Ahoy there, Ethereonauts!

[Yuchangi]

Hello everyone,

I feel as though I've gone as far as I can go with plain old conceptual analysis and the digestion of the vast array of so-called alternative accounts of the way the world is in terms of the realities of religion, concealed socio-economic and political power structures, and the limits of conscious/rational thought itself. In short, I feel ready to take the plunge into the psychedelic realm of experience.

However, a certain degree of trepidation remains. My main worry is that I might upset my internal equilibrium in the process of accessing other dimensions of reality. This, in the long term, may be beneficial, but nevertheless the fear exists. And, on a more practical level, the only resources currently available to me (that I perceive as valuable modes of expanding my perception) are psylocibin mushrooms and peyote.

As such, I would be much obliged if anyone could recommend which avenue to take. I should say that in no way do I consider the taking of psychedelic substances to be a recreational affair. I'm treating this whole matter with the respect I feel it deserves - namely that of a potential spiritual awakening. But, if I am best to achieve this, which way should I go? I gather that Peyote is something of a tutelary spirit along the lines of Ayahuasca, whereas magic mushrooms only seem to alter perception, without any solid indication that real insight is afforded into the meaning of an individual's existence and purpose in their current incarnation.

Can anyone advise me on what is to be expected should I take either the mushrooms or Peyote?

Many thanks in advance,

Yuchangi

 

[fungalfanatic]

Ahoy!

I am not sure I understand what more than 'only' altering perception you expect mescaline or aya to do. Altering perception is exactly what psychedelics do. All of these substances can give profoundly powerful introspective experiences. They can all give relatively mild experiences too. IMO whether or not you draw insight from your altered perception depends more on you and the circumstances of your trip (dose, set, setting) than on what substance you pick.

I would recommend starting with fungus. I think the shorter duration of mushrooms compared with mescaline makes it a superior choice for the beginner.

As for what to expect... expect something remarkable and beautiful :d . Specific expectations are pointless as no one can tell you what it will be like for you

 

[Enoon]

Hello Yuchangi,

Welcome to the Nexus. First off, may I suggest you take a look at the Open Hyperspace Travelers Handbook (in my signature) - perhaps you can find some interesting pointers to help you along in your journeys.

I find psilocybine mushrooms to be an excellent psychedelic both for beginners and for experienced psychedelic users - just when I think I understood the nature of the experience they come around and surprise the hell out of me again. As fungalfanatic pointed out, the insights you draw from a psychedelic experience really depend on you - your integration process and the depth you allow yourself to go during the experience. Mushrooms can be very very profound and revealing, they can be confusing and earth-shatteringly strange and intense, leaving you lots and lots of things to work on or with in the following days/weeks/months. Do not underestimate the power they have to alter your perception and to fling you into cosmic interconnectedness, to reveal to you the secrets of the inner workings of the universe, etc. But don't expect to be able to write it all down in an understandable manner...

I would definitely recommend mushrooms. Also, grow your own, it's the best experience ever!

cheers

 

[Yuchangi]

Hello, fungalfanatic and Enoon.

Thank you for your thoughtful responses. It seems that mushrooms are indeed the way forward!

Enoon - I will definitely check out your Handbook. :thumb_up:

fungalfanatic - It was just that I've heard that, when taking Ayahuasca or peyote, it is possible to have encounters with the spirits that rule the plants themselves, and that these spirits are very powerful earth spirits. In fact, I've even heard that, while meeting the spirit of peyote is a hit-or-miss affair, meeting Mother Aya is more or less guaranteed while on an Ayahuasca trip. And the consensus seems to be that, on meeting these spirits, they give direct and unequivocal feedback on how one is doing in life. As such, it seems that, while on mushrooms, it would rely more on individual interpretation and extrapolation of meaning from what is experienced during the altered state of consciousness, rather than (I suppose) being spoon-fed wisdom from a single higher entity.

But, considering both your posts, it looks like mushrooms are not to be underestimated, and are more than enough for a beginner. So mushrooms it shall be!

Thanks again,

Y

 

[ArchetypalDreamer]

Greetings, Yuchangi.

It's good to have another newbie around these parts; one Ayahuasca experience aside, I am also new to the world of psychedelics.

