Am I Ready to Speak With The Mushroom

[Cudi]

It has been 2 years since the last (and first) time I tripped. It was 2 tabs of LSD that turned out to be double dosed, so 4 hits altogether. I have a thread posted about this trip, but I'll just save you the time. You can read it if you want. It turned out to be the worst trip of all time and changed my life. I had PTSD like symptoms for months and couldn't sleep properly for weeks, it was that bad. Told myself I wouldn't ever touch a drug ever again, even alcohol or weed. I feared them.

BUT. Here I am, 2 years later. Recovered. Better than I've ever been in my life really. For the last few months the mushroom has been tugging on my shoulder. I've been watching numerous lectures of Terence Mckenna discussing mushrooms for the last couple weeks, and reading up on loads of trip reports. The research I've done into psychedelics over the last 2 years since that terrible trip has been expansive. Books, videos, documentaries, you name it. I know so much about these substances, but have only had a trip one time. My curiosity is ever so maximizing toward a peak.

I am asking however, if I truly am ready. Terence always mentions that the issue with mushrooms is people don't take enough. He says 3.5-4 grams is surely the proper dose, even for a first timer like myself. That way, he goes on to say, you're completely taken over by it and forced to surrender to the experience. Having had a nightmare trip, I'm a little anxious about it, although I do believe the main reason my trip went bad to begin with was due to cannabis. At the peak of my trip I speak about, I smoked a lot of pot from a bong on my deck. Things went south shortly after. This time around, I won't be including cannabis into the mix whatsoever. I might just keep some benzos handy though just in case.

This sounds stupid, but I must add this in too. Yesterday, it was hilarious. I was at a Chinese place getting food and upon leaving, I reached my hand into the fortune cookie basket thing they have. It was the last fortune cookie. Sometimes I'm a superstitious person when it comes to coincidences, so I open it with great interest. I crack it open and get the paper out of it. It reads "May your faith always exceed your fears-- no price is too great to go through life afraid." And then I turn it around, and my luckiest number 47 appears on the backside along with other numbers. I've been fearing going into this experience and debating if it's worth potential months of recovery again. As dumb as it sounds, reading this caused my courage to increase greatly about this trip.

I don't know for sure when this trip will happen. Sometime within the next 8 months. It will be Cubensis. During this trip, I seek to listen to beautiful music, go outside into beautiful nature, and just be in a pleasant setting. I want to experience the mushroom's dialogue that so many people tell about. I want the extraordinary visuals that go in synchroncity with my thoughts and the sounds around me. I'm a very spiritual person, but don't tie myself to any certain religion at the moment. I want a spiritual experience. I honestly almost want to trip alone, but with a trip sitter. Intertwining with someone else's trip isn't ideal to me. I just want so badly to let go and not encounter much fear in this experience.

Any opinions on Terence's advice about doing 3.5 to 4 grams, and also being the only one tripping? I know we aren't supposed to ask on these forums "What dose" so instead I suppose I'll just keep it worded as it is, on the opinions of Terence's advice.

 

[mr peabody]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. Bad trip always equals too much substance for the situation. Of key importance is that some people have a MUCH lower tolerance to psychedelics than others. By much lower I mean...people you're with are taking 2-3 tabs (or grams of mushrooms) and having a great time, and you can only safely handle 1/4 of that. This is PERFECTLY NORMAL. You can avoid ever having another bad trip. Here's how.

Never listen to ANYONE concerning dose. Only you can establish your own tolerance. You do this by trial and error. Start with 1/4 tab, and if that goes well, next time try 1/2. Follow this procedure for every substance. Mind that 1/2 tab of one substance might well be MUCH stronger than 1/2 of another..., so even if you did well with 1/2 of one, you can easily find yourself in over your head if you take 1/2 of something else. Always test each batch of each substance yourself, first.

Never mind Terrance. Anyone who knows will tell you that mushrooms are high anxiety for a lot of people, so steer clear of those until you are much more experienced.

I suggest you go for ALD-52, which is readily available online. Start with 1/4 blotter (30 mics). With little or no result, a week later try 1/2, which should be plenty. Advance no more than 1/4 blotter at a time after that. People will disagree with me, and I'm fine with that, but never smoke pot when your tripping. That can easily cause a bad trip, and it's happened to me repeatedly. Finally, I would avoid tripping in public. Choose a calm, familiar environment, and pick a nice sunny day.

