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Comment by Moodles | Hacker News Reader

I’ve taken psychedelics a few times. Sometimes, it’s just been mild and giggling at colors and nature. Pleasant, but just kind of a fun drug. Sometimes it’s been just extremely confusing and not at all fun, to the extent that I’d forget my own name or what I’ve taken and basically just all memories. It’s very frustrating to be in that state, constantly trying not to fly away but not able to ground yourself. It’s a little disturbing, but not horrific.

Sometimes though, it’s been a truly beautiful, enlightening experience. I still think of it sometimes. It’s very difficult to really explain in words, but it feels like kind of extreme empathy with all life. Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay. I’m not particularly religious or spiritual at all but that experience really changed me a bit, I still think of it. It feels like a shortcut to enlightenment that usually takes a lifetime of meditation, albeit short-lasting. To really get it permanently, you probably have to meditate a lot. It was amazing. It feels like life is in all these different forms, and you just happen to be one variation of it, but you could easily be any other living thing, so you just feel love and empathy for all life. And you know it’s finite and you’re not afraid of death. I would still attempt to avoid death, but I was just at peace with it if it was inevitable.

I think it’s a shame psychedelics get put in the same category as other drugs in the law and in people’s heads. It’s not at all the same as heroin, meth, cocaine. Not at all. I think on balance they should probably be legal, but I can easily imagine someone with mental illness struggling with mushrooms so I’m glad John Hopkins is doing these studies. It does seem like the therapeutic affects are long-lasting, and it’s not like you can overdose on them. The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them. However if the dose is so strong, you probably wouldn’t be able to move much anyway.

Edit: a lot of replies to this post seem to talk about LSD. I was actually talking about mushrooms. I've only taken LSD once. Maybe the distinction matters.

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I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose). Anecdotally I had a friend in high school who was a brilliant programmer and started using LSD and other psychedelics.

He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook and after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore - the drugs permanently changed him.

To be fair I don't know if he was using other drugs in conjunction with psychedelics but my (possibly ignorant) gut feeling is to be wary of implications of harmlessness when it comes to any drug.

I knew a guy who had changed significantly after a weekend retreat with some cultish experience (Landmark Forum, I am, or something like that). 48 hours of intensive experience though no pharmaceutical.

He was on every kind of excellence list at uni, on 3 different merit scholarships (which all unfortunately went directly to the uni, not personally to him).

That weekend was in the middle of the semester; he basically quit that week, but still came in to campus to complete his TA duties which are hard to drop mid semester; then went on an around-the-world trip for a year. I met him once randomly on the street afterwards, and he said he was happier than ever before, with no intention of going back to his studies or any other aspect of his former life.

I had told this around the time he came back from his trip to two of my friends, neither of whom knew that guy.

One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”.

The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”.

20 years later, I still don’t have a firm opinion myself.

One’s response was “wow, that weekend saved him from decades of misery”.

The other’s response was “wow, that weekend had ruined him forever”.

The truth is in the eye of the beholder, of course. "Save" and "ruin" is such strong language though. However, I'm willing to bet this guy is better off not worrying about others think, and maybe, by extension, you're better off for not judging.

Maybe the course he was doing was not for him but didn't have the guts or confidence to move on, psychedelics really open you up, and at the end of the day if he is happy, he is winning at life. Regardless of career aspirations etc.

Landmark forum is a self improvement seminar with pretty cult-