6 ms·

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

I’ve taken mushrooms quite a few times. Sometimes, it’s just been mild and giggling at colors and nature. Pleasant, but just kind of a fun drug. With a moderate dose, you tend to be introspective and consider your own life and relationships in different ways. There’s usually a lesson at the end. With higher doses, it’s sometimes 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. I think the reason for this is that I am afraid to lose my ego/die and I would actually benefit from a slightly higher dose to blast it away... With really high doses 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. 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. Also, when you come back to reality you’re utterly, utterly convinced that you’ve experienced something profound, possibly, despite all your rationality, there’s a message form god inside this mushroom. It’s almost like the mushroom is laughing at you: “good luck going back to your normal life now.” You’re left with “wow? That was that?!” It’s annoying honestly, because I’m not religious at all and I know it sounds crazy to even say that out loud. Of course, that feeling does slowly fade away like a distance dream or memory. A great story it reminds me of is “The Egg” by Andy Weir: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

wyldfire 7y ago
Hey, that was a good story. Thanks for sharing.
bambataa 7y ago
Out of interest, at what kind of dosage did you have the enlightening experience? I've had plenty of introspective experiences, but not much further, at what seemed to me to be fairly high doses.
- Moodles 7y ago
  My apologies. It’s not exactly like “take this amount and you will experience this trip”. It’s like how one day you may only have a few drinks of alcohol and yet feel way more drunk than other times you’ve drank a lot more. But to roughly answer your question, I had a breakthrough experience on about 5g of magic mushrooms. I’ve also had it on 22g of magic truffles. By the way, ever since these trips, I can’t enjoy much marijuana in the same way. Marijuana feels like the start of that trip now. It’s very weird.
  - aerovistae 7y ago
    Oh my God, 22g? As someone about to try it for the first time soon, I thought 4-5 was considered a high dose, I would have thought 4x that amount could be dangerous. (I'm not knowledgeable about drugs.)
    - Moodles 7y ago
      Magic truffles need different doses to magic mushrooms.
      - pmoriarty 7y ago
        Accurate dosing of mushrooms and other non-synthetic psychedelics is very difficult anyway, as the active compounds can greatly vary even within the same species and even within the same batch. Also, with psychedelics the effects will vary from person to person, and even on the same person depending on that person's mood, body chemistry, how much and what they've eaten, what's going on with their life and their subconscious mind at the time, what their expectations are, their stage of development, where and with whom they take it, etc.
  - 7y ago
chiefgeek 7y ago
Exactly this. And doing post trip integration work with a therapist or a group is particularly helpful in weaving the experience into your life.
novoid 7y ago
I went through a similar realization when I consumed mushrooms a few years ago. Truly beautiful understanding about how connected everything in the universe is, how we're all just a single thing. Even outside the trip, it is an objective notion, it is just that I had to go through the trip to really "know" it in my bones. However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this?
- floatrock 7y ago
  There was an article here a few days ago talking about mental flexibility that described it as "a vice" is going too far on either extreme and "the virtue" is being balanced... too far one way and you're stubborn, too far the other way and you're gullible. That article was on a different topic, but the lesson is being aware of the extremes and taking a bit of both is to be balanced, not to be contradictory.
- Moodles 7y ago
  > However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this? I think if you're concerned about it, it's probably not a big problem for you. Being kinder to all living things includes being kinder to yourself and your family anyway :-)
Bartweiss 7y ago
This ties nicely into the two questions I have about the article. First, have you seen clear, lasting changes in anxiety and depression? If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also. Second, how well do those feelings of contentment stick around? The stories I hear of enlightenment on mushrooms, DMT, any other "entheogen" all have the element you describe of being unable to grasp the discovery after the trip, and once it's in hindsight I can imagine that memory being anywhere from comforting to aggravatingly out-of-reach.
- metadaemon 7y ago
  I believe it's intent that matters here. It's possible to have a life-changing experience on mushrooms alone, but I've had better luck reprogramming unwanted neural pathways by explicitly going into the experience with strong intent towards a goal.