and was flying away.
It's one of the few I've not tried. Personally I believe all the psychoactive plants are tools with distinct purposes (to be prescribed if you will) - salvia is the one that I'm not sure what it should be used for, I guess it's a good tool to show very literally that everything is everything, that seems to be what it basically does?
The more traditional way to use it is to chew on leaves, which is a far less intense and slower way to use it. Probably the approach you'd take if you wanted to get something useful out of the experience.
It's a deliriant, not a disassociative. Worth mentioning the trip is said to be deeply unpleasant, and also the plant is poisonous.
But yeah I too find it interesting how a drug can seemingly yield the same specific hallucination in different people. See also spiders and DPH (another deliriant).
It was very easy to buy in Russia and neighboring countries up until 2012 or so. I've never used it (chickened out of trying out something like that), but there are tons of stories from more adventurous people.
Many factors. Quality and type of substance. Liquid, blotter, pill form, mushrooms,cactus,leaves. And very important one's belief system. Then how much you ate, did you trip the previous days. How old one is? Do you tell fibs to yourself and others. On and on.
For DMT it's immediate. Even closing your eyes you see colors (flashes of light). I was sitting at a wooden table and the grain patterns were moving especially the circular placemat in front of me with concentric rings. And I remember being scared of my own arm like wtf is that. It was brief though minute or two it was over.
I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.
IMO its the worry itself which causes the bad trip not actually the repressed/bad memories. I know lots of people with bad childhoods who have great trips, but anybody who is anxious or worried about anything on the trip will have a bad time.
If you are in a good place surrounded by good people and you are happy, then it should be a good experience. If you go into it worrying about what will happen then the drugs will compound that anxiety, not relieve it.
DMT hallucinations are very different, and a lot more vivid, than those from LSD or mushrooms. With the latter, at least with eyes open and in reasonable doses, the effect is not so much as seeing "new things", but seeing the same thing somehow differently. There may be some slight morphing-type movement, but it's still obvious that you see the "same things". I don't think the visual effects are really significant part of LSD/Mushroom trips. They are just easiest to verbalize (unlike e.g. some weird brainfucks like forgetting what a door does), so they are talked about more.
With DMT it can be as if someone suddenly put VR glasses on you.
> I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.
That's a reasonable stance. I've found "bad" trips on both to be incredibly healing, nevertheless. I'm sure the outcome depends largely on your state of mind at the onset. Combining with MDMA could take the edge off bad memories that come up and grant space for processing them directly.
What do you think about doing it with a sober friend to control you? I guess you could be alone in a room and they monitor you if you need help.
Also micro-dose. It's funny the movie Jobs 2013 it shows him doing acid and he's in the field, I'm like "Oh if I do acid I can be like Steve Jobs" not serious but was wondering maybe... unlocks your brain somehow.
A sober, or an experienced trustworthy, tripsitter is almost a must. A small amount of MDMA (especially if you're not familiar with it) before taking a psychedelic can be helpful as mentioned. Having some sedatives just handy just in case may itself lessen the probability of unpleasant effects.
Micro-dosing is mostly placebo. But a good idea is to start with small doses (check e.g. the "threshold limits" at Psychonaut Wiki), and maybe faster shorter acting substances like 2C-B or mushrooms rather than longer acting like LSD.
Also good to acknowledge that psychedelics just aren't very enjoyable experiences for many, and even for most they are rarely unambiguously good.
Psychedelics aren't necessarily as anxiety/paranoia inducing as weed, and even the effects in general aren't necessarily as intense. Of course it depends on the dosage, the person and the setting, and paranoia from weed most likely correlates with difficult psychedelic experiences.
benzos end LSD trips, so if you are worried about a bad trip, just have a xanax with you when you do it and if you want out, take one and in 30 minutes you will be okay.
My dmt trips never felt like the ones I read about online. They were crazy and impactful every time. (I kept a dmt journal durring covid lol) But visuals were always 2d, geometric, I never saw some of the common things people described. Or seemingly common idk. The way trip reports sound were there were alternate worlds to wander around, 3d beings interacting. I think I used to dab about 20mg, I'd have to look it up.
I used shrooms for a while to recover from depression, but I never once saw anything. While walking along a trail I felt my vision had grown sharper, but never colors, never patterns or movement. That baffles me because at the time, I thought maybe I had consumed the wrong shrooms. The self-reflection, realization, and separation of thought from emotion was the most profound moment in my life. Yet no hallucination.
I did mushrooms quite recently in a highly therapeutic setting. Bar none, it was the only thing that actually addressed my depression after decades of basically everything else. I feel refreshed each day and everything is interesting again for what feels like the first time in my life.
Shrooms and visuals seem to be all over the place. From personal experience, they usually induce visuals but not always. For some friends, they rarely induce visuals, but sometimes they do - especially with specific strains of cubensis (despite “a cube is a cube”).
Interesting way to describe it. Some caveats I forgot to mention: To actually make something happen I had to take 4.5 grams of dried soaked in OJ swallowed down. Granted I was on these evil little shits called antidepressants; fun fact: Big Pharma does not publish instructions for GETTING OFF of antidepressants.
