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I’ve taken psychedelics a few times. Sometimes, it’s just been mild and giggling at colors and nature. Pleasant, but just kind of a fun drug. Sometimes it’s bee

I’ve taken psychedelics a few times. Sometimes, it’s just been mild and giggling at colors and nature. Pleasant, but just kind of a fun drug. Sometimes it’s been just extremely confusing and not at all fun, to the extent that I’d forget my own name or what I’ve taken and basically just all memories. It’s very frustrating to be in that state, constantly trying not to fly away but not able to ground yourself. It’s a little disturbing, but not horrific. Sometimes though, it’s been a truly beautiful, enlightening experience. I still think of it sometimes. It’s very difficult to really explain in words, but it feels like kind of extreme empathy with all life. Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay. I’m not particularly religious or spiritual at all but that experience really changed me a bit, I still think of it. It feels like a shortcut to enlightenment that usually takes a lifetime of meditation, albeit short-lasting. To really get it permanently, you probably have to meditate a lot. It was amazing. It feels like life is in all these different forms, and you just happen to be one variation of it, but you could easily be any other living thing, so you just feel love and empathy for all life. And you know it’s finite and you’re not afraid of death. I would still attempt to avoid death, but I was just at peace with it if it was inevitable. I think it’s a shame psychedelics get put in the same category as other drugs in the law and in people’s heads. It’s not at all the same as heroin, meth, cocaine. Not at all. I think on balance they should probably be legal, but I can easily imagine someone with mental illness struggling with mushrooms so I’m glad John Hopkins is doing these studies. It does seem like the therapeutic affects are long-lasting, and it’s not like you can overdose on them. The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them. However if the dose is so strong, you probably wouldn’t be able to move much anyway. Edit: a lot of replies to this post seem to talk about LSD. I was actually talking about mushrooms. I've only taken LSD once. Maybe the distinction matters.

