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The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale

155 points by tsg 10y ago

bduerst 10y ago
Has anyone here actually tried ayahuasca and can share their experience?
- secabeen 10y ago
  Erowid has lots of use stories: https://erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca.shtml https://erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca.shtml
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Psychedelic experiences, like any drug experience are highly dependent on dosage, which is not standardized for Ayahuasca, as well as setting, and many other factors. Hence expect to hear a variety of experiences. It's generally gonna be quite a high dose of DMT from what I've heard so quite mind blowing.
  - hosh 10y ago
    Dosages are not standardized. They are customized. The point isn't to try to get you to fit into a mold; a big part of this is to come into a wholeness of being. The day we try to standardize Ayahuasca dosages in order to create a map of causal effects ... that's the day we missed the point of this.
- unfunco 10y ago
  I have, not in Peru but at home. I've tried DMT roughly 300 times, pharmahuasca (N,N-DMT in an enteric capsule, inside a larger capsule of synthetic monoamine oxidase inhibitor) and ayahuasca, and the usual others (I've tried everything I could find from Pihkal and Tihkal). I eventually became too afraid of DMT (I had mistakenly bought 5-MeO-DMT and was using the same dosage and that wasn't pleasant, and now I'm too anxious to "blast-off" because of the pace) and wanted something slower, so I turned to Ayahuasca. It's a difficult feeling to describe (three Ayahuasca sessions at home so far.) – it's similar to N,N-DMT but whilst DMT feels like chapter-skipping, Ayahuasca feels like things are being played at 1x – If you have specific questions I will try to answer them.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Have you ever just combined DMT and a MAOI to replicate the effects or is that not how it works?
    - unfunco 10y ago
      Yep, as mentioned, I twice had DMT (HCl) in an enteric capsule within a capsule of synthetic MAOI (Moclobemide) – it was a similar experience to Ayahuasca but there was much more of a mechanical feel to the CEVs, similar to the visuals produced by the Ketamine hole, there was also more anxiety, the plants combined with DMT in Ayahuasca are synergistic, the mechanical feeling could be a subjective effect in the brain caused by knowing the source of the material before consumption.
  - vernie 10y ago
    You still think of it as "trying" after 300 doses?
    - unfunco 10y ago
      I was lucky enough to breakthrough on my first dose, and the only times I haven't broken through have been down to choice (to feel what lower doses felt like) – I invested in better equipment (http://imgur.com/vjvKzQB http://imgur.com/vjvKzQB – from one of my posts in the /r/DMT channel in reddit) after the first few breakthroughs, it was the most interesting, terrifying, and beautiful thing that has ever happened to me, and I wanted to keep doing it to try and work out just what it was, there have been moments where I have lay in awe completely convinced I am witnessing everything happening everywhere in the universe, there have been times where I've been convinced I am solely responsible for the destruction of the universe, that my consciousness was the last thing left, there have been so many other strange experiences, I could never control them, I had to just sit back and feel everything, so it was always trying, I doubt that it's possible to master the effects, and most I know from various communities on the subject tend to ease off at around the same number of times that I did, as a chemical, it's absolutely non-addictive, all psychedelics I tend to find as self-regulating.
  - 10y ago
- RankingMember 10y ago
  Where's gwern to give us a writeup?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    IIRC, gwern tends to focus on cognitive enhancers, or psychoactive drugs that could theoretically be used for that purpose (like the LSD microdosing experiment). I don't think he takes hallucinogens recreationally (or if he does, he doesn't write about it)
- cnp 10y ago
  It has been life changing through and through -- too much to type and so much to say. But a few suggestions for those who are curious: 1) Do your research; don't go in there not knowing what you've signed up for. It can be incredibly transcendent and healing, but also quite possibly the hardest experience of your life. Difficult experiences make you stronger; this is the point. 2) For first timers -- and really anyone -- I would highly, highly recommend starting at a minimum of TWO nights. When going into the experience for the first time there's a lifetime of tangled psychology that the medicine loosens up, and there have been many people who go in for a single session unaware that the experience changes over multiple nights, end up disappointed or scared, and then leave and never touch it again. Night one untangles, leading into the second night and beyond which tends to get much, much deeper. 3) Read this book by Ralph Metzner, who has studied the subject extensively; it will give you a better idea of the pharmacology as well as the experience: https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Spirits-Ralph-Metzner-Ph-D/dp/1594770530 https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Spirits-Ralph-Metzner-Ph-D/dp/.... And lastly, 4) leave your expectations behind. I can only speak from personal experience, but the Aya seems to enjoy toying with those who expect certain things from her -- this ends up generally being a valuable lesson in humility, for better or for worse.
- throwaway80218 10y ago
  Throwaway account; this stuff is of dubious legality and I like being employable. I participated in a Yagé ceremony -- locally, though led by a Columbian shaman and apprentice -- about a month ago on recommendation of my individual therapist. This was my first experience with psychedelics (or anything stronger than marajuana), and I went in with a set of expectations: powerful wakeful hallucinations, ego death, and a total emotional asskicking. (This latter expectation in particular is almost a manifestation of my own personal issues; ymmv.) The description of the plant as having her own agenda and laughing at your plans is quite accurate; much as I tried to find a way to use the experience to reveal all of my own deep emotional flaws, I felt a presence just laughing and saying-without-saying to choose to love myself as an action, not just a concept and a feeling -- and to take the active step of choosing not to beat myself up so damn much, and all would be okay. Also as written, this experience was deeply personal; for me to go into much greater description of my own interactions and experience would require you, dear reader, to both know and care about all of the issues that I carry. Suffice to say that if you were to try this, you would likely find your experience also to be both profound and incredibly difficult to communicate satisfactorily. To follow on the description as personal: it was also incredibly isolating while _in situ_. You may be sitting with a dozen or with fifty people, but (aside from the sounds of retching and of guidance from the shaman, apprentice, and/or assistants) you are very much alone with whatever is going on inside of you. * * * For contrast, my wife had a less typical and more powerful experience with ayahuasca about ten years back while traveling in Peru. She and a friend participated in a ceremony in a much more intimate environment (just the two of them, a shaman, and a female bystander for safety) without as much of the physical preparation; they did it practically on a whim, so while my wife was fairly prepared emotionally and spiritually from her own work, she hadn't, say, avoided pork or alcohol for the week before. She downed two or three cups of the vile stuff over the course of their ceremony, to little obvious effect that evening. It was on the travel back out of the jungle that everything hit: the most intense projectile vomiting of her life to date, followed by extremely intense daytime hallucinations, and a strong sense of spiritual connectedness and openness that she carries to this day. Having asked around, this significantly delayed and highly intense experience is very uncommon. * * * Finally, as a quick followup on the original article discussing the anthropomorphization of the leaf as grandmother/_abuela_ -- it's worth noting, for context, that frequent medicinal users, devotes, psychonauts, etc. refer also to peyote as grandfather/_abuelo_. I have no personal experience, but have been given to understand that peyote gives a very different but complimentary experience: communal and reassuring rather than individual and truth-revealing.
- hosh 10y ago
