So I have read these mushrooms represent Alpha and Omega, psilos the beginning of the spiritual path and aminita the end. I read that they made a great combination. Over the weekend I ate 6 grams of psilos and 7 grams of aminitas and rather than feeling like the greatest combo ever, it actually made me feel like I was losing my mind. I have never felt so crazy on any drugs before. At one point, I thought a dead friend of mine was trying to communicate with me, but unlike other spirit encounters I have had which I felt quite sure were real, in this case, I literally could not tell what was real and what was not anymore. I mean, I felt totally insane. I could no longer differentiate between the spirit world and the physical world anymore. What happened? Did I take too much? What is the proper dosage level for this combo? I did not feel like I got any spiritual insights out of this combo, only that I nearly lost my mind.
mixing psilocybin cubensis and aminita muscaria?
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well i don't know about amanita dosing but 6 grams of cubes is definitely a big dose
feeling like you're losing your mind or feeling really crazy is not really uncommon at all, like yesterday i was tripping on acid and putting a sweater on felt like i was entering a vortex. pretty crazy if you ask me. and i've freaked out thinking i had become insane forever on shrooms too. psychedelics warp your perception of reality, or enhance, whatever.
plus, iirc, amanitas are deliriants so the experiences from it are supposed to be very fucking weird. i never tried them, but if it is anything like zolpidem (supposedly another GABAergic deliriant) it is definitely some weird as fuck, manic shit.
feeling like you're losing your mind or feeling really crazy is not really uncommon at all, like yesterday i was tripping on acid and putting a sweater on felt like i was entering a vortex. pretty crazy if you ask me. and i've freaked out thinking i had become insane forever on shrooms too. psychedelics warp your perception of reality, or enhance, whatever.
plus, iirc, amanitas are deliriants so the experiences from it are supposed to be very fucking weird. i never tried them, but if it is anything like zolpidem (supposedly another GABAergic deliriant) it is definitely some weird as fuck, manic shit.
Aminita is nothing like zolpidem, or any man made crap. It is a divine mushroom.
sekio
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It is a "divine mushroom" to some, outright toxic ne'er-do-well to others, and to yet more people it is merely a beautiful specimen of a fungus.
I think the thing with Amanitas is there is somewhat less drive for people to cultivate specimens with closely reproducible alkaloid content, simply because there is less call for doing Amanita mycology and breeding then there is Psilocybe spp.
I was under the impression you had to titrate every individual cap you find on its own, to get safe and reproducible results. I suppose you could also homogenize all the caps you find and extract the muscimol.
It could also be that 6 grams of Psilocybe and 7 of Amanita spp. are simply too much for your poor nervous system. It may have been telling you to treat it better, the last time!
I think the thing with Amanitas is there is somewhat less drive for people to cultivate specimens with closely reproducible alkaloid content, simply because there is less call for doing Amanita mycology and breeding then there is Psilocybe spp.
I was under the impression you had to titrate every individual cap you find on its own, to get safe and reproducible results. I suppose you could also homogenize all the caps you find and extract the muscimol.
It could also be that 6 grams of Psilocybe and 7 of Amanita spp. are simply too much for your poor nervous system. It may have been telling you to treat it better, the last time!
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CrazyEngineer
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I would agree with you that amanitas are quite different from zolpidem, but the difference has nothing to do with some sort of grand divide between natural and man-made things. Basically, zolpidem is a selective GABA-A-a1 agonist, with some activity at a2, a3, and a5 in higher doses. For the most part, since banging on a1 causes sedation, while banging on a2 and a3 cause euphoria and anxiolysis and banging on a5 causes memory issues up to and including blackouts, zolpidem will put your ass to sleep in sane doses and give you decently long euphoric periods with minimal inhibitions and no memory at higher doses. Muscimol hits all the GABA-A-a receptors, but also hits the GABA-C receptors, which do a whole bunch of other things that may be at least partially responsible for the hallucinogenic effects of the experience.
Nexus_Tripper
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Natural drugs are incredibly dangerous and shitty. If it ain't made in a lab, I ain't taking it.
