• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

LSD headaches, or..ego aches?

Migrated topic.
benzyme said:
LSD was completely predictable to me, I knew how it was going to be, even when meditating. That's a fact. You telling me that it isn't predictable, contrary to my past experiences with it, isnt.
Click to expand...

Great, that was to you're experience with it. You came off a little harsh by saying that's not a fact at all. LSD is highly unpredictable for me as well as many of my friends.
 
I can relate to what benzyme is saying. I know exactly how much LSD I am taking every time I take it. I usually always take the same amount. The experience is very predictable. I have become quite familiar with LSD over the years, and it's because I know and love it so well that I use it so often. Basically every trip is the same nowadays, and I love that. I can dose without thinking twice because I know I'm just going to have a great day and a few epic orgasms.

I have had many phenomenal experiences on LSD. They usually always occur when I throw in some new element into the mix. Like a psychedelic gathering on the beach, or I dose with friends somewhere beautiful instead of meditating solo in my apartment. If it's just me here chillen' doin' what I do- It's highly improbable that anything unpredictable is going to occur...

Just the way I see this lovely medicinal substance. Looking forward to my weekly dose on Saturday for a full moon. Makes me feel refreshed and rejuvenated every time. Bliss!
 
What is the normal trip you have when on L? Mine have been ranging from full connectedness, to out of body experiences, feeling of enlightenment, glimpses into nirvana, etc. I'm not being rude so don't take it that way, but are these things actually predictable to you guys? I feel like every time I take it something incredible and different happens. I hope the novelty does not wear off!
 
I've been going once every couple weeks give or take, depends on if I can find good set/setting and time away from school.

And I'm sorry it is :/ that's why we have our good friends DMT/Aya/Mescaline/Mushrooms :)
 
In my experience, LSD is by far the most predictable of the psychedelics, except for perhaps mescaline. The content during the comedown is typically novel, though the stage is not, and the entire arc plays itself essentially the same since the first trip with it. It just took a while to become familiar with the formula.

Edit: The LSD headaches came up about 50% of the time and never had to do with clinging or incomplete experiences, as far as can be recalled.
 
50% is quite common for a substance that has no effect on the physical body except the receptors of some brain cells, which feel no pain after all. One of the unconscious mind's primary functions is to hide itself from the conscious mind...with a very very ingenious way. Take for instance somebody that has a weird behaviour on a specific issue. You ask him why he behaves like that. The person can come up with wonderful stories to support it. The tricky thing is that the person actually believes every single word he says. He is not creating an excuse to cover himself from the eyes of society. His mind is creating a reality that makes absolute sense for him. When a substance like LSD is pushing in, the unconscious mind is using all its expertise to remain hidden. Unless it looses the battle and it is defeated and thus, revealed, only then the person will get the insight. Resistance can be as clever as "Oh I want to go out and see the grass". It can be a genuine desire or it can be a tricky resistance.

My last LSD experience contained an element that was very bizzare. I had a very very real sensation in all over my tongue that I had licked something poisonus. Something extremely bitter. And this sensation lasted for at least 15 hours. No matter what I was eating to take it away, it was there. The next day I did some search on it to try to make something out of it. I found people on forums reporting the same experience and other people trying to give their explanations. Well here is something very strange. LSD is tasteless, fact. And here are some people reporting a very strong bitter poisonous taste. Someone can even have it many times like, 50% of the times. Who knows??

And then I opened Grof and I found that during the perinatal process people report a very strong foul taste in their mouth. And his explanation is that the embryo at some point during the stage of delivery is coming into contact with biological material such as blood, urine and even feces which enter its mouth. And this is a recall of this memory. And as the process was deepend more and more elements of the stages of birth were entering the experiential field. And unless someone comes with a better-fitting explanation, this works wonders for me. What is really interesting and makes Grof's theory so interesting is the fact that when a regression into memory is happening and the person is reliving something on its full intensity, then abreaction occurs. And these elements disappear from all subsequent LSD sessions and then the LSD experience completely changes. This is a constant observation that has happened to thousands of people that this person has witnessed.