Post AT's I could get the red pill effect in as little as 1/4 of a gram. Still no hallucinations but.. when I took that HERO dose to overcome the meds.. that walk in the forest did pop out at me. That was what I called sharper but yeah, it popped.
I was lets say economical with shrooms (one growkit from Amsterdam and that was it), so dosed it based on dry weight and never used more than '1 dose' (3g IIRC).
Since its consumed orally, full stomach greatly diminishes effects. Second trick I've used (I think I've found it on erowid) is to mix that dry shroom with raw fresh lemon juice. The result tastes horribly, even worse than just dry mushrooms, but it manages to make the trip much shorter and way more intense which is a good change IMHO.
And the last thing I've done to get as much trip from those rather small doses - I've laid down in bed, alone, covered myself, run some quiet shamanic music in the background and went off. And off I went, complete loss of all senses, dancing as a mist of atoms to that music that was and wasn't there, and then very slowly coming back, rediscovering my limbs and senses one at a time, feeling inner peace and connection to universe never experienced before. It was always profound experience but I always felt that I could jump out quickly by just opening my eyes and starting interacting with reality.
One time, first time, I didn't do any of above and just ate them, walking around Amsterdam, laying in the park watching nature and people during sunny day. It was almost 0 effect, I properly felt my video feed from eyes was too strong compared to shrooms effect and it was overriding whatever mild trip was trying to happen.
I get how tripping every few years might be a good way to get the cobwebs out and shake things up a bit. However, after 2 times, it just seemed like too much of a hassle. After a couple of hours of kaleidoscope, the novelty and fun starts waning, and it starts to feel like a chore. And then the exhaustion the next day.
when i take lsd i almost seem to gain the ability to see and hear my thoughts. i can imagine stuff with my mind's eye normally, but with lsd it's like i can see concepts directly. it feels like instead of thinking in words like usual it's like i can think with raw energy or something and i have more access to things
also it's a lot easier for me to recall like trauma and other buried stuff when i'm on lsd
I had great plans to feed Erowid's database through Claude to get a better classification of drug phenomenology. Sadly they have explicitly disallowed the feeding of Erowid reports into LLMs: https://erowid.org/experiences/email_warning.php
I appreciate the stand they're taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.
Might be worth reaching out to them, assuming you meet their criteria of "researcher".
>The Erowids state on their website that researchers cannot “mine” data from their site but that they’re open to discussing projects with researchers, provided they’re properly credited and cited.
Once I took way way too much and disappeared into a swirling mass of organs and gibbering creatures a la Geiger. It should have been terrifying but it just... wasn't. I really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile, back in the fully conscious world, my roommates had conversations with me that I do not remember at all. I took a very long break from any experimenting after that.
This is so strange. The entire HN story page claims to be recent but if you look at user profiles this was all posted days ago. I didn't realize HN had a repost-with-altered-timestamps feature.
Hah, this now prompted me to ask ChatGPT to tell me about Erowid and the most remarkable things it read there, and we're chatting along over bad trips and it telling me how apparently heroin can't fix a bad trip, and it comes up with quotes from which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations, but "funny" ones if one thinks about them just having gotten made up by an AI:
> Every bad sensation was magnified a thousandfold because there was nothing to filter or rationalize it. Pain didn't feel like something I was experiencing—it felt like everything I was.
> I was convinced I had broken something inside my mind permanently, that I'd never be normal again. The terror of that idea became its own reality.
but also the nice things are interesting to chat about
Users frequently say things like:
“There was no past or future, only this moment.”
“Who I was didn't matter anymore; I just existed.”
or "That's one of the most interesting paradoxes people report: thinking continues, but the thinker disappears."
I think people belive that there is no thinker because sometimes your ego dissapears, at least fase out. Our thoughts and opinions arent relevant anymore. Thats muy experience and opinión btw.
Have no idea what variant of LSD I last consumed, but I remember some deep feelings of profound thoughts and self-reflection quite almost instantly when the stuff "hit" (maybe 30-45 minutes after ingestion), I was still cognizant enough to be able to write it all down. Some of what I wrote was indeed stuff I needed to work on in my own life and it was pretty helpful.
I then spent the next like 12 hours on my couch realizing that the entire concept of time is a manmade construct that is absolutely meaningless and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. All this while watching golf on TV (which followed a golfer who posted the lowest final round score ever at a major). I have no idea how the TV turned on, and why I didn't turn it off.
LSD is fucking wild.
I think watching golf on TV would make time seem pretty meaningless for a lot of people too!
i like the quiet vibes in general
> entire concept of time
“Entire” concept is stretching it, causality and entropy are not man made.
If you want to look at ideas people made up that have way too much influence on our lives, you need look no further than your wallet.
If you could prove the bit about causality you'll get a Nobel prize or two.
As that would definitively declare that there's no going back in time, there's no negative mass, and perhaps philosophically--theres no free will.
I'd say causality and entropy are contingent on the (very compelling) assumption that time is real. We could be Boltzmann Brains, or something even weirder. Do I believe that the world is terribly different from what it appears to be? No, but ultimately our perceptions of the world are merely representation held in our minds.