  I drank on at least 35 nights, most of them with Mestizo shamans brought into the US. This happened within the span of three intense years. Every single time was difficult and challenging. Each one of them brought a theme that picked off where the last left off. What I worked on was a range of things: from physical ailments, to letting go of attachments and facing fears, to purging out BS in the mind, to spiritual ailments spanning across multiple lifetimes. I had to work through a lot of internal resistance. There were training in a variety of things at a variety of levels of being. It did not help that there was something within me that drove me to keep coming back, like I'm hurrying to make it. There was period where, by the next ceremony rolls around, I forgotten the initial suffering and I have fond memories of the peak. By the time I got to the most recent one I participated in, I could intuitively tell when I was going to work a lot. My experiences are atypical and intense. I am sensitive to it, and it took a while to figure out where the right dosage was for me. Every person's experience and work is going to be unique to them, even if it might fall into broad, general patterns. I'm currently on hiatus, and will probably be getting back into it... well, when the time is right again. In the meantime, I've been keeping up with my daily practices of meditation and sometimes chanting, getting into the darker spaces of my being, when necessary. If anything, my experiences in the ceremonies taught me to have courage to look. And although the hiatus was due to external circumstances, I'm training to access these visionary states without taking the medicine directly.
deleted 10y ago
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6stringmerc 10y ago
In years of observation, I have no doubt that if the compound has some interesting properties, it will be exploited, outcry / moralizing will ensue, and legislation will be passed to criminialise any use. All it really takes is one precious snowflake to do something hurtful to themselves or others to kick-off a motivated response. Well, at least computer duster inhalants are still widely available (/sarcasm).
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  >legislation will be passed to criminialise any use DMT was banned ages ago.
- thescribe 10y ago
  Honestly, just from reading this thread it sounds like it should be banned.
apathy 10y ago
The classical comparison that comes to mind is this: LSD is like walking through the doors of perception. DMT (as in ayahuasca) is like being shot out of a cannon. I wonder if it has dawned on any of these "shamans" that a fistful of risperidone might be useful for the freakouts? Antipsychotics exist for a reason. Also, anyone on MAOIs is likely to have a very bad time, and people on SSRIs may not notice a thing (other than barfing). The whole enterprise seems very poorly thought out.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  According to my friends and everything I've read on the subject, the cannon effect is achieved when you smoke DMT. Ayahuasca is DMT + MAOI inhibitors and is more like the usual experiences of orally ingesting LSD, psilocybin or mescaline.
  - azernik 10y ago
    Plus fantastically uncomfortable physical side effects, and on the positive side an experienced spotter to help you along.
    - monktastic1 10y ago
      Depends. If the MAOIs are extracted from the caapi, leaving out the other alkaloids, even the uncomfortable physical side effects can be avoided.
      - Nursie 10y ago
        Ah but that's working around the 'plant spirit' and all that other stuff, you won't have an 'authentic' or 'real' experience and the hipsterswill laugh at you....
        chillwaves 10y ago
        What's the point of the tone of your comment? Some people would find the processed drug to lack the "authentic" experience of what is found in nature. Doubt anyone really cares. Sounds more like a caricature to me.
Nursie 10y ago
So much pretension, so much bollocks... Just drop some acid like a normal person, or take a harmaline cap and some dmt later. No need for all this 'purging' and ceremony.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  I agree although some ceremony can add to your trip.
  - ntaenta 10y ago
    I agree with both of you. Ceremony is one way to attain a pleasant set and setting, but ultimately I get somewhat exasperated by all the woo and mysticism surrounding psychedelic use. Psychedelics can be therapeutic or "spiritual", but once you have some familiarity they can also just be fun. I've had equally wonderful experiences sitting alone in the woods, playing beer pong at a frat party, exercising, playing an instrument, having sex, etc. Higher doses of certain psychedelics will make some of these experiences less pleasant / possible, but in general it can be much more than the solemn introspection that most people expect.
- cnp 10y ago
  You seem to be so certain of this, eh?
- throwanem 10y ago
  I don't know that it is bad for novices to have some framework in which to interpret and assimilate what is often a very intense experience. A reasonable degree of nuance might suggest that, while there's perhaps quite a lot of reason to blame people experienced enough to know better for making more (less?) of it than it merits, there's no reason to blame people who lack that experience for wanting, especially their first time, something a little more special than just "oh, drop some acid like a normal person".
  - Nursie 10y ago
    Special? Fine, set and setting can be very important. But the nonsense about picking the vines at a certain time of day, and the idea that we don't need medical expertise on hand because we're special and.... It really winds me up. You're doing oral DMT, not magic...
yolesaber 10y ago
I run an ayahuasca clinic in Upstate NY. I make all my own preparations and tend to the ritual aspects as well as guide people on trips. I've been doing this as my profession for several years now, feel free to ask any questions
- deleted 10y ago
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- jrowley 10y ago
  1. How'd you find yourself doing this? 2. From your experience, how does ayahuasca compare to other psychedelics? 3. Any personal advice for someone interested in experimenting with these drugs?
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    1. I lived in Marin and worked as a software engineer and then later a research fellow for ten years (still sometimes on and off when they need me). Then I got really bored and moved across the country to start an art commune with old friends from college. We did our thing, went separate ways and I decided to invest what I had left in some land by a river / waterfall. Well one of the people we met from the art commune's dad was an exec, like VP level, for Fiji Water and one day we were driving around and I showed them the land and they loved it and bought it from me for double what I paid. I used that cash to buy a house outright in a dinky little town with enough leftover to mean I only had to work like 10-15 hours a week to be able to retire at 47. I didn't want to program, didn't want to be a landlord or do more flipping, so I went on an acid trip to figure it out and my friend floated the idea as a "startup" as a joke, but it's funny because he was associated with the Body Actualized Center which was basically the same thing before it got shut down (there's a bunch of articles about it, probably the biggest one to get busted in years). So yeah sorry to ramble but essentially I wanted a really weird part-time job and so I just invented one. 2. I personally am not the biggest fan of ayahuasca, but am in awe of it. I respect it and let it do its work upon people but I rarely take it and I have a feeling I never will again. I usually just smoke a bit of DMT mixed with THC shatter when I'm coming up with the client(s) to get into a similar headspace but other than that I'm sober and there to guide and work with the psychonauts. I've taken it four times, each time was different and each time I found new words and new ways to express myself but I'm much more careful about it now. LSD on the other hand I do about every month or so. It is, in my opinion, the finest substance known to man besides cannabis. If you want to have a profound physical and mental experience that takes over your body and melds your mind, by all means drink the potion. LSD lets you have a little bit more control and is less, in my opinion, 'religious'. 3. Do them with people you know and love. Don't go into it expecting wisdom or enlightenment and don't be surprised when the work you create or the thoughts you write are inane and obtuse once you see them through sober eyes. Do it because the mind and body and spirit need to be explored and known in ways that some may see as meandering or even farcical (how many times has acid been the butt of low-rent sitcom gags?) but to the determined can be a wellspring of experience and, perhaps most importantly, a joy that is inimitable.
ktRolster 10y ago
Be careful. These quotes from the article are kind of worrying: “Do you have doctors or anyone on hand who understands what’s happening on a pharmacological level if something goes wrong?” There was a tense silence, and then Little Owl replied, “We are healing on a vibrational level.” And: I asked how she could tell it wasn’t something requiring immediate medical intervention, and the [mediator] replied, “Intuition.”
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Indeed. This is not a toy drug. This is heavy-duty. I wonder if there is maybe something simple, medically, that can be done by a 'non pro' - like - if there are specific and identifiable symptoms - 'take this pill' which has a neutralizing or softening effect or something. Hopefully something safe and natural. Maybe even something like 'drink caffeine and eat something fatty' - or whatever might work that's easy and accessible.
  - Kroniker 10y ago
    As far as I know, you can get "chill pills", I think maybe benzodiazepines will calm you down, but even in an ER they just make sure you're safe and let your ride it out. Once that roller coaster starts it needs to run it's course. Source: Burnout friend.
