Percussion_is_Free
Bluelighter
Background
People have been eating San Pedro for thousands of years--we were tripping on San Pedro before we started eating Peyote. Of all the entheogens, synthetic or plant based, San Pedro continues to fascinate me. It is in equal measure earthy and otherwordly.
1) our senses are turned up and set to bliss (the air tastes like vanilla and diving into a pool is heaven. sex is ridiculous.
2) the trip is supernatural in character (ghosts flying around the room, deep connection to God, spectacular synchronicity).
This picture sums it up astoundingly well:
Trip:
I don't mess with dried cactus, cactus skin, freezing, etc. I start with live cactus. Chop, blend, boil, strain, and drink. I reduce down to about 12 oz. per foot of cactus. The tea is pretty bitter--shockingly so--orange juice is a good chaser. I consume in gulps spread out over 20 minutes. My girlfriend is a trooper and handles her tea just fine.
The come-up is long. The first alert is a bit of excitement / euphoria. I'm walking down the street coming back from the post office, and I realize the sun is so damn warm and pleasant. The flowers and cacti in the neighbors' garden are so real--impossible to miss, gorgeous.
I head into my apartment and my girlfriend is coming up too. We sit at the kitchen table and light incense. The swirling smoke reminds her of her grandmother, who used to smoke cigarettes. Suddenly, her grandmother is "with us," and my girlfriend starts to cry in awe. Bit by bit, the room has become full of swirling entities (see the picture above). They're neither good nor bad--its like diving at an unprotected reef--everything churning, the exotic lifeforms swimming, darting in and out as they always do. It feels like there is a holy wind whipping through the apartment.
We can't actually see this--this is all a feeling, an intuition. But at the same time the "sensation" that our room is full of frenzied spirits is plain, undeniable.
My girlfriend goes into the bedroom and stares up at the ceiling. She sees "the ecosystem"--a swirling tableau containing all the plants and animals of the planet. We look at our wall print of Kandinsky's "Upwards" (1929), which we bought at the Guggenheim collection in Venice, Italy. I'd seen the original, looked at it long and hard, bought it, and looked at the print frequently. Suddenly I am seeing it for the first time. The colors, the depth, the textures--they're all re-creating themselves. I can finally see what Kandinsky had done--what he saw in his work. Before, I had only owned the scratchy, 1920s era recording; suddenly, I am in a New Orleans nightculb with Satchmo playing his heart out in front of my eyes. The colors are bursting in our retinas, exploding off the page.
We go into the living room and sit on couches and easy chairs. We are talking about the incredible things going on, about how hard we're tripping. Our bodies are alive, zinging with the holy wind. Our minds are separate, we look down at our heaps of meat and flesh and are amazed that we inhabit this stuff. That we can move it, that we care for it. Its all so much!
We continue tripping for hours. This stuff has legs. It has caught us off guard with its power. Not gentle; at the same time, not frightening. It is quite intense, quite significant, quite real. Impossible to ignore.
People have been eating San Pedro for thousands of years--we were tripping on San Pedro before we started eating Peyote. Of all the entheogens, synthetic or plant based, San Pedro continues to fascinate me. It is in equal measure earthy and otherwordly.
1) our senses are turned up and set to bliss (the air tastes like vanilla and diving into a pool is heaven. sex is ridiculous.
2) the trip is supernatural in character (ghosts flying around the room, deep connection to God, spectacular synchronicity).
This picture sums it up astoundingly well:
Trip:
I don't mess with dried cactus, cactus skin, freezing, etc. I start with live cactus. Chop, blend, boil, strain, and drink. I reduce down to about 12 oz. per foot of cactus. The tea is pretty bitter--shockingly so--orange juice is a good chaser. I consume in gulps spread out over 20 minutes. My girlfriend is a trooper and handles her tea just fine.
The come-up is long. The first alert is a bit of excitement / euphoria. I'm walking down the street coming back from the post office, and I realize the sun is so damn warm and pleasant. The flowers and cacti in the neighbors' garden are so real--impossible to miss, gorgeous.
I head into my apartment and my girlfriend is coming up too. We sit at the kitchen table and light incense. The swirling smoke reminds her of her grandmother, who used to smoke cigarettes. Suddenly, her grandmother is "with us," and my girlfriend starts to cry in awe. Bit by bit, the room has become full of swirling entities (see the picture above). They're neither good nor bad--its like diving at an unprotected reef--everything churning, the exotic lifeforms swimming, darting in and out as they always do. It feels like there is a holy wind whipping through the apartment.
We can't actually see this--this is all a feeling, an intuition. But at the same time the "sensation" that our room is full of frenzied spirits is plain, undeniable.
My girlfriend goes into the bedroom and stares up at the ceiling. She sees "the ecosystem"--a swirling tableau containing all the plants and animals of the planet. We look at our wall print of Kandinsky's "Upwards" (1929), which we bought at the Guggenheim collection in Venice, Italy. I'd seen the original, looked at it long and hard, bought it, and looked at the print frequently. Suddenly I am seeing it for the first time. The colors, the depth, the textures--they're all re-creating themselves. I can finally see what Kandinsky had done--what he saw in his work. Before, I had only owned the scratchy, 1920s era recording; suddenly, I am in a New Orleans nightculb with Satchmo playing his heart out in front of my eyes. The colors are bursting in our retinas, exploding off the page.
We go into the living room and sit on couches and easy chairs. We are talking about the incredible things going on, about how hard we're tripping. Our bodies are alive, zinging with the holy wind. Our minds are separate, we look down at our heaps of meat and flesh and are amazed that we inhabit this stuff. That we can move it, that we care for it. Its all so much!
We continue tripping for hours. This stuff has legs. It has caught us off guard with its power. Not gentle; at the same time, not frightening. It is quite intense, quite significant, quite real. Impossible to ignore.
, nice report. my question is this : what does it taste like? good? shitty? neither?