> causality and entropy are not man made
Given that we fundamentally depend on our own, very human, sensory and cognitive apparatus to make any kind of judgement I have a hard time imagining a proof or even a convincing argument of this without falling back on “it’s obvious” (etc).
Yes, I am being obtuse. Sorry about that. Just for the record.
Sometimes it just hits in such a way that you have no idea wtf is happening. One time I couldn't read because letters just didn't have meaning any more. It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.
> It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.
That's how my iPhone keyboard looked when I took a moderate amount of shrooms. It was weird, I could still think and talk coherently, but the keyboard was an incrophensible, vibrating, round, green-energy-sparks-decorated mess.
That happened to me as well. Pretty cool effect. I also remember trying to order “human food” off my phone but couldn’t figure out what anything on the app was
Heh, yes I remember something similar with an old Nokia.
Isn't that kinda scary? I mean when some parts of your brains don't work or not work properly?
It being scary is kind of the point. Or rather, if you’re going to do LSD, you need to be in the mindset that 1) this is temporary, and you’ll feel fine tomorrow, and 2) the experience you’re about to have will be extraordinarily novel and impossible to fully describe, even after having experienced it. It’s an intense hallucinogenic, and is the most potent mind altering substance that we know of. It’s also one of the safer ones, if you’ve done your research and aren’t predisposed to a certain category of mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety).
Knowing that it’s temporary is the best tether to this world that keeps me from having a bad trip, if it feels like that could happen. As others have said, an LSD trip is going to take you places you might not expect to end up. Meditation can be good preparation leading up to a trip.
LSD is one of those chemicals that gives you a glimpse at what it’s like to process the world with a completely different category of consciousness.
Microdosing (or rather 1/4-1/10th a normal dose) works quite well. You get much of the mental flexibility without serious disorientation and serious physical reaction (jitteriness and nausea, which is also why I avoid shrooms—too physical).
It's also worth noting LSD is quite pleasant on the come down. You're just very comfortable and calm. Typically self-soothing through the angst of the first half of the trip is straightforward. Also a great reason to be in good mental health before hand.... if you're not prepared to face something you've been avoiding or deluding yourself through, LSD is a very, very bad choice.
a category of consciousness AI cant reach.
On what basis are you comparing?
Wouldn’t we be able to give AI all kinds of random bytes and code eventually to make them “trip”? Much easier then engineering novel psychedelics
I suppose we could simulate tripping in that fashion but it would seem easier to affect a distributed activation function or other parameter to the simulation.
Not sure why you're asking me.
what basis would you recommend? Given the rate that chatbots engaging in making stuff up you can't just ask them. At least as humans we can take the substance ourselves to verify there's something happening. I think there will always be an insurmountable barrier to deciding if computers can be conscious, at least in our lifetimes. We're not even sure other humans experience similar consciousness.
I didn't make the claim and have no interest in defending or building it.
FWIW I appreciate the epistemic humility.
Nope, but as others have said - you must commit and realize that once you dose you're in for whatever it is. You must assure yourself that this is temporary and will pass. As a matter in fact our lives are much the same, nothing ever lasts forever. Just gotta roll with it.
Anyway, it's not that the brain isn't working properly it's just that the brain is working differently. That's how I see it.
It's only scary if you try to hard to hold on. Relax and float down stream... In the moment, it does not feel like your brain is not working properly. I tend to feel more clearheaded (even when confused) than I am on alcohol.
HAving had a similar experience, I have found it somewhat useful.
I've often found that my brain hasn't been working or working properly, and it's good to know that a) that happens, b) it can be transitory and c) even when it feels like it's working, I might still be fooled.
As I grow older, it's been a lot more difficult speak in absolutes.
At the same time, the contrast to observing when my brain actually -does- do something useful has also been useful and I have felt a lot better about leaning into that feeling.
This culture is insane and will gaslight the hell out of you, as will many of its constitutive members, so having some data on what it feels like to vividly hallucinate versus to have a different view on something has been very validating.
I am sure that sounds dumb, and that there are plenty of folks (especially on this social media forum) who would say that I am probably worse off for feeling like I have a better handle on "correct" and "incorrect", but hey, "enjoy the water, boys".
Depends on your attitude.
I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
That's why I LOVE alternate states of mind, even if they are scary.
Nothing excites me more than the prospect of feeling thing and seeing things I have not experienced before.
> I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
Interesting. The main benefit I've gotten from psychedelics (mostly mushrooms) is that all of life / reality is impossibly miraculous -- even, paradoxically, when it seems dreadfully boring. And also that I've somehow always known this, even when it feels like I've forgotten. It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed. It's the ultimate cosmic joke.
This framing never made much sense to me. It's incredible to be alive at all of course, but miraculous compared to what? I've found it best in these situations to quietly appreciate rather than trying to reify some ontology for contemplation—which is, after all, a distraction from appreciation itself in the moment, something largely akin to meditation.
The easiest way to experience some of the feelings you get from tripping is, in fact, meditation. The LSD mostly just forces you to be more honest with yourself by smashing barriers you would normally dismantle through allowing your mind to rest.
Granted, I've never experienced anything like eg a blurring of the sense of self with meditation. Theoretically it's possible. Maybe I'm just too content with myself to pursue it.
