Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide" by James Fadiman Ph.D.
CAN SUB-PERCEPTUAL DOSES OF PSYCHEDELICS IMPROVE NORMAL FUNCTIONING?
Although no formal research exists on sub-perceptual doses, a growing number of people have been using psychedelics this way. When people take a sub perceptual amount—for LSD, about 10 micrograms (also known as a micro-dose, subdose, or "tener")—the common sensory effects associated with higher doses of LSD or psilocybin—a glow or a sparkle around the edges of living things, sensory interweaving such as hearing in color or tasting music, and a loosening of ego boundaries—do not appear. What follow are reports from people who have used these small doses of LSD and psilocybin. Some are from longtime users and others are from people trying them for the first time£
Indigenous cultures have known about and used sub-perceptual doses of different psychedelics for centuries. Until recently, this knowledge has been overlooked. After being involved in research on sub-perceptual dosages for over a year, I found myself embarrassed at my own cultural bias as I came to realize I had ignored the obvious, and that indigenous heal-ers or shamans, working with their own psychedelic plants, have systematically and fully explored every dose level.
As these reports are the first to appear in the literature. I've avoided coming to any general conclusions about these low doses beyond noting that all the reports in my files indicate, as these individuals have, that low-dose use has been positive.
Reports: LSD Charles
"Charles," an environmental expert and a ghostwriter ofnonfiction books, look sub-perceptual doses of LSD once every three days. His report is part user's guide and part personal response. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, two children, and three cats.
When the idea of micro-dosing was suggested, it was made even more intriguing by the notion that this was something I could do during my regular workday and that nobody else even had to know what I was up to.
There are also some cautions, some hard-learned do's and don'ts, and I just wanted to quickly run through them here before describing what you might expect (or at least what I experienced).
• Be conservative in following the protocol, including the amount and the days bet ween doses.
• Slick with your normal patterns, especially eating, working and sleeping.
• Be very discreet as to whom you let know.
So first, be conservative in howmuch you take and how often youtake it. It's best to start small. The goal isn't the McKenna-size heroic dose or even the standard 80- to 120-microgram "effective" dose, but something one-tenth the size of that, that is, 10 micrograms, or somewhere between 6 and 12 micrograms. So be conservative, especially if you aren't exactly sure of how much you're giving yourself. If you take more, if you really start "getting off," then if you're like me, you'll have a hard time proceeding with your "normal" day. So start small, and if it's too small, you can always add more the next time.
Also, go slow The protocol I followed had me take a micro-dose one day, then carefully observe any ongoing or lingering effects the second day, and then give myself the third day completely off. By going slow; you give yourself a chance to really know, to really observe what is different, why it's different, and howyoucan bea take advantage of it. The day you're completely off is great as a reset day, kind of like clearing the mind/body palate. Then you're fresh and ready to undertake the experiment again.
Second, do what you normally do. Make sure you eat your regular meals, 9ay hydrated, do your regular exercise, meditations, and practices, and so on. The idea here is to stay grounded while youare being stimulated, ever so slightly, beyond your normal parameters.
Third, be discreet. You may want to, or need to, tell your mate, your housemate, or your best friend, but generally speaking the fewer who know; the better. Note that by going small, your behavior, your demeanor, and your external appearance will be pretty much like normal.
I've regularly felt four kinds of effects from micro-doses: physical, emotional, creative, and spiritual.
