Psychedelics

Exploring my mind has always been one of the most interesting things in life for me.

Exploring different states of consciousness both naturally or chemically induced. There is a certain sense of mystery how one chemical can radically change your perception in such a short time and leave you with more questions than you started with.

Sadly, there is a rather negative stigma attached to most illegal drugs. It's sad that drugs like alcohol that numb your senses and your perception are socially acceptable yet drugs that let you explore and see things in a new light are banned and frowned upon. Declaring war on plants is insane.

On the brighter side, I think things are changing and are getting better in this regard. With advent of such easy access to knowledge, it is not so hard to do one's own research and come to one's own conclusions instead of accepting what other people think or say.

But as will all things, moderation is key. Or as in the case of psychedelics, this Alan Watts quote:

"When you get the message, hang up the phone"

My favorite psychedelics currently are 4-AcO-DMT, 4-HO-MiPT, 5-MeO-DMT, Changa & LSD (or 1cP-LSD) (~ 150-200 ug).

Want to try mescaline at some point too and actually breakthrough on DMT.

I use Tablets iOS app to track all my doses. This helps me make sure I don't abuse any substance. Usually take 2+ month breaks in between.

I hope to grow my own plant garden one day. For now I only grow my own mushrooms & cannabis. But want to try grow Peyote & Salvia amongst few other things. Plants and gardening is a fun rabbit hole to study.

Psychedelics together with listening of Alan Watts taught me a lot about life and death and how to always find my happiness amidst all the universe's chaos.

I like listening to my Trip playlist of songs when I trip.

Realchems is great vendor.

It's good to be aware that set and setting are important to get right before taking psychedelics. Otherwise you risk getting a bad trip.

Psychedelic Information Theory is a nice read.