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      I think for opioid overdose there is a medical intervention, but for these psychedelic things ... I guess there isn't much to do. But psychological risk is real. My friend did something similar in Brazil and had 'fear' episodes for years.
- rosser 10y ago
  Provided you screen for things like heart conditions, contra-indicated pharmaceutical or supplement usage, or some mental health issues, psychedelics are, on the whole, profoundly physically safe. Not saying shit doesn't happen, but if you're going to the jungle to work with these plants, with a reputable practitioner, you're at vastly greater risk from things like snakes and mosquitoes — or even jaguars and alligators — than you are the plants, themselves.
notliketherest 10y ago
All of this "self exploration, cosmos consciousness, soul enlightenment" justification for using these drugs sounds to me like the promises of profit in Tim Ferris' 4 hour work week: 1) take drugs 2) ??? 3) Enlightenment. You know that Mt Fuji analogy whereby a hiker hikes to the top of Mt Fuji for enlightenment, choosing his path on the way? Well it seems to me like this people are looking for a quick helicopter ride to the top. And having used these drugs myself in the past, I was so stupid and naive to think that it would impart the wisdom that decades of life should give you. Idk to me this all seems like a bunch of bullshit.
- empath75 10y ago
  Drug experiences are still experiences and like any experience, you can learn something from them or waste them. At the absolute least, a psychedelic experience should teach you a lesson about the reliability of the senses and about how subjective our experience of reality can be, which is a valuable lesson to learn, IMO, and no matter how much you understand it intellectually, directly experiencing it is another matter entirely.
  - notliketherest 10y ago
    You make a good point - the psychedelic experience can lead to a greater sense of empathy in that you perceive the world not through the eyes of your ego but as "all one" (over simplification). An increase in empathy is a good thing but equating these drugs to a magic pill for self actualization is wrong.
    - posterboy 10y ago
      > world not through the eyes of your ego in most cases, you don't see much of the world past you own eyes anymore, but some "fantasy", which is why it is aptly called an hallucinogen. It messes with your head and you have a hard time making sense of the world so you revert to some basic notions of knowledge, that appear like an epiphany because they are that basic. I don't think these are new found insights and good luck if these facilities of your brain are damaged in the process. It is called acid for a reason. Edit: A neat analogy would be fuzzing a production system. Not only that, it is randomly deleting files and flipping bits of memory to see how robust the system is. If your system is error free, the fuzzing is not a problem, but every system has bugs.
steauengeglase 10y ago
While I don't doubt the psychological benefits of ayahuasca (or any hallucinogenic), the language of many of those advocating in the article set off red flags. "Format your harddrive", reminds of Arch Oboler's "Society of the Cosmos", something dreamed up by Evangelical hucksters who didn't see a future in peddling Jesus so they turned to techno speak to wring out the marks. "We manifest abundance wherever we go," sounds even worse. That's the kind of reason Dominionist give when trying to dodge their car taxes. What did Hunter Thompson say about the seekers who tried to buy enlightenment by the dose? Instead the real benefit is trying to rationally understand their experience. "Wait, was there a giant hand with my dad's watch on it's wrist crushing the room? Damn, I didn't realize I was letting that take over my life." Without that personal insight you are just dealing with pseudo-spiritual abstractions.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  I feel like the sheer amount of bullshit surrounding these drugs leaves me with a duty to take heavy doses of psychedelics and proudly learn nothing but "boy that was fun"
  - cnp 10y ago
    Or "boy was I wrong -- wow"
  - fragola 10y ago
    Agreed on the bullshit. I think this might have something to do with me growing up in a certain hippy town on the California coast, but I couldn't get through this article without a lot of eye-rolling. OK, let's just put the whole drug thing aside and call it a hobby. You can have a hobby without having a pseudospiritual and vaguely appropriative justification for it. Bodybuilders have a term that they use to describe the mythos that has evolved in their subculture regarding steroids and supplements: Broscience. This is the yuppie drug-dabbler equivalent.
    - stinkytaco 10y ago
      Offtopic, but unfortunately broscience has extended beyond pharmaceuticals to training practice. This kind of thinking dominates the crossfit world with terms like "muscle confusion" and "failure". It's sad because I got into crossfit ten years ago because it was fun, something different every day kept me coming back. I didn't want to be a Navy SEAL, just to keep active, but the almost religious adherence to the training philosophy -- and the injuries sustained by several people I knew -- drove me away. Now I find myself sedentary and looking for something similar, but less pseudo-scientific.
ap22213 10y ago
Why does the plant produce DMT? Is it a poison? Are there other plants that produce it? I wonder about the evolutionary reasons for its emergence. Does the plant influence the Human so that the Human protects and nurtures the plant? When did Humans begin altering South America? 15,000 years ago? More than enough time for the plant to adapt. It's a strange feeling to ingest a hallucination producing organism. I remember being 19 years old, in the 90s, being given mushrooms. I spent the next several hours sitting at a tree stump feeling myself sink into it, feeling merged with plants around me. I remember thinking a lot about the juxtaposition of the natural with the concrete and brick and asphalt just a few hundred meters away - and wanting to tear it all down. Now, decades later, reading the woman's experience, I wonder if the fungi had somehow manipulated me.
- centicosm 10y ago
  Interestingly, there are hundreds of plants that produce it. Even more interesting, the human body also produces it. There was some human studies that took place in New Mexico. Check out: DMT: The Spirit Molecule for some interesting reading if such studies are of interest.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Might want to spend some time thinking about that phrase "evolutionary reasons". There's an assumption in there I'm not sure you've noticed.
  - ap22213 10y ago
    That's pretty cryptic... Ok, what do you mean? I'm dense.
    - salmon30salmon 10y ago
      I am not the OC, but I think he was going on about how you apparently attributed a certain level of "reason" to evolution. His contention is that evolution exists free of reason. I think you two are disagreeing on the term reason. You mean "reason" in the sense of "why" and he means reason in the sense of "logical conditions". The why is an interesting question, what environmental or other factors provided an advantage in a plant containing this chemical, or was it a non-important side effect of some other change. It is interesting, maybe not easily knowable. Hope this clears it up. I may be wrong, but I get annoyed when I read comments that are negative without an explanation, so I thought I would attempt to shine some light.
zizzles 10y ago
In my eyes the VERY FACT that psychedelics like N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) even exist in the FIRST place (and take you on the experiences that they take you) can NOT be some sort of coincidence. I am not suggesting that they are some special all-knowing tool, but the sheer potency of DMT and the other-worldly-dimension-changing-states-of-mind that it yields when consumed can not be shrugged off as just another recreational drug or "you're just high bro", at least not to me. We have consciousness. We see. We feel... but existence remains a mystery. No one on Earth can properly put into words what THIS is. It's unexplainable, at least to me. You can perhaps say "we are in the Milky Way" or "we are located in the Universe" or "we are existing" but these are just vague primitive monkey explanations. Substances like DMT can shed light on these questions from a different vantage point.
- rconti 10y ago
  I'm confused. It cannot be a coincidence that substances exist on this earth that alter our consciousness? Why not? There are all kinds of substances found naturally that can change the way you feel, change the way your body acts, kill you, make you hallucinate, whatever. Is it proof that there has to be a purpose behind them? I forgot what the term is, but is this not like the fallacy of believing there must be a creator, because there is this wonderful planet for us to experience? But if we were not here to experience it, we would not know it was missing.
  - stevetrewick 10y ago
    Possibly the argument from personal incredulity?[0] Or maybe the Anthropic Principle? [1] Little column A, little column B? [0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity#Personal_incredulity http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity#Perso... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
    - rconti 10y ago
      Anthropic principle, yes, thank you!
lwhalen 10y ago