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also." Set, drug, dose, and setting all play huge roles in the effects one gets. First, a lot of drugs on the black market aren't what they claim to be. So someone who tried what they thought were mushrooms in college might have gotten something else. The dose of psilocybin one gets from black market mushrooms is also difficult if not impossible to gauge. So someone who tried mushrooms in college could have gotten too low or too high a dose. Many people are also completely clueless when it comes to how to optimally prepare for and take drugs, and believe all sorts of myths and misconceptions about drugs. So many of those who took mushrooms in college probably did so in very poor circumstances, with no intention or even self-destructive intentions (such as those that often go hand-in-hand in binge-drinking), and possibly with misconceptions about what the experience will be like. This is all very, very different from taking psilocybin or other psychedelics in a carefully designed study, with trained therapists who typically give days if not weeks of therapy before the sessions, during, and after the sessions, are given pure, precisely measured doses. The setting is designed for maximum therapeutic effect, as are the resources available during the session (such as having pictures of loved-ones on hand to focus on at the peak of the session). The sessions are usually done with light blocked out by an eye-shade, and with music carefully designed to facilitate the session. The therapists are on hand to give support and help the patient work through any diffcult experiences, and are encouraged to work through such difficulties rather than run away from them. Acceptance is encouraged. Because of this careful preparation, planning, and professional therapy, the results are likely to be much different than casual mushroom use in college by people who are likely to be ignorant of psychedelics in general, and of how to properly run a therapeutic session in particular.
davebryand 7y ago
I had a similar experience. I was a burnt out YC startup founder in SF with a wife and kids whose life I was missing, and everything felt off track. I started working with a life coach, left my startup in the capable hands of my co-founders and moved to Raleigh. I soon thereafter had my first psylocibin experience. There were a bunch things shifting in me, but this experience blew my mind open and I haven't been the same since. (Much for the better, of course!) During that first trip, in a few hours I went from seeing the universe as a mechanistic, "matter is all there is", reality, to directly experiencing that there is so much more. Since then I've gone much deeper down that path and I'm so very thankful for this beautiful medicine for opening my eyes and heart!
rrivers 7y ago
Not at all crazy, I share your experiences. The mushroom is a method to commune with something larger than ourselves. Although I share your lack of faith in traditional religions, the mushroom has me believing that the spiral does indeed go up (just as we know it goes down).
ttul 7y ago
I have found that there is a mid-range of dosage that is "dangerous". In that range, one's perception is altered in an unpleasant way, yet the rush of joy that comes with a higher dose has not kicked in. You are left feeling nervous and even paranoid that the experience will never end. Take a bit more and it shifts into joy; you can embrace the weirdness and just let it take you away.
state_less 7y ago
I think mushrooms can open us up to truths that we don't always want to confront and sometimes it allows us to cry and make peace with our existence. When I grew mushrooms in college, I'd take massive doses of fresh mushrooms simply because I was flush with these amazing fungi. So I took a massive dose of fresh mushrooms, which I think is a better way to go if you can make it happen, something like over 50g wet. As it sets in, I looked up at the night sky and a drop of water precipitated with all the moments of my life reflected inside it. It was as if I was a single drop from a large ocean. In some ways it was sad, this teardrop would pass someday and return to the ocean. I know it's okay, and I want to say that it's been a lot of fun spending time with everyone. The experience reminds me of Blade Runner when the replicant confronts his own death. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop." - Kabir
- Moodles 7y ago
  50g!? That seems like an insane amount of mushrooms to eat in one dose. Edit: my apologies. I thought it was dry, not wet.
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    It's a large dose, but generally the conversion from wet to dry is 10 to 1.
    - Moodles 7y ago
      My mistake.
  - quotz 7y ago
    He said wet, not dried
gugagore 7y ago
Here's kurzgesagt's rendition of "The Egg": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
monkeynotes 7y ago
Just to note and call out that not everyone has enlightening experiences with heroic doses. I've had horrible experiences with a very large dose. I essentially passed out and when I awoke I genuinely thought I had died and was roaming as an invisible spirit. It wasn't until a friend interacted with me I realized I was still alive and began to come down. I really think anyone should take care when experimenting with powerful hallucinogens. They aren't for everyone and have been known to trigger psychosis and other adverse reactions if one has a family history of mental illness.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  The people that really suffer from drugs don't post here. Camille Paglia mentions some of the radical thinkers from the 60s lost their minds on drugs. Most people have little incentive to talk about having a bad trip on illegal drugs.
benji_is_me 7y ago
As someone with both relentless death anxiety and normal anxiety, this piques my interest. Have you had any full blown panic attacks while tripping?
- witherk 7y ago
  I have with LSD, a truly terrifying experience. I think it can still be worth trying but things can surely go very wrong with anxiety and hallucinogens.
- Moodles 7y ago
  I've had uncomfortable experiences. I don't know what would constitute a panic attack exactly. Get some supervision, stay in a safe place away from people. It's a journey. Even the good enlightening trip wasn't really a pleasurable experience: it was scary at times, but worth it.