LSD is a catalyst. Provides an intensification of mental processes. The experience is more depended on the set/setting and the personality of the person taking it rather than the dose. If you change your approach to it, you might get surprised about what is going to happen to you. Not only setting, but set. If it becomes boring or predictable, one thing to do is triple the dose. If it still is boring then it might not be the LSD.
 
I also want to add that if everytime you are having blissful ecstatic experiences and you find this boring or trivial, you might be lucky enough to be halfway there on your everyday life!!! :p
 
One day I met someone and I had the chance to spend a few months with this guy. When he was ounger he told me that he was taking alot of LSD and a lot of mushrooms all the time. He absolutely loved them. They were in his life completely and he always had a marvelous time. He had created a philosophy of the world coming out of his experiences. This was happeing for 6-7 years. When I asked him why he stopped, he told me that one day he took LSD and he saw his family in a way that hurted him and shocked him soo much. He also told me that the way he saw them, doesn't mean that is false or an LSD hallucination. But he stopped using psychedelics since then completely cause he didn't want to see them like that again. This is unpredictability my friends. And the unconscious mind is very painful. What it hides in there is governing your life. And unlike Ayahuasca, LSD might need your desire as well to walk in these territories.
 
SalooM said:
50% is quite common for a substance that has no effect on the physical body except the receptors of some brain cells, which feel no pain after all.
Click to expand...
You really think that LSD has no effect on the physical body? Two symptoms I often had, both of which are associated with headaches, are low blood sugar and jaw clenching from the phenylethylamine structure. Of course, there are all sorts of documented effects on the body, including disruption of body temperature regulation, diuresis... This claim you're making is silly.

The ironic thing, about your embrace of Grof, is he's laying out a structure that the LSD experience is supposed to follow. Very similar to the work Masters and Houston did in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, and based in the idea that the psychedelic experience, or at least that of LSD and mescaline, traverse a stable territory which with an accurate cartography can be... predictable.

SalooM said:
If it becomes boring or predictable, one thing to do is triple the dose. If it still is boring then it might not be the LSD.
Click to expand...
Tripling the dose doesn't make LSD more unpredictable for me. Unlike mushrooms, ayahuasca or DMT, more LSD is just moar LSD. The same, but stronger and of a longer duration.

The story about your friend does not point to a structural unpredictability. I can't say what personal information/associations will arise during the comedown, but I can say for certain that they will.

The unconscious mind doesn't have to be painful at all.
 
Were you able to measure your blood sugar levels during your trip?? You must understand that with LSD there is a strong body-mind connection. A subjective feeling you may have on your body does not mean that LSD is acting on it through a chemical interaction on the site. There are hundreds of somatic complaints being experienced by people that turn out to be psychosomatic symptoms. Very very real things if you ask the people involved. Almost everything in your body is regulated by tiny changes in hormonal levels and various regulatory enzymes and the nervous system has a big influence on these. While on LSD people report various pressures on every part of their body imaginable. And all of the symptoms you refer are symptoms caused by body-mind interaction, not by chemical interaction with LSD on the regulatory mechanisms. LSD acts on the brain. The brain does all the rest. A chemical interaction should be the same to almost every user almost every time of ingestion. Vasoconstriction might be the second best.

The jaw clenching is included in one of the effects reported during the perinatal unfolding. When a memory is re-experienced, the body adopts as much as it can to the circumstances of the memory. What I am saying, according to Grof that I so much embrace, people that had these symptoms, WHEN the unconscious material was worked out, re-experienced and integrated, these symptoms ceased to exist on all the sessions following. Where did the phenethylamine structure activity go then?? All of a sudden??

I have to agree about your observation that tripling the dose of LSD will not do alot as compared to tripling the dose of mushrooms or DMT. I mentioned that mostly to exclude the possibility that somebody is not taking too little of LSD. But I also said that if this doesn't work, maybe is not the LSD the problem. I have read a few people (including Grof :p ) agreeing on the fact that on LSD, it is not the dose that is important. The resistances of a person can hold LSD back to a great degree. I am a living example of this. A year ago I would take a moderate quantity of LSD and I would have some effects. I would double the dose next time and I would have almost the same effects. Now I take the same dose and I feel many more.