Seen this? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTehpkc1PNY

 

[Solipsis]

Pfff

the problem is that most people don't take enough?? Well psilocin is similar to DMT a lot, and with DMT yes there can be a benefit to it overwhelming you before you have a clue what's going on... but it seems pretty damn tricky to just gamble on that with mushrooms. For starters, 3.0 to 3.5 should be a full dose usually, and it can certainly lead to a sort of crisis nonetheless and be very very intense.

Actually while low dose DMT experiences were difficult for me as they were like having one foot on another dimension rather than having two feet in a mildly distorted dimension, with mushrooms there certainly is such a thing as middle ground... although compared to with LSD the distortions can even then be a little more crazy and fairy-tale like, with "entities" and "being" being much easier to form.

I'd say what is much more important is that you don't just go about your merry way to a chinese place for example... finding yourself tripping in a place like that, while adventurous, is also very hard to predict. You are much better off starting from a safe haven... I mean have interesting enough thing going on there, but not as open-worldly as a 'chinese places' ffs.

Yeah never mind Terrance, he writes interesting things to read but I would rather say that he believes a lot of thing about mushrooms rather than he knows a lot of things about mushrooms.
(I mean sure, he probably knows plenty about the basics, but beyond that they are beliefs). It does NOT seem healthy to hold that as a sort of truth or bible that will guide you the way. It may be *useful* as wisdom but wisdom is not truth, insight is different, it's rather seeing things in a way that help guide you than knowing anything properly. He had a lot of insight, but he can't help substitute for your knowledge or even your own insight.

 

[Cudi]

I'm not interested in synthetics or semi-synthetics right now. No research chemicals for me. And I don't necessarily think too much is what causes a bad trip. It's just how you handle it. Cannabis for me made me not handle LSD well because cannabis induces panic in me quite often.

 

[Cudi]

Solipsis,


Good advice, thank you. But I think there is a misunderstanding lol, I don't intend on tripping in a Chinese restaurant. I mentioned that I found a fortune cookie there with a strangely coincidental fortune concerning my mushroom curiosity.

 

[Solipsis]

Ohh that does make more sense, although I got to admit tripping in a chinese restaurant is somewhat original..

 

[Kittycat5]

Now I want to eat mushrooms and dim sum.

 

[swilow]

I don't think its useful to personify psychedlics like this. If you consider that a psychedelic effect is something being 'done' to you by an exogenous intelligence (by "speaking to the mushroom") I feel like it may render you more liable to feel out of control when you trip. Not to say that there isn't something remarkable that feels like intelligence inside mushrooms, but the idea that you are approaching an external entity removes the feeling of control and impetus that conciously choosing to ingest a drug can provide.

When you encounter the entities though, that is another thing altogether.

I am asking however, if I truly am ready. Terence always mentions that the issue with mushrooms is people don't take enough. He says 3.5-4 grams is surely the proper dose, even for a first timer like myself. That way, he goes on to say, you're completely taken over by it and forced to surrender to the experience. Having had a nightmare trip, I'm a little anxious about it, although I do believe the main reason my trip went bad to begin with was due to cannabis. At the peak of my trip I speak about, I smoked a lot of pot from a bong on my deck. Things went south shortly after. This time around, I won't be including cannabis into the mix whatsoever. I might just keep some benzos handy though just in case.

No one can really answer that, but I would advise that you take Terence McKenna's advise with a grain of freebase. The reality is that the higher the dose of a psycedelic, the higher the probability that the effects will become unmanageable. You can speak from experience with your difficult LSD trip of a few years ago. I understand the confrontational aspect in which you may feel like grabbing the unicorn by the horn, but this is by no means a sure thing- it might just increase the difficult feelings you encountered the last time.

Anyway, I think a lower dose may also be useful. You don't need to be raped by psychedelics to achieve meaningful results; a lower dose, that still provides the full spectrum of trippy effects and you can fully engage with them, without major fear or trying to reject the feelings. I would agree that you should avoid weed; it is a remarkable synergist with psychedelics and does very dramatic and odd things in tandem. I never get the thought loops that I do when combining weed with psychedelics. And the benzos are a good move, even just for backup, but I usually take a small 'tranquilising' dose of a benzo or other GABAergic when I trip as I am prone to interpret physical stimulation as anxiety.

Do you meditate? That is a skill that can be drawn on in difficult times and can really help to center oneself.

