Is it possible to negotiate with the psychedelic substance?

[Cabbanis Lifestyle]

I like to play with this idea that we can build a relationship with some substances in a way that I'm able to mentally manipulate the knowledge contained in the substance by projecting the effects in the shape of characters.
And then we are able to negotiate with the substance.
​

Maybe I can be clearer:

We can ask the psychedelic for power. ​

First, learn how to stand up for yourself during the trip and mentalize a question. The answer will be presented to you in the shape of the patterns that your cognitive system highlights to your awareness.​

To stand up for yourself is to be sure of the fundamentals of reality (even during the effects of the substance) in a way that nothing can make you doubt your ground.
Basically: practice navigating the psychedelic landscape.

This takes training.

Find whatever mental representation of the psychedelic substance makes sense to you.

Maybe your approach to "negotiate" with the substance will be a scientific one, but the common during a psychedelic experience is that we mentally explore parts of our minds that are not easily expressed with words or scientifically and our subconscious automatically projects the mental patterns in the form of characters in a story, like in a dream.

Humans have an easy time manipulating characters and stories. I believe that this is why the most complex religious ideas are presented in the form of stories.

Many Religious Stories are Projections of Higher Ideas​

Create your own psychedelic mythology.​

Explore the mental landscape like you are mapping a new environment in another planet (or dimension, if you will) until you are familiar with it like you are with the back of your hand.

If you have a choice, during a psychedelic trip it's beneficial to navigate the mental abstractions in a way that is

1. Easy to understand;
2. Easy to manipulate;

For most people, this means that they must give a personality to non-living beings (ideas).

I understand spirit as being the name that we give to patterns. ​

The spirit of Christmas, for example, is all the patterns that are related to Christmas, if this makes sense.

Once you understand that you will be able to talk and even negotiate with the substance (or the patterns of the effects projected in the form of a character),

"Imagine that it's your privilege to have a brief interview with God. What would you ask?​

​

Knowing how to conduct yourself when you encounter a mental representation of the psychedelic substance is fundamental.

The encounter must be honest and straight forward.

Respect yourself before asking for respect.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to negotiate.

All this "negotiation" process with the substance is a mental conversation with the self in which you decide how to go about taking advantage of the power (lessons, mindsets, epiphanies, etc...) that the substance can offer you.

To illustrate, there is the story of a man approximately 100 years ago in Brazil who used to work extracting latex from trees in the rain forests of the Amazon.

This man got in contact with an indigenous tribe that introduced him to ayahuasca.

He learned so much from taking ayahuasca that he was convinced that he had more to learn and every day for 30 days the man would prepare and drink the ayahuasca brew.

By the end of the experience, he managed to get a deeper grip on the reality of the trip in such a way that he managed to mentally keep his ground and finally met a humanoid representation of the spirit of the Ayahuasca.

This spirit manifested itself in his mind in the shape of a feminine personality who offered him all the knowledge of the universe if he agreed to share ayahuasca with the world.

This legendary psychonaut was named Ramundo Irineu Serra, also called Mestre Irineu and after this sacred encounter, he founded the religious ayahuasca-based group called Santo Daime. Today Santo Daime is present in almost every continent in the world.

​

In the same way that Mestre Irineu asked for power and supposedly received it after committing to the mission assigned to him by a mental representation of the effects of ayahuasca, I believe that it is possible that we can accomplish the same with nearly everything that changes our perception, especially if it induces a deep mental journey.

Of course, all of this is just a mere play with ideas and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Nevertheless, I'd like to hear more opinions about this.

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

Psychedelics are just a tool, not an entity in their own right. The only thing you can negotiate with is your mind.

 

[JackARoe]

^ I was going to say the same thing FUBAR. They are tools for the mind. But it is an interesting post CL and the notion of negotiating with the trip has some validity. However I think people do that all day long even without a pychedelic. The conversation with ourselves in our head. The constant music in our head that causes us to hum or whistle.

I remember when Terrence McKenna was saying he asked the mushroom questions. I was never to comfortable talking to it. lol I take the power back and say whatever is shown I will decide where it goes in my mind. I really do think minimalizing information coming in is for the best. We have all seen people say they talked to God or a spirit. And it could be valid but as we walk around in the flesh we would appeared kooky if we keep saying we talk to psychedelics or spirits. It is easier to say we have internal dialogs with ourselves.

I do approach psychedelics (and life) with a show me attitude. But are we being shown by something? Are all realizations something that is shown to us or something that just occurs to us. I have been shown things by people as well as learned on my own. We can be taught or self teaching. So does that translate to the subtle world of thought? And who is showing us.