I respect your opinion, but in my experience there is a difference between natural and synthetic drugs.
CrazyEngineer
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Fair enough, though if I had to guess that would most likely have to do with the fact that natural drugs aren't purified, isolated chemicals; more often than not they come as a massive hodgepodge of alkaloids, in which one or two do most of the pharmacological heavy lifting and another five or ten wind up subtly coloring the experience in ways you don't really notice until you do the main alkaloid by itself and notice the difference.
Yes, that is correct and one of the major differences. I also believe in a creator and I believe the natural drugs were created with a specific purpose and intention and all the alkaloids contribute to providing for that intention.
In addition, I believe that human beings have as Christianity put it "fallen from grace" or we could say, have incorrectly imagined themselves as separate from nature and declared war with it. Because of this, I believe that the objects which humans create are tainted in a sense, not quite in line with the natural order of things. Because of this, many of the man made drugs are what I would consider "mis-creations", things that should not be. It's not as simple as all natural drugs being good and all man made ones bad, thats not what I am saying. But it is very much my experience that by and large, the natural drugs are superior in effect and far less harmful than the man made ones. I did not go into using drugs with this point of view, but rather came to it after years and years of experimention and watching for consistencies.
Some man made drugs are pretty good (often the ones which are very close to natural ones like LSD) but to me there is no comparison between crap like zolpidem and the natural entheogens. Even to suggest that they are the same is blasphemy in my opinion. Secondly I understand if not everyone agrees with me, so I want to make it clear I am not speaking about some objective truth about an objective world. I am merely speaking from my own experience, which is all any of us has. If someone else has a different experiences, I don't necessarily view it as less valid than my own, but I must choose to go by my own experience rather than someone elses.
In addition, I believe that human beings have as Christianity put it "fallen from grace" or we could say, have incorrectly imagined themselves as separate from nature and declared war with it. Because of this, I believe that the objects which humans create are tainted in a sense, not quite in line with the natural order of things. Because of this, many of the man made drugs are what I would consider "mis-creations", things that should not be. It's not as simple as all natural drugs being good and all man made ones bad, thats not what I am saying. But it is very much my experience that by and large, the natural drugs are superior in effect and far less harmful than the man made ones. I did not go into using drugs with this point of view, but rather came to it after years and years of experimention and watching for consistencies.
Some man made drugs are pretty good (often the ones which are very close to natural ones like LSD) but to me there is no comparison between crap like zolpidem and the natural entheogens. Even to suggest that they are the same is blasphemy in my opinion. Secondly I understand if not everyone agrees with me, so I want to make it clear I am not speaking about some objective truth about an objective world. I am merely speaking from my own experience, which is all any of us has. If someone else has a different experiences, I don't necessarily view it as less valid than my own, but I must choose to go by my own experience rather than someone elses.
sekio
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The whole natural vs. synthetic debate is kind of meaningless. It actually grinds my gears a bit. Here's a thought experiment. One of these glucose molecules was made synthetically, with toxic lead and chromium reagents and chlorinated solvents. The other is a "natural" glucose molecule made by a, say, banana plant. Let's assume they are both purified by recrystallization to the point there's no other detectable impurities and the physical properties like melt point, refractive index, optical rotary power etc all match.
Can you tell the difference? I can't, because there isn't actually a meaningful one on a biochemical level. Your body really does not care where the chemicals come from, and any differences in isotopic composition don't change how the compounds behave in the body. Scientists can calculate the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 atoms (not to be confused with carbon 14, which is used for radiometric carbon dating) which can then be used to determine if compounds were synthesized with carbon from "biological" sources in a C3 or C4 carbon fixation cycle or instead by some other means, because biochemical reactions incorporate a slightly different ratio of isotopes than traditional synthesis. The two different carbon fixation cycles actually produce reproducible ratios of C12/C13 that can be used as a useful fingerprint. In addition I believe it can be used to determine the origin of nitrogen that ends up in compounds, because nitrogen fixation in bacteria has a different prefertence for N14/N15 ratio than synthetic ammonia made for fertilizers. The important thing to remember is that even that sort of analysis is not 100% accurate and infallible, all it takes is using exclusively naturally produced starting materials rather than pertochemicals or Haber process ammonia.