I hope to see you around the board

- A

 

[Yuchangi]

Hello there, ArchetypalDreamer.

Thank you for the welcome. Have you posted anything about your experience with Ayahuasca? I'd be interested to read about it, if you have.

Likewise, I hope to see you around!

Cheers,

Yuchangi

 

[sproutsfriend]

Hey buddy, I really believe there is no way to really psychologically prepare for a first journey with any of these substances Best bet is to creat a nice comfortable setting. ie. don't go to disneyland or try to watch trippy movies. Just a good comfy spot to chill with the option of maybe walking in a natural setting is my advice. Also, if things start feeling too intense, just breathe and let it flow through you. As far as the experience though, it's like trying to understand sound as a lifelong deaf person. Impossible to perceive without prior experience.
enjoy.
BTW I agree with the recommending of fungus for you this time.

 

[HippingTrippY]

Welcome Yuchangi,
I don't think you can go wrong with either. IME mescaline is much more gentle and "manageable" I have read experienced folks say and I agree with the statement "If you had to drive, like in a medical emergency, you can on mescaline". It's been my experience that I can do a little do a little more and the whole world slows down while I feel centered and as if there is a loving presence smiling at me.
At times on mushrooms or DMT I have felt as if I am losing my mind/soul, or identity. It helps greatly that I KNOW it is a transitory experience. No matter how high I am I will come down. I have never felt this on mescaline. You can't go wrong either way.




"Furtehr up and further in"
Aslan

 

[sproutsfriend]

So, what's up? this is my first thread I've ever commented on here. JUst curious how everything went for you

 

[Yuchangi]

Hi Everyone!

Sorry it's taken so long to updated this thread - I was snowed under with work for the last week. I have, however, managed to take mushrooms twice since my last post - the second trip being just last night!

The first trip went really well. The mushrooms seemed to be quite mild, and I had an experienced friend with me, who did a really good job of keeping me comfortable and guiding me through things. When I bought the shrooms, I specifically asked for a more visual experience, although I didn't really end up "seeing" anything except for the brief moment when I was busy throwing up into the loo, at which point I saw some nice, intricate little designs quite clearly before my eyes. Overall, though, all my senses were enhanced: the light looked like it was shining right down on my friend intentionally, and the colours and shapes in the room I was in were brighter and somehow more pleasing. My sense of taste was also enhanced - I didn't know that food could taste so good! - and I experienced liquid substances as more of a kind of static electricity than anything else. Actually, at one point I had a shower and spent quite some time marvelling at the fact that it's possible to get wet. That is, the water didn't really feel like it was touching my skin, and yet there were clear signs of wetness, which indicates some kind of interaction between the water and myself.

I also had some quite nice insights into the subjectivity of human experience, and how, although there is something that might be described as objective reality, we can only ever access it through our own subjective consciousness, which means that even physical "laws" are really just creative, subjective and more-or-less internally consistent descriptions of something that can never be experienced as what it is in itself, and that there could very well be infinite ways of correctly describing noumenal reality. So, what Kant said, basically (I wonder if he ever did mushrooms? )

The second trip was a bit more difficult. I did it alone and took some stronger mushrooms this time. I also did it at night, and ended up going for a walk through the woods that lasted for around 2 hours. I've never experienced such dramatic beauty before. There weren't any hallucinations involved, but the trees seemed to be frozen pieces of dynamic movement, and it also occurred to me that they could well be expressions of electric current, albeit unfolding very slowly from our perspective. The taut arch of the branches and ecstatic skyward stretch were a revelation, to say the least!

However, because I was alone, I was confronted more jarringly with the essential emptiness of life and the universe. Again, everything was perspective, and I realised with quite devastating force that I spend the majority of my time in my thoughts, under the impression that I'm interacting with people, where this is not actually the case. I felt a profound sense of loneliness and quite hopeless regarding the possibility of ever really connecting with another human being. However, fortunately, after allowing these thoughts to take me where they wanted to take me, it seemed that love and compassion are truly the only moral imperative in life. How can you have anything but compassion for beings who are stranded in eternity, surrounded by all the possibilities of everything that ever has or ever will be, all unfolding at once? The universe is so completely full that it is desolate it its emptiness. I understood why esoteric traditions say that man can be driven mad by coming face-to-face with God. There is terror in the realisation of the power of thought, and I was grateful for the limits of my everyday waking consciousness, because life would not be possible if we were aware at all times of the role played by our own perceptions and conscious focus on the way we experience our lives.