http://www.theonion.com/article/ayahuasca-shaman-dreading-another-week-guiding-tec-52941 http://www.theonion.com/article/ayahuasca-shaman-dreading-an...
- hosh 10y ago
  Yup. A friend sent that a while ago. I sent it around to the folks who regularly takes Ayahuasca. We were all cracking up. It was either written by someone who took it at least once, or maybe just connected really well with it. I didn't know at the time it was such a thing in SV though.
  - deleted 10y ago
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Kazamai 10y ago
Short circuiting your brain is not the path to spirituality, therapy or enlightenment.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  is that what you think it is? have you ever taken a psychedelic drug?
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    Or perhaps more importantly, surveyed the unfortunately scant literature to understand how they work as well as any potential for harm.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      Regardless, you MIGHT get some non-mainstream academic agreement that there is the potential for therapeutic benefits; but not "Enlightenment" or anything spiritual. Although, it seems to me that the burden of providing such literature is on you, not OP (no, erowid.com doesn't count).
      - metaphorm 10y ago
        erowid is a fine source for experiential reports and technical information on the botany and/or pharmacology of the substances involved. let me ask you a question: is nothing true unless a credentialed academic writes a peer reviewed journal published paper about it?
trappedintime 10y ago
The experience you will have is tremendously dependent on a few things: your existing state of mind, the physical environment / location of the experience, preparations (if any) made for the experience, and arguably most importantly (IMHO), your intention or reason for seeking the experience. If you go at it with the attitude that this is simply a reason to get high, or to observe visual disturbances for the sheer sake of hallucinating, there's a very good chance that will comprise your experience. Conversely, if you set an intention of learning about yourself, life, death, existence, the universe, etc., and approach it with regard, then there is a very good chance you will have that experience. From what I have gathered observing myself and my friends, the latter can be quite transformative to the self. It can encourage profound positive changes in attitude and improve quality of life, increase spiritual awareness and feelings of interconnectedness, greatly diminish or eliminate one's fear of death, among other things. These feelings can last, sometimes for life, and it can take months to fully integrate the lessons learned and information gained after returning from the "journey". See the John's Hopkins study on psilocybin for more information. Preparation and intent simply cannot be understated when it comes to the use of these substances. What the psychedelic enthusiasts refer to as 'set and setting'.
- thescribe 10y ago
  If the effect only manifests when you think about it correctly, is it a placebo?
  - TimPrice 10y ago
    Cognitive distortion may manifest in many ways, like bad trips.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - trappedintime 10y ago
    And this is precisely where trying to measure a unique experience with microscopes and well-established materialist scientific theorems begins to fail us. An experience, by the way, that many call the 'most important' of their life. They describe it as 'noetic' in that it seems more real than ordinary consensus reality, and 'ineffible' in that it cannot be successfully described, it must be experienced firsthand. These aren't just the waxings of a hippie distracted at work, I can point you to studies that demonstrate the repeatability of it all (i.e., 'most important experience of life' claims, noetic properties, ineffable, etc.) Many people use these descriptors when regarding their respective psychedelic journeys. In my opinion, the reason some people have awe-inspiring life-changing experiences and some just see neat visuals or have the ominous 'bad trip' goes back to my first comment. Set, setting, and intention are absolutely everything with these substances. The stuff just seems to be of a higher order, and it seems it gives you just what you deserve.
wtbob 10y ago
I wonder what the effects of chemically-induced pseudowisdom are. Real wisdom, after all, is both physiological and mental, a product of experience as well as of neurochemistry. What might be the ill-effects of feeling that one has gained wisdom when in fact one has only altered one's brain chemistry?
- StudyAnimal 10y ago
  Well, if real wisdom requires experience then the harm you are talking about is probably slightly less harmful than the pseudo-wisdom one feels when reading another persons experience in a book. After all reading a book doesn't give us an experience, its all "just" chemistry too..
  - wtbob 10y ago
    > After all reading a book doesn't give us an experience, its all "just" chemistry too.. I'd disagree there. It's less experience than actually doing something, but more than just getting a chemical flow across the brain. Reading is a weak sort of experience, no?
    - StudyAnimal 10y ago
      I was being toungue and cheek. Of course reading a book is an experience, as is taking drugs. And its not just chemical , you might go to the park and have an adventure between two blades of grass or something. Its not like people just drop a tab, close their eyes and lie in bed. I would say in order of strength of experience I would say something like: [Big Adventure without drugs] > [Small adventure with drugs] > [Reading] > [Dreaming]
makeset 10y ago
A friend of mine participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, and he said that it completely changed him, from a person who wanted to try ayahuasca to a person who would never do it again.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
I'm a SV entrepreneur who is pretty well-connected with the community here (only mentioning this for the sake of credibility). Maybe it's because I missed Burning Man this year, but I haven't heard of anybody doing this outside of articles on Tech Crunch that say people are (let alone normal hallucinogens). Marijuana or Adderall, sure (Meadow and Eaze are doing well here); maybe even the /r/nootropics stack, but not hallucinogenic substances. I know people who have experimented with shrooms, but they don't consider them a "drug of choice," let alone a productivity enhancer by any means. In fact, one of my acquaintances ended up going off the deep end when he started taking LSD. It was a really sad story.
sverige 10y ago
I tripped once years ago on an extract of morning glory seeds that a genius friend of my sister concocted. (Essentially lysergic acid amide, plus maybe some other alkaloids, look it up if you're that interested.) There was no preparation as far as set and setting. Basically I was a chronic drug-using teenager who was trying something new. Took the stuff before a concert and began tripping during the opening act. Had a great time. Saw some weird shit. Blacked out for a while as usual because I was also smoking a lot of pot and drinking beer for hydration. Somehow reconnected with the people I went with and got a ride home, with some intervening adventures on the way. Lay down in bed to sleep and that's when it got weird. Hard to describe and kind of boring if you weren't there (but you might have been! ;-)) Woke up the next morning still tripping balls. Couldn't stop it, got kind of scared. Called people and said shit I don't remember and that they still won't repeat. Finally stopped tripping later that day, and was exhausted for another day. Found out later from the genius that the dose was roughly equivalent to 350-500 mcg of LSD (i.e., a lot). Read The Yage Letters shortly after that. Haven't tripped since. Occasionally consider it since I've done a lot more reading and work in the 37 years since that experience, but now it's a hipster thing so it's embarrassing to admit. I mean, the New Yorker is writing articles about it. You don't even have to dig through a few different grungy bookstores to find a copy of the Beat take on it from the '50s. So, probably never yage / ayahuasca, but maybe someday a tab of acid. Or maybe not. I'm a lot more self-aware and enlightened than I was at 17, but I think that's mostly because I've lived another 37 years and survived all the trouble along the path, not because I tripped once. P.S. People had these exact same kinds of conversations on this topic 35 years ago.
gerbilly 10y ago
Why is this community so uncomfortable around 'woo'? Some of my ideas: Woo multiplies entities beyond necessity. Woo uses imagery (goddesses, grandmotherss, spirits, 'energy') that we find aesthetically displeasing? Woo has an anything goes feel to it (whatever is true for you...) But perhaps we should look at our own woo before criticizing others too much for theirs, after all the world of business is full of it's own sort of woo (synergize our two platforms to leverage our cloud based infrastructure going forward...) To me when someone speaks woo, it's a sign that the person may be on to something that can't yet be expressed. This can happen to techies, for example during that interval when you feel that you have solved a problem you have been working on, but can't quite express it clearly yet. But woo is so open ended, that this is only true for the best cases. Often it's just nonsense, but so are scientific abstracts and press releases sometimes.