I would say that's confirmation bias. More than ever in this day and age, partly because we have the ability to make and screen hundreds of thousands of candidates rapidly, and partly because of the litigous culture in the US, drugs have a higher and higher bar for what is considered to be safe and acceptable side effects. Because the age of 'heroic medicine' is basically over, the criteria for a drug to be judged 'safe' get stricter with every passing day. The number of natural drugs that are truly ideal as drugs in a pharamceutical sense of the word is a short list indeed.
Here's a neat article by a drug discovery blogger. He points out that a "natural" drug like aspirin (salicin if you're being very strict, I think aspirin is semi synthetic) would never be approved today. Nor would quite a few antibiotics. And if you think about it, lots of natural products suffer from problems that made people pursue syntheic analogues in the first place.
There are just as many drugs with nasty side effects as there are 'blockbuster' drugs. Often natural product drugs work well enough, but leave certain aspects lacking. Natural penicillin G has next to no oral bioavailibility, so semi-synthetic penicllin V or amoxicillin are more widely used today. Cocaine has a low oral bioavilibility is cardiotoxic and very short-acting, methylphenidate was developed to avoid both those issues. Morphine has a low oral bioavailibility and higher incidence of side effects than something like oxycodone. Local anesthetics like lidocaine are more controllable than something like cone snail venom. Non-depolarizing muscular paralyzing agents have a smoother induction period than "natural" curare alkaloids. If you've ever used ibuprofen or acetaminophen you've used painkillers with better efficacy and better tolerability than salicylic acid alone. If you've ever had a general anesthetic, it was with synthetic drugs with rapid elimination from the body and was probably not a morphine and atropine twilight coma where the doctor gambles every time. And so on, and so forth. In fact, I can't think of many natural drugs that actually are undeniably better than anything chemistry has come up with., with the notable exception of THC.
Even if you count all the natural drugs that *are* a good time, you almost always need to get chemistry involved at some stage, to extract and standardize the active principles. It is very rare for any biological to make products of high purity that are easily isolatable: even Cannabis took years of selective breeding to get high-THC, high-cannabinoid strains popular. It used to be, you needed to do a hash oil extraction, acid isomerization, then further purification to yield THC, nowadays people do it with a single butane wash. Other common problems inclusde, making penicillin in a huge fermenting tank and needing to get it out of the water and dead mould cells and into a sterile standardized dosage form. The coca plant doesn't produce pure cocaine. Nor is morphine the only active principle in opium. In addition, different plants of the same genetics can produce varying amounts of alkaloid in the different parts of the plant. Or even have significant variation between individual plants. Nature is tricky like that, synthesis was developed for a reaon.
I dunno. In the end, I think it's a more useful attitude to just treat all drugs as tools. They are just chemicals in the end, who made them and where they originated is demonstrably less important than what they actually are, in terms of purity and structure. There are comparatively harmless "synthetic" chemicals, and toxic "natural" ones, and I would say there are an equal fraction of toxic compounds in both camps. Nature is mean and doesn't prefer humans for a mysterious reason, we just like to find patterns and think we are special because of them. Chemists do actually have a lot of respect for natural products: it is almost always the case that plants are better at making some specific compounds, even on a large scale. e.g., nobody makes totally synthetic caffeine, and it would never be profitable, because it's a waste product from coffee decaffeination. The corollary holds that some rare and complex natural products with important usages as drugs have significant efforts to make them synthetically, rather than be beholden to a supply of plant or animal that could be endangered and can be inconsistent in availibility. The case of paclitaxel from Pacific Yew is one notable case, testosterone from bull testes, or vanillin from vanilla beans... they are all established extractions, but they take time, money, and effort which makes costs increase. Synthetic vanillin is about 1/10 the cost of natural vanillin because of the difficulty of growing, hand-pollinating, and ageing vanilla properly compared to using the waste product of paper pulping (availiable on a ton scale year-round - chemistry is big on re-use of "waste" streams as money makers) and there is no difference in flavor or odor if you have purified compounds.