Agan I never believe things to full extent but I can appreciate ideas. Timothy Wylie, someone who has done a lot of psychedelics and dissociatives has a book called Ask Your Angels and it is interesting. Angel and non physical beings that can show us. I can at least entertain the ideas without 100% believing them. I think Timothy Wylie was one of the few people that could take ketamine or PCP and come back with good info without sounding too crazy (at least to me lol) But really is an "aha" moment something we ourselves just realized or is it something that was shown to us? They are just ideas, nothing written in stone but worthy of thought like this post.

Edit: I had heard the Beatles All You Need Is Love the other day. And it has the statement "there is nothing you can see that isn't shown". So I trying to digest that and I haven't even started it seems.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

i usually prep my mindset by first thanking the universe albert hoffman and then the LSD and set me intention of what i want to get out the trip whenever it be just fun or spiritual liberation or growing as a person or guidance. One of my mantras on LSD that seems to take my trip to next levels is just repeating LSD-25 in my head while peaking for some reason shit gets extra magic and crazy and i have no idea why.

 

[finitelifeform]

No, I think it's the reverse. You don't have a psychedelic experience to fight it, challenge it, etc. You have one to be guided by the content that flows from within your psyche, particularly if what you seek is healing and transformation. You cannot be guided if it's you are controlling the experience and you could say that manipulating the experience is a form of control.
You must surrender to the experience. All the healers of the world profess about the ultimate surrender. People having bad trips often involve the ability to let go and surrender. The so often mentioned feeling of going crazy, of things not being right, of losing control - this IS the wisdom. What pushes the trip into a negative loop is the fact that you're doing something that runs counter to your having a beneficial experience. The wisdom is there already, it's just being clouded by the demand for things to go a certain way.
Many say you cannot heal and transform without first letting go and stop trying to control everything. Away from psychedelic experiences, Buddhism teaches this. In terms of real life events, such as trauma, abuse etc. At one point in time, the person experiencing trauma and/or abuse must be able to let go, to accept what has happened, to stop fighting with the past, stop trying to control everything, stop trying to develop elaborate coping mechanisms to cover up the reality that lurks beneath. At some point they have to actually experience the raw content that continues to define their life.

In my opinion, there is a time for challenging, fighting, standing up and there is a time for letting go, embracing, surrendering etc. Each has their place.
I have to say though, your post was very inspirational and in general it's just really really cool and you've put a lot of thought into it, and that is to be respected and admired

 

[SunriseChampion]

Psychedelics are just a tool, not an entity in their own right. The only thing you can negotiate with is your mind.

Exactly what I was thinking and this manifests itself most strongly when I'm battling panic attacks from loops during mushroom trips.

That being said, I read the OP as conforming in a way to the way my trips usually go: a psychological gab fest with representations of ideas but in different forms.

I mean negotiating with mental representations of anything IS negotiating within your mind and with it.

It's entirely true that everything I've learnt from psychedelics was gleaned from an internal dialogue with myself. They simply allowed me to approach questions and issues from different perspectives; ones I hadn't though of yet.
This is known to be caused by the neurogenesis that takes place with the use of psychedelics.

 

[Cabbanis Lifestyle]

You guys are awesome, all the responses gave me something to chew on.

I grew up avoiding personifications of things that I don't consider living. As a matter of fact, even people I break down and try to have a materialistic approach.

But recently I started revisiting religious stories and other stories and general and I have been able to make parallels between the characters of the stories and major archetypes and ideas of life. What I realized is that once I understood how the character would react within the story I would simultaneously understand how the outside phenomenon the character represents would react.

In such stories, the important is that the characters act and react in a way that corresponds to reality.

My point is, if you have a story with characters that behave like their real-life counterparts, you can understand reality by manipulating the characters within the context of the story.

And for many ideas, especially the big-picture ones, it's much easier to manipulate a humanoid character than it is to handle the idea itself.

Just like in Greek mythology where people manipulated the idea of Time (Chronos), for example, and made it interact with other characters, and by studying this dynamic between the characters we can make conclusions about how reality interacts with the other elements in the universe.

In the Orphic tradition, the unaging Chronos was "engendered" by "earth and water", and produced Aether and Chaos, and an egg.[9] The egg produced the hermaphroditic god Phanes who gave birth to the first generation of gods and is the ultimate creator of the cosmos.​

By the way, while writing this response I came across this wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_mythology maybe it is related to what I'm saying.

In the same way that Plutarch wrote about Chronos, we can create our own mythology to represent psychedelic ideas that are hard to grip.

In this case, it might be useful to give personalities to the mental characteristics of the trip.

Doing this, you might get to a point where you can have full-on conversations with the "characters" you created, and maybe you can extract the knowledge of the substance in a more verbal and logical way than what is ordinarily available to the psychonaut, which is easier for your conscious mind to process and manipulate.

Makes sense?

 

[pupnik]

I would completely avoid mishmashing other peoples' idiosyncratic or fake stories of their inner landscapes into your own process of discovery, or refer to science which has some dependable observations.

be your own science, but it only works if you are scientific, i.e. lose the voodo