Hi Mr Grateful, sorry for the delay in getting back to you, I just had to make sure I had the time to write a proper response. What I would say is try not push yourself and be too forceful, go at a pace that suits you and respects where you are now. Try not to worry. During the 20 years I have been taking LSD and other lysergamides my relationship to them has been completely changing all the time. For the first ten years or so I had reservations and was scared of taking high doses that you have to surrender to and therefore rarely did. Then one year at a music festival I was buying a single drop of liquid acid when the lid fell off and nearly all of it spilt down my arm. I knew at that point I had no choice, I was either going to have to embrace the fact that i was in the process of ingesting god knows how much acid or be completely torn apart by it. In the end I licked up the acid and had one of the best and most life changing trips of my life. The foundations of my fear had disappeared and ever since then those fears have been evaporating, I can't stop it because they have been totally undermined. I realised what I was really frightened all the parts of me that I had neglected, locked away and hadn't allowed myself to understand.
With the help of meditation practice and psychedelic medicines like LSD and mushrooms and in the last few years ayahuasca and ibogaine, all those parts of me have been opened up and I have seen them for what they were, all faults and flaws included, and have had to learn to accept it. I am still in that process but I know I am making progress so I am happy.
But at the same time I now understand that it is totally natural to be afraid. Of the unknown but also of lots of others things. Fear is hard wired in us as a survival mechanism, and cannot be so swiftly and easily transcended, particularly if we are still trying to push it away rather than acknowledging and understanding it. I still develop irrational fear when I am in a big expanse of sea that I can't see the bottom of, a fear of what is out there in the unknown. But that's ok, that's what happens for me and I don't let it stop me swim. I am still afraid of what the future might have in store for me (our old friend the unknown again), of getting a terminal illness, of losing my parents too soon, of so many things.
And I still have fear around ego dissolution, of course I do because I have been gripping on tightly to my ego thinking it was me since long before I can remember. Now I am being shown that restricting my identity to this tiny and deceptive component of the operational mechanism I need function properly in ordinary life on this planet is stopping me from seeing the bigger picture and understanding that I am so much more.
But I don't let that stop me, I just try and accept that the fear is a transitory part of where I am currently and that's ok. You could even turn things around and say that having a fear of the unknown is the very reason you SHOULD take psychedelics because they will help you better understand and gain the freedom and tools to move beyond it.
I am not saying that everyone should take psychedelics, lots of people should not because they are just not cut out for it, just like I am not cut out for being a professional basket ball player. But it sounds like you already have experience and a love for psychedelics so you know already that you can take them. Psychedelics can help us to grow very fast, and that can be scary because we that means will have to let go of a lot of things that are very familiar. Even though ordinary life is really not that great at all, because the potential we have to become a stronger being with a better understanding of who we really are is still an unknown for us, I think it is natural to be frightened. Terrence McKenna once said that if you had no fear before a DMT trip there was something wrong with you, that the fear was critical because it meant you understood the significance and transformative power of the journey ahead of you. The same applies for LSD.
Sorry for the long post, I am really trying to say more with less but I struggle to be really succinct particularly when it comes to this topic and I really want to help if I can.
If anything, 3/4 of a 125ug tab would be the best starting dose. I don't think 125ug is necessarily too strong but family members have started with 3/4 and been more than happy and had full spiritual experiences. That is to say, 200ug+ is much too strong for a first dose.
