Bienvenidos a bardo

[Beatriz]

Hello Nexians,

I have enjoyed your community's work from a distance, and I would like to contribute some of my experiences. More than the substances I have used or the things I have seen, the places I have been stand out. Based on the comments, not everybody travels the way I do. I would like the other people who have been to other worlds to feel free talking about it.

I first experienced the shimmering disconnection that I have come to know so well when I tried nitrous oxide for the first time at a party. Everything acquired a certain sharpness, turned a deeper color, and I had a strong feeling that things had gone almost - but not quite - this way before. All evening I felt like an alien gazing out through the eye-parts of a new species. Only the next day did I feel back to normal.

I kept experimenting with dissociatives for years. Many people prefer ketamine, but I have always been most impressed with the rapid onset and recovery of the inhaled anesthetics. Lab-grade diethyl ether is my favorite. The greatest tool of a century of surgeons has taken me on more exotic journeys than all other drugs save the Spice. I have found myself in future hospitals inundated with plague victims. I've watched from the ceiling as my limbs were posed in artistic positions for surgeons' photographs. Quite commonly, I will find myself rising and falling as though on a glass elevator in tune with my level of intoxication. Get off here for the extraterrestrial petting zoo, or hang on for the next stop.

I have to "dive" quite deeply into the ether fugue to achieve these results, so the practice has never been a frequent affair. DMT can provide similar effects with less lead-in, and the visuals are more classically psychedelic. Both Spice and ether have taken me on voyages to other very concretely material places, but only Spice ornaments the familiar world around me in quite such a baroque fashion. It is almost always at higher doses of pure Spice that I break through fully. As all experienced trippers know, there's no predicting what you'll see.

I don't mean to encourage people to follow my lead willy-nilly; I only mean to describe my method for relatively consistent immersion into other realms. It's entirely possible some people won't trip at all, no matter how much you give them. Still others might be afraid if they'd seen the things I have.

Enjoy the ride!
-Beatriz

 

[Lucid.deviance]

Welcome! I dont have much experience with inhalants, aside from doing whipits, and certainly never an experience that can be compared to spice. Forgive my ignorance, but aren't inhalants inherently dangerous? Especially when achieving a breakthrough experience?

Thanks in advance and safe travels!

 

[Beatriz]

Thanks for your question. Inhalants have a prodigious reputation, largely because of the contaminants that come along with them. People use gasoline, starter fluid, glue, and all sorts of things with lots of toxic side effects. This is highly inadvisable: never use anything but 99+% pure laboratory-grade or medical-grade gases.

Like so much received knowledge about drugs in our post-drug-war world, "inhalant" has been branded uniformly bad, despite not being a rigorously defined pharmaceutical category. Inhaled drugs simply happen to be gaseous at body temperature. Biochemically, they can have any set of actions, positive or negative.

Ether has about a century of remarkably safe use history, even in surgical doses far in excess of those required for psychoactive effects. It was replaced by halogenated anesthetics like isofluorane largely because of fears of fire in poorly-ventilated operating rooms. The modern equivalents are flame-retardant, but actually more toxic, and can cause liver and other organ dysfunction. For this reason, ether should only be used with good ventilation and 12 hours of prior fasting in case of nausea, the same as harmalas/caapi.

I offer my experience with rapid-acting dissociatives as an alternative to ketamine. Ether gets exhaled and metabolized very quickly, providing an automatic escape route from the places I describe. K sticks around and can't be easily reversed. A tiny amount of powdered K mixed with heroin has been known to cause sudden death in IV drug users. Even John C. Lilly, a personal hero of mine, nearly died while overdosing on ketamine in his float-tanks.

As always, keep safety in mind no matter what you plan. And don't use any drugs daily except coffee.

Honor your nature, honor yourself.

 

[Thefunze]

Interesting post

I’d never considered that Ether could take you to such places. Just from casual observation I assumed it was just a cheap high for teenagers that hang about on roadside curbs.

It sounds like it could be a valuable tool to add to the tool set (for the right one shaman) personally I’m not keen on the idea that it takes a while to feel normal again (as you have said). Perhaps I’m spoilt only having recently discovered the spice. I’m in awe of its characteristic to bring you completely back to mental and physical normality only moments after the journey has ended. Having experimented I know this is rare with such substances.

So would you say that the experiences are comparable in realism to, spice, k, mushrooms or dreams? Are they any easier to remember, how lucid are they/ how much control do you have in such experiences?

 

[Lucid.deviance]

Thanks for the reply. You are right about false stigma about psychoactives. It pains me to say, even as experienced as I am, that I still hold on to some of the propaganda I was fed.

That being said, I feel prohibition (of anything) creates more harm, in the form of impure, adulterated products, ruining people's lives by incarcerating them, and propping up vast criminal enterprises that fill the void that prohibition creates.