Physical: Within an hour after I swallowmy little glass of water or sugar cube, I start feeling more energy. It's a kind of bubbling burning on a very low level; my cells and systems are pumped up with a noticeable kind of buzz that is very different from caffeine (which I often use), speed (which I never use), or pot (which I'm very familiar with). What's lovely is that it's a kind of good secondary energy, that is, I can use it to work out with weights, do Pilates, ride my bike, or really just enjoy being with my body. And if, like me, you're a regular caffeine user, you might ingest a little less caffeine than usual, but it's also fine to continue with your regular amounts. That is to say, I haven't found any negative combinatory effects with caffeine (or pot for that matter). And yes, you will need to have a good night's sleep afterward; buzzing with extra energy eventually tires you out. Emoti onal: My micro-dose mentor once told me that at the very lowest micro-doses you see how much God loves you, if you take a bit more, you also see howmuch youlove God, and if you take quite a bit more, then of course it gets pretty hard to disentangle exactly who youare and who God is. What I find is that it's easy for me to appreciate everyone and everything in my life, to very easily and naturally step into a space of gratitude andsustain it. Creative: I've found that I've had some brilliant outbursts (at least they seemed brilliant to me) with respect to both work product and personal creative projects. What seems to happen is that the " floW' state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and noted frequently in the sports arena is a lot easier to access and stay in. Also, it's relatively easy to access and stay in the state that the consciousness explorer John Lilly once called your "professional satori," that is, you are doing what you do professionally, you are doing it well, time passes quickly, and you are pleased with your output. If you have a serious work project, if a lot is due all at once and you feel under the gun, you will want to think twice about micro-dosing but it may just pay off. Spi ritual: What I feel that micro-dosing does is to slightly rearrange my neural furniture so that glimmers of full-on psychedelic states are constantly pouring into my awareness. I can see how the spidei; her web the wall the web is on, the house the wall is part of, the town the house is part of, and so on, are all connected It becomes easy to see those connections, in fact, practically self-evident. And from there, it's just a short step to radically affirming the tightness of the spider's web, just the way it is in this moment.
And this occurs not in a distracted way, but in a marvelous, enlightening, synchronistic, divine way. The Truth of What Is is simply easier to spot, and
that makes everything else easier. Even the next day—the day after—the hint of universal connectedness is still quite apparent. It's unclear to me whether I'm just becoming sensitized to LSD or whether something else is going on, perhaps an ongoing yearning and learning to make just a little bit more out of the reality that I'm perceiving. That is, over my months of micro-dosing, my expectations as to what is easily possiUe to see have grown. My Amazing Meter seems to be permanently set to a slightly lower threshold in a way that I feel has made my life more pleasurable, more powerful, andmore effective in terms of my being able to take care of myself and contribute back to others. It's almost like I was born to be like this, and now I get to be like this, on an increasingly regular basis, all thanks to an astonishingly small amount of the substance LSD-25.1 don't knowif this will help me to reach beyond the one-hundred-year mark like Albert Hofmann did but I'm pretty certain I'll have a more interesting, effective, andjoyous ride regardless.
Madeline
Madeline, a tall, almost willowy, woman in her early thirties, lives in Manhattan. Her report fills in some of her different occupations. She is married and has a four-year-old child.
As the subway rumbles along toward downtown, my observation of the passengers around me is that they put utter poison into their bodies! A woman in a camel-colored suit and white gym shoes uses a plastic knife to spread cream cheese on a giant bagel, washing it all down with gulps of soda. A few others enjoy fast-food breakfasts; enough sandwiches and hash browns are withdrawn from steamy paper sacks to scent the entire car with fryer oil. I wonder for a moment about what these people would think about my peculiar breakfast ritual—20 micrograms of LSD chased a bit later by green juice made from juiced cucumbers, sunflower sprouts, and pea greens.
I arrive at my temporary office where I'm on a seven-week contract editing film. The documentary I'm working on has a budget of nearly nine hundred thousand dollars and will air on the second best network. My job is to screen nearly fifty hours of historical footage and knit it together into a story arc. I snip the footage down to its most essential bits, add narration notes, and harvest sound bites. I feel deeply connected to my work, focused and in the flow I barely come up for air for the next five hours because I am so sincerely enjoying what I'm doing. I laugh aloud and occasionally cry at poignant moments. I love my work. Although I'm not hungry and don't feel in need of a break, I know that it is healthy to take one. Once outside, the world is too bright, even with my sunglasses on. I have very large blue eyes and naturally large pupils, and anything above 10 micrograms of LSD makes them as big as saucers.
After a six-block walk, I feel hungry, and I sit my lunchbox and thermos on a ledge at my favorite park. I begin Chinese exercises and deep breathing. The movement feels wonderful, and I feel so healthy and connected to my body that I begin to tear up for a second and enjoy a little laigh that can only be described as a release of joy and gratitude. I plan a longer than average workday today and will skip the gym, so this stolen moment of movement and sunshine is essential. My lunch is a thermos of mild green tea and four small salads that I made a day earlier. One is seaweed with sesame seeds, another chickpeas, another quinoa, and the last is fruit with coconut and pecans. Exquisitely nourished I head back to my office for another four-hour stretch.