A lot of people are well aware of how much they are deluding themselves (into thinking they are happy and deserve to be so) that they should avoid psychedelics at all costs. It's like their ego knows it's in danger.
+1 Insightful
Also, your website (https://www.lifeismiraculous.org) is awesome. Echoes of Bertrand Tolle and Alan Watts. Thanks for publishing it and putting it in your profile!
> Nothing excites me more than the prospect of feeling thing and seeing things I have not experienced before.
absolutely same
Whose to say my brain works properly to begin with? We live in a collective delusion and any time I can see outside the delusion, sign me up.
> deep feelings of profound thoughts.
I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni.
Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :).
The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently. I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together.
But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.
I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight.
When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!
I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics.
Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life.
Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool.
PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
I had to throw out the notes I had taken while on shrooms because they literally looked like I had lost my mind if someone had seen them
This is baffling to me. I recall this comment from the last week but it currently reads "4 hours ago". Algolia also shows it posted "4 days ago". Some sort of reposting functionality?
Considering the topic, it made me consider if I was having intense deja vu.
this was posted a few days ago. Submissions get second chances and their timestamps are updated.
this says 4 days ago:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=What%20do%20people%20see%20whe...
I didn't realize they rewrite comment timestamps.
That sounds pretty amazing. What a metaphor that is. Hope you fully recovered but kept some valuable mental souvenirs from your trip. I do think people underestimate the dangers of LSD. It's amazing but I've known people who permanently injured their cognitive capacities using it.
Artists put themselves through various experiences (sometimes extreme) to portray the ineffable through abstract art. Works at both personal and societal level
https://youtu.be/A9gYgHkizSI
When I was in my 20s I tried salvia (Salvia divinorum) several times as tincture and by smoking dried leaves, and I'd like to share my experiences:
The first time was with tincture. My entire left body half became intoxicated in the exact same way as when drunk on alcohol. The left half of my body had difficulties with balance, coordination and motor functions. The vision on my left eye was impaired by the eye refusing to stay on target. Most interestingly, the left half of my brain was also influenced, giving me problems with speaking fluently and thinking straight. My right body half was completely unaffected, instilling me with a sense that humans were composed of two distinct halves rather than one body.
The second time was also with tincture. Nothing happened. No sensations of any kind.
The third time was with tincture and by smoking. It was a profound experience. I dozed off and dreamt that I was a nut on the branch of a tree. The wind swept me away and threw me onto a meadow where I sprouted and began to grow. I experienced life as a sapling, growing for years and years until I was an old tree, and I had vivid and fresh memories of seeing countless springs, summers, autumns and winters coming and going. When I came out of it I had an exhausted feeling in my chest reminiscent of waking up from long and deep sleep, and in my mind I had the memory and feeling of having lived for a hundred years, and a strong sense of an incredible amount of time having gone by since I smoked the salvia.
The last time I used it was by smoking. I experienced merging with things I touched. I sat on the floor and leaned back against a sofa, and felt my back sinking into the sofa and becoming part of it. I laid down on the floor, and felt my back fusing with the floor. I drank water from a glass and felt as if the glass didn't want to "let go" of my hand.
Smoking salvia hit almost instantly. With tincture, which was to be kept in the mouth for 10+ minutes but not swallowed, it took close to 20 minutes before the sensations begun. All of the trips lasted no more than 15-20 minutes and I never had any kind of hangover or lingering effects other than the (positive) emotional and psychological phases of reflecting on the experiences.
Used to take quite high doses of LSD, and often had incredible visual hallucinations. Things like watching a large plant sprout flower buds all over it, which slowly expanded to full bloom and then retreated back to small buds; the whole experience went on like that for 20 minutes. Another time I hallucinated that a neighbor's house was on fire, until my friend said she was hallucinating the same thing. Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
> Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
imagine calling them like "my friend and i are both on lsd and we are both seeing that house on fire so could you check it out please in case it's real"
a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing
until you hit the generative AI camera mode because, well, you're tripping, and it hears your description of the fire and adds flames to your image. In the words of Neo, "whoa!"
plentiful whoas ahead x D
> a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing
You can't trust the pictures either.
it’s a great trick and even some schizophrenic people can use cameras to ground themselves. I trust the computer, and it will never lie to me.
There's something about digital pictures that escapes the visuals.
I dunno about that, everything turns into a wildly animated gif when I’m tripping
i had a friend who told me that on high enough doses every picture becomes like a movie, you can just stare into it and imagine that whole world
You don’t need acid for that. Just imagination. That was my first entertainment as a child.
But LSD and related psychedelics are uniquely able to help one reconnect with that part of themselves.
Just remember: There are a lot of chemicals that produce LSD-like effects. The farther away you are from the chemist, the less likely you know the actual drug that you're getting. This is especially the case at concerts / festivals, where the "game of telephone" might mean that you don't really know what you're taking.
After reading many trip reports on Erowid for LSD, I suspect that the authors often unknowingly took something else. A classic case is STP/DOM, which often comes in paper / tabs and is visually indistinguishable from LSD. If you ever hear the familiar, "I took some crazy acid. At first it didn't work, so I took another, and then I finally came up after an hour and had an intense trip," it was probably STP/DOM instead of LSD.