ta1234567890 8y ago
You might enjoy reading the book How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan. It describes exactly what you are saying, has lots of different testimonials and has a great overview of the whole psychedelic therapy research world going from the 50s all the way to now.
umvi 8y ago
I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose). Anecdotally I had a friend in high school who was a brilliant programmer and started using LSD and other psychedelics. He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook and after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore - the drugs permanently changed him. To be fair I don't know if he was using other drugs in conjunction with psychedelics but my (possibly ignorant) gut feeling is to be wary of implications of harmlessness when it comes to any drug.
- temp129838 8y ago
  Changing yourself due to increased neuroplasticity is a feature, not a bug. That isn't the same thing as "overdosing."
  - skellera 8y ago
    Being in an environment or situation where that can be a problem is still not preferred. It may not be an overdose, but the outcome of drug use by their friend doesn’t seem positive.
    - temp129838 8y ago
      Agreed. You can have good trips and bad trips. It is highly dependent on environment and state of mind. The only guarantee is that your ability to change increases due to increased neuroplasticity. Whether the change is good or bad is ultimately up to you, which is why I think if these drugs were to be legalized that the intake should happen in conjunction with in-person therapy in a controlled environment and not at all something you'd just pickup at a pharmacy and take on your own like anti-depressants are today.
- Moodles 8y ago
  > I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose I meant lethal overdose, like heroin. I certainly I know some people who take too many drugs. Personally I don’t feel like I have to do any psychedelics ever again, but maybe I will, I don’t know. They are not chemically addictive anyway. And your high school friend taking them at such a young age?! Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally ill anyway? Maybe it was the drugs? Maybe it was other drugs? That’s why I would like to see more controlled studies from reputable places like John Hopkins. The data looks relatively promising so far, but more needs to be done I think.
lostmsu 8y ago
Could you elaborate why are you calling experience "enlightening", considering you can not put it into words? There is a joke about a guy, who could not remember a brilliant idea, he got under drugs. He left a piece of paper and pencil around, and wrote it down during the next trip. A day later he found the paper, which read "The Water is Wet".
- byproxy 8y ago
  I think the most basic of observations can feel extremely profound while on hallucinogenics in that they might set off a cascade of ideas and recognitions that make the world feel more intimate. A phrase such as "the water is wet" could've been akin to an input to a particular function that unlocked a slew of realizations. Possibly.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I could buy that. What I've found is that a lot of the most fundamental truths of the universe are really simple. So simple, they can often be expressed as, or nearly as, tautologies. Here's one for karma: if you put good into the world, there will be good in the world.
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    Any specific realizations, that are unlike "water is wet", that came to you or your friends on drugs?
    - byproxy 8y ago
      I wasn't speaking of my specific experience[], rather I was guessing what might lead to profound moments while under the influence. "Water is wet" isn't the realization in what I'm hypothesizing, but could be a spark of an idea that sets of a chain reaction of tangentially related concepts that seem to make a whole lot of sense as a whole and impart feelings of great beauty to one who is high and might inspire that person to write down the "big bang" of their experience, if you will. So, someone writing "water is wet" is writing the map, not the treasure. Maybe? []I've done mushrooms once and it was mostly a horrifying, traumatic experience. The drive home during sunrise with my car's radio set to the local classical station playing choral music felt particularly affecting, though.
AVTizzle 8y ago
This was beautifully written, and very, very much captures my sentiments (and experiences) with psychedelics as well. Actually, reading your post was moving. Maybe the most impactful HN post I can remember reading (perhaps with some amount of recency bias in it's favor. Still...) Thank you!
- state_less 8y ago
  Indeed, you might not have to use the drug to get some benefits :) We live in a culture of (economic) winners and losers, and if you get hung up on this mindset, which is encouraged btw, you could imagine a low place for yourself. Get stuck long enough and it’ll grind you to dust. If we can break out using psychedelics, so much the better. And I agree with others here, it’s best as medicine, not a diet.
- Moodles 8y ago
  Thank you.
balabaster 8y ago
> Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay. My Mom raised me to feel that this is putting yourself outside the picture as a passive observer. I was taught from a very young age to remove myself to this state whenever I felt I couldn't understand the world. The older I get, the more I observe the world and behaviour of people around me, the harder I find it to escape this state, silently watching, observing, trying to understand the chaos that is humanity.
- Moodles 8y ago
  Do you like being in that state?
  - balabaster 8y ago
    Honestly, it can be depressing and confusing. I equate it to being in the mind of a therapist. You're there in the moment, but you're not really there in the moment. You're watching people, thinking about who they are and why they are the way they are, observing behaviour, understanding the nuance of how they interact together. It's interesting. Fascinating even from an academic standpoint. But life isn't academic. The beauty of life can only be experienced if you let yourself experience it. You know that scene where he wants to be put back in the Matrix because ignorance is bliss... yeah, that.
    - Moodles 8y ago
      This is a very different answer to the other one. How interesting.
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      There is a meditation experience called the "Dark Night" where some people are overwhelmed by the dissociative "no self" feelings after meditation. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...
    - monktastic1 8y ago
sandov 8y ago
>The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them. Not so fast. I had a bad LSD (and some marijuana) trip once and had flashbacks for 2 months. I would be going around my day and suddenly reality turned into a videogame or an evil simulation. That was like 3 years ago, it has all passed now, never had flashbacks again and I'm glad I had that bad trip, because it showed me reality in a way that I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. But maybe if I had had a higher dose, or had been in a worse place in my life, I would have gone completely mad.
- 50656E6973 8y ago
  Were you on any other pharmaceuticals at the time?
  - sandov 8y ago
    No.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I knew someone once who took a lot of LSD. Her line was that LSD was the most economical of the drugs, because after a while, the effects would happen even when you weren't taking them. I thought this sounded more similar to "permanent brain damage".
- daotoad 8y ago
  This is why either having a good grounding in meditation techniques and having a guide on hand during a trip is a very important precaution to take for safe experiences. An experienced guide could have helped you break out of the negative experience. If you had better conscious awareness of your mental state, you could have recognized the slide into a bad state and prevented it. The flashbacks you were experiencing were very real traumatic flashbacks, like what a victim of violence would experience. The promising results that psychologists are having with psychedelic drugs all centers around having a trained operator guiding the experience to get a desired effect. It's not just a matter of dropping acid and you immediately see GOD and fix your PTSD.
- 8y ago
lgvln 8y ago
I have a question though. Have you ever had a bad trip on psychedelics? The closest analogy to that seems to be an episode of psychosis. The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those. Sam Harris wrote about his experience with it in Waking Up. He had numerous good experience with it, a good setting and state of mind but yet he still had a bad trip and it has stuck with him ever since, like “a door left ajar” in his words.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  I had multiple bad trips on mushrooms where Strange thoughts would enter my mind.. usally happend the second day if i did it again or when i did too little. Also with too little lsd it just gives you time to Think and feel yourself rather than enough and be sweept away by it. Did Perhaps shrooms 50x. With 2cb it was Strange and I just had to accept that the Ground below me wasent really crawling with snakes and it was also beautifull. With changa every trip is everything ... its scary its a bad trip and the Best trip ever, Ive made ot myself and given it away under my supervision now 76 times/hours and many go through a Very scared part before they feel the love abd beauti of it ... Perhaps 10 percent even the experienced ones who did All other stuff. Thats Why i tripsit and make them accept and enjoy but otherwise try to make it an undisturbed private thing. Most scary i did was mandrakeroot Where we Two of us did it a day apart but became almost possessed and drawn to eachother to fight for No aparent reason.
- collyw 8y ago
  > The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those. Plenty of people on reddit think they are very worthwhile and say tehy learn the most from bad trips.
electriclove 8y ago
"I took a walk alone last night. I looked up at the stars To try to find an answer in my life I chose a star for me, I chose a star for him I chose two stars for my kids and one star for my wife Something made me smile. Something seemed to ease the pain Something about the universe and how it's all connected" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RwlGRtanvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RwlGRtanvs