wyldfire 7y ago

Hey, that was a good story. Thanks for sharing.

bambataa 7y ago

Out of interest, at what kind of dosage did you have the enlightening experience? I've had plenty of introspective experiences, but not much further, at what seemed to me to be fairly high doses.

Moodles 7y ago
My apologies. It’s not exactly like “take this amount and you will experience this trip”. It’s like how one day you may only have a few drinks of alcohol and yet feel way more drunk than other times you’ve drank a lot more. But to roughly answer your question, I had a breakthrough experience on about 5g of magic mushrooms. I’ve also had it on 22g of magic truffles. By the way, ever since these trips, I can’t enjoy much marijuana in the same way. Marijuana feels like the start of that trip now. It’s very weird.
- aerovistae 7y ago
  Oh my God, 22g? As someone about to try it for the first time soon, I thought 4-5 was considered a high dose, I would have thought 4x that amount could be dangerous. (I'm not knowledgeable about drugs.)
  - Moodles 7y ago
    Magic truffles need different doses to magic mushrooms.
    - pmoriarty 7y ago
      Accurate dosing of mushrooms and other non-synthetic psychedelics is very difficult anyway, as the active compounds can greatly vary even within the same species and even within the same batch. Also, with psychedelics the effects will vary from person to person, and even on the same person depending on that person's mood, body chemistry, how much and what they've eaten, what's going on with their life and their subconscious mind at the time, what their expectations are, their stage of development, where and with whom they take it, etc.
- 7y ago

chiefgeek 7y ago

Exactly this. And doing post trip integration work with a therapist or a group is particularly helpful in weaving the experience into your life.

novoid 7y ago

I went through a similar realization when I consumed mushrooms a few years ago. Truly beautiful understanding about how connected everything in the universe is, how we're all just a single thing. Even outside the trip, it is an objective notion, it is just that I had to go through the trip to really "know" it in my bones. However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this?

floatrock 7y ago
There was an article here a few days ago talking about mental flexibility that described it as "a vice" is going too far on either extreme and "the virtue" is being balanced... too far one way and you're stubborn, too far the other way and you're gullible. That article was on a different topic, but the lesson is being aware of the extremes and taking a bit of both is to be balanced, not to be contradictory.
Moodles 7y ago
> However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this? I think if you're concerned about it, it's probably not a big problem for you. Being kinder to all living things includes being kinder to yourself and your family anyway :-)

Bartweiss 7y ago

This ties nicely into the two questions I have about the article. First, have you seen clear, lasting changes in anxiety and depression? If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also. Second, how well do those feelings of contentment stick around? The stories I hear of enlightenment on mushrooms, DMT, any other "entheogen" all have the element you describe of being unable to grasp the discovery after the trip, and once it's in hindsight I can imagine that memory being anywhere from comforting to aggravatingly out-of-reach.

metadaemon 7y ago
I believe it's intent that matters here. It's possible to have a life-changing experience on mushrooms alone, but I've had better luck reprogramming unwanted neural pathways by explicitly going into the experience with strong intent towards a goal.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also." Set, drug, dose, and setting all play huge roles in the effects one gets. First, a lot of drugs on the black market aren't what they claim to be. So someone who tried what they thought were mushrooms in college might have gotten something else. The dose of psilocybin one gets from black market mushrooms is also difficult if not impossible to gauge. So someone who tried mushrooms in college could have gotten too low or too high a dose. Many people are also completely clueless when it comes to how to optimally prepare for and take drugs, and believe all sorts of myths and misconceptions about drugs. So many of those who took mushrooms in college probably did so in very poor circumstances, with no intention or even self-destructive intentions (such as those that often go hand-in-hand in binge-drinking), and possibly with misconceptions about what the experience will be like. This is all very, very different from taking psilocybin or other psychedelics in a carefully designed study, with trained therapists who typically give days if not weeks of therapy before the sessions, during, and after the sessions, are given pure, precisely measured doses. The setting is designed for maximum therapeutic effect, as are the resources available during the session (such as having pictures of loved-ones on hand to focus on at the peak of the session). The sessions are usually done with light blocked out by an eye-shade, and with music carefully designed to facilitate the session. The therapists are on hand to give support and help the patient work through any diffcult experiences, and are encouraged to work through such difficulties rather than run away from them. Acceptance is encouraged. Because of this careful preparation, planning, and professional therapy, the results are likely to be much different than casual mushroom use in college by people who are likely to be ignorant of psychedelics in general, and of how to properly run a therapeutic session in particular.