Sub-doses of 10 to 20 micrograms allow me to increase my focus, open my heart, and achieve breakthrough results while remaining integrated within my routine. While a full dose requires that I carefully plan my surroundings, on a sub-dose I am fully able to navigate all manner of logistics and social interactions. I would venture to say that my wit, response time, and visual and mental acuity seem greater than normal on it. I utilize a sub-dose about six days each month and sometimes more often if I am engrossed in a project requiring extraordinary focus. This has been my practice for more than ten years, andit has facilitated my success working in mainstream and independent media, staff-level positions in government, and publishing dozens of pieces of journalistic work.
I am not saying that I wouldn't have done any of this without LSD, but I am saying that I wouldn't have <k>ne all of this without it. The practice of sub-dosing transforms my work from being work to being creative play.
I'm a naturally persuasive person, able to enlist others in my vision, but never more so than when I am enhanced by a subdose. Therefore, I find it essential to my work as a grant writer and coalition builder to open myself in this way. One of my standard responses to the question "How are you doing?" from a colleague is to reply that I am doing"soaringly well." It really sums up what it feels like to perform my work while sub-dosing: it's somewhat like flying.
I had never heard of sub-dosing when I began doing it. After a coiple years of wonderful success with the practice, I met a friend of Terence McKenna's who, upon hearing about my practice, explained that he uses subdoses too—something he learned from McKenna. He explained that Albert Hofmann did the same thing and that McKenna told him that Hofmann believed that LSD sub-doses would have gone on to be widely prescribed in much the same way as Ritalin, had it not been so harshly scheduled
I played with big doses before I played with small ones. I experimented with 250- to 800-microgram doses and learned to surrender to their intensity. My experiences at these doses were profound amazing, and fun, but ultimately, I couldn't bring too much back with me. I left super-high doses in the late nineties.
Then I began to experiment with subdoses. I don't drink alcohol because I find it a bit harsh and numbing, so I was looking for something to make me feel sparkly and up at cocktail parties and networking events. I tried a few cups of coffee, but I wasn't quite loose enough and I'd still get tired so I began trying small doses instead I found that on sub-doses, I made more meaningful and lasting connections, and my own evolution seemed to accelerate, as if I were able to accomplish more living within the same span of time.
I wondered how sub-doses could be employed within my career, and I began using them for bigger assignments and events. I also expanded my role within my own family during this time, and became the one most often consulted Following conversations with relatives and friends, they would report feeling truly seen. Within only a few months of discovering sub-doses, my skills as a listener and communicator had blossomed Interestingly, a number of family members appointed me executor to their estates almost immediately after I began using sub-doses.
I find that 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD is both a stimulant and a calming agent at the same time. For me, the only challenge that remains with sub-doses is increased light sensitivity, which I mitigate by wearing sunglasses or dialing down the brightness of my computer screen. This minor inconvenience is certainly worth it to me, because when I'm enhanced I feel more passionate. I feel more energized. I feel more focused and enlisted I feel more.
I'm not completely comfortable with how little is known about the long-term effects of LSD and other drigs. I'm a healthy young woman, and I want to do only what is safe and smart for myself and my family, so I wish to know what the long-term effects of LSD use are. Albert Hofmann seemed perfectly sharp at 101 years old and the friends I know who are twice my age and use LSD frequently are some of the most brilliant people I know. And I want the fear of criminalization removed from this field of research so that people like me will be willing to share their experiences openly and have their data quantified.
James
"James" is a warehouse manager in Waco, Texas, for a large home improvement company. He is active in his church and is also writing a family history of what he describes as "my more colorful relatives."
I hadn't used psychedelics for some years, but when a still-tripping friend offered me a few hits divided into teners and told me I could drop one and still go to work, I gave it a try. From the first time out, I liked how I felt. Got my work done easier, rarely lost my temper, my paperwork got done on time, and when I got home at night, I was a lot more fun to be with. What was cool is I found out that I was as good the second day after I'd dosed as the first, maybe better. I didn't say when I was using and when I wasn't, but after awhile, my wife would say, "Hey, did you do it today?" Usually, she was right on.
Clifford
"Clifford" is an important psychedelic researcher, group leader, and writer. He is currently writing a book of personal essays.