Grof did not try to make the psychedelic experience predictable. He simply made the observation that if someone follows serial administrations of LSD in an internalized way, with selected music and with a mind-set of either therapy or self exploration, each and every one of them, sooner or later would experience certain themes. On his list there are all (or most) kind of personality structures, people with either psychological issues of all kinds or normal people, artists, psychologists etc.

We that have an interest on these stuff read alot, but at the same time we cannot avoid the urge to include our own experiences on our understanding of these stuff. So personally, as a lonely explorer in this land I am searching for maps. And from all the maps I have read so far, Grof's is the one that fits my needs. I have found "myself" among his models. I have found my experiences and not only that but the progress of my experiences. I have used his techniques (which are not his btw) with great success so far. These themes he describes are also observed on Ayahuasca healing breakthroughs from people. I have no reason not to trust his work especially if it resonates so much with my experiences. I do not consider myself a special unique case, unless I can prove the opposite. It seems that you my friend might be someone that your unconscious mind is free of pain. Mine is not, and I am trying to free it by applying known "procedures".
 
When you say "body-mind" connection, we already have a problem because it's not like they're separate in any way. You can't make any claims regarding the impact LSD has on "body-mind function" separate from "regulatory mechanisms" because that's not how body-as-system works.

The blood sugar is easy to tell for me, because when I remember to have fruit juice on hand it's often enough to completely eliminate the headaches. We also have data that psychedelics increase (glucose-consuming) metabolism in the brain.

It's wonderful that you've found an interpretive framework that is useful in your explorations. Unfortunately, if you use it to explain away any and all justifications without presenting any objective information for why it should be preferred, what's the point in discussing it?
 
I love this little debate!! Is getting interesting. Let me answer specifically to your points!! Because you are quoting a scientific paper, I shall assume that you have some basic understanding of chemical interactions. When we say that LSD has a pharmacological effect on the body we mean that it interacts with other chemicals or complex supramolecular entities present in the human body causing a measurable change in a property. And as humans we might have different phenotypes, but chemically we are extremely similar to each other. So first of all, if LSD has a pharmacological action, it will have the same action to everyone of us. Now if someone takes LSD and feels his leg sinking on the floor, this doesn't mean that LSD is chemically interacting with the neurons located on the leg of the person thus firing a false signal to the brain. If I take LSD and I have flu-like symptoms and I feel cold and I have a runny nose (it has happened to me) doesn't mean that LSD is acting on the gland that produces mucus. LSD acts on the brain and the brain controls the body. This is a secondary action that depends solely on the person taking the LSD and most of the time is just a perception, not even related with the body's real state measured by external means. A very nice example would be a person having a bad trip thinking that his heart is beating so fast and so hard that it is going to explode. And then somebody checks his pulse and is normal.

As for brain chemistry, I know a few things but I am not an expert so I will try to answer based on what I know. First of all the paper you present, does not include LSD so any claims made are just a hypothesis and not objective information. From what i know, glucose is the only "fuel" that the human brain can burn unlike the rest of the body that has more options. So let's go slowly here. All the energy that the brain needs, come from metabolizing glucose. Glucose metabolism then can be increased easily by performing a mental function like concentrating on a difficult task or solving a mathematical problem or making love. Maybe it can be increased by taking LSD and psilocybin as well. BUT an increase in glucose metabolism and the conclusion that this increase is so severe that available glucagon will not be able to provide the glucose needed thus leading to hypoglycemia, would have been in big headlines in the news years ago. To me, if I could try to make sense out of it, I could say that either you are a case in a million that this thing actually happens, or that the orange juice is merely a placebo and your own mechanism of calming yourself down a psychologically based effect. There is still an unanswered question of mine though. How can you explain the fact, that people who have these kind of somatic complaints, when they work on intensifying them and not getting rid of them, they reach a state of breakthrough which leads to a disappearance of the symptoms from subsequent sessions? (Timothy Leary also in the "Psychedelic Experience", mentions that if any somatic symptoms occur, do not try to avoid them, just merge with them).

