hallucinogenics

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I have to be careful with that stuff. When it doesn't work, I'm disappointed, and when it does work, everyone else is.

Thank you for posting this question!!

I definitely felt NT when I was on mushrooms. I was with my fiancee David and our friends Lindsey and Joey. I was the only one on the shrooms - they were just having beers. I had one cap and stem and a bite of another stem (took these as one dose). I got some crazy visuals at first - people turning colors, saw the couch and the fridge breathing LOL, stuff like that. But when that wore off, it was replaced by a feeling of peace and connectedness to everything around me.

I think whoever said that it felt like being "in the world" rather than "in the bubble" hit the nail on the head. I finally understood what it was to "live in the moment" - fully experiencing each minute with my friends in my surroundings. I was profoundly intrigued with each of them! Getting to know them on mushrooms was like discovering three separate universes. It was AMAZING. I felt like I could "SEE" them just by talking with them - asking what they thought about things and letting each one answer - I was able to sense their souls/auras/charisma/personality, whatever you want to call it, and interact with them. It is one of the most amazing experiences of my life so far.

I am eager to see what comes of the testing that was being done on sylocybin (sp?) which is the active agent in the mushrooms. I heard a while back in the news that they were running tests on people with clinical depression and they were getting some really great results out of it. I would definitley sign myself up for that! I would give anything to be able to "see" people all the time. (We don't do any experimenting anymore since we had our baby - it's all about family now, and building a good life..)

An interesting visual for those who are interested in Jung and symbolism and stuff like that:
When the mushrooms started kicking in, I felt like there was something missing from my head. I said silently to myself "i'm free" and there was a thought communicated to me from something OUTSIDE of me (no s**t) that said "hat's off! take a break!" It had sort of a mirthful/jovial feel to it.

When the mushrooms started wearing off, I could feel it - like a cool, grey fog was rolling in. A red hat appeared on the floor on the other side of the room. It looked like a shorter version of the dr. seuss cat's hat and it was all red and furry. My heart sank when I saw the hat I because I knew it was my Asperger's. And that instant the hat appeared on my head and then I became unaware of it as I became aware of the bubble again. And that's how I faded out of my mushroom experience.

The Red Hat

Imprecisely determined. Probably it is a partial agonist at Serotonin receptor 5-HT(2A). Which would explain why certain atypical antipsychotics can turn off LSD's effect, and why some SSRIs tend to cause me to experience a side-effect (the taste of aluminium) that I associate with the period between the time I've taken LSD and the time the hallucinations begin.



I have no clinical data about that. I have never felt anxious on LSD and have eaten a fairly remarkable amount of it, and am often anxious. I have observed others become terrorized. I have always been able to 'turn off' this effect for them by distracting them in a simple way, like showing them a toy that is visually stimulating, like a flint-and-steel wheel that throws a lot of sparks, or simply leading them into another room. The drug causes one thing after another to become fascinating, I believe that the terrorized user is actually trapped in fascination/obsession with something that happens to frighten him. New input will cause him to become fascinated with a new, hopefully unscary thing and appear to forget the old one entirely. I'd say it's actually very like obsessive thinking, but it's usually accompanied by euphoria and one cycles through fascinations/obsessions in minutes. But it may not seem like minutes, because the stuff seems to compress and stretch time in weird ways, and many of my memories of 'trips' are faulty in that they are in the wrong order -- what happened at dawn will seem to have happened before what happened at 3 am.

It causes things to seem significant and connections that normally do not appear at all to seem evident and obvious, giving users 'I am one with the universe' impressions of partial omnescience and at times the feeling that one is sharing thoughts with others, or can read their minds. Probably this is illusion created by 5-HT(2A)'s impressive signal cascades. I would guess (and half-remember some researcher proving) that it opens a number of new neural pathways (rendering some permanently available, like looking at the Richard Gregory Dalmatian Dog picture and seeing the dog does) because first-time LSD users often come out of it with new or modified ontologies. I'd speculate that this explains why LSD might cure some depression, some OCD, some anxiety, and also explains poopylungstuffing's (not unusual) experience of feeling a brain 'reset' -- a bunch of pathways that are normally not active just got lit up.

Asides:
LSD effect will vary when you're using street drugs, because your supplier is probably an idiot and may have suspended it in chlorinated tap water before he dipped blotter, or done something else that damaged it. It's fragile.

I am talking only about LSD-family psychedelics -- LSD, Psilosybin, mescaline. Salvia works in a different way. So do some other hallucinogens you may run across, like belladonna, the fly agaric mushroom, and jimson weed. The latter three are almost guaranteed to be a bad time.

Okay, here goes. While I wouldn't say I was more typical of anyhting except a person on LSD while I was on it, the issues brought to my attention during the trip definitely gave me things to think about, to meditate on, to analyse, to practise. To be aware of.

I would say I became more conscious about the matter of choice and control I have over everything I do. Eating. Drinking. Talking. Walking. Breathing. You get the picture. I experienced the same "brain reset" - except I think mine may have been more permanent than Poopylungtuffing's. A lot of my actions became much more deliberate and intuitive, and I became much more confident about my actions, once I introspected for a few minutes and decided what my aim was. I would guess that this confidence is something enjoyed by "normals"; I had never experienced it before. I learned a lot about my personal comfort levels and boundaries that I never knew. I would recommend it to myself again.