Same thing for ecstasy: Can be anything from filler scam, to an MDMA dosage that will probably send you to hospital, to drugs that work very similar to MDMA and can also be called ecstasy to weird ass hard drugs that are something completely different.
In Vienna we have an organization that checks pills or powder from the batch you bought and tells you what exactly it is.
even LSD doesn't usually work immediately. it usually takes something like 30 minutes to an hour to start having effects.
i think one of my records is something like 12 hours after dosage to start feeling the effects. which i think happened because i also ate a bunch of food before taking
i use LSD recreationally every 1-2 weeks or so
Checking out your profile, did you already have dissociative identity disorder before finding your way to LSD? How do you think the two interact? No judgement or implications, curious.
I frequently eat before taking LSD and it never takes 12 hours to hit, after 1 hour it's always live and peak will occur within 3-4 hours. With a light meal or empty stomach it comes on a bit faster to a noticable state (but the hidden hunger can interfere with well being during the trip )
At Bonnaroo, one of our party got STP instead of acid and we had to babysit all frickin weekend. Of course, I had already taken my mescaline so it was not fun at all.
I tried 2C-E a couple times a long time ago. I think it was a relatively low dose. It was really interesting how mentally I felt mostly sober. But the visuals were so intense I got motion sick. It started out with tracers as I waved my hand. The textured paint on the walls looked extra 3D and the walls started to breath. The swirly pattern on the bathroom linoleum looked like chocolate milk. My posters turned into cartoons. And when it was all overwhelming and the motion sickness really kicked in, I closed my eyes and was greeted by fractal machines that built the molecules of the world.
I don't recall any really profound thoughts, introspection, or feelings of intoxication. Which was a strange difference to me compared to things like 4-ACO-DMT and LSD, but I liked it.
I dont like visual only drugs. That is like watching a screensaver for a few hours.
2C-B was more my thing (when I could get it).
Fast and powerful. Like LSD but without the 12 hour trip plus body aches.
2C-B never had any headspace effects for me except in very high insufflated doses (and even then it was minimal), taking normal doses orally would just give me a couple of hours of visuals. For me it was nothing like LSD in terms of headspace.
Agree - my experience with 2C-B was that it was almost entirely visual (tracers and such), with a very subtle mood lift, akin to very weak MDMA.
2C-E on the other hand sent me to some extremely trippy places. 2C-P is a fascinating one to read about too (though I've never tried it.)
I only ever vaporised 2C-B. usually I would get a full intense trip that lasts about 30 minutes and then very little after effects. A hit was also about $10 at the time (decades ago). Quality was good considering I was at one the top chemical engineering schools in the world.
Did you also get the uncomfortable bodyload that 2C-E is notorious for?
Yeah, I think it didn't come on for a while. I spent probably the 2nd half of my trips just laying down watching the closed eye visuals because my stomach hurts and I felt nauseated when I walked around or looked at stuff for too long.
I once took Ketamine, "fell through the bed" and spent half an hour in a different dimension, peacefully floating above and close to incredibly detailed, dull and dark colored patterns while unable to form language-based thoughts until I suddenly snapped out of it. The music I was listening to (HUSBANDS (Run Along, Son, etc.)) helped a lot and was just incredible, though I am still not sure if I could have had the same great experience with different music.
It was THE single most amazing and out-of-this-world thing I ever experienced and I highly recommend it to everyone.
I don't know if it helped me in any way with my depression though. No hangover. No lasting changes.
I had a similar experience with ketamine listening to different music. It felt almost like I was engulfed in the music, in a very positive and beautiful way. Having experienced opiates, MDMA, 2C-E, 2C-B, LSD, shrooms, and DMT, ketamine is still the experience I am most fond of. I sometimes wonder what certain music would feel like to experience on ketamine.
I experienced severe depression in my teenage years. Towards the end of them, I had this ketamine experience (well, a few sessions, but this one stands out in particular.) My depression has never come back nearly as strong as before (it's been over 10 years.)
One time I snorted ketamine with a bunch of hairy middle eastern guys on a club toilet in Tel Aviv and the next day I was courageous enough to rent myself a car and drive to the dead sea, when I had given up navigating the shitty bus booking websites for dead sea transports the day before.
There might be something to it. Unfortunately, the last few times I tried to buy Ketamine I got scammed with Cocaine, which I abhor.
Love the shroom experience, hate all the yawning and sore jaw after.
Idk how people do ketamime recreationally or in public. I did one little bump and was couch locked, managed to do two more and was laying on the floor with the world spinning, eyes closed, trying to manage motion sickness
You might want to seek out a formal therapist who uses medication assistance. They will have a series of regular sessions first to prepare/prime you for treatment. Set and setting matter a lot with these drugs!
