I'm writing this essay to serve as an introduction to myself and to share my first true entheogenic experience. The first thing you need to know about me is that I do not believe in anything beyond the physical universe as observed and recorded by science. I am an antheist and an active member of what has been called the New Atheist movement. I start with this revelation because pretty soon I'm going to get into a tale about spirits and gods and magical powers. You need to understand that, to me, these are all creations of my brain without any foundation in abject reality.
My psychedelic experience started in college, first with weed then with LSD. I've had 3 true experiences on acid, 2 of which were absolutely beautiful and life changing. I've always had an extremely vivid imagination so watch acid blur the lines between reality and fantasy delighted me. I felt like it had opened a window into my subconscious and I could watch all the little subsystems of my brain working. There was my visual subsystem transforming light data into abstract objects. There were my emotions, building up layers of abstraction on my senses and then my feelings. There was my language processing center, making words from sounds. LSD is an awe-inspiring, important experience that opened my mind a whole new world of self exploration. I would love to do more because I barely scratched the surface of what acid has to offer, but post Picard bust it became more and more difficult to find quality 'water' especially because I don't live in a metropolitan area.
From LSD, I moved to MDMA, which some here don't view as a true psychedelic. I respectfully disagree. In my mind, MDMA has two faces depending on how you want to enjoy it. Combined with amphetamines or other dopamine stimulants as is common in E pills, it's a euphoric stimulant that is good fun is not a deep psychedelic experience. By itself however, at higher doses, it can become truly psychedelic. The secret is patience. I've had some truly earth shattering experiences meditating on MDMA to soothing electronic music. Because of the stimulation throughout my whole body, I can become intimately aware of each nerve firing within my body, allowing me to "surf" my ego around my body and even out into the music itself. I imagine the sound waves moving around me and I can actually float outside of myself amongst a crystalline world of octaves and harmonies all mediated by beat of the music. It's very difficult to convince myself to remain still for enough time to enter this trance state, but it's totally worth it.
About a year ago I became interested in the world of exotic psychedelics, primarily because of a failed pharma experiment using raw extract a friend gave me. In hindsight, I didn't use enough harmalas but I had no idea what I was doing at the time. After some trolling around the web, I came across The Nexus and was pleasantly surprised not only by the wealth of information on this site but by the professionalism, kindness and courtesy of the posters. There seemed to be a very low amount of FUD, which is rare for any forum, particularly a drug forum. I soon came to learn that enteogens were more than drugs to many Nexus users. My curiosity was sufficiently peaked so I ordered some Mimosa, some cebil seeds and 100g of cactus powder, along with various bases and solvents I figured I would need to do an extraction.
My first extraction was 69ron's limolene cactus tek. This tek was right on the money but I made many different mistakes along the way which severely hurt my yields. A word of caution: Hydrochloric acid and milk jugs do not mix. All in all, I managed to get 475mg of off-white mescaline powder from 100g of starting material. I was disappointed with the quantity but not surprised considering I more or less ruined my first pull (which had been soaking for a whole week) with above mistake. I took 75mg myself, just enough to verify that what I extracted was mescaline and I noticed a definite mood lift with some stimulation. I took a third of a clean E pill about 7 hours after dosing which quadrupled the effects of both and had a great time. I split the remain 200mgs with my girlfriend a few weeks later (at Disneyland) and we had a great time, but it never got really visual or psychedelic. I'm in the middle of a resin tek right now from fresh cactus (hopefully of the right variety) which I hope will yield a more powerful experience.
My second and more successful tek was the bufotenine toaster tek. The experience reports from bufotenine really intrigued me and the tek seemed a lot easier than most DMT teks. I made an enhanced leaf mixture using a combination of Passionflower, white lotus, lavender, and damiana. I should have stuck with something simpler for my first time, but I tend to be an over achiever. What resulted was a blackish mixture of finely ground herbs with an unknown amount of bufotenine dissolved on them. I also had about 175mg of THH, depleted from by a small test. These are the starting elements of an experience I'm going delve into more in depth, in experience report style below.