 

[Cudi]

Swilow,

Appreciate this advice, you definitely put a lot of thought into it. I'm thinking I will probably do somewhere between 2 to 2.5. And about my previous LSD trip, I just really wish I knew for sure if it was the cannabis purely that caused it to go so bad. Before the weed, I had been sort of "on the edge" and swinging between positive and negative feelings. Although the feelings were negative, they weren't nightmarishly visual with endless thought loops, memory wiping, and intense tachycardia with extremely decreased body temperature until the cannabis hit me. I was sweating bullets while my body temp was like 94.5 degrees, I believe just due to the ceaseless panic. And this horrendous part of the trip didn't begin until around the 3 hour mark or so, maybe slightly after. Thank you for the advice though, really.

 

[silverbirch]

Regarding McKenna, I will echo swilow in saying that you shouldn't believe anything he says on blind faith. That is, after all, what he was all about. As exciting as his ideas were I haven't heard any stories of people successfully engaging in communication with the mushroom. I personally came to the conclusion that he was communicating with himself and that the voice was a manifestation or projection of his own. He was a bard, a dreamweaver. He made his living by speaking.

Of course, that's just what I think.

He also recommended and encouraged the consumption of 5 dried grams in silent darkness. Don't do that. To echo mr. peabody, "Never listen to ANYONE concerning dose." I really do think the best thing to do is work your way up. It isn't worth the risk of repeating your last trip.

And about my previous LSD trip, I just really wish I knew for sure if it was the cannabis purely that caused it to go so bad.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that the cannabis is what pushed you over the edge. If you hadn't smoked it's likely that the LSD would have continued to gradually decrease in intensity over time. Recently I experienced a bad trip when I combined cannabis with mushrooms during the peak which I documented here: http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads...Partially-experienced-My-Journey-Into-Madness

By all means do not read it if you risk retriggering feelings from your trip but it's there for reference, in case any of it is familiar. Loss of memory, anxiety, panic, and heat management issues seem to have been experienced by both of us. I also noticed that the cannabis made the body load of the psychedelic far more pronounced where I noticed my heart rate and anxiety developed because of it. The heart rate and anxiety then fed off of each other in a feedback loop.

I've experienced various psychedelics on their own and I've never had issues of this sort. Following the experience, I've read other people's bad-trip reports and a large proportion of them begin with something like "and then we smoked a bowl".

Having said that, I don't think it's fair to dismiss cannabis forever. It can synergise wonderfully with most traditional psychedelics but only well after the peak when there is a far lower risk of it overwhelming you. It usually just wraps you up in a warm fuzzy blanket and hugs you lovingly. You reach a perfect equilibrium of psychedelia, focus, and euphoria.

 

[swilow]

^Nice post friend

 

[LucidSDreamr]

why are you against synthetics? just because a chemical exists in nature has no bearing on weather it is safer or a more pleasant experience. Mushrooms are more scary and anxiety causing than almost any psychedelic inclusing lsd.

i would just take less lsd not 4 hits which is an OD for a first timer. take 1 hit....theres a reason they put 1 hit on 1...hit.

also have a benzo handy....it probably could have stopped your entire bad trip last time instantly

 

[morphine-dreams]

Do you know which strain of mushrooms you have? If it's a potent one, i.e. penis envy or golden teacher, start at 1g and slowly work your way up with each trip. 2 grams of a potent strain can kick my ass and I'm experienced. 3 grams of penis envy on my first trip resulted in complete ego-death and dissolution of time, and it was terrifying.

When I tried LSD (and almost all the psychs I've tried since) I started low and worked my way up over time, and I've never had a problem with LSD. Trust me, you'd rather be underwhelmed than overwhelmed with mushrooms, especially considering the long-term effects you experienced from your LSD trip. Get familiar with the headspace of any psychedelic before chasing a more serious trip.

 

[Cudi]

I think it's just more of a personal thing when it comes to people preferring nature over artificiality. Nobody can predict the long term effects of using something made in a laboratory. And yes, I realize LSD is semi-synthetic, and I have no current plans to ever try LSD again in the future.

 

[Cudi]

Yes, I noted that it will be Cubensis. No way I'd start off with penis envy or cyanescens.

 

[swilow]

I think we can make some statements about the long term effects if LSD, its been used for almost 80 years. You can also extrapolate from other similar 'natural' psychedelics the long term effects of lab made compounds.

Either way, theres no real reason to think any psychedelic has long term effects that can be quantified.

 

[iksaxophone]

I don't have experience with other classical psychedelics, but I found that in spite of its natural origin mushrooms produced a very mechanical feeling. Very sci-fi, with red/blue colour amplification, fractals, tile patterns, as well as some fundamental atmosphere.
I'm sure this is varies between people, but it is worth noting that the most organic chemicals may not necessarily cause the most organic experience.