When I did my only two Ayahuasca sessions and closed my eyes I saw some kind jungle scene with the eyes of a big cat looking at me. It was really interesting. With mushrooms I usually see abstract patterns. I never have mach hallucinations with eyes open. I just notice more things that I usually wouldn't notice. That's why I believe a lot movie directors took some kind of drugs because of all the details they can see.
all i know is that once you see the eyes looking back at you, and realize that it is the eye of nicholas cage, the universe and reality begins to make a lot more sense and it shows that even the gods reuse assets
The first time I took shrooms I had a very "thing in itself" moment where I realized that, because every time I thought something, all the sudden it became true, my perception must be affected by my cognition and that there were things outside the boundaries of my cognition that I could not necessarily perceive. Worst part was I still had to get up the next morning to teach, I started saying the weirdest shit in my practical anthropology course...
Here's a novel AI safety thought: Will AI need medicines to remain mentally healthy and sane? Will it enjoy tripping? Will it eventually fix itself to remain in touch with reality in all circumstances?
https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS
also, chemical substances like entheogens seem not relevant to AI now but this connection could unlock enormous educational potential once bio cell and "omnimodal" hybrid computing goes mainstream. Interesting times ahead : )
"We also looked at different types of psychedelics and didn’t see any systematic differences there."
This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn't have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they're all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.
That seems much more like a limitation of their analysis to me
This. There’s obvious differences in salvinorin and psilocybin effects and both are well represented in the data. But keep in mind the current paper only looks at existing categories of visual effect. The second study might include a finer taxonomy.
They don't, they are drastically different in character. There are close similarities within classes between some of the lysergamides, substituted phenethylamines or tryptamines. But even closely structurally related analogues can be extremely different (ex. 2C-E vs DOET vs 2C-C).
LSD is almost nothing like psilocybin or mescaline or DMT. And nothing is like salvinorin...
the recent research on psilocybin therapy is very interesting and so long overdue, i am so glad it's finally happening
I usually see the floor when I trip.
Sorry about the bad joke, but reading the title I first thought someone is doing experiments having people wear an action cam or something. ;)
Interestingly, there is a drug call datura, a beautiful white flower you can find all over suburbia, whose seeds when drank in a tea are an extremely powerful deliriant.
If you read the trip reports of it (which are pretty fascinating tbh) you notice a common trend of people hallucinating that they are smoking a cigarette, and then they drop it, only to search around and be unable to find it. This is usually one of the first tip-offs they have that something is happening before they totally get lost in the void. Really fascinating how many people on there had this same common experience while taking datura specifically.
Absolutely no one should even be entertaining the thought of experimenting with datura without first performing in-depth research, and having come to an understanding and acceptance that the result may likely be a multi-week violent psychotic/deleric episode culminating in involuntary hospitalization or incarceration. I have NEVER heard of anyone having an enjoyable experience with this substance, and I've been around for a while.
I meant to add that at the end. Like you said, basically no one ever has a good time on this drug. The trip reports seem to be almost entirely kids looking for a free high, and virtually no one who knows what they are doing purposely taking it.
The difference between an effective dose and a damaging or deadly dose is also pretty small IIRC. Between that and the stories of "I had no idea what was real and what was not for three days," it's a hard pass for me. There doesn't seem to be any insight to be gained from its use, or even recreational entertainment.
i think it's probably bad that this made me more curious
i think someone in my head wants to try it even if it's universally unpleasant
edit: jk i read literally anything about what the experience is actually like and i don't know if i feel like boiling the body with dehydration that bad, and apparently the other way you know it's working is that your mouth and throat get so dry that it becomes impossible to swallow food without choking
When the Soviet Union fell, lots of military first-aid kits escaped in the wild. Some of them (small plastic ones colored in bright orange IIRC) contained this thing:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Апрофен
(sorry, you'll have to rely on Google Translate, there's very little info on it in English)
It's a powerful anticholinergic agent used to treat poisoning by organophosphorus compounds (like Sarin).
Like many other anticholinergics (including Datura), if taken without first actually experiencing the poisoning, it results in a deep delirium with complete loss of control over one's actions. There are lots of interesting/disturbing stories out there on the internet, most of them written in late 1990s to early 2000s before all the stockpiles had been found and used up.
Take my word for it, Datura and Dramamine aren't worth fucking with. If you are determined not to take my word for it, Dramamine is pretty similar and a lot safer.
Take too much Datura and you're dead. How much is too much? It's very difficult to know, because it varies plant to plant. I'm sure you can die from taking too much Dramamine, but at least you can accurately gauge the dose.
Nothing I ever experienced on these drugs was interesting or enlightening. Some of it was horrifying. Typically I ended up curled up in a ball waiting for the madness to end (which took hours). 0/10 would not try again. Reliable source of bad trips.
>Take my word for it, Datura and Dramamine aren't worth fucking with. If you are determined not to take my word for it, Dramamine is pretty similar and a lot safer.
Dramamine the over-the-counter medicine to treat nausea and motion sickness?
That's the one.
You can get all kinds of (very questionable) highs from tons of OTC drugs: diphenhydramine (benadryl/zzzquil), dextromethorphan (Robitussin), doxylamine (NyQuil)...
A friend-of-a-friend took it and did the same thing. He was pinching his fingers in the blades of grass and putting them to his lips in a smoking motion. Then he ran straight into a wooden fence and took down the entire panel. Nothing about datura is good, nobody has ever had a good trip with it. Stay away.
Salvia turns people into zippers and books, sometimes door knobs.