As for your last point, I think you have misunderstood me completely. I am not explaining away any justification. Someone here made a post called "LSD headaches, or..ego aches?". He had some concerns. I jumped in to tell him that someone who spend a lifetime studying LSD observed these things on other people as well and wrote a book about what he thinks it is and how he helped them overcome it. I gave some key point of the book and I told him to read and see if it resonates with him. If he had his own system to deal and explain it, he wouldn't have started the conversation from the first place. The link of headache on LSD with hypoglycemia is not an objective information at all IMO and I do not use Grof to justify it away.

You also tend to dismiss him as not-objective. I do not know what is objective to you but he has done an excellent work of linking LSD and its action on the mind with the current models of psychology. When someone goes to do psychoanalysis, the aim is slowly to regress into childhood traumatic memories. It has been observed by mainstream psychology (Freud) that when this happens and the person relives these memories, he is freed from the impacts of these memories on his life. Grof observed the same with LSD. That it catalyzes this process if used properly and brings about the same results but much quicker. He also observed people reporting back very vivid relivings of their own birth that involved a great deal of pain, psychological and physical and he assumed that the human brain starts storing information not only after birth (magically) but even before, as the embryo is fully developed and there is no reason "not to" as Freud had assumed. He also observed that lots of suffering and emotional garbage completely disappeared from the people that went through this. And he also observed that everyone goes through this if uses LSD properly. I find this to be very objective information and above all, they are observations. The beginning of science. And what I am writing here is nothing compared to the beauty of this book. He explains alot of things with great arguments about alot of stuff concerning LSD's dark/glorious alleys. Shall I assume he is not objective because he is lying?? Or because I do not have access to his medical files of all the recordings of the LSD sessions he supervised?? I do not get your point here really. And on top of all of these, it has given answers to my problems and puzzles. So I discuss it as a sharing. Some take it some leave it. But why do you dismiss him?? Have you tried to take LSD the way he proposes?? How many times in a row?? What is your opinion on what he has said and concluded?? Do you have any explanation yourself about his observations?? Do you have an alternative book (on LSD) to propose?? An alternative map? Reasons of preference??
 
Oh, I thought your claim was that in an individual, a drug should have the same action every time if it's the drugs effects, which we already know is false, but generalizing that to the entire human race is much more fallacious. One might as well say the same thing for opiates, which make me extremely uncomfortable and which are only of any value when in extreme pain while many people enjoy enough to become addicted to. And that's a drug which we mostly understand it's action in the brain.

Sorry if you got out of my body-as-system comment that I am unfamiliar with conversion disorders and the like.

SalooM said:
How can you explain the fact, that people who have these kind of somatic complaints, when they work on intensifying them and not getting rid of them, they reach a state of breakthrough which leads to a disappearance of the symptoms from subsequent sessions?
Click to expand...
While I don't actually believe this is an established fact, there's no more reason to attribute it to the inherent value of exploring these somatic complaints instead of placebo, as long as we're going there. Regarding the juice, not eating for 8-12 hours on it's own is enough to give me low blood sugar, much less in such a state of mental arousal.

I'm not sure how I tend to object to Grof as non-objective (hah), as I've only mentioned it once, but the therapeutic frame in which his observations are embedded prevents any objective information from coming out of it. The whole dance of therapist and patient is an orchestration, which the unconscious readily responds to. I went through my own period, intentionally exploring Grof's map and was able to create the experiences easily, but as soon as I felt I had reached the end of what it had to provide and switched to other explorations, my LSD experiences no longer matched it. That's one of the main points behind Alpert/Leary/Metzner's The Psychedelic Experience, that with your own imagination and ingenium, you can experience any of these maps. That Grof's model may help in certain therapeutic situations, I won't doubt, not because of any truth it might contain, but because it gives opportunity for the unconscious to bring forth new arrangements and behaviors.

Psychoanalytic work is in no way scientific. There isn't anywhere in the world of psychology where Freud is considered mainstream. People completely untreated recover at the same rates as those who undergo psychodynamic treatment. As to your characterization for Freud, he abandoned the "trauma hypothesis" and kicked out several analysts from the association who continued to publish papers linking neurosis to childhood trauma.

None of Grof's information is objective. It has nothing to do with whether he is lying or if his patients were lying or not.
 
Back
Top Bottom