{The Trip}
My tipping partner of the night was a friend I'll call S. S has dozens of experiences with LSD and MDMA and was once a coke head for almost a year but he had been clean (of coke) for about 6 months when this trip occurred. I had read many reports about the effects of Bufotenine online but nothing prepared me for the experience I was about the have. Before, I had warned our friends that we were going to be tripping balls that night but that phrase is so far from the truth as to be almost comical.
The afternoon started with me extracting the bufotenine from about 35 grams of seeds. My process was simple:
-toast at 350F until all the seeds pop (about 30 minutes).
-grind seeds into a fine powder with coffee grinder
-toast powder another 30 minutes at 350F (this gives you a black, burnt powder)
-extract 2x with IPA
-filter though old t-shirt, coffee filters, etc.
-evap IPA with heat until majority is gone
-add herbs and evap remaining ipa until you can't smell the IPA
I performed all these steps over the course of the afternoon. My friends thought I was a little crazy and they all were intrigued to see the results. I didn't take the time to evap the bufo separately to weigh how much I had and I just guesstimated how much herbs to add but I ended up with pretty decent amount of changa with visible bufotenine crystals. I made the mistake of using too much heat during the final evap and I burnt my herbs; I assume. I made the smoke a bit more harsh.
I decided I wanted to experience bufotenine with THH since I'd read so many good things. I intended to add the THH directly to the IPA before the final evap, but I forgot. Not wanting to take the time to evap more IPA, we decided to take the THH first, then wait until we felt the effects before smoking the bufo. THH Hcl is a dry white powder, so S (being a coke lover) immediately suggested that we snort it. I had difficulties with sublingual absorption with my first test so I figured why not, how bad could it really hurt?
We divided the into two equal lines, presumably around 80mg each. S snorted his, half up each nostril. Before waiting for him to react, I snorted mine, but I chickened out on the second half and probably only got 65mg. The pain hit immediately but at first I thought it wasn't so bad, comparable to snorting MDMA. I was wrong. The pain kept getting worse and worse; I could feel the chemical eating away at my nostrils and soon my whole sinus cavity was on fire. The drip carried that awful burn down the throat and showed no signs of abating for at least 10 minutes. I tried running water up my nose and that helped a little, but the pain was still excruciating. Anyone who reads this: NEVER snort Tetrahydroharmoline Hcl!
Finally, after about 15 minutes the pain was slowly starting to fade and with it the effect of the THH were coming on. Harmalas are really weird in my opinion. I could definitely feel the drug working but I couldn't describe at all how they were making me feel. But I was feeling good, somehow. It's a strange feeling that's hard to understand, especially because you keep second guessing thinking the effect are placebo. At this point S says he's feeling pretty good and he might not need to smoke the bufo.
I encourage him otherwise, telling him that going through the pain of THH without the bufo would be a waste. After feeling the effects of the THH for about 30 minutes we decide to pack a bowl of our bufo enhanced leaf. I go first, trying to get a decent sized rip, but the smoke is very harsh. I immediately begin coughing super hard as I pass S the bowl. He takes a hit but can't hold it in either. I take another hit, breathing in much slower this time and filtering the smoke as I went. I hold in the smoke as long as I can, then slowly exhale.
Within a minute I can feel the effects I'd read about, pressure and prickling in the back of the head and a general tightness throughout the body that I assume is vasoconstriction. My friend takes another and is getting the same effects. Again he tries to quit, but I push him onward; I tell him I've read about the experience and you have to keep smoking. The side effects go away and the good effects are worth it, I tell him. To be honest, I was encouraging myself as much as I was him. Slowly we pushed ourselves to smoke more and each hit got easier and easier to smoke.
This is the point where my memory gets a little bit fuzzy. We were in the middle of our third bowl when we started to notice the effects. One of our friends was a little drunk and waving a towel around for whatever reason. S noticed it first and pointed out to me that the towel looked really trippy. I don't recall what it looked like exactly, but suddenly at that moment, everything clicked. I was no longer in my friends' (huge) house, but I'd been transported somewhere else, somewhere magical. From this point onward, time ceased to exist in any relevant sense of the word. We had crossed through the looking glass and where now in our own personal magical kingdom, a place that existed in a different dimension of space and time. Of course, the first thing we did was take another bowl of changa straight to the dome.