davebryand 7y ago

I had a similar experience. I was a burnt out YC startup founder in SF with a wife and kids whose life I was missing, and everything felt off track. I started working with a life coach, left my startup in the capable hands of my co-founders and moved to Raleigh. I soon thereafter had my first psylocibin experience. There were a bunch things shifting in me, but this experience blew my mind open and I haven't been the same since. (Much for the better, of course!) During that first trip, in a few hours I went from seeing the universe as a mechanistic, "matter is all there is", reality, to directly experiencing that there is so much more. Since then I've gone much deeper down that path and I'm so very thankful for this beautiful medicine for opening my eyes and heart!

rrivers 7y ago

Not at all crazy, I share your experiences. The mushroom is a method to commune with something larger than ourselves. Although I share your lack of faith in traditional religions, the mushroom has me believing that the spiral does indeed go up (just as we know it goes down).

ttul 7y ago

I have found that there is a mid-range of dosage that is "dangerous". In that range, one's perception is altered in an unpleasant way, yet the rush of joy that comes with a higher dose has not kicked in. You are left feeling nervous and even paranoid that the experience will never end. Take a bit more and it shifts into joy; you can embrace the weirdness and just let it take you away.

state_less 7y ago

I think mushrooms can open us up to truths that we don't always want to confront and sometimes it allows us to cry and make peace with our existence. When I grew mushrooms in college, I'd take massive doses of fresh mushrooms simply because I was flush with these amazing fungi. So I took a massive dose of fresh mushrooms, which I think is a better way to go if you can make it happen, something like over 50g wet. As it sets in, I looked up at the night sky and a drop of water precipitated with all the moments of my life reflected inside it. It was as if I was a single drop from a large ocean. In some ways it was sad, this teardrop would pass someday and return to the ocean. I know it's okay, and I want to say that it's been a lot of fun spending time with everyone. The experience reminds me of Blade Runner when the replicant confronts his own death. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

pmoriarty 7y ago
"All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop." - Kabir
Moodles 7y ago
50g!? That seems like an insane amount of mushrooms to eat in one dose. Edit: my apologies. I thought it was dry, not wet.
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  It's a large dose, but generally the conversion from wet to dry is 10 to 1.
  - Moodles 7y ago
    My mistake.
- quotz 7y ago
  He said wet, not dried

gugagore 7y ago

Here's kurzgesagt's rendition of "The Egg": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

monkeynotes 7y ago

Just to note and call out that not everyone has enlightening experiences with heroic doses. I've had horrible experiences with a very large dose. I essentially passed out and when I awoke I genuinely thought I had died and was roaming as an invisible spirit. It wasn't until a friend interacted with me I realized I was still alive and began to come down. I really think anyone should take care when experimenting with powerful hallucinogens. They aren't for everyone and have been known to trigger psychosis and other adverse reactions if one has a family history of mental illness.

friendlybus 7y ago
The people that really suffer from drugs don't post here. Camille Paglia mentions some of the radical thinkers from the 60s lost their minds on drugs. Most people have little incentive to talk about having a bad trip on illegal drugs.

benji_is_me 7y ago

As someone with both relentless death anxiety and normal anxiety, this piques my interest. Have you had any full blown panic attacks while tripping?

witherk 7y ago
I have with LSD, a truly terrifying experience. I think it can still be worth trying but things can surely go very wrong with anxiety and hallucinogens.
Moodles 7y ago
I've had uncomfortable experiences. I don't know what would constitute a panic attack exactly. Get some supervision, stay in a safe place away from people. It's a journey. Even the good enlightening trip wasn't really a pleasurable experience: it was scary at times, but worth it.