ta1234567890 8y ago

You might enjoy reading the book How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan. It describes exactly what you are saying, has lots of different testimonials and has a great overview of the whole psychedelic therapy research world going from the 50s all the way to now.

umvi 8y ago

I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose). Anecdotally I had a friend in high school who was a brilliant programmer and started using LSD and other psychedelics. He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook and after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore - the drugs permanently changed him. To be fair I don't know if he was using other drugs in conjunction with psychedelics but my (possibly ignorant) gut feeling is to be wary of implications of harmlessness when it comes to any drug.

temp129838 8y ago
Changing yourself due to increased neuroplasticity is a feature, not a bug. That isn't the same thing as "overdosing."
- skellera 8y ago
  Being in an environment or situation where that can be a problem is still not preferred. It may not be an overdose, but the outcome of drug use by their friend doesn’t seem positive.
  - temp129838 8y ago
    Agreed. You can have good trips and bad trips. It is highly dependent on environment and state of mind. The only guarantee is that your ability to change increases due to increased neuroplasticity. Whether the change is good or bad is ultimately up to you, which is why I think if these drugs were to be legalized that the intake should happen in conjunction with in-person therapy in a controlled environment and not at all something you'd just pickup at a pharmacy and take on your own like anti-depressants are today.
Moodles 8y ago
> I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose I meant lethal overdose, like heroin. I certainly I know some people who take too many drugs. Personally I don’t feel like I have to do any psychedelics ever again, but maybe I will, I don’t know. They are not chemically addictive anyway. And your high school friend taking them at such a young age?! Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally ill anyway? Maybe it was the drugs? Maybe it was other drugs? That’s why I would like to see more controlled studies from reputable places like John Hopkins. The data looks relatively promising so far, but more needs to be done I think.

lostmsu 8y ago

Could you elaborate why are you calling experience "enlightening", considering you can not put it into words? There is a joke about a guy, who could not remember a brilliant idea, he got under drugs. He left a piece of paper and pencil around, and wrote it down during the next trip. A day later he found the paper, which read "The Water is Wet".

byproxy 8y ago
I think the most basic of observations can feel extremely profound while on hallucinogenics in that they might set off a cascade of ideas and recognitions that make the world feel more intimate. A phrase such as "the water is wet" could've been akin to an input to a particular function that unlocked a slew of realizations. Possibly.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I could buy that. What I've found is that a lot of the most fundamental truths of the universe are really simple. So simple, they can often be expressed as, or nearly as, tautologies. Here's one for karma: if you put good into the world, there will be good in the world.
- lostmsu 8y ago
  Any specific realizations, that are unlike "water is wet", that came to you or your friends on drugs?
  - byproxy 8y ago
    I wasn't speaking of my specific experience[], rather I was guessing what might lead to profound moments while under the influence. "Water is wet" isn't the realization in what I'm hypothesizing, but could be a spark of an idea that sets of a chain reaction of tangentially related concepts that seem to make a whole lot of sense as a whole and impart feelings of great beauty to one who is high and might inspire that person to write down the "big bang" of their experience, if you will. So, someone writing "water is wet" is writing the map, not the treasure. Maybe? []I've done mushrooms once and it was mostly a horrifying, traumatic experience. The drive home during sunrise with my car's radio set to the local classical station playing choral music felt particularly affecting, though.