All this actually took me back to a profound awakening I had at university, although this time it was amplified and had a significantly stronger emotional impact. It was harder to deal with, but it showed me a lot about myself and the way I'm living my life. It made me realise just how lonely I've been, and that I've been looking in the wrong places for love. I now want to start building real relationships with flesh-and-blood people, rather than updating Facebook or YouTube and being duped into thinking that such things count as social interaction (the fact that I ever thought like that sounds crazy now that I'm writing it down!)

One more significant insight was into the nature of love: I stopped to admire one tree in particular, and I told it how I saw it. I told it it had a young soul, and that it would never truly grow old, and that it was beautiful. And then, as I was walking away, I looked at one of its branches and thought about how happy and glad I'd feel if this tree were to choose to freely give me part of itself to take with me, out of gratitude for the communication we'd shared. And I realised that this is how human love must be - if you appreciate and love someone and do your best to communicate this love, then at some point it will overflow and come back to you as a gratitude that will fill your heart up. Giving love is the only real way to connect with other people, and the fear of judgment is the reason that we - or at least I - don't give love a chance. The irony being, of course, that this fear does the job of the judgment without anyone ever actually having to judge you. It's like pre-emptively clipping your own wings just so that no-one else can do it do you, despite the fact that there's no surer way to guarantee that you'll never fly again.

I'm sorry if this is a bit incoherent - just woke up about half an hour ago, and as such am still experiencing the after-effects of my trip. I really hope to integrate a lot of the insights I gained this time around, and to make a change in the way I've been living my life. I hope you can all relate to my experience - feel free to respond!

And sproutsfriend and HippingTrippY - thanks for commenting!

- Yuchangi

 

[Intezam]

I was confronted more jarringly with the essential emptiness of life and the universe. Again, everything was perspective, and I realised with quite devastating force that I spend the majority of my time in my thoughts, under the impression that I'm interacting with people, where this is not actually the case.

Same here...:shock: thanks for sharing these writings :thumb_up: (it wasn't incoherent at all ) Rather very very great! 8)

 

[Yuchangi]

Thanks, Intezam. It's good to know that you can relate to my experience. I'm sure such experiences aren't uncommon on mushrooms, but I still don't have too much of a frame of reference for the range of psychedelic experiences, so it's great to get some feedback. ^_^

 

[ArchetypalDreamer]

Awesome write up. Thanks for sharing, and good luck on your future voyages!

 

[alex mowry]

Yuchangi; i'm glad to have read this and the things you took the time to share and write about. i'd like to share my attitude about using psychedelics and beginning with them.

in my experience; the psychedelic experience is put into three phases.

Preperation: where the individual designs a rough draft of their experience to work off of. each experience is individual and each individual should take the time to start the experience by taking a few weeks or even months to contemplate life, tap into creativity, practice things you think you might experience or would like to stimulate yourself with, talk with trip sitter(s) (i find the more the merrier and the more; the more likely you can to make your trip or experience have a individual ceremony; just for you! and that suits your needs and wants; just think about the things you want and the things you need so that you don't confuse them when you're tripping and perhaps learn to love your needs and like your wants and face what you have predestined and imagine an integration for that). the prep; whether intricate or not; is very important. it's the first step of understanding how you hallucinated, what your mind was telling you or what data you might have stumbled upon and all kinds of things about the experience you gained. and i'd like to say something about crisis situations; usually the preparation phase is the single best phase to prevent a crisis situation therein. a crisis situation in the psychedelic experience is like a signal from your brains subconscious and that signal is really just a communication; usually alerting you that something of your psychological health is off or needs attention. i know for sure that when i faced some psychological breakdowns while using LSA that i have become a stronger and more mentally, emotionally, and socially healthy person as a result. psychedelics are just tools; honestly.

