Sounds great. I didn't know you could get away with using such a small amount of cactus, actually. How are the aftereffects?
The after-effects were disappointing! In fact, it felt a bit like it zeroed out the previous 2C-B afterglow. It was a week that reminded me that I'm very much still mending. I was a bit too enthusiastic in my post-trip exercise and paid a price for it in re-emergence of symptoms like arthritic feet, brain fog, etc. OTOH, I did "power walk" a few miles every day, and had a day of light jogging. I also did some other strength exercises and ate a fair amount more food than usual. I overdid it but not so much that I didn't add some muscle and lose some Xmas fat. The other thing is that I didn't really have anything to integrate, post-trip. In fact, the only insight I got was "take more next time".
So I did, finally today take 10 g of this T. Terschekki. This time I feel like the strength of the experience was a lot closer to what I would expect for the dose. I felt it in 20 minutes but it did little except churn my guts for the first couple hours. Really it never got above (+) until after the 4th hour. i had held off smoking as much weed to see if that had amplified my last (5 g) experience more than I thought. I think it did. Even with more weed though around the 5th hour though, I didn't feel as high as I did the first time.
I also felt kind of anxious. So, I decided to try sitting on the floor in half lotus instead of moving on my feet. I concentrated on developing a form, which was difficult but felt very rewarding as I found better balance and could sustain it with less exertion. I then did some leg stretches followed tree pose on each leg. These activities changed the whole character of the trip. After the stretches, I felt a wave of somatic euphoria which was accompanied by a vision of ribbons of flowing color. Up to this point, the visuals had been monochromatic and quite dull, so it's like these actions helped to unlock the positive aspects of the trip. It changed monochromatic visuals to color visuals. That's amazing! Then my wife came home and smoked some weed. I always let her know what I'm on, and this time she caught a strong contact high. What followed was a shared experience that I can't easily describe, nor do I fully understand myself.
The cactus isn't special just to me but to both of us. It was our first trip together which we took at a small gathering in a mountain forest setting on the day after we met. We took heavy doses, 70-75 g of this material or maybe like 600 mg worth of mescaline. I need to revise the record here. I said I did not experience ego loss on mescaline, but the other day I found some old notes of mine which stated very explicitly that I *did experience ego loss* on this trip. We began at high noon on the day of midsummer, and as the last effects wore off at around 6 the next morning, some part of me knew we were meant for each other and would be together for a very long time. We've gone past 20 years now. This past week I had a lot of anxiety over the future of our relationship for reasons I won't go into here. Tonight, when she slipped into my headspace, we experienced tiny glimpses of that first time together with the cactus. I now feel reassured, as though the cactus was reminding her and I that it catalyzed and consecrated our bond in the first place, and that this should not be forgotten.
As for why the 5 g felt so strong, I have a few hypotheses. (1) The tiny amount of sediment in the tea (which got through a coffee filter) is mescaline rich and I didn't stir enough; (2) my body was in a heightened inflammatory state on that day which may have caused a transient sensitivity; (3) I smoked so much pot that it was really a mescaline-enhanced pot trip that nevertheless felt a lot like mescaline ought to. I lean toward (3) mostly but maybe (2) is important too. I do believe my body tends to get 'triggered" from time to time, leading to an amplification of most of my inflammatory problems at the same time, so I have to wonder if I might be hypersensitive to psychedelics on such "triggered" days. It's something I will be watching out for. I expect I will get much better after-effects this time, and I may have some trip integration to do. Hopefully my guts come out it in good shape. This mere 10 g dose felt like it did quite a number on them, and this was my only body complaint, really.
Because this cactus material is limited, precious, and practically irreplaceable. I have some new T. peruvianus material that I'm going to trial and compare with. This ought to be interesting given all the other alkaloids in T. peruvianus. Supposedly T. terschekki contains only mescaline and N,N-dimethylmescaline, the latter of which is said to be inactive until 1.5 g or so when it just decreases blood pressure a bit. Most people who have heard of T. terschekii believe it to not have enough mescaline to be worthwhile. My guess is one just has to have the regional knowledge to know which cacti specimens are worth the trouble and how/when to harvest them for best results. This material absolutely delivers the goods. I estimated it to be about 0.8% mescaline dry wt, and the effect feels very clean, as I would expect chemical mescaline to feel. Other than this material, I've had two trips on T. pachnoi, but they were way too weak to form a reasonable basis for comparison. So like I said, this comparison should be interesting, and I'll have new material to use as a mainstay while saving the T. terschekki for special purposes. For example, I've combined it with ayahuasca (vine only) a few times with superb results. These were weak experiences though because I was being very cautious and wasn't noticing any MAOI potentiation (!!). OTOH, I'm not sure I even want to risk trying an MAOI with T. peruvianus or T. pachnoi because of all the other stuff in those.
Since I'm on a roll here... IIRC, Shulgin suggested that maybe T. terschekki was being used with an MAOI in indigenous practices, which perhaps made the N,N-dimethylmescaline active. I only learned of this though long after I had an actual conversation with him in which I told him of my first ayahuasca+Terschekki experiment and how surprised I was that I did not notice any potentiation. He was seemed surprised to hear this too. Speaking of weird synchronicities, on that first aya-mesc trip I took, I went hiking literally within a mile or so of the Shulgins' farmhouse. He might have even been able to see me from his property. At the time I had no idea I was near where they lived, but then one day we got invited to the 4th of July potluck and I was amazed at how they were just *right there*. (He had an amazing cactus garden by the way!) Anyway, when I spoke with him about the MAOI + T. Terschekki at a conference, he asked if I had any analytical data for the material. I did not, and shortly after the encounter I sadly forgot about it. In fact, I only recalled it a few months ago when I uncovered some old notes which jogged my memory of it. I rather regret now having forgotten because if I''d thought about it, I could have dropped some dried cactus in his hands for him to analyze during one of those 4th of July potlucks so that he could satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps some day I will follow through on that analysis to honor his memory.
Edit: Corrected cactus dry weight percent 0.8% instead of 1.2%.
...damn, that's one of those unexpected self-insights that feels unexpectedly profound.
I keep coming back to this thread finding other things that remind me of stuff but I also said this (I think) deep in a 3-MeO-PCE + Metocin "hole", which coincidentally also followed thinking I had broken the reality simulation by inducing a state of mind that the architects of the simulation had forgotten to code for, I think I quote my own trip report on that there.
Lol, that isn't a narrative that would make much sense to non drug people I realise but I very much appreciate the fact that I feel I can share it here.