Notes

I believe that everything is the creator. People and animals are the creator looking through different eyes.
- Psychedelics made me realize how intricate reality really is. They added this thought that maybe there’s something more real than real.
The spiritual perspective, at least from the point of view of Buddhism/Sufism/Daoism (and many others), is that it is inside of you. Except that you is completely different than what you've been taught.
- There is only one being in all of existence. You. Everything is you. Humans are small parts that exist within you in the same way that cells are smaller parts that exist within the human body.
- I am you. The beings you meet are you. God is you.
  - This is exactly what DMT reveals if you go deep enough. It's even more directly experienced with 5 MEO-DMT, but substances are not even necessary for the realization. Meditation will bring you there, eventually.
Psychedelics can make anything seem meaningful even if it's something pointless, similar to how cannabis can make you satisfied with boredom, opiates can make you relaxed in any situation, stims can give you confidence, etc. Relying on any drugs to give you meaning or whatever makes you a slave to them and in the end the only way you really get something is working for it, not just doing psychedelics and thinking about how meaningful something is.
Drug induced enlightenment is not enlightenment at all, I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but it feels like a different version of ecstacy. You take it, you overload your brain with serotonin, feel wonderful and connected, and then it's gone. I think psychedelics do the same with whatever chemical gets released in much smaller amounts when we figure something out.
Most psyches target 5-HT receptor. 5-HT is the chemical name for serotonin.
I've always felt that hallucinogens each have their own "staircase", and they all lead to the same "place" in their own way.
Bad trips happen because your brain is uncomfortable with something in your surroundings, your life, or yourself. Normally it is easier to not think of this but on a trip your brain turns the mirror in on itself and you're often forced to confront that unpleasantness.
- This can be a purely bad thing, but only if you let it. What should you do to keep it from being purely bad? Accept what your brain is showing you, rather than fight it. Consider the problems and their source. Figure out how to improve the situation or else make it a non-issue in your life, and take action when you have sobered up toward making those changes a reality.
The feeling that I got is that there is a certain type of knowledge that exists there, but it cannot come back with you. It's like trying to save a banana to a memory stick. Our brains simply cannot store that type of data. The heart of the experience(if you go deep enough) is something which is beyond mind. It can be experienced but not remembered.
Psychedelics deactivate what's called your Default Mode Network (DMN) and therefore enhance creativity and novel perspectives.
LSD helped me understand that time is just a human construct to describe the causality of the universe. Time is not another dimension, it is the result of things constantly shifting and changing. Nothing is still in this universe.
Psychs dissolve social constructs - its not specific for that though. They desynchronize the DMN which is responsible for consistency. Psychs may increase unconscious underworkings, or alternately, decrease the threshold required for these to manifest into consciousness. Social constructs are important for life and society. But ofcourse bad social constructs exist too. If they allow other sensory info to be considered, and other ideas to manifest, then you'll beable to see that our minds operate in a very fixed way. To relate to a study on LSD, they found that psychs increase entropy of language/semantics. They increase the semantic activation networks in our brain - allows more disorganized semantic priming.
The central revelation, as I see it, isn't so much about facts or content (e.g. truth, purpose, ultimate meaning) but rather about how flexible the hardware/software package is that underlies our cognition and sense of the world - the experience of your mind behaving in novel ways. The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed.
The current model is that psilocybin (and LSD) basically just activate the 5-HT2A receptor which leads to a collapse in the brain’s functional hierarchy via modulation of the DMN. The 2A receptor is there for a reason; current speculation is that it is activated in times of crisis, when beliefs need to rapidly be reassessed in order to adapt. Makes sense, right? The DMN/ego is there to reinforce beliefs; to fit them into a storyline. If you want transformation, the stories needs to be relaxed.
- This is in alignment with a lot of people’s reports of spontaneous “Awakening” experiences; a lot of them tend to have a common variable: surrender. The point is, the drugs aren’t doing anything that can’t be done without them, the circumstances just need to be right. The brain is normally working very hard to give you your “mundane” everyday experience.
- I have no experience with breathwork but having been on a couple meditation retreats I can certainly tell you the experiences can become very similar.
Dissociatives and psychedelics remove the conflict of interest when it comes to working on yourself. We get in the way normally, but then these drugs remove us from ourselves so we can look at ourselves without “ourselves.”
I kept tripping expecting every trip to show me or teach me a killer valuable lesson and that never happened. Instead I learned over all those years that I don’t own the truth, and that my reality (or rather my perception of it) is truly given by my context, my education, social life, opportunities and so on. So I can’t play judge and be judgmental about people and their situations because context is everything. I’ve learned to be aware and try and be less biased towards life. It took about 6 years to finally realize I was learning this the whole time.
Psychedelic assisted therapy is the product here - not psychedelics. Also you are completely missing the opportunity now presents through decriminalization for research into making even better drugs. Less side effects, less duration, more precise results. There’s now a run for companies to patent a drug that will be time release inside of your therapeutic lsd capsule so it stops the trip at a designated interval.
Citruline Malate or/and L-Arginine are best for vasoconstriction.
If psychedelics turn out to be as effective as they look in early trials, we're going to look back at the last 50 years of prohibition & realize we just sat by & allowed oceans of unnecessary pain.
Some people think they’ve transcended the ego when that’s really their ego talking.
I think psychedelics often times just reinforce existing personal traits.
The brain is very susceptible to this sort of "I'll never recover. Thing will always be this way." type of thinking. People who get high for the first time start thinking it's going to last forever, after only minutes to an hour of being high! The brain is really bad at predicting future mental and emotional states, but very good at convincing you that its predictions are absolutely correct.
While we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally.
The most persistent thing I see on the various psychedelic subreddits is the notion that our waking sober reality is an illusion and that the trip reality is more real.
Everyone's practice is different because everyone is different. I take a macrodose on a Saturday, like every 1-3 months as needed. I spend the week(s) beforehand preparing mentally, journaling, setting intentions, and taking excellent care of myself (diet, exercise, yoga, friends, etc). I really only do a healing trip if I feel like I am getting stuck in my old unhealthy habits and need some internal change. If you don't know how to facilitate a proper healing setting for yourself, I would recommend starting to work on this while sober first. Learn mindfulness and meditation and how you can heal in shallow waters before diving off the deep end. Then, start with smaller doses like <1g, and increase if helpful. It can help to set an intention (for this trip, I want to work on ____). And of course, set and setting and all that.
I suspect psychedelics all dock into the same DMT shaped receptors that induce dreaming while not inhibiting long term memory formation. The rest is unconstraining of perception via disinhibiting serotonergic messaging, and substance specific flavoring (eg slight euphoria from harmaline).
Your brain is experiencing time differently on psychedelics because internal time referencing mechanism is disrupted, like a glitching computer. objective time flows normal and you are not traveling anywhere other than in your imagination.
Don't give into fear. There’s not really rules to this game but one of the first astute observations one makes playing it is “don’t fight the current, ride the wave” or some other equally pedantic allegorical philosophy for how to deal with a sideways trip.

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