Questions I've been pondering after a dozen of trips.

[Astor]

I've been wondering several psychedelic related topics I think the community will highly benefit discussing.

1) How do you integrate your trips ?

I feel sometimes that I need to spend several days meditating after, journaling, getting massaged and going to the spa because I feel quite fragile and I have a lot of emotions to process that are coming up.

2) How often do you wait between trips ?

I feel like shrooms/LSD have a two week tolerance because nature wanted it to be used that way, to at least wait 2 weeks before usage, but that might be just a unfounded theory which sounds nice. But tripping too often can maybe be harmful if you don't get enough time to integrate, which is paradoxical since tripping also helps you to integrate !

3) How do you know when you should increase your dose and when you should remain and work at any given dose ?

4) Is it best to : set intentions and take notes during the trip or fully surrender to it and let yourself be taken by it ?

For instance, shrooms for me are a let go experience where I let go of control while I have more control on LSD and can prepair questions I wanna ponder which seems absurd on mushrooms.

5) Is there actually a plant spirit or molecule spirit working with you or are you "alone" and "roleplaying" with yourself ?

6) How do you handle things you're not able to surrender to whilst tripping ?

7) How do you know the difference between you disrespecting the substance (bad set &setting) vs. you dealing with your own projections ?

Is the psychedelic "neutral" and bringing out "content" from inside yourself (subconscious) and your current environment or is it something else ?

 

[heatlessbbq]

1) How do you integrate your trips ?
Answer: Keep tripping.

2) How often do you wait between trips ?
Answer: Your intuition will guide You.

3) How do you know when you should increase your dose and when you should remain and work at any given dose ?
Answer: Your Set and Setting should tell You.

4) Is it best to : set intentions and take notes during the trip or fully surrender to it and let yourself be taken by it ?
Answer: Just go with the flow.

5) Is there actually a plant spirit or molecule spirit working with you or are you "alone" and "roleplaying" with yourself ?
Answer: Absolutely.

6) How do you handle things you're not able to surrender to whilst tripping ?
Answer: Distract Yourself with things YOU enjoy and like.

7) How do you know the difference between you disrespecting the substance (bad set &setting) vs. you dealing with your own projections ?
Answer: If You have an awareness. You're karma will tell You.

 

[Hodor]

I've been wondering several psychedelic related topics I think the community will highly benefit discussing.

1) How do you integrate your trips ?

During trip: Write a journal. After trip: read through journal again, taking everything you write down with a grain of salt. Many times the things you come up with during trip are just good for a laugh, sometimes they're inspiring. The best ones are probably the ones that are both inspiring AND funny/bizarre, giving you motivation to better your life and reminding you not to take your hallucinatory epiphanies as gospel at the same time.

And of course it can help to discuss the trip with a therapist, should you be seeing one.

2) How often do you wait between trips ?

I feel like shrooms/LSD have a two week tolerance because nature wanted it to be used that way, to at least wait 2 weeks before usage, but that might be just a unfounded theory which sounds nice. But tripping too often can maybe be harmful if you don't get enough time to integrate, which is paradoxical since tripping also helps you to integrate !

Isn't shroom/tryptamine tolerance said to reset more quickly than LSD/lysergamide tolerance? At any rate, if you were to trip every ~14 days a year, the problem would be less one of purely physiological tolerance, but more that of psychological tolerance, the famous "losing the magic". Well, that or psychosis.

IMO, it would be good to trip, on average, every ~6-8 weeks or so, but that can mean that sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to have two trips less than two weeks apart (you might have to adjust the dose to account for tolerance, however), and then maybe not trip for two months. Again, the main issue here is psychological tolerance.

That said, when I tripped several times during one summer, at one point having two lysergamide trips just a week apart, I saw visual snow (visual white noise/static like the "snow" on an old TV, except multi-coloured) persist for more than a full day after tripping. Obviously, visual snow is not something I wanted to become persistent for extended periods, since as a symptom of HPPD it represents a quasi-physical impairment (the visual noise impairs your ability to see contrasts in the dark). So yeah, that kind of symptom might be a hint to take it easier on the psychedelics.

3) How do you know when you should increase your dose and when you should remain and work at any given dose ?

Tripping is different from weight lifting. Way too many people nowadays seem caught up in this dick-sizing contest about who can handle the most heroic of doses and die the most ego deaths.

Choose a dose that is appropriate to the situation. Are there additional risk factors? How well did you handle your last dose? Even Shulgin liked to point out that the most amazing kinds of trips, the ones he'd rate a +4 on his scale, weren't necessarily tied to high doses.

4) Is it best to : set intentions and take notes during the trip or fully surrender to it and let yourself be taken by it ?
For instance, shrooms for me are a let go experience where I let go of control while I have more control on LSD and can prepair questions I wanna ponder which seems absurd on mushrooms.

I like taking notes because it is sometimes enlightening and often hysterically funny. "Setting intentions" should not get to the point where the whole experience gets way too serious and you get into a stresssed-out mindset. Also, I am pretty sure that at an appropriate dose, any psychedelic can be used for "pondering". It's just that psychedelics like LSD, 2C-E or mescaline, being more long-lasting, lend themselves better to drawn-out pondering sessions than something like psilocybin or 2C-D, where the trip may already be over before you've been able to get in some decent pondering time.

5) Is there actually a plant spirit or molecule spirit working with you or are you "alone" and "roleplaying" with yourself ?

IMO, if there was a "plant spirit" in shrooms, the first thing it would tell you is probably something like: "I AM *NOT* A FUCKING PLANT. Just because it lives in the woods and is immobile doesn't mean it's a plant. WE FUNGI ARE MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO YOU HUMANS THAN WE ARE TO PLANTS!"

6) How do you handle things you're not able to surrender to whilst tripping ?

Try and distract yourself. Otherwise take a benzo, just enough to get the trip back under control.

7) How do you know the difference between you disrespecting the substance (bad set &setting) vs. you dealing with your own projections ?
Is the psychedelic "neutral" and bringing out "content" from inside yourself (subconscious) and your current environment or is it something else ?

The psychedelic is indeed "neutral" and bringing out "content" from inside the self (subconscious) and altering the way you process your environment, yes.
However, your set and setting can greatly influence what kinds of things get dredged up from your subconscious.

 

[Chris Timothy]

IMO, if there was a "plant spirit" in shrooms, the first thing it would tell you is probably something like: "I AM *NOT* A FUCKING PLANT. Just because it lives in the woods and is immobile doesn't mean it's a plant. WE FUNGI ARE MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO YOU HUMANS THAN WE ARE TO PLANTS!"

That's assuming plant spirits would be pedantic about semantics.. : P

Excellent point though. So much to be learned from exploring the Tree of Life.