In our magical kingdom, everything came to life like the furniture in a Disney fairy tale. The first such entity I noticed was Gumpy the Technicolor Fireplace. We gave him that name because he was a large fireplace in my friend's house that looks like a smiley face with ears if you look at it right. Instead of a brick, Gumpy was made of multi colored stained glass that shimmered and seemed to glow in the dark. The colors were vibrant and the mortar between the "bricks" looked like molten glass. Unlike acid visuals, Gumpy was a remarkably stable illusion; I got inches away from him and the stained glass like increasingly shiny and vibrantly colored. We both could feel his presence and his kind, protective nature. We knew he was looking out for us and even as we explored around the castle (the house) we could feel him watching over us. For all useful purposes he was a living, breathing being and a good friend of ours throughout the night.
We spent most of the night exploring the mythical castle that had replaced S's rather large house. I don't recall everything we saw but I'll share a few of the highlights. Outside, the house is surrounded by a fence made of stone blocks that are worn and rough. In bufo land these imperfections in the stone seemed to be hills and valleys of a vast land populated by a microscopic civilization complete with villages, towns and cities. S and I postulated that citizens of this world must view us as great gods. Just by touching their world with our fingers we could change the course of their lives forever, destroying cities or damming rivers. We didn't dare interfere. We talked about how vast the cosmos was and how our one planet was but one of 8 in our one solar system of billions in our galaxy, itself one of millions of galaxies spread throughout the expanse of space. In the grand scheme of things, our lives were less consequential than those of the stone-wall people with respect us. Somehow we found this very comforting.
S lived in the garage in front the house and before this night, I'd never been inside his room. When he showed me inside I felt as though I was entering heaven. All his walls were covered with intricately patterned tapestries that appears to be made from liquid glass. One tapestry was lined with elephants which appeared to be alive; I could see them breathing. From the roof above hung another tapestry with an enormous sun in the center and I swore I could feel the heat from it's rays despite the fact that it was a pretty cold night. S had several posters on his walls ranging from Marilyn Monroe to a lion holograph that all were all alive and had unique personalities. We tried to get some of the entities to speak to us, but failed after several attempts.
We stayed in S's room for the rest of the night, smoking more changa from his little pipe. we used a cigarette as a lighter because it burned cool and made the smoke less harsh. I could feel the spirit of each herb in the changa working throughout my body: the passionflower soothed my spirit, the lotus brightened my mind, the damiana invigorated my body and the lavender tickled my senses. We both felt absolutely fantastic, completely clear head and focused like never before. Unlike LSD, which can be confusing and alien, bufotenine makes everything clear. We felt like sober observers transported to a magical place and that place was much more important than the drug itself. We were travellers who had finally reached the top of Mount Olympiad and were sitting among the gods. We had earned our place by completing the arduous journey we had to endure earlier.
Our trip lasted for about 6 hours, but we kept smoking our changa throughout the night to prolong the effects. I have no idea how much bufotenine I consumed, but between the two of us and a few spills we finished about half of the changa I had made from 35ish grams of cebil seeds. I know we wasted a fair amount because the effects never really got past a certain level, but it was fun to smoke (once you got used to it). I have no idea how much of the effects were due to the THH versus the bufotenine but I think the bufotenine was the main player. The THH probably made the effects last longer and made us feel more euphoric than the bufo itself would have. Again, this is just my theory.
Despite the power and majesty of this experience, the greatest effects were actual felt over the next few days. Both S and I commented that we were excited to see what the world looked like the next morning. The whole day, everything seems more alive and I noticed the small details in everything that would normally have escaped my notice. S's roommates had a day party at his house and normally a bunch of drunken frat guys would have seriously pissed me off and made me feel very uncomfortable since I was sober but now I felt above it all, perfectly at peace with myself. I was content to let them be stupid without affecting my disposition. I struggle with social anxiety and my bufo trip greatly reduced my anxiety! The sense of peace was marked for the first couple weeks but even now, months later, when I start to feel anxious I can go back to my personal magical kingdom and it calms me down tremendously.