Can you tell the difference? I can't, because there isn't actually a meaningful one on a biochemical level. Your body really does not care where the chemicals come from, and any differences in isotopic composition don't change how the compounds behave in the body. Scientists can calculate the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 atoms (not to be confused with carbon 14, which is used for radiometric carbon dating) which can then be used to determine if compounds were synthesized with carbon from "biological" sources in a C3 or C4 carbon fixation cycle or instead by some other means, because biochemical reactions incorporate a slightly different ratio of isotopes than traditional synthesis. The two different carbon fixation cycles actually produce reproducible ratios of C12/C13 that can be used as a useful fingerprint. In addition I believe it can be used to determine the origin of nitrogen that ends up in compounds, because nitrogen fixation in bacteria has a different prefertence for N14/N15 ratio than synthetic ammonia made for fertilizers. The important thing to remember is that even that sort of analysis is not 100% accurate and infallible, all it takes is using exclusively naturally produced starting materials rather than pertochemicals or Haber process ammonia.
I would say that's confirmation bias. More than ever in this day and age, partly because we have the ability to make and screen hundreds of thousands of candidates rapidly, and partly because of the litigous culture in the US, drugs have a higher and higher bar for what is considered to be safe and acceptable side effects. Because the age of 'heroic medicine' is basically over, the criteria for a drug to be judged 'safe' get stricter with every passing day. The number of natural drugs that are truly ideal as drugs in a pharamceutical sense of the word is a short list indeed.
Here's a neat article by a drug discovery blogger. He points out that a "natural" drug like aspirin (salicin if you're being very strict, I think aspirin is semi synthetic) would never be approved today. Nor would quite a few antibiotics. And if you think about it, lots of natural products suffer from problems that made people pursue syntheic analogues in the first place.
There are just as many drugs with nasty side effects as there are 'blockbuster' drugs. Often natural product drugs work well enough, but leave certain aspects lacking. Natural penicillin G has next to no oral bioavailibility, so semi-synthetic penicllin V or amoxicillin are more widely used today. Cocaine has a low oral bioavilibility is cardiotoxic and very short-acting, methylphenidate was developed to avoid both those issues. Morphine has a low oral bioavailibility and higher incidence of side effects than something like oxycodone. Local anesthetics like lidocaine are more controllable than something like cone snail venom. Non-depolarizing muscular paralyzing agents have a smoother induction period than "natural" curare alkaloids. If you've ever used ibuprofen or acetaminophen you've used painkillers with better efficacy and better tolerability than salicylic acid alone. If you've ever had a general anesthetic, it was with synthetic drugs with rapid elimination from the body and was probably not a morphine and atropine twilight coma where the doctor gambles every time. And so on, and so forth. In fact, I can't think of many natural drugs that actually are undeniably better than anything chemistry has come up with., with the notable exception of THC.
Even if you count all the natural drugs that *are* a good time, you almost always need to get chemistry involved at some stage, to extract and standardize the active principles. It is very rare for any biological to make products of high purity that are easily isolatable: even Cannabis took years of selective breeding to get high-THC, high-cannabinoid strains popular. It used to be, you needed to do a hash oil extraction, acid isomerization, then further purification to yield THC, nowadays people do it with a single butane wash. Other common problems inclusde, making penicillin in a huge fermenting tank and needing to get it out of the water and dead mould cells and into a sterile standardized dosage form. The coca plant doesn't produce pure cocaine. Nor is morphine the only active principle in opium. In addition, different plants of the same genetics can produce varying amounts of alkaloid in the different parts of the plant. Or even have significant variation between individual plants. Nature is tricky like that, synthesis was developed for a reaon.