Student days at the University of California at San Diego were a whirlwind blending of 1960s' issues with the academic pressure necessary to enter postgraduate training of some sort. My personal choices were between psychology and medicine. My introduction to psychedelics had convinced me of their value. I was taking a biology course to prepare for medical school, and we were studying the development of the chick embryo. After the first meeting of the one-quarter-long course, I realized that in order to stay alert, a tiny dose of LSD could be useful. With that in mind I licked a small, but very potent, tablet emblazoned with the peace sign before every class. This produced a barely noticeable brightening of colors and created a generalized fascination with the course and my professor, who was otherwise uninteresting to me.
Unfortunately, when finals came around my health disintegrated and I missed the final exam. The next day I called my professor and begged for mercy. She said "No problem, come to my lab." " When shall we schedule this?"
She suggested immediately. With some dismay, I agreed that I would meet her within an hour. I reached into the freezer and licked the almost exhausted fragment of the tablet I had used for class. I decided t hat there was so little left I might as well swallow it all.
At the lab my professor suggested that, since it was such an amazing day, perhaps I could take the exam outside in the wetland wilderness reserve that surrounded the lab. The view of the swamp was stunning! Somehow it had never seemed beautiful to me before. She asked that I take my notebook and pencil out. "Please draw for me the complete development of the chick from fertilization to hatching. That is the only question." I gasped "But that is the entire course!"
" Yes, I suppose it is, but make-up exams are si^posed to be harder than the original, aren't they?"
I couldn't imagine being able to regurgitate the entire course. As I sat there despondently, I closed my eyes and was flooded with grief. Then I noticed that my inner visual field was undulating like a blanket that was being shaken at one end I began to see a movie of fertilization! When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I realized that the movie could be run forward and back and was clear as a bell in my mind's eye, even with my physical eyes open.
Hesitantly, I drew the formation of the blast ula, a hollow ball of cells that develops out of the zygote (fertilized egg). As I carefully drew frame after frame of my inner movie, it was her turn to gape! The tiny heart blossomed The formation of the notochord the neural groove, and the beginnings of the nervous syaem were flowing out of my enhanced imagery and onto the pages. A stupendous event—the animated wonder of embryonic growth and the differentiation of cells—continued at a rapid pace. I drew as quickly as I could To my utter amazement, I was able to carefully and completely replicate the content of the entire course, drawing after drawing, like the frames of animation that I was seeing as a completed film!
It took me about an hour and a quarter drawing as fast as I could to reproduce the twenty-one-day miracle of chick formation. Clearly impressed my now suddenly lovely professor smiled and said "Well, I suppose you deserve an A!" The sunlight twinkled on the water, the cattails waved in the gentle breeze, and the gentle wonder of life was everywhere.
Reports: Psilocybin Mushrooms Stephen Gray
Stephen Gray describes himself as "a lifelong student, teacher and researcher of spiritual paths, in particular Tibetan Buddhism and the peyote ceremonies of the Native American Church. I've studied and practiced several other modalities in the healing and awakening fields. I've also devoted much time and love to music as a teacher singer-songwriter and composer of music for healing and spiritual work under the artist name Keary." The following excerpt is a portion of an essay, "The Benefits of Low-Dose Psilocybin Mushrooms. " The full essay can be found at ww.sienhenrmvvision.com by searching for " benefits of low-dose psilocybin mushrooms."
It's well known to the experienced that medium to high doses of psilocybin mushrooms, given advantageous internal and external conditions— often called set and setting—can provoke experiences of stunning insight, visions of great beauty, an abundance of love, contact with spirit entities, and authentic mystical experiences completely beyond the boundaries of the separate ego. Much less frequently discussed are the benefits of very low-dose experiences with these mushrooms.
I often get together with friends on weekends to play music. On one of these evenings, I went to the home of some friends who have a collection of dried and frozen Psilocybe cyanascens. We decided to try an experiment. We wanted to see how a very low dose would affect the emotions and the mechanics of playing and singing.
We each ate two medium-size dried mushrooms, the stems perhaps an inch and one-half long and the caps one-half to three-quarters of an inch across. Althot^h we didn't weigh them, previous experience suggests we're talking about less than a gram of dried weight. We didn't engage in any special preparation such as fasting for several hours beforehand althoigh I always attempt to make a connection with such medicine plants before consuming them by offering a short prayer, a dedication, andor an expression of gratitude to the spirit of the plant.
This was in no way a reliable scientific experiment. We included a little cannabis smoking with the mushrooms, knowing that the two often complement each other quite nicely. The result was that you might say the mushrooms overrode the somewhat more fiizzy effects of cannabis with a subtle but noticeable sharpness of mind and emotion.