Ha, thats sort of my experience too. Or often like looking through paper roll or grooved gun barrel which keeps twisting on subspace level. Or Van Gogh' Starry night pattern.
Good thing is salvia is very short acting, maybe 5-10 mins for me and intensity is somewhere around mushrooms. But I talk about at least 10x extracts, raw one is just tons of very biting smoke and comparatively little effect. The kick is literally within seconds, I barely managed to put down bong after a single hit and was flying away.
It's one of the few I've not tried. Personally I believe all the psychoactive plants are tools with distinct purposes (to be prescribed if you will) - salvia is the one that I'm not sure what it should be used for, I guess it's a good tool to show very literally that everything is everything, that seems to be what it basically does?
The more traditional way to use it is to chew on leaves, which is a far less intense and slower way to use it. Probably the approach you'd take if you wanted to get something useful out of the experience.
It's a deliriant, not a disassociative. Worth mentioning the trip is said to be deeply unpleasant, and also the plant is poisonous.
But yeah I too find it interesting how a drug can seemingly yield the same specific hallucination in different people. See also spiders and DPH (another deliriant).
Spiders are also a recurring theme among amantadine users:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amantadine
It was very easy to buy in Russia and neighboring countries up until 2012 or so. I've never used it (chickened out of trying out something like that), but there are tons of stories from more adventurous people.
Ah yes, thanks, my mistake
Many factors. Quality and type of substance. Liquid, blotter, pill form, mushrooms,cactus,leaves. And very important one's belief system. Then how much you ate, did you trip the previous days. How old one is? Do you tell fibs to yourself and others. On and on.
For DMT it's immediate. Even closing your eyes you see colors (flashes of light). I was sitting at a wooden table and the grain patterns were moving especially the circular placemat in front of me with concentric rings. And I remember being scared of my own arm like wtf is that. It was brief though minute or two it was over.
I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.
IMO its the worry itself which causes the bad trip not actually the repressed/bad memories. I know lots of people with bad childhoods who have great trips, but anybody who is anxious or worried about anything on the trip will have a bad time.
If you are in a good place surrounded by good people and you are happy, then it should be a good experience. If you go into it worrying about what will happen then the drugs will compound that anxiety, not relieve it.
DMT hallucinations are very different, and a lot more vivid, than those from LSD or mushrooms. With the latter, at least with eyes open and in reasonable doses, the effect is not so much as seeing "new things", but seeing the same thing somehow differently. There may be some slight morphing-type movement, but it's still obvious that you see the "same things". I don't think the visual effects are really significant part of LSD/Mushroom trips. They are just easiest to verbalize (unlike e.g. some weird brainfucks like forgetting what a door does), so they are talked about more.
With DMT it can be as if someone suddenly put VR glasses on you.
I'm just afraid of being trapped in a bad trip for hours ha may seem like eternity, maybe it's not so bad/try micro dose.
Edit: tangent: it's interesting, I jumped out of a plane before (tandem) and when I landed I didn't change as a person.
> I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.
That's a reasonable stance. I've found "bad" trips on both to be incredibly healing, nevertheless. I'm sure the outcome depends largely on your state of mind at the onset. Combining with MDMA could take the edge off bad memories that come up and grant space for processing them directly.
What do you think about doing it with a sober friend to control you? I guess you could be alone in a room and they monitor you if you need help.
Also micro-dose. It's funny the movie Jobs 2013 it shows him doing acid and he's in the field, I'm like "Oh if I do acid I can be like Steve Jobs" not serious but was wondering maybe... unlocks your brain somehow.
A sober, or an experienced trustworthy, tripsitter is almost a must. A small amount of MDMA (especially if you're not familiar with it) before taking a psychedelic can be helpful as mentioned. Having some sedatives just handy just in case may itself lessen the probability of unpleasant effects.
Micro-dosing is mostly placebo. But a good idea is to start with small doses (check e.g. the "threshold limits" at Psychonaut Wiki), and maybe faster shorter acting substances like 2C-B or mushrooms rather than longer acting like LSD.
Also good to acknowledge that psychedelics just aren't very enjoyable experiences for many, and even for most they are rarely unambiguously good.
Yeah I'm wondering if you can tell like I can't smoke w because I get paranoid/scared of people. I just drink in a social setting
edit: tell as in if you can't handle w, shouldn't do acid/psychedelics ha
Psychedelics aren't necessarily as anxiety/paranoia inducing as weed, and even the effects in general aren't necessarily as intense. Of course it depends on the dosage, the person and the setting, and paranoia from weed most likely correlates with difficult psychedelic experiences.
benzos end LSD trips, so if you are worried about a bad trip, just have a xanax with you when you do it and if you want out, take one and in 30 minutes you will be okay.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant
My dmt trips never felt like the ones I read about online. They were crazy and impactful every time. (I kept a dmt journal durring covid lol) But visuals were always 2d, geometric, I never saw some of the common things people described. Or seemingly common idk. The way trip reports sound were there were alternate worlds to wander around, 3d beings interacting. I think I used to dab about 20mg, I'd have to look it up.