I could wax eloquent about my theories of the human brain and how bufotenine magnifies the brain's natural inclination to personify everything but this post is already quite long. Kudos to anyone who read (or at least skimmed) the whole thing. I hope you found it as enjoyable to read as I did to write. I hope to become an active member of this site because I have certainly caught the "extraction bug."
Peace and Love to All.
My psychedelic experience started in college, first with weed then with LSD. I've had 3 true experiences on acid, 2 of which were absolutely beautiful and life changing. I've always had an extremely vivid imagination so watch acid blur the lines between reality and fantasy delighted me. I felt like it had opened a window into my subconscious and I could watch all the little subsystems of my brain working. There was my visual subsystem transforming light data into abstract objects. There were my emotions, building up layers of abstraction on my senses and then my feelings. There was my language processing center, making words from sounds. LSD is an awe-inspiring, important experience that opened my mind a whole new world of self exploration. I would love to do more because I barely scratched the surface of what acid has to offer, but post Picard bust it became more and more difficult to find quality 'water' especially because I don't live in a metropolitan area.
From LSD, I moved to MDMA, which some here don't view as a true psychedelic. I respectfully disagree. In my mind, MDMA has two faces depending on how you want to enjoy it. Combined with amphetamines or other dopamine stimulants as is common in E pills, it's a euphoric stimulant that is good fun is not a deep psychedelic experience. By itself however, at higher doses, it can become truly psychedelic. The secret is patience. I've had some truly earth shattering experiences meditating on MDMA to soothing electronic music. Because of the stimulation throughout my whole body, I can become intimately aware of each nerve firing within my body, allowing me to "surf" my ego around my body and even out into the music itself. I imagine the sound waves moving around me and I can actually float outside of myself amongst a crystalline world of octaves and harmonies all mediated by beat of the music. It's very difficult to convince myself to remain still for enough time to enter this trance state, but it's totally worth it.
About a year ago I became interested in the world of exotic psychedelics, primarily because of a failed pharma experiment using raw extract a friend gave me. In hindsight, I didn't use enough harmalas but I had no idea what I was doing at the time. After some trolling around the web, I came across The Nexus and was pleasantly surprised not only by the wealth of information on this site but by the professionalism, kindness and courtesy of the posters. There seemed to be a very low amount of FUD, which is rare for any forum, particularly a drug forum. I soon came to learn that enteogens were more than drugs to many Nexus users. My curiosity was sufficiently peaked so I ordered some Mimosa, some cebil seeds and 100g of cactus powder, along with various bases and solvents I figured I would need to do an extraction.
My first extraction was 69ron's limolene cactus tek. This tek was right on the money but I made many different mistakes along the way which severely hurt my yields. A word of caution: Hydrochloric acid and milk jugs do not mix. All in all, I managed to get 475mg of off-white mescaline powder from 100g of starting material. I was disappointed with the quantity but not surprised considering I more or less ruined my first pull (which had been soaking for a whole week) with above mistake. I took 75mg myself, just enough to verify that what I extracted was mescaline and I noticed a definite mood lift with some stimulation. I took a third of a clean E pill about 7 hours after dosing which quadrupled the effects of both and had a great time. I split the remain 200mgs with my girlfriend a few weeks later (at Disneyland) and we had a great time, but it never got really visual or psychedelic. I'm in the middle of a resin tek right now from fresh cactus (hopefully of the right variety) which I hope will yield a more powerful experience.
My second and more successful tek was the bufotenine toaster tek. The experience reports from bufotenine really intrigued me and the tek seemed a lot easier than most DMT teks. I made an enhanced leaf mixture using a combination of Passionflower, white lotus, lavender, and damiana. I should have stuck with something simpler for my first time, but I tend to be an over achiever. What resulted was a blackish mixture of finely ground herbs with an unknown amount of bufotenine dissolved on them. I also had about 175mg of THH, depleted from by a small test. These are the starting elements of an experience I'm going delve into more in depth, in experience report style below.
{The Trip}
My tipping partner of the night was a friend I'll call S. S has dozens of experiences with LSD and MDMA and was once a coke head for almost a year but he had been clean (of coke) for about 6 months when this trip occurred. I had read many reports about the effects of Bufotenine online but nothing prepared me for the experience I was about the have. Before, I had warned our friends that we were going to be tripping balls that night but that phrase is so far from the truth as to be almost comical.