155 points by tsg 10y ago

bduerst 10y ago

Has anyone here actually tried ayahuasca and can share their experience?

secabeen 10y ago
Erowid has lots of use stories: https://erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca.shtml https://erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca.shtml
Synaesthesia 10y ago
Psychedelic experiences, like any drug experience are highly dependent on dosage, which is not standardized for Ayahuasca, as well as setting, and many other factors. Hence expect to hear a variety of experiences. It's generally gonna be quite a high dose of DMT from what I've heard so quite mind blowing.
- hosh 10y ago
  Dosages are not standardized. They are customized. The point isn't to try to get you to fit into a mold; a big part of this is to come into a wholeness of being. The day we try to standardize Ayahuasca dosages in order to create a map of causal effects ... that's the day we missed the point of this.
unfunco 10y ago
I have, not in Peru but at home. I've tried DMT roughly 300 times, pharmahuasca (N,N-DMT in an enteric capsule, inside a larger capsule of synthetic monoamine oxidase inhibitor) and ayahuasca, and the usual others (I've tried everything I could find from Pihkal and Tihkal). I eventually became too afraid of DMT (I had mistakenly bought 5-MeO-DMT and was using the same dosage and that wasn't pleasant, and now I'm too anxious to "blast-off" because of the pace) and wanted something slower, so I turned to Ayahuasca. It's a difficult feeling to describe (three Ayahuasca sessions at home so far.) – it's similar to N,N-DMT but whilst DMT feels like chapter-skipping, Ayahuasca feels like things are being played at 1x – If you have specific questions I will try to answer them.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Have you ever just combined DMT and a MAOI to replicate the effects or is that not how it works?
  - unfunco 10y ago
    Yep, as mentioned, I twice had DMT (HCl) in an enteric capsule within a capsule of synthetic MAOI (Moclobemide) – it was a similar experience to Ayahuasca but there was much more of a mechanical feel to the CEVs, similar to the visuals produced by the Ketamine hole, there was also more anxiety, the plants combined with DMT in Ayahuasca are synergistic, the mechanical feeling could be a subjective effect in the brain caused by knowing the source of the material before consumption.
- vernie 10y ago
  You still think of it as "trying" after 300 doses?
  - unfunco 10y ago
    I was lucky enough to breakthrough on my first dose, and the only times I haven't broken through have been down to choice (to feel what lower doses felt like) – I invested in better equipment (http://imgur.com/vjvKzQB http://imgur.com/vjvKzQB – from one of my posts in the /r/DMT channel in reddit) after the first few breakthroughs, it was the most interesting, terrifying, and beautiful thing that has ever happened to me, and I wanted to keep doing it to try and work out just what it was, there have been moments where I have lay in awe completely convinced I am witnessing everything happening everywhere in the universe, there have been times where I've been convinced I am solely responsible for the destruction of the universe, that my consciousness was the last thing left, there have been so many other strange experiences, I could never control them, I had to just sit back and feel everything, so it was always trying, I doubt that it's possible to master the effects, and most I know from various communities on the subject tend to ease off at around the same number of times that I did, as a chemical, it's absolutely non-addictive, all psychedelics I tend to find as self-regulating.
- 10y ago
RankingMember 10y ago
Where's gwern to give us a writeup?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  IIRC, gwern tends to focus on cognitive enhancers, or psychoactive drugs that could theoretically be used for that purpose (like the LSD microdosing experiment). I don't think he takes hallucinogens recreationally (or if he does, he doesn't write about it)
cnp 10y ago
It has been life changing through and through -- too much to type and so much to say. But a few suggestions for those who are curious: 1) Do your research; don't go in there not knowing what you've signed up for. It can be incredibly transcendent and healing, but also quite possibly the hardest experience of your life. Difficult experiences make you stronger; this is the point. 2) For first timers -- and really anyone -- I would highly, highly recommend starting at a minimum of TWO nights. When going into the experience for the first time there's a lifetime of tangled psychology that the medicine loosens up, and there have been many people who go in for a single session unaware that the experience changes over multiple nights, end up disappointed or scared, and then leave and never touch it again. Night one untangles, leading into the second night and beyond which tends to get much, much deeper. 3) Read this book by Ralph Metzner, who has studied the subject extensively; it will give you a better idea of the pharmacology as well as the experience: https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Spirits-Ralph-Metzner-Ph-D/dp/1594770530 https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Spirits-Ralph-Metzner-Ph-D/dp/.... And lastly, 4) leave your expectations behind. I can only speak from personal experience, but the Aya seems to enjoy toying with those who expect certain things from her -- this ends up generally being a valuable lesson in humility, for better or for worse.
throwaway80218 10y ago
Throwaway account; this stuff is of dubious legality and I like being employable. I participated in a Yagé ceremony -- locally, though led by a Columbian shaman and apprentice -- about a month ago on recommendation of my individual therapist. This was my first experience with psychedelics (or anything stronger than marajuana), and I went in with a set of expectations: powerful wakeful hallucinations, ego death, and a total emotional asskicking. (This latter expectation in particular is almost a manifestation of my own personal issues; ymmv.) The description of the plant as having her own agenda and laughing at your plans is quite accurate; much as I tried to find a way to use the experience to reveal all of my own deep emotional flaws, I felt a presence just laughing and saying-without-saying to choose to love myself as an action, not just a concept and a feeling -- and to take the active step of choosing not to beat myself up so damn much, and all would be okay. Also as written, this experience was deeply personal; for me to go into much greater description of my own interactions and experience would require you, dear reader, to both know and care about all of the issues that I carry. Suffice to say that if you were to try this, you would likely find your experience also to be both profound and incredibly difficult to communicate satisfactorily. To follow on the description as personal: it was also incredibly isolating while _in situ_. You may be sitting with a dozen or with fifty people, but (aside from the sounds of retching and of guidance from the shaman, apprentice, and/or assistants) you are very much alone with whatever is going on inside of you. * * * For contrast, my wife had a less typical and more powerful experience with ayahuasca about ten years back while traveling in Peru. She and a friend participated in a ceremony in a much more intimate environment (just the two of them, a shaman, and a female bystander for safety) without as much of the physical preparation; they did it practically on a whim, so while my wife was fairly prepared emotionally and spiritually from her own work, she hadn't, say, avoided pork or alcohol for the week before. She downed two or three cups of the vile stuff over the course of their ceremony, to little obvious effect that evening. It was on the travel back out of the jungle that everything hit: the most intense projectile vomiting of her life to date, followed by extremely intense daytime hallucinations, and a strong sense of spiritual connectedness and openness that she carries to this day. Having asked around, this significantly delayed and highly intense experience is very uncommon. * * * Finally, as a quick followup on the original article discussing the anthropomorphization of the leaf as grandmother/_abuela_ -- it's worth noting, for context, that frequent medicinal users, devotes, psychonauts, etc. refer also to peyote as grandfather/_abuelo_. I have no personal experience, but have been given to understand that peyote gives a very different but complimentary experience: communal and reassuring rather than individual and truth-revealing.
hosh 10y ago
I drank on at least 35 nights, most of them with Mestizo shamans brought into the US. This happened within the span of three intense years. Every single time was difficult and challenging. Each one of them brought a theme that picked off where the last left off. What I worked on was a range of things: from physical ailments, to letting go of attachments and facing fears, to purging out BS in the mind, to spiritual ailments spanning across multiple lifetimes. I had to work through a lot of internal resistance. There were training in a variety of things at a variety of levels of being. It did not help that there was something within me that drove me to keep coming back, like I'm hurrying to make it. There was period where, by the next ceremony rolls around, I forgotten the initial suffering and I have fond memories of the peak. By the time I got to the most recent one I participated in, I could intuitively tell when I was going to work a lot. My experiences are atypical and intense. I am sensitive to it, and it took a while to figure out where the right dosage was for me. Every person's experience and work is going to be unique to them, even if it might fall into broad, general patterns. I'm currently on hiatus, and will probably be getting back into it... well, when the time is right again. In the meantime, I've been keeping up with my daily practices of meditation and sometimes chanting, getting into the darker spaces of my being, when necessary. If anything, my experiences in the ceremonies taught me to have courage to look. And although the hiatus was due to external circumstances, I'm training to access these visionary states without taking the medicine directly.

deleted 10y ago

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6stringmerc 10y ago

In years of observation, I have no doubt that if the compound has some interesting properties, it will be exploited, outcry / moralizing will ensue, and legislation will be passed to criminialise any use. All it really takes is one precious snowflake to do something hurtful to themselves or others to kick-off a motivated response. Well, at least computer duster inhalants are still widely available (/sarcasm).