One of the results of this sharpness was that my guitar playing became more focused and agile. I don't play guitar enough anymore to get through most songs flawlessly, but on those nights, my playing was definitely more on the mark. I also noticed that my ability to recollect lyrics was noticeably superior to my
In conjunction with the sharpness has been a softening of the heart, which helped me connect to the emotion of the songs. Alot of the songs I like to play have poetic lyrics that don't necessarily reveal clear and simple meanings. The songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen can be like that.... During these low-dose mushroom sessions, I've noticed that my mind instantaneously grokked meanings that had previously eluded me.
I've noted before with Psilocybes and had confirmed again in these experiences that the mushroom appears to temporarily dismantle inhibition and hesitation to seeing things clearly and talking about personal topics straightforwardly. And it appears to be just as easy to hear these truths spoken about oneself as it is to say them. I've had some very intimate conversations with friends where we revealed ourselves without embarrassment and spoke about sensitive issues without raising defensive reactions.
Ingeaing such small doses is something most people can do safely on their own. No particular ritual is necessary to elicit beneficial effects, although in my experience the spirit of the plant is always potentially present and is much more likely to Hess and empower even these mild experiences if petitioned and treated with respect.
I'll mention a couple of cautions. Although the Psilocybe s are all around us in certain areas of North America, they are not easy to identify at fira and can easily be miaaken for similar-looking but poisonous mushrooms. I had an experienced mycophile point out the local Psilocybe cyanascens, and since then I've shown another friend howto identify them.
Not all mushrooms have the same potency, of course, and not all people respond the same. One time I ate two small ones and the effects were too subtle to have much impact. Another time I experimented with a slightly higher dose, somewhere between one gram and a gram and a half. For playing music that quantity proved to be a bit much. The effects interfered with my functionality.
If we're able to shift our cultural underaanding of these plants and begin to see them as medicine, I would say that, used with respect and good intentions, low-dose psilocybin is good medicine. .. The important thing is to provide the right kind of space for the medicine's effects to manifea. There has to be enoi^h space in the mind's "busy-ness" to notice the subtleties, to feel the softening of the heart, and to catch the insights as they arise.
Anita
"Anita " is a professional artist's model.
Once, while being very professionally overextended in New York, I got hold of a good-sized dose of mushrooms. But inaead of taking it all at once, I took a pinch of it each day. I found that I was much more emotionally even and more able to see the world as interrelated rather than disjointed. It was a fully pleasurable experience.
Nathan
"Nathan " is a professional bass and guitar player and a dedicated surfer living in a beach town in Southern California.
I took a small hit of mushroom the other day .. .went out surfing. It was a life-changing event. I was so much more in my body and could feel deeper into it. I sensed the wave had come thousands of miles and that we were coming together for its laa few seconds before it hit the beach. But what was bea was feeling like I connected back into the greater world What was so special is that for the paa few weeks, I've been really down. A great long-term love relationship broke up, and I've been devaaated I'm still sad about it, but I know it's only a part of me. I got attuned that day, and I haven't loa it. Oh, yeah, my surfing was definitely awesome.
The Question of Tolerance
I asked a once prominent LSD chemist if the "every three days" regimen like the one "Charles" used was necessary, since it is well known that one cannot lake repeated doses of most psychedelics and have them continue to be effective.
His initial reply was, "As far as I can determine, less-than-obvious doses do not cause tolerance, which could argue in favor of benefits from ten a day. I'd have to test further, but so far I suspect that sub-detectable doses several days in a row cause no tolerance for a similar barely detectable dose the day following. At this sub-detectable level, there is really at most only the tiniest of intimations you took something."
Preliminary Conclusions
These reports are representative of those I have received in 2010. The reports have several things in common. Everyone said their experiences were positive and valuable. "Charles " suggested that there was a gradual buildup of openness and awareness, eventually spilling over into non-sub-perceptual days. Madeline and Stephen both indicated they did better at what they do well—not excessively, but enough to notice.
As several reports slated, someone taking a dose this low functions, asfaraslhe world is concerned, a little better than normal. To date, I received no reports that sub-perceptual doses have caused any social disruption, personal upset, or any form of work-related difficulty. However this is a very preliminary look at an area that may become of considerable interest as more opportunities for research open up. m may yet get to know mote about what Albert Hofmann called "an under-researched area. "
but it was fantastic!