The afternoon started with me extracting the bufotenine from about 35 grams of seeds. My process was simple:
-toast at 350F until all the seeds pop (about 30 minutes).
-grind seeds into a fine powder with coffee grinder
-toast powder another 30 minutes at 350F (this gives you a black, burnt powder)
-extract 2x with IPA
-filter though old t-shirt, coffee filters, etc.
-evap IPA with heat until majority is gone
-add herbs and evap remaining ipa until you can't smell the IPA
I performed all these steps over the course of the afternoon. My friends thought I was a little crazy and they all were intrigued to see the results. I didn't take the time to evap the bufo separately to weigh how much I had and I just guesstimated how much herbs to add but I ended up with pretty decent amount of changa with visible bufotenine crystals. I made the mistake of using too much heat during the final evap and I burnt my herbs; I assume. I made the smoke a bit more harsh.
I decided I wanted to experience bufotenine with THH since I'd read so many good things. I intended to add the THH directly to the IPA before the final evap, but I forgot. Not wanting to take the time to evap more IPA, we decided to take the THH first, then wait until we felt the effects before smoking the bufo. THH Hcl is a dry white powder, so S (being a coke lover) immediately suggested that we snort it. I had difficulties with sublingual absorption with my first test so I figured why not, how bad could it really hurt?
We divided the into two equal lines, presumably around 80mg each. S snorted his, half up each nostril. Before waiting for him to react, I snorted mine, but I chickened out on the second half and probably only got 65mg. The pain hit immediately but at first I thought it wasn't so bad, comparable to snorting MDMA. I was wrong. The pain kept getting worse and worse; I could feel the chemical eating away at my nostrils and soon my whole sinus cavity was on fire. The drip carried that awful burn down the throat and showed no signs of abating for at least 10 minutes. I tried running water up my nose and that helped a little, but the pain was still excruciating. Anyone who reads this: NEVER snort Tetrahydroharmoline Hcl!
Finally, after about 15 minutes the pain was slowly starting to fade and with it the effect of the THH were coming on. Harmalas are really weird in my opinion. I could definitely feel the drug working but I couldn't describe at all how they were making me feel. But I was feeling good, somehow. It's a strange feeling that's hard to understand, especially because you keep second guessing thinking the effect are placebo. At this point S says he's feeling pretty good and he might not need to smoke the bufo.
I encourage him otherwise, telling him that going through the pain of THH without the bufo would be a waste. After feeling the effects of the THH for about 30 minutes we decide to pack a bowl of our bufo enhanced leaf. I go first, trying to get a decent sized rip, but the smoke is very harsh. I immediately begin coughing super hard as I pass S the bowl. He takes a hit but can't hold it in either. I take another hit, breathing in much slower this time and filtering the smoke as I went. I hold in the smoke as long as I can, then slowly exhale.
Within a minute I can feel the effects I'd read about, pressure and prickling in the back of the head and a general tightness throughout the body that I assume is vasoconstriction. My friend takes another and is getting the same effects. Again he tries to quit, but I push him onward; I tell him I've read about the experience and you have to keep smoking. The side effects go away and the good effects are worth it, I tell him. To be honest, I was encouraging myself as much as I was him. Slowly we pushed ourselves to smoke more and each hit got easier and easier to smoke.
This is the point where my memory gets a little bit fuzzy. We were in the middle of our third bowl when we started to notice the effects. One of our friends was a little drunk and waving a towel around for whatever reason. S noticed it first and pointed out to me that the towel looked really trippy. I don't recall what it looked like exactly, but suddenly at that moment, everything clicked. I was no longer in my friends' (huge) house, but I'd been transported somewhere else, somewhere magical. From this point onward, time ceased to exist in any relevant sense of the word. We had crossed through the looking glass and where now in our own personal magical kingdom, a place that existed in a different dimension of space and time. Of course, the first thing we did was take another bowl of changa straight to the dome.