Synaesthesia 10y ago
>legislation will be passed to criminialise any use DMT was banned ages ago.
thescribe 10y ago
Honestly, just from reading this thread it sounds like it should be banned.

apathy 10y ago

The classical comparison that comes to mind is this: LSD is like walking through the doors of perception. DMT (as in ayahuasca) is like being shot out of a cannon. I wonder if it has dawned on any of these "shamans" that a fistful of risperidone might be useful for the freakouts? Antipsychotics exist for a reason. Also, anyone on MAOIs is likely to have a very bad time, and people on SSRIs may not notice a thing (other than barfing). The whole enterprise seems very poorly thought out.

wavefunction 10y ago
According to my friends and everything I've read on the subject, the cannon effect is achieved when you smoke DMT. Ayahuasca is DMT + MAOI inhibitors and is more like the usual experiences of orally ingesting LSD, psilocybin or mescaline.
- azernik 10y ago
  Plus fantastically uncomfortable physical side effects, and on the positive side an experienced spotter to help you along.
  - monktastic1 10y ago
    Depends. If the MAOIs are extracted from the caapi, leaving out the other alkaloids, even the uncomfortable physical side effects can be avoided.
    - Nursie 10y ago
      Ah but that's working around the 'plant spirit' and all that other stuff, you won't have an 'authentic' or 'real' experience and the hipsterswill laugh at you....
      - chillwaves 10y ago
        What's the point of the tone of your comment? Some people would find the processed drug to lack the "authentic" experience of what is found in nature. Doubt anyone really cares. Sounds more like a caricature to me.

Nursie 10y ago

So much pretension, so much bollocks... Just drop some acid like a normal person, or take a harmaline cap and some dmt later. No need for all this 'purging' and ceremony.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
I agree although some ceremony can add to your trip.
- ntaenta 10y ago
  I agree with both of you. Ceremony is one way to attain a pleasant set and setting, but ultimately I get somewhat exasperated by all the woo and mysticism surrounding psychedelic use. Psychedelics can be therapeutic or "spiritual", but once you have some familiarity they can also just be fun. I've had equally wonderful experiences sitting alone in the woods, playing beer pong at a frat party, exercising, playing an instrument, having sex, etc. Higher doses of certain psychedelics will make some of these experiences less pleasant / possible, but in general it can be much more than the solemn introspection that most people expect.
cnp 10y ago
You seem to be so certain of this, eh?
throwanem 10y ago
I don't know that it is bad for novices to have some framework in which to interpret and assimilate what is often a very intense experience. A reasonable degree of nuance might suggest that, while there's perhaps quite a lot of reason to blame people experienced enough to know better for making more (less?) of it than it merits, there's no reason to blame people who lack that experience for wanting, especially their first time, something a little more special than just "oh, drop some acid like a normal person".
- Nursie 10y ago
  Special? Fine, set and setting can be very important. But the nonsense about picking the vines at a certain time of day, and the idea that we don't need medical expertise on hand because we're special and.... It really winds me up. You're doing oral DMT, not magic...

yolesaber 10y ago

I run an ayahuasca clinic in Upstate NY. I make all my own preparations and tend to the ritual aspects as well as guide people on trips. I've been doing this as my profession for several years now, feel free to ask any questions

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jrowley 10y ago
1. How'd you find yourself doing this? 2. From your experience, how does ayahuasca compare to other psychedelics? 3. Any personal advice for someone interested in experimenting with these drugs?
- yolesaber 10y ago
  1. I lived in Marin and worked as a software engineer and then later a research fellow for ten years (still sometimes on and off when they need me). Then I got really bored and moved across the country to start an art commune with old friends from college. We did our thing, went separate ways and I decided to invest what I had left in some land by a river / waterfall. Well one of the people we met from the art commune's dad was an exec, like VP level, for Fiji Water and one day we were driving around and I showed them the land and they loved it and bought it from me for double what I paid. I used that cash to buy a house outright in a dinky little town with enough leftover to mean I only had to work like 10-15 hours a week to be able to retire at 47. I didn't want to program, didn't want to be a landlord or do more flipping, so I went on an acid trip to figure it out and my friend floated the idea as a "startup" as a joke, but it's funny because he was associated with the Body Actualized Center which was basically the same thing before it got shut down (there's a bunch of articles about it, probably the biggest one to get busted in years). So yeah sorry to ramble but essentially I wanted a really weird part-time job and so I just invented one. 2. I personally am not the biggest fan of ayahuasca, but am in awe of it. I respect it and let it do its work upon people but I rarely take it and I have a feeling I never will again. I usually just smoke a bit of DMT mixed with THC shatter when I'm coming up with the client(s) to get into a similar headspace but other than that I'm sober and there to guide and work with the psychonauts. I've taken it four times, each time was different and each time I found new words and new ways to express myself but I'm much more careful about it now. LSD on the other hand I do about every month or so. It is, in my opinion, the finest substance known to man besides cannabis. If you want to have a profound physical and mental experience that takes over your body and melds your mind, by all means drink the potion. LSD lets you have a little bit more control and is less, in my opinion, 'religious'. 3. Do them with people you know and love. Don't go into it expecting wisdom or enlightenment and don't be surprised when the work you create or the thoughts you write are inane and obtuse once you see them through sober eyes. Do it because the mind and body and spirit need to be explored and known in ways that some may see as meandering or even farcical (how many times has acid been the butt of low-rent sitcom gags?) but to the determined can be a wellspring of experience and, perhaps most importantly, a joy that is inimitable.

ktRolster 10y ago

Be careful. These quotes from the article are kind of worrying: “Do you have doctors or anyone on hand who understands what’s happening on a pharmacological level if something goes wrong?” There was a tense silence, and then Little Owl replied, “We are healing on a vibrational level.” And: I asked how she could tell it wasn’t something requiring immediate medical intervention, and the [mediator] replied, “Intuition.”

jomamaxx 10y ago
Indeed. This is not a toy drug. This is heavy-duty. I wonder if there is maybe something simple, medically, that can be done by a 'non pro' - like - if there are specific and identifiable symptoms - 'take this pill' which has a neutralizing or softening effect or something. Hopefully something safe and natural. Maybe even something like 'drink caffeine and eat something fatty' - or whatever might work that's easy and accessible.
- Kroniker 10y ago
  As far as I know, you can get "chill pills", I think maybe benzodiazepines will calm you down, but even in an ER they just make sure you're safe and let your ride it out. Once that roller coaster starts it needs to run it's course. Source: Burnout friend.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    I think for opioid overdose there is a medical intervention, but for these psychedelic things ... I guess there isn't much to do. But psychological risk is real. My friend did something similar in Brazil and had 'fear' episodes for years.
rosser 10y ago
Provided you screen for things like heart conditions, contra-indicated pharmaceutical or supplement usage, or some mental health issues, psychedelics are, on the whole, profoundly physically safe. Not saying shit doesn't happen, but if you're going to the jungle to work with these plants, with a reputable practitioner, you're at vastly greater risk from things like snakes and mosquitoes — or even jaguars and alligators — than you are the plants, themselves.