Recommending psychoactive drugs to anyone else is a very, very dangerous thing. There are mental and physical safety issues. I ahve no idea how stable anyone who reads this will be. The source of my anxiety was always dual: myself and other people. And I wouldn't recommend tripping alone for safety reasons. It is good to strike a balance: people around, maybe in say a 3 bedroom house, but enough space to go hide if needed. Something sensory to lose yourself in. Music always worked. Something soft and comfortable. A bed with clean sheets and a nice heavy down comforter. Something to draw with. I liked oil pastels. It made me feel the experience wasn't lost. I would have a souvenir at the end. I had good, knowledgeable, kind people around me. I had a good culture around me (honors dorm, college town).

Obviously I didn't do any of this in a controlled scientific setting. Nothing was measured or recorded. The results are only anecdotal. But yeah, I feel lthat it helped me. A great deal.

This was not just once. It was maybe once every four to six weeks, over the course of about 2 years.

Yes. I think the connections part stayed, though. I don't think it was completely an illusion. It was a change in brain chemistry, which from an endemic standpoint, taught me a different way of thinking. Acid made my sense of social timing better, at the very least, because I remember sitting around with people just "getting" it all of a sudden. The game. The point. The thing I needed.

this whole analysis in scientific terms doesn't explain the religious feeling most of us get with mescaline or Ayahuasca (psycolobin). Perhaps it is a way of atheists to analyze it. What if you truly get in touch with the 4th and 5th dimension and are able to communicate with them? Do Aspies become psychic and do they have more paranormal experiences?

To see the reactions here I have the impression that most of you just trip, I for instance get in trance, a whole other issue, if you ask me. I was an atheist until 2005, that is 32 years, and by my second explosive trance in Bolivia, I was never too be an atheist again, the things I said then and there were recognized by Indians and their healers, they concluded that I was truly connected with their apus (ancestors).

Last edited by Loborojo on 22 Aug 2008, 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I never experienced anything you would call "paranormal". But I never tried Ayahuasca, and I was raised in a suburb in the southern United States. I wouldn't say it's a culture which is conducive to religious experiences. Unless they involve being dunked in a tub of water.

That would be really interesting, though. I say it's a cultural difference. And possibly the difference between a manufactured versus a naturally occurring substance.

This is crazy! I used to tell my husband all the time it was like pressing my "reset" button too! Like when you use a hair dryer too much and it blows out the plug, then you press reset to make it work normally again.

I'm just really amazed someone would use that exact same term!

That is what I meant. Like the picture of the dog, once you parse the 'dog' out of the splotches (which takes average joes about forty seconds) a neural-pathway that allows you to see the dog is now open, and will remain so for the rest of your life -- years later, you will see the dog instantly. You will never have to 'find' the image again and if you want to recreate the interesting experience of your perception 'building' the dog out of the splotches, you need a different photograph with the same trick of contrast done to it.

The illusion I meant was the suchness of the trip: "I understand the cosmic significance of this beetle." "There is a map of reality imprinted in the grain-pattern on the surface of this rock," etc. These don't persist. I think one gets them because during that time, the neural connections are not merely open/available, but flooded with electrical activity. Later, when the increased electrical activity associated with LSD-use has gone, the connections (at least some of them) remain available.

Loborojo: Some people (such as Ramachandran, though his experiments on the matter seem a little weak to me) find that religious experiences are associated with activity in the (left) temporal lobe(s). Since LSD supposedly causes a global increase in such activity, well, naturally some people will experience that. There's also the way that 'religious experience' seems to be characterised by endowing significance and emotional connection to things that don't quite 'normally' get that response. Similar to LSD's effect. Probably some people characterise experiences as 'religious' when other people, subjected to the exact same brain-stimulation, would regard them as 'Eureka!' moments.

LOL. "Why did I write 'all you need is a stick' on this piece of paper, and frame it...?"

I do not know. I still have the rock and occasionally look at its very significant surface, and I could probably recreate any rambling incoherent speech I may have made about it at the time, but I no longer really see the map of reality on it. Now it's some sort of symbol-of-a-symbol.

I like Salvia Divinorum and meditation.

I used to enjoy the lingering subtle sensations of chewing the raw leaf...my bad experiences with the stronger concentrations had to do at least partially with the um...negative environment I was in at the time. The first time I tried 10X, the people who gave it to me started yelling in my face and teasing me. That pretty much ruined it for me...and every one of the possibly 3 subsequent experiences I had with it were not exactly pleasant, except for the one time it snapped me out of a pretty severe meltdown...so that I went from suicidal crazy panic..to..calm-down-go-to-sleep-mode....just by dramaticly derailing my perception for just a few minutes....


I don't bring this up much, but I work for a company that sells it....

www.mazatecgarden.com


There is gonna be a new york times video pretty soon..I won't be in it, but my partner will be.

I've certainly never taken a hallucinogen ("hallucinogenic" is an adjective, not a noun). I'd be far too scared to do it. However, a number of years ago I read an article about the efficacy of ayahuasca against depression, which was quite interesting. Apparently there is a company that organizes tours to Brazil, where it's legal, for the purpose of taking it therapeutically.

How would you know if you became more NT? Lowering inhibitions with drugs might just get you into trouble. Inhibition limits exist because of what is learned through experience. Lowering inhibitions doesn't correct whatever led to high inhibitions and limited interests in the first place.