I used shrooms for a while to recover from depression, but I never once saw anything. While walking along a trail I felt my vision had grown sharper, but never colors, never patterns or movement. That baffles me because at the time, I thought maybe I had consumed the wrong shrooms. The self-reflection, realization, and separation of thought from emotion was the most profound moment in my life. Yet no hallucination.
I did mushrooms quite recently in a highly therapeutic setting. Bar none, it was the only thing that actually addressed my depression after decades of basically everything else. I feel refreshed each day and everything is interesting again for what feels like the first time in my life.
Shrooms and visuals seem to be all over the place. From personal experience, they usually induce visuals but not always. For some friends, they rarely induce visuals, but sometimes they do - especially with specific strains of cubensis (despite “a cube is a cube”).
for me psychedelics tend to cause things to "pop out" at me more but they don't cause new things to appear on top of reality
Interesting way to describe it. Some caveats I forgot to mention: To actually make something happen I had to take 4.5 grams of dried soaked in OJ swallowed down. Granted I was on these evil little shits called antidepressants; fun fact: Big Pharma does not publish instructions for GETTING OFF of antidepressants.
Post AT's I could get the red pill effect in as little as 1/4 of a gram. Still no hallucinations but.. when I took that HERO dose to overcome the meds.. that walk in the forest did pop out at me. That was what I called sharper but yeah, it popped.
I was lets say economical with shrooms (one growkit from Amsterdam and that was it), so dosed it based on dry weight and never used more than '1 dose' (3g IIRC).
Since its consumed orally, full stomach greatly diminishes effects. Second trick I've used (I think I've found it on erowid) is to mix that dry shroom with raw fresh lemon juice. The result tastes horribly, even worse than just dry mushrooms, but it manages to make the trip much shorter and way more intense which is a good change IMHO.
And the last thing I've done to get as much trip from those rather small doses - I've laid down in bed, alone, covered myself, run some quiet shamanic music in the background and went off. And off I went, complete loss of all senses, dancing as a mist of atoms to that music that was and wasn't there, and then very slowly coming back, rediscovering my limbs and senses one at a time, feeling inner peace and connection to universe never experienced before. It was always profound experience but I always felt that I could jump out quickly by just opening my eyes and starting interacting with reality.
One time, first time, I didn't do any of above and just ate them, walking around Amsterdam, laying in the park watching nature and people during sunny day. It was almost 0 effect, I properly felt my video feed from eyes was too strong compared to shrooms effect and it was overriding whatever mild trip was trying to happen.
I get how tripping every few years might be a good way to get the cobwebs out and shake things up a bit. However, after 2 times, it just seemed like too much of a hassle. After a couple of hours of kaleidoscope, the novelty and fun starts waning, and it starts to feel like a chore. And then the exhaustion the next day.
The datura report vault is an old favorite when I am feeling bad about my life choices late at night.
https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha... is a classic!
when i take lsd i almost seem to gain the ability to see and hear my thoughts. i can imagine stuff with my mind's eye normally, but with lsd it's like i can see concepts directly. it feels like instead of thinking in words like usual it's like i can think with raw energy or something and i have more access to things
also it's a lot easier for me to recall like trauma and other buried stuff when i'm on lsd
I had great plans to feed Erowid's database through Claude to get a better classification of drug phenomenology. Sadly they have explicitly disallowed the feeding of Erowid reports into LLMs: https://erowid.org/experiences/email_warning.php
I appreciate the stand they're taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.
Commendable stance from you. It's sad that big tech won't care and will index their content anyway. I wish terms of use like this were enforcable.
Might be worth reaching out to them, assuming you meet their criteria of "researcher".
>The Erowids state on their website that researchers cannot “mine” data from their site but that they’re open to discussing projects with researchers, provided they’re properly credited and cited.
Once I took way way too much and disappeared into a swirling mass of organs and gibbering creatures a la Geiger. It should have been terrifying but it just... wasn't. I really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile, back in the fully conscious world, my roommates had conversations with me that I do not remember at all. I took a very long break from any experimenting after that.
Giger. Geiger is the counter.
This is so strange. The entire HN story page claims to be recent but if you look at user profiles this was all posted days ago. I didn't realize HN had a repost-with-altered-timestamps feature.
HN is tripping?
Hah, this now prompted me to ask ChatGPT to tell me about Erowid and the most remarkable things it read there, and we're chatting along over bad trips and it telling me how apparently heroin can't fix a bad trip, and it comes up with quotes from which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations, but "funny" ones if one thinks about them just having gotten made up by an AI:
> Every bad sensation was magnified a thousandfold because there was nothing to filter or rationalize it. Pain didn't feel like something I was experiencing—it felt like everything I was.
> I was convinced I had broken something inside my mind permanently, that I'd never be normal again. The terror of that idea became its own reality.
but also the nice things are interesting to chat about
or "That's one of the most interesting paradoxes people report: thinking continues, but the thinker disappears."generally a fun thing to chat about with it.
I think people belive that there is no thinker because sometimes your ego dissapears, at least fase out. Our thoughts and opinions arent relevant anymore. Thats muy experience and opinión btw.
Who is the master who makes the grass green?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_the_master_that_sees_an...
> which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations
They definitely are, in one way or another ;)