AVTizzle 8y ago

This was beautifully written, and very, very much captures my sentiments (and experiences) with psychedelics as well. Actually, reading your post was moving. Maybe the most impactful HN post I can remember reading (perhaps with some amount of recency bias in it's favor. Still...) Thank you!

state_less 8y ago
Indeed, you might not have to use the drug to get some benefits :) We live in a culture of (economic) winners and losers, and if you get hung up on this mindset, which is encouraged btw, you could imagine a low place for yourself. Get stuck long enough and it’ll grind you to dust. If we can break out using psychedelics, so much the better. And I agree with others here, it’s best as medicine, not a diet.
Moodles 8y ago
Thank you.

balabaster 8y ago

> Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay. My Mom raised me to feel that this is putting yourself outside the picture as a passive observer. I was taught from a very young age to remove myself to this state whenever I felt I couldn't understand the world. The older I get, the more I observe the world and behaviour of people around me, the harder I find it to escape this state, silently watching, observing, trying to understand the chaos that is humanity.

Moodles 8y ago
Do you like being in that state?
- balabaster 8y ago
  Honestly, it can be depressing and confusing. I equate it to being in the mind of a therapist. You're there in the moment, but you're not really there in the moment. You're watching people, thinking about who they are and why they are the way they are, observing behaviour, understanding the nuance of how they interact together. It's interesting. Fascinating even from an academic standpoint. But life isn't academic. The beauty of life can only be experienced if you let yourself experience it. You know that scene where he wants to be put back in the Matrix because ignorance is bliss... yeah, that.
  - Moodles 8y ago
    This is a very different answer to the other one. How interesting.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    There is a meditation experience called the "Dark Night" where some people are overwhelmed by the dissociative "no self" feelings after meditation. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...
  - monktastic1 8y ago

sandov 8y ago

>The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them. Not so fast. I had a bad LSD (and some marijuana) trip once and had flashbacks for 2 months. I would be going around my day and suddenly reality turned into a videogame or an evil simulation. That was like 3 years ago, it has all passed now, never had flashbacks again and I'm glad I had that bad trip, because it showed me reality in a way that I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. But maybe if I had had a higher dose, or had been in a worse place in my life, I would have gone completely mad.

50656E6973 8y ago
Were you on any other pharmaceuticals at the time?
- sandov 8y ago
  No.
linsomniac 8y ago
I knew someone once who took a lot of LSD. Her line was that LSD was the most economical of the drugs, because after a while, the effects would happen even when you weren't taking them. I thought this sounded more similar to "permanent brain damage".
daotoad 8y ago
This is why either having a good grounding in meditation techniques and having a guide on hand during a trip is a very important precaution to take for safe experiences. An experienced guide could have helped you break out of the negative experience. If you had better conscious awareness of your mental state, you could have recognized the slide into a bad state and prevented it. The flashbacks you were experiencing were very real traumatic flashbacks, like what a victim of violence would experience. The promising results that psychologists are having with psychedelic drugs all centers around having a trained operator guiding the experience to get a desired effect. It's not just a matter of dropping acid and you immediately see GOD and fix your PTSD.
8y ago

lgvln 8y ago

I have a question though. Have you ever had a bad trip on psychedelics? The closest analogy to that seems to be an episode of psychosis. The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those. Sam Harris wrote about his experience with it in Waking Up. He had numerous good experience with it, a good setting and state of mind but yet he still had a bad trip and it has stuck with him ever since, like “a door left ajar” in his words.

simonsaidit 8y ago
I had multiple bad trips on mushrooms where Strange thoughts would enter my mind.. usally happend the second day if i did it again or when i did too little. Also with too little lsd it just gives you time to Think and feel yourself rather than enough and be sweept away by it. Did Perhaps shrooms 50x. With 2cb it was Strange and I just had to accept that the Ground below me wasent really crawling with snakes and it was also beautifull. With changa every trip is everything ... its scary its a bad trip and the Best trip ever, Ive made ot myself and given it away under my supervision now 76 times/hours and many go through a Very scared part before they feel the love abd beauti of it ... Perhaps 10 percent even the experienced ones who did All other stuff. Thats Why i tripsit and make them accept and enjoy but otherwise try to make it an undisturbed private thing. Most scary i did was mandrakeroot Where we Two of us did it a day apart but became almost possessed and drawn to eachother to fight for No aparent reason.
collyw 8y ago
> The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those. Plenty of people on reddit think they are very worthwhile and say tehy learn the most from bad trips.

electriclove 8y ago

"I took a walk alone last night. I looked up at the stars To try to find an answer in my life I chose a star for me, I chose a star for him I chose two stars for my kids and one star for my wife Something made me smile. Something seemed to ease the pain Something about the universe and how it's all connected" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RwlGRtanvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RwlGRtanvs