In our magical kingdom, everything came to life like the furniture in a Disney fairy tale. The first such entity I noticed was Gumpy the Technicolor Fireplace. We gave him that name because he was a large fireplace in my friend's house that looks like a smiley face with ears if you look at it right. Instead of a brick, Gumpy was made of multi colored stained glass that shimmered and seemed to glow in the dark. The colors were vibrant and the mortar between the "bricks" looked like molten glass. Unlike acid visuals, Gumpy was a remarkably stable illusion; I got inches away from him and the stained glass like increasingly shiny and vibrantly colored. We both could feel his presence and his kind, protective nature. We knew he was looking out for us and even as we explored around the castle (the house) we could feel him watching over us. For all useful purposes he was a living, breathing being and a good friend of ours throughout the night.
We spent most of the night exploring the mythical castle that had replaced S's rather large house. I don't recall everything we saw but I'll share a few of the highlights. Outside, the house is surrounded by a fence made of stone blocks that are worn and rough. In bufo land these imperfections in the stone seemed to be hills and valleys of a vast land populated by a microscopic civilization complete with villages, towns and cities. S and I postulated that citizens of this world must view us as great gods. Just by touching their world with our fingers we could change the course of their lives forever, destroying cities or damming rivers. We didn't dare interfere. We talked about how vast the cosmos was and how our one planet was but one of 8 in our one solar system of billions in our galaxy, itself one of millions of galaxies spread throughout the expanse of space. In the grand scheme of things, our lives were less consequential than those of the stone-wall people with respect us. Somehow we found this very comforting.
S lived in the garage in front the house and before this night, I'd never been inside his room. When he showed me inside I felt as though I was entering heaven. All his walls were covered with intricately patterned tapestries that appears to be made from liquid glass. One tapestry was lined with elephants which appeared to be alive; I could see them breathing. From the roof above hung another tapestry with an enormous sun in the center and I swore I could feel the heat from it's rays despite the fact that it was a pretty cold night. S had several posters on his walls ranging from Marilyn Monroe to a lion holograph that all were all alive and had unique personalities. We tried to get some of the entities to speak to us, but failed after several attempts.
We stayed in S's room for the rest of the night, smoking more changa from his little pipe. we used a cigarette as a lighter because it burned cool and made the smoke less harsh. I could feel the spirit of each herb in the changa working throughout my body: the passionflower soothed my spirit, the lotus brightened my mind, the damiana invigorated my body and the lavender tickled my senses. We both felt absolutely fantastic, completely clear head and focused like never before. Unlike LSD, which can be confusing and alien, bufotenine makes everything clear. We felt like sober observers transported to a magical place and that place was much more important than the drug itself. We were travellers who had finally reached the top of Mount Olympiad and were sitting among the gods. We had earned our place by completing the arduous journey we had to endure earlier.
Our trip lasted for about 6 hours, but we kept smoking our changa throughout the night to prolong the effects. I have no idea how much bufotenine I consumed, but between the two of us and a few spills we finished about half of the changa I had made from 35ish grams of cebil seeds. I know we wasted a fair amount because the effects never really got past a certain level, but it was fun to smoke (once you got used to it). I have no idea how much of the effects were due to the THH versus the bufotenine but I think the bufotenine was the main player. The THH probably made the effects last longer and made us feel more euphoric than the bufo itself would have. Again, this is just my theory.
Despite the power and majesty of this experience, the greatest effects were actual felt over the next few days. Both S and I commented that we were excited to see what the world looked like the next morning. The whole day, everything seems more alive and I noticed the small details in everything that would normally have escaped my notice. S's roommates had a day party at his house and normally a bunch of drunken frat guys would have seriously pissed me off and made me feel very uncomfortable since I was sober but now I felt above it all, perfectly at peace with myself. I was content to let them be stupid without affecting my disposition. I struggle with social anxiety and my bufo trip greatly reduced my anxiety! The sense of peace was marked for the first couple weeks but even now, months later, when I start to feel anxious I can go back to my personal magical kingdom and it calms me down tremendously.
I could wax eloquent about my theories of the human brain and how bufotenine magnifies the brain's natural inclination to personify everything but this post is already quite long. Kudos to anyone who read (or at least skimmed) the whole thing. I hope you found it as enjoyable to read as I did to write. I hope to become an active member of this site because I have certainly caught the "extraction bug."
Peace and Love to All.