notliketherest 10y ago

All of this "self exploration, cosmos consciousness, soul enlightenment" justification for using these drugs sounds to me like the promises of profit in Tim Ferris' 4 hour work week: 1) take drugs 2) ??? 3) Enlightenment. You know that Mt Fuji analogy whereby a hiker hikes to the top of Mt Fuji for enlightenment, choosing his path on the way? Well it seems to me like this people are looking for a quick helicopter ride to the top. And having used these drugs myself in the past, I was so stupid and naive to think that it would impart the wisdom that decades of life should give you. Idk to me this all seems like a bunch of bullshit.

empath75 10y ago
Drug experiences are still experiences and like any experience, you can learn something from them or waste them. At the absolute least, a psychedelic experience should teach you a lesson about the reliability of the senses and about how subjective our experience of reality can be, which is a valuable lesson to learn, IMO, and no matter how much you understand it intellectually, directly experiencing it is another matter entirely.
- notliketherest 10y ago
  You make a good point - the psychedelic experience can lead to a greater sense of empathy in that you perceive the world not through the eyes of your ego but as "all one" (over simplification). An increase in empathy is a good thing but equating these drugs to a magic pill for self actualization is wrong.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    > world not through the eyes of your ego in most cases, you don't see much of the world past you own eyes anymore, but some "fantasy", which is why it is aptly called an hallucinogen. It messes with your head and you have a hard time making sense of the world so you revert to some basic notions of knowledge, that appear like an epiphany because they are that basic. I don't think these are new found insights and good luck if these facilities of your brain are damaged in the process. It is called acid for a reason. Edit: A neat analogy would be fuzzing a production system. Not only that, it is randomly deleting files and flipping bits of memory to see how robust the system is. If your system is error free, the fuzzing is not a problem, but every system has bugs.

steauengeglase 10y ago

While I don't doubt the psychological benefits of ayahuasca (or any hallucinogenic), the language of many of those advocating in the article set off red flags. "Format your harddrive", reminds of Arch Oboler's "Society of the Cosmos", something dreamed up by Evangelical hucksters who didn't see a future in peddling Jesus so they turned to techno speak to wring out the marks. "We manifest abundance wherever we go," sounds even worse. That's the kind of reason Dominionist give when trying to dodge their car taxes. What did Hunter Thompson say about the seekers who tried to buy enlightenment by the dose? Instead the real benefit is trying to rationally understand their experience. "Wait, was there a giant hand with my dad's watch on it's wrist crushing the room? Damn, I didn't realize I was letting that take over my life." Without that personal insight you are just dealing with pseudo-spiritual abstractions.

oldmanjay 10y ago
I feel like the sheer amount of bullshit surrounding these drugs leaves me with a duty to take heavy doses of psychedelics and proudly learn nothing but "boy that was fun"
- cnp 10y ago
  Or "boy was I wrong -- wow"
- fragola 10y ago
  Agreed on the bullshit. I think this might have something to do with me growing up in a certain hippy town on the California coast, but I couldn't get through this article without a lot of eye-rolling. OK, let's just put the whole drug thing aside and call it a hobby. You can have a hobby without having a pseudospiritual and vaguely appropriative justification for it. Bodybuilders have a term that they use to describe the mythos that has evolved in their subculture regarding steroids and supplements: Broscience. This is the yuppie drug-dabbler equivalent.
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    Offtopic, but unfortunately broscience has extended beyond pharmaceuticals to training practice. This kind of thinking dominates the crossfit world with terms like "muscle confusion" and "failure". It's sad because I got into crossfit ten years ago because it was fun, something different every day kept me coming back. I didn't want to be a Navy SEAL, just to keep active, but the almost religious adherence to the training philosophy -- and the injuries sustained by several people I knew -- drove me away. Now I find myself sedentary and looking for something similar, but less pseudo-scientific.

ap22213 10y ago

Why does the plant produce DMT? Is it a poison? Are there other plants that produce it? I wonder about the evolutionary reasons for its emergence. Does the plant influence the Human so that the Human protects and nurtures the plant? When did Humans begin altering South America? 15,000 years ago? More than enough time for the plant to adapt. It's a strange feeling to ingest a hallucination producing organism. I remember being 19 years old, in the 90s, being given mushrooms. I spent the next several hours sitting at a tree stump feeling myself sink into it, feeling merged with plants around me. I remember thinking a lot about the juxtaposition of the natural with the concrete and brick and asphalt just a few hundred meters away - and wanting to tear it all down. Now, decades later, reading the woman's experience, I wonder if the fungi had somehow manipulated me.

centicosm 10y ago
Interestingly, there are hundreds of plants that produce it. Even more interesting, the human body also produces it. There was some human studies that took place in New Mexico. Check out: DMT: The Spirit Molecule for some interesting reading if such studies are of interest.
throwanem 10y ago
Might want to spend some time thinking about that phrase "evolutionary reasons". There's an assumption in there I'm not sure you've noticed.
- ap22213 10y ago
  That's pretty cryptic... Ok, what do you mean? I'm dense.
  - salmon30salmon 10y ago
    I am not the OC, but I think he was going on about how you apparently attributed a certain level of "reason" to evolution. His contention is that evolution exists free of reason. I think you two are disagreeing on the term reason. You mean "reason" in the sense of "why" and he means reason in the sense of "logical conditions". The why is an interesting question, what environmental or other factors provided an advantage in a plant containing this chemical, or was it a non-important side effect of some other change. It is interesting, maybe not easily knowable. Hope this clears it up. I may be wrong, but I get annoyed when I read comments that are negative without an explanation, so I thought I would attempt to shine some light.

zizzles 10y ago

In my eyes the VERY FACT that psychedelics like N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) even exist in the FIRST place (and take you on the experiences that they take you) can NOT be some sort of coincidence. I am not suggesting that they are some special all-knowing tool, but the sheer potency of DMT and the other-worldly-dimension-changing-states-of-mind that it yields when consumed can not be shrugged off as just another recreational drug or "you're just high bro", at least not to me. We have consciousness. We see. We feel... but existence remains a mystery. No one on Earth can properly put into words what THIS is. It's unexplainable, at least to me. You can perhaps say "we are in the Milky Way" or "we are located in the Universe" or "we are existing" but these are just vague primitive monkey explanations. Substances like DMT can shed light on these questions from a different vantage point.

rconti 10y ago
I'm confused. It cannot be a coincidence that substances exist on this earth that alter our consciousness? Why not? There are all kinds of substances found naturally that can change the way you feel, change the way your body acts, kill you, make you hallucinate, whatever. Is it proof that there has to be a purpose behind them? I forgot what the term is, but is this not like the fallacy of believing there must be a creator, because there is this wonderful planet for us to experience? But if we were not here to experience it, we would not know it was missing.
- stevetrewick 10y ago
  Possibly the argument from personal incredulity?[0] Or maybe the Anthropic Principle? [1] Little column A, little column B? [0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity#Personal_incredulity http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity#Perso... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
  - rconti 10y ago
    Anthropic principle, yes, thank you!

