Lysergamides Exploring LSD’s potential

[mehdislim]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working with LSD for about two years, at a low and infrequent pace (once or twice every six months). My experiences usually take place in calm settings, often in nature or relaxed indoor environments, and always around trusted people, even when I’m the only one dosing.

I’ve never had a bad trip. Even when someone around me struggled, I felt relatively grounded and able to stay present. Overall, these experiences have been positive and genuinely transformative, leading to changes in how I see myself and relate to life.

Alongside this, I’ve been reading quite a bit about Buddhism, shamanism, and Jungian psychology. My main interest is introspection and understanding the unconscious.

At this point, I feel a bit stuck. It seems like my current conceptual understanding has reached a limit, and I’m unsure how to deepen the work in a meaningful and responsible way. Coming from Tunisia, there isn’t much local discussion or shared experience around these topics, so I’m hoping to learn from people here who’ve gone through similar phases.

I’m looking for concrete approaches, things to explore, and methods or frameworks that others have found useful for introspection and long-term integration, rather than just theory.

Thanks for reading.

 

[pupnik]

I have been deeply immersed in this area for more than 55 years, and I see that there isn't is anything concrete and comprehensive.

however that should not discourage you. Instead you have to find what is meaningful to you.

for me comparative neurophysiology and contemplating memory and awareness of active mental contents has been very satisfying if not exactly concrete.
Meditation upon what is honestly being experienced in the moment is also satisfying and does not break the truth detector that would be invalidated through the demands of LSD use.

good luck on your journey at the forefront of human knowledge.

 

[red22]

The potential for shadow work here is incredible, this is the area that all my psychedelic experiences have ultimately pointed towards as the point of all this.


There's way too much that happened to cover it all in such a short post but I know that I'll personally never be doing LSD again without rue / caapi to accompany it.

Pile of cats, 2021-06-11, https://forum.dmt-nexus.me/posts/3276813

Using LSD as a substitute for DMT in ayahuasca

 

[jasperkent]

Hi

You might try the Waking Up meditation app.
It has good instructions for beginners as well as a series of guided daily meditations. Also, lots of lectures, discussions & conversations with interesting people in philosophy, psychology, & other fields related to consciousness, mindfulness, & all those sorts of things. Psychedelics are explored as well.

I'm pretty sure they still offer a free 30-day trial. They also provide discounted or free subscriptions if you ask for them.

 

[iom]

Alongside this, I’ve been reading quite a bit about Buddhism, shamanism, and Jungian psychology. My main interest is introspection and understanding the unconscious.

At this point, I feel a bit stuck. It seems like my current conceptual understanding has reached a limit, and I’m unsure how to deepen the work in a meaningful and responsible way. Coming from Tunisia, there isn’t much local discussion or shared experience around these topics, so I’m hoping to learn from people here who’ve gone through similar phases.

I think it would help to know your background better. Do you practice religion or have you in the past? When you say you feel you've hit a limit, what do you mean exactly? How are you looking to grow?

One suggestion I can offer is to get out of our head and into your whole body. Western societies and probably others with cultural roots in Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, tend to see the mind as existing in the brain sitting as if on a throne at the top the "machine" we call the body, almost like a God in Heaven observing and controlling everything below.

This conceptual framework is certainly useful and is foundational to civilization as we know it, yet it is a framework which is unbalanced. It disconnects us from our bodies and in many ways from life itself. Through the body, we find our connection to nature, to the great Goddess cradling us from below, to Mother Earth to whom our bodies return when we die. I believe these masculine and feminine aspects of divinity are actually complementary, and I find it fascinating that in many places like the Amazon, it's not unusual at all for people to be devoutly religious toward both a logos male divine, an eros female divine. The Virgin Mary in Catholicism often becomes a kind of medium or surrogate for the Mother Earth as well as a way to fold pagan traditions into a colonial culture.

Getting into the body doesn't necessarily mean engaging in hedonism or sensory indulgences. Rather, it's about encouraging consciousness to expand into the body. Your body has a lot of memories and wisdom that you may not be consciously aware of. Actually what you do consciously recall is abstract. The primitives used to construct these abstract memories are based entirely on your experience of having a body. It is the only concrete thing you are really in contact with. Everything else is mediated by senses processed into abstractions.

Something I love to do while tripping is dancing. Dancing is not just a physical movement, it's an expression of form inspired by sound and music. The Western logos-biased view treats matter and spirit as entirely separate, as it existing in entirely different universes. The "mystical experience" that Westerners attribute to psychedelics is necessarily understood in such terms. Getting into the body can help break out of these conceptual restrictions to witness the reality that matter and spirit exist together. Spirit is encoded upon matter, like musical notes on a paper. Your DNA contains echos of all of your ancestors, going all the way back to the source, in addition to a memory of everywhere you've been and everything you've done, from the point of view of each of your cells.