 

[silverbirch]

So, OP, what are you thinking?

 

[SKL]

Based upon the phrasing of the question, the unequivocal answer is NO.

Envisioning psychedelics as a "dialogue" of any type other than an interior one, or that one might receive "messages," speak with plants, etc. is total nonsense and therein lies delusion. Describing mushrooms "tugging on your shoulder," etc. is discomforting at least to hear.

"Double dosed doses," as you should know enough from reading around here, is just dealer talk and advertising; this is unlikely to have an impact on whether you had a bad experience or not unless you heard while coming up "double dosed" and then this made you anxious.

McKenna has a point though about dosing. There's sort of an inverse bell curve in the risk of having a bad time, taking smallish doses are more likely to just promote discomfort and anxiety and restlesness waiting for an actual experience that won't happen (although some people enjoy this just as a stoned sensation, actually, plenty of people do e.g. appreciate a small cup of mushroom tea; microdosing LSD is also popular in a certain set but I have to say that for myself it just makes things weird and uncomfortable rather than give me a benefit.) Taking a larger dose is more likely to render the experience more internal and hopefully to a degree that you won't have any "behavioral toxicity" as it is described in the literature but that doesn't guarantee a pleasant experience.

Of usual mushrooms ~1/8 oz. is a pretty standard dose for a full trip, and certainly is enough either to bring you to agony or ecstasy. I don't think it's excessive. Taking a smaller dose might again be just weird and anxious and not give you a good idea of the drug and taking more might be excessive, and lead to either a really bad time or a manic reaction, which I think is particularly likely due to the way you speak about "speaking" with drugs and them "pulling your shoulder." This is metaphor, perhaps, but it's an extremely dangerous metaphor and a bad mindset. These are just drugs, which alter your perception and the experience can be fun and you can experience moments where you feel a (usually transient) deeper understanding of things and occasionally you can walk away with some insights; there is increasing evidence that there is a role for them in medicine, mushrooms anecdotally have been helpful for people with, existential crises at end of life, addictions, obsessive compulsive issues, depression, and many of other things, although only for some of these has there been actual scientific evidence.

But they are not entities, they are not gateways to another universe or reality ,they have no message for you. This kind of thinking can lead to freakouts, of the manic/messianic/grandiose kind and of the paranoid/persecutory/guilt/existential crisis type (which are really just inverses of one another, if you are specially gifted, they're out to get you, if you're the Messiah, well, the Lamb of God bears the sins of the World, not to mention your own, and anxieties regarding the difficulties in your own social situation and other parts of your life.) All of this is stuff that can preoccupy you and send a trip in a bad way (although one of these subjectively feels good at least to start and one feels bad), but ascribing preternatural powers to drugs just magnifies this stuff. If you are going into a trip looking for a message, this is wrong and dangerous; there is no message or messenger in psychedelic experiences other than altering your own chemistry. This mindset however can predispose you to certain types of problematic experiences some of which can manifest as (perceived or real) malign preternatural influences; once more with feeling, you are not ready to "speak" with the mushroom, because "speaking to a mushroom" is delusional.

You, in the right set and setting and dose, however, might be ready to enjoy a trip on mushrooms.

If it is available to you I might consider a synthetic alternative like 4-AcO-DMT (closest unless you have actual artificial psilocin which is quite rare) or something in the same family but a little gentler like 4-HO-MiPT.)

Have a benzodiazepine or similar on hand. Simply knowing you have it will be helpful in dealing with anxiety and they are highly efficacious when having a bad time on psychedelic drugs. My preference is Valium > Ativan > Klonipin > Xanax in terms of the most available ones (in the US at least.) This is important and can be the difference between a terrible time with posttraumatic stress type symptoms and a close call.

 

[Solipsis]

Yes definitely on all accounts! ^ good post

There can still be realizations, lessons etc but you can learn things from experiences regardless of whether they are illusory or not. It doesn't necessary make the lesson better or worse, it just says that you should be careful about believing everything or anything the experiences are based on unless empiricism offers additional confirmation.

You can have the insight without the beliefs and the magic without the loss of skepticism. It can be more work though, because you'd have to reject part of it - the whole experience can be powerful and the lessons worthwhile... then it may seem almost like blasphemy to betray belief in the underlying experience regarding where it's all coming from. Maybe it's not easy, but cognitive ease is not an argument to believe something.