The experience; okay, so when these drugs hijack your brain you should be inbewteen their control and your own. you've essentially invited a chemical guest to your mental home. now with inviting unknown beings into your analogical brain-home; you might consider lots of different stuff for when you do experience. sometimes i reasonably disagree that recreation is always a bad thing in using psychedelics; it depends on the context really. now; addiction (such as mental) are actually a real thing to be careful about with psychedelics. psychedelics and drugs in general affect the brain differently from individual to individual; from culture to culture; and from experience to experience. my opinion on psychedelics is that they have to be looked at through a few different angles to understand them and what they try to say to people; and how they are generally more beneficial than any other drug i've seen; and i will stand by that theory firmly.

sometimes; i find it easier to look at psychedelics as entities and sometimes i find it easier to look at them as drugs altering my mind. with the experience of using LSA i found that life was drastically grown and amplified. what things meant to me rose to the surface; and i discovered a part of myself i never considered before or could ever consider. my only mistake in my initial ordeals with using LSA was that i actually didn't know a whole lot about it when i tried it. i find this use of psychedelics irresponsible and generally a negative approach. but it's a paradox or contraindiction isn't it? if you make it hard for people who are interested in psychedelics to talk about and research and use psychedelics and make people afraid of psychedelics; psychedelics essentially become a negative influence for the user. but then because it's all about the set and then the setting that make up how a psychedelic affects you; you essentially learn as you go and gain more experience with psychedelics and reading and writing literature about them from mediums like DMT nexus, erowid, other forums, M.A.P.S., actual experience, trip reports, and such.

Integration: i find the preparation important to the experience and the experience important to the individual; then i find integration important to society. i believe that taking what your brain has learned about in a psychedelic experience and making it available through a communication for others to read to fundamentally sharing new ideals about math or art or the sciences or other skills that are neurological in behavior. when you use a psychedelic it's a big deal; not out of respect, not out of spirituality, not out of anything alone in a seperate or isolated context. simply what i'm getting at; is that psychedelics are like a rollercoaster; they do flips and throw you over; board your ship that's going nowhere, if you stop you'll end up somewhere. also psychedelics don't have to be about addiction or depression or anything that the media hypes them up to be. many people's life experiences and whole understandings of psychedelics are uneventful in the sense of danger. usually instead; psychedelics are over all a posative influence with most individuals if the set and setting are carefully balanced.

the set and setting: these are the fundamental "mathmatical" aspects of the semi-predictability of experiencing psychedelic drugs. my opinion is that "set" (intention, previous experience, genetic factors like body weight or height or activity, mindset, mental capacity, mental activity, emotional capacity and activity, opinion and attitude about drug use or altered consciousness or generally alternative consciousness exploration; etc.) is important for how the drug makes you percieve things about the world around you. the set is the most important aspect of how you can use psychedelics as a tool fit for you. now "setting" on the other hand (external and internal mood, perception, reality, the cosmic "storyline" going on around you, space, time, what happens to you or what you stumble into or end up seeing, your level or degree or spectrum of intelligence, creativity, and insight, the psychedelic you are using, how you entered it into the body, how quickly it takes for your body to absorb the drug and your brain to process what the drug is doing, what your body signals and tells you about the drug and how it's affecting you, how society views and teaches each other about drugs, etc, etc) is important for how psychedlic culture, psychedelic users, and psychedelics in general and how they affect the individual experience of an individual psychedelic user. with integration; people have been able to create incredible inventions, change aspects of their life they have no control over, and make the world a better place. with preperation, you can already do something about the loss of control humanity already has a problem with. and with the actual experience; anything is possible, especially if you are intelligent, creative, insightful, or try to generally understand why it's a good idea to be a "good" person rather than a "bad" one; although not preaching about what is right and what is wrong; everyone has their own opinion on this.

all in all; psychedelics are actually remarkably simple for some people to understand; it's people that are the most complicated drug of all. life... it's one hell of a drug and i'm constantly tripping balls!

i just think that we can describe psychedelics to just about anyone; its just that psychedelics can't describe themselves and people have a hard time describing things in general; we have to be the one's to interpret the word "psychedelic", the experiences there of, and make psychedelics impact society posatively; otherwise they will remain illegal and useless to the world around. sometimes what is right isn't always popular and what is popular isn't always right.

lastly-lastly, i find trip reports to be one of the single most important tools at our disposal. we should let people get creative with this tool and use it to help each individual. this is common sense; but it doesn't help to carry on the reminder from newbie to newbie to senior to senior.