(Edited to add the last paragraph.)

 

[Huba]

I find it hard to find real LSD now a days because I'm older. Its more of a younger crowd drug. I wouldn't want to buy bromo dragon fly, DOx or God forbid N-Bomb.

I'm glad you didn't have a bad trip yet. I recommend not smoking a joint after being up on it all night thinking the trip is over. Every time I did that it packed a pack a wallop of visuals and sketch afterwards even though I thought it wore off.

 

[Pfafffed]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working with LSD for about two years, at a low and infrequent pace (once or twice every six months). My experiences usually take place in calm settings, often in nature or relaxed indoor environments, and always around trusted people, even when I’m the only one dosing.

I’ve never had a bad trip. Even when someone around me struggled, I felt relatively grounded and able to stay present. Overall, these experiences have been positive and genuinely transformative, leading to changes in how I see myself and relate to life.

Alongside this, I’ve been reading quite a bit about Buddhism, shamanism, and Jungian psychology. My main interest is introspection and understanding the unconscious.

At this point, I feel a bit stuck. It seems like my current conceptual understanding has reached a limit, and I’m unsure how to deepen the work in a meaningful and responsible way. Coming from Tunisia, there isn’t much local discussion or shared experience around these topics, so I’m hoping to learn from people here who’ve gone through similar phases.

I’m looking for concrete approaches, things to explore, and methods or frameworks that others have found useful for introspection and long-term integration, rather than just theory.

Thanks for reading.

Nice to meet you! I'm glad to hear that you've had so many enriching experiences along your path so far. That's really good to hear.

I should probably start by saying that you should probably temper your expectations - I think it's fair to say that, while perhaps brilliant at times, most of us here are varying degrees of dysfunctional.

I enjoy the heterodox nature of your interests up to this point, and think that Jungian psychology, Buddhist thought, and the rich and varied territory of indigenous spiritual traditions are all wonderful places to explore. I do think there's not enough shared ground between them to form a coherent and consistent worldview, though. If you're looking for concrete frameworks, I distrust any that might claim to reconcile all of them. Heck, you'll find significant ideological differences between two Buddhist temples in the same village. If you are interested in grand intellectual achievements of synthesis and reconciliation in Buddhism, then I can say that I've never come across anything as impressive as the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. I'd say it was Nagarjuna's elegant way of unifying and reconciling pre-existing Buddhist doctrine so that it was consistent with Mahayana thought. I wouldn't have thought it possible, and I got a lot out of reading it. I read an academic translation, but I see that Stephen Batchelor has a translation out. That might be a good entré.

If, however, you're looking for concrete practices for long-term growth, not just theoretical exercises...there's the one thing that psychonauts have added or switched to time and time again: meditation. It's like weight-lifting: there's no end to training, there's just consistency and dedication. You grow when you do it regularly over long periods of time. Crash courses are fine, but the real benefits come from sustained practice. And honestly, the foundational practices are almost always the ones that bear the most fruit. If you want to build your capacity for introspection, then you need to stabilize the ground of the mind first. Stability opens doors to greater and greater subtlety. And whatever you do, don't sleep on loving-kindness practice. It provides you with concentration and an opening into calm abiding just like watching the breath or scanning the body, but it also helps you generate compassion and care for yourself to help sustain your practice through adversity. It helps you be better in community, to stave off loneliness, to be happier, and to be kinder. It help with right thinking by reinforcing an accurate world view centered not around an atomized self but instead relationally with all beings and other phenomena.

But here I am, talking about things that have been important to me, when I should be taking iom's approach. Help us understand a little more about where you are coming from, what your goals are, what is important to you. You're clearly incredibly intelligent and articulate, but I'm not sure we have a shared understanding of what an interest in introspection or in the subconscious mean.

 

[Opana313]

The potential for shadow work here is incredible, this is the area that all my psychedelic experiences have ultimately pointed towards as the point of all this.


There's way too much that happened to cover it all in such a short post but I know that I'll personally never be doing LSD again without rue / caapi to accompany it.

Pile of cats, 2021-06-11, https://forum.dmt-nexus.me/posts/3276813

Using LSD as a substitute for DMT in ayahuasca

I love this, I had a recent acid trip that told me by showing me exactly this..almost like every light source becomes a strobing effect and the opposite of that being the shadow work.

 

[PsychedelicSummer]

I think psychedelics sometimes leads to more questions than answers. Sufim may be one path near your own culture to explore. Read Rumi and the others and find a group of like minded. Somatic psychotherapies, yoga, meditation and martial arts other pats/complementary approaches.