lwhalen 10y ago

http://www.theonion.com/article/ayahuasca-shaman-dreading-another-week-guiding-tec-52941 http://www.theonion.com/article/ayahuasca-shaman-dreading-an...

hosh 10y ago
Yup. A friend sent that a while ago. I sent it around to the folks who regularly takes Ayahuasca. We were all cracking up. It was either written by someone who took it at least once, or maybe just connected really well with it. I didn't know at the time it was such a thing in SV though.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Kazamai 10y ago

Short circuiting your brain is not the path to spirituality, therapy or enlightenment.

metaphorm 10y ago
is that what you think it is? have you ever taken a psychedelic drug?
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  Or perhaps more importantly, surveyed the unfortunately scant literature to understand how they work as well as any potential for harm.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Regardless, you MIGHT get some non-mainstream academic agreement that there is the potential for therapeutic benefits; but not "Enlightenment" or anything spiritual. Although, it seems to me that the burden of providing such literature is on you, not OP (no, erowid.com doesn't count).
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      erowid is a fine source for experiential reports and technical information on the botany and/or pharmacology of the substances involved. let me ask you a question: is nothing true unless a credentialed academic writes a peer reviewed journal published paper about it?

trappedintime 10y ago

The experience you will have is tremendously dependent on a few things: your existing state of mind, the physical environment / location of the experience, preparations (if any) made for the experience, and arguably most importantly (IMHO), your intention or reason for seeking the experience. If you go at it with the attitude that this is simply a reason to get high, or to observe visual disturbances for the sheer sake of hallucinating, there's a very good chance that will comprise your experience. Conversely, if you set an intention of learning about yourself, life, death, existence, the universe, etc., and approach it with regard, then there is a very good chance you will have that experience. From what I have gathered observing myself and my friends, the latter can be quite transformative to the self. It can encourage profound positive changes in attitude and improve quality of life, increase spiritual awareness and feelings of interconnectedness, greatly diminish or eliminate one's fear of death, among other things. These feelings can last, sometimes for life, and it can take months to fully integrate the lessons learned and information gained after returning from the "journey". See the John's Hopkins study on psilocybin for more information. Preparation and intent simply cannot be understated when it comes to the use of these substances. What the psychedelic enthusiasts refer to as 'set and setting'.

thescribe 10y ago
If the effect only manifests when you think about it correctly, is it a placebo?
- TimPrice 10y ago
  Cognitive distortion may manifest in many ways, like bad trips.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- trappedintime 10y ago
  And this is precisely where trying to measure a unique experience with microscopes and well-established materialist scientific theorems begins to fail us. An experience, by the way, that many call the 'most important' of their life. They describe it as 'noetic' in that it seems more real than ordinary consensus reality, and 'ineffible' in that it cannot be successfully described, it must be experienced firsthand. These aren't just the waxings of a hippie distracted at work, I can point you to studies that demonstrate the repeatability of it all (i.e., 'most important experience of life' claims, noetic properties, ineffable, etc.) Many people use these descriptors when regarding their respective psychedelic journeys. In my opinion, the reason some people have awe-inspiring life-changing experiences and some just see neat visuals or have the ominous 'bad trip' goes back to my first comment. Set, setting, and intention are absolutely everything with these substances. The stuff just seems to be of a higher order, and it seems it gives you just what you deserve.

wtbob 10y ago

I wonder what the effects of chemically-induced pseudowisdom are. Real wisdom, after all, is both physiological and mental, a product of experience as well as of neurochemistry. What might be the ill-effects of feeling that one has gained wisdom when in fact one has only altered one's brain chemistry?

StudyAnimal 10y ago
Well, if real wisdom requires experience then the harm you are talking about is probably slightly less harmful than the pseudo-wisdom one feels when reading another persons experience in a book. After all reading a book doesn't give us an experience, its all "just" chemistry too..
- wtbob 10y ago
  > After all reading a book doesn't give us an experience, its all "just" chemistry too.. I'd disagree there. It's less experience than actually doing something, but more than just getting a chemical flow across the brain. Reading is a weak sort of experience, no?
  - StudyAnimal 10y ago
    I was being toungue and cheek. Of course reading a book is an experience, as is taking drugs. And its not just chemical , you might go to the park and have an adventure between two blades of grass or something. Its not like people just drop a tab, close their eyes and lie in bed. I would say in order of strength of experience I would say something like: [Big Adventure without drugs] > [Small adventure with drugs] > [Reading] > [Dreaming]

makeset 10y ago

A friend of mine participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, and he said that it completely changed him, from a person who wanted to try ayahuasca to a person who would never do it again.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

I'm a SV entrepreneur who is pretty well-connected with the community here (only mentioning this for the sake of credibility). Maybe it's because I missed Burning Man this year, but I haven't heard of anybody doing this outside of articles on Tech Crunch that say people are (let alone normal hallucinogens). Marijuana or Adderall, sure (Meadow and Eaze are doing well here); maybe even the /r/nootropics stack, but not hallucinogenic substances. I know people who have experimented with shrooms, but they don't consider them a "drug of choice," let alone a productivity enhancer by any means. In fact, one of my acquaintances ended up going off the deep end when he started taking LSD. It was a really sad story.

sverige 10y ago

I tripped once years ago on an extract of morning glory seeds that a genius friend of my sister concocted. (Essentially lysergic acid amide, plus maybe some other alkaloids, look it up if you're that interested.) There was no preparation as far as set and setting. Basically I was a chronic drug-using teenager who was trying something new. Took the stuff before a concert and began tripping during the opening act. Had a great time. Saw some weird shit. Blacked out for a while as usual because I was also smoking a lot of pot and drinking beer for hydration. Somehow reconnected with the people I went with and got a ride home, with some intervening adventures on the way. Lay down in bed to sleep and that's when it got weird. Hard to describe and kind of boring if you weren't there (but you might have been! ;-)) Woke up the next morning still tripping balls. Couldn't stop it, got kind of scared. Called people and said shit I don't remember and that they still won't repeat. Finally stopped tripping later that day, and was exhausted for another day. Found out later from the genius that the dose was roughly equivalent to 350-500 mcg of LSD (i.e., a lot). Read The Yage Letters shortly after that. Haven't tripped since. Occasionally consider it since I've done a lot more reading and work in the 37 years since that experience, but now it's a hipster thing so it's embarrassing to admit. I mean, the New Yorker is writing articles about it. You don't even have to dig through a few different grungy bookstores to find a copy of the Beat take on it from the '50s. So, probably never yage / ayahuasca, but maybe someday a tab of acid. Or maybe not. I'm a lot more self-aware and enlightened than I was at 17, but I think that's mostly because I've lived another 37 years and survived all the trouble along the path, not because I tripped once. P.S. People had these exact same kinds of conversations on this topic 35 years ago.

gerbilly 10y ago

Why is this community so uncomfortable around 'woo'? Some of my ideas: Woo multiplies entities beyond necessity. Woo uses imagery (goddesses, grandmotherss, spirits, 'energy') that we find aesthetically displeasing? Woo has an anything goes feel to it (whatever is true for you...) But perhaps we should look at our own woo before criticizing others too much for theirs, after all the world of business is full of it's own sort of woo (synergize our two platforms to leverage our cloud based infrastructure going forward...) To me when someone speaks woo, it's a sign that the person may be on to something that can't yet be expressed. This can happen to techies, for example during that interval when you feel that you have solved a problem you have been working on, but can't quite express it clearly yet. But woo is so open ended, that this is only true for the best cases. Often it's just nonsense, but so are scientific abstracts and press releases sometimes.