I dunno. In the end, I think it's a more useful attitude to just treat all drugs as tools. They are just chemicals in the end, who made them and where they originated is demonstrably less important than what they actually are, in terms of purity and structure. There are comparatively harmless "synthetic" chemicals, and toxic "natural" ones, and I would say there are an equal fraction of toxic compounds in both camps. Nature is mean and doesn't prefer humans for a mysterious reason, we just like to find patterns and think we are special because of them. Chemists do actually have a lot of respect for natural products: it is almost always the case that plants are better at making some specific compounds, even on a large scale. e.g., nobody makes totally synthetic caffeine, and it would never be profitable, because it's a waste product from coffee decaffeination. The corollary holds that some rare and complex natural products with important usages as drugs have significant efforts to make them synthetically, rather than be beholden to a supply of plant or animal that could be endangered and can be inconsistent in availibility. The case of paclitaxel from Pacific Yew is one notable case, testosterone from bull testes, or vanillin from vanilla beans... they are all established extractions, but they take time, money, and effort which makes costs increase. Synthetic vanillin is about 1/10 the cost of natural vanillin because of the difficulty of growing, hand-pollinating, and ageing vanilla properly compared to using the waste product of paper pulping (availiable on a ton scale year-round - chemistry is big on re-use of "waste" streams as money makers) and there is no difference in flavor or odor if you have purified compounds.
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First of all, I am not saying natural psilocybin is better than psilocybin made in a lab although I would choose mushrooms over lab produced psilocybin because mushrooms contain other alkaloids which contribute to the experience. I am saying that in my experience, the natural drugs agree much better with my body and mind than synthetic ones. Synthetic drugs tend to give me feelings, that feel, well, unnatural. Its not that natural drugs cant have negative effects, but even when they do, somehow those negative effects feel more natural. For instance take opiate wd vs benzo wd. Opiate withdrawal is horrendously awful, but it still feels more like a natural illness than xanax withdrawal, which feels so strange and unnatural. No natural drug I have ever taken, have produced the sort of "wrong" feelings I have experienced many times on natural drugs.
And I agree the debate is meaningless because you are listening to your logical mind while I am listening to what I feel, regardless of whether it makes logical sense. I cant really put what I am saying into logical sounding words, except to say that synthetic drugs give me feelings which I feel should not be felt. I used to be a very logical minded person but psychedelics taught me that there is a higher intelligence than human logic and I listen to that now. It makes me look stupid in front of logical people, but thats the only downside. In every other way, it does a much better job at guiding me than logic. Also keep in mind I am not saying all synthetic drugs are worthless. Man has created some worthwhile things, but he has also made all sorts of miscreations which you just dont find in nature. Sometimes man is also able to improve on natural things, like making cannabis into hash or breeding the cannabis plant. I dont see this as unnatural. I see it as a symbiotic relationship between two organisms. Perfectly natural, as in - in line with the natural order of things. I see a chemist making weird drugs in a lab with the goal of raking in huge profits as unnatural- out of line with the natural order of things.
And I agree the debate is meaningless because you are listening to your logical mind while I am listening to what I feel, regardless of whether it makes logical sense. I cant really put what I am saying into logical sounding words, except to say that synthetic drugs give me feelings which I feel should not be felt. I used to be a very logical minded person but psychedelics taught me that there is a higher intelligence than human logic and I listen to that now. It makes me look stupid in front of logical people, but thats the only downside. In every other way, it does a much better job at guiding me than logic. Also keep in mind I am not saying all synthetic drugs are worthless. Man has created some worthwhile things, but he has also made all sorts of miscreations which you just dont find in nature. Sometimes man is also able to improve on natural things, like making cannabis into hash or breeding the cannabis plant. I dont see this as unnatural. I see it as a symbiotic relationship between two organisms. Perfectly natural, as in - in line with the natural order of things. I see a chemist making weird drugs in a lab with the goal of raking in huge profits as unnatural- out of line with the natural order of things.
Kl519
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I find Sekio's post very interesting. It seems to be that, at the basic level, all synthetic chems are derived from natural sources. For those naturally occurring substances, it seems that nature is the one responsible for "synthesizing" them.
I think naturally occurring substances just have a better ring and feel to them because there has been a longer history of human usage. In that context, it does make one feel more comfortable about taking them, even if synthetic chems prove to be just as safe. The jury is still out.
I think naturally occurring substances just have a better ring and feel to them because there has been a longer history of human usage. In that context, it does make one feel more comfortable about taking them, even if synthetic chems prove to be just as safe. The jury is still out.
Well of course you can say that in the absolute sense, there is nothing unnatural. And yet, on a relative level it seems to me at least that there is a natural order and mankind has stepped out of that natural order, or has gone out of balance and this results in great and tremendous human suffering. I feel like this is a very basic entheogenic lesson. Entheogens have taught me that nature is good. Plants are happy. Animals for the most part are happy. They do not see themselves as separate from nature, nor do they try to control nature but mostly live in alignment with its natural rhythms. Living in alignment with nature, eating natural foods, taking natural entheogens and observing plants and insects has made me so much happier and healthier than watching reality tv programs, news and sitcoms. It is painfully obvious to me that human beings are out of alignment with I think of as the natural rhythm of life on this planet, so out of alignment in fact that they can't even see how out of alig
Somehow human beings have forgotten how to do this (the Biblical fall) and the result is suffering. So as long as you dont care about human suffering, you can say hey everything is natural, everything is as it is and that is true from one perspective. But when you really start thinking deeply about spiritual questions and start asking yourself, why is there so much pain, suffering, sorrow, addiction, ill health, negativity, violence, etc among the human race and is it necessary or would it be possible for human beings to live differently? Do human beings need to pollute and destroy the enviornment or might there be a way for them to live in harmony with it?
Psychedelics have shown me how man with his complex brain, abstracts a mental image of who he thinks he is and then identifies himself with that image thus creating a sort false self, or a psychological self that is very real in experiences but has no substance when you actually look for/at it. This false self lives in self consciousness. It can only exist by being aware of itself. Thus it experiences life as though there were a division between itself and everything else even though the idea of this division makes little sense logically and scientifically.
Psychedelics have shown me that without this false thing in the way, the human physiology is capable of functioning beautifully. However, when man is identified with the false self then his life becomes very unbalanced. His mood becomes very fragile and he becomes fixated on gains and losses, pleasure and pain. Even small events with no eternal significance can ruin his day. He finds himself unhappy and often abuses substances or other people because he does not know how to cope with his misery.
What a sad state of affairs for man. Rather than experiencing life directly, as it is, instead he lives trapped in his thoughts and concepts about what happens, which stem from his conditioning so most men live their entire lives in a prison made out of thought. THe beauty of psychedelics is they have the power to temporary deconstruct this prison and open man up to what is truly natural and in balance.
The natural reality is natural because it always was there and always will be there and it is already in balance with itself. THe world of man is unnatural because it is out of balance and thus can only exist for a time, before it must change. Words are tricky but I feel as though I am speaking about something real here.
When I take mushrooms for instance I can feel myself as part of nature, it is so obvious how the idea that man and nature are two separate things is some sort of silly little delusion that we have somehow created. THus I feel that recongizing ones place in nature is essential to healing and living a happy life. Anything that can help one to live a happy and healthy life is a worthv
Where did you score your aminita from? If you got it from an online vendor, you probably just got crap aminita. Next, how open was your spiritual heart when you took it? What was your intention? Did you understand the level of consciousness it was taking you to and how it fints into the larger picture? Aminita are very spiritul. If I was wanting a recreational xperience i would not choose aminita. I think a lot of peopleddisl
Well, how could synthetic chems not be derived from natural sources? I mean, where else are you gonna go to get materials? Outside nature, which is everywhere?
I think naturally occurring substances just have a better ring and feel to them because there has been a longer history of human usage. In that context, it does make one feel more comfortable about taking them, even if synthetic chems prove to be just as safe. The jury is still out.
Thats actually another reason I prefer natural drugs which I forgot to mention, the long history of human usage. Not only does this provide assurance of safety, but if you go with the premise that everything is fundamentally made of mind rather than physical
Kl519
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That was the whole point at face value, pretty much. It was simply an observation that I gleaned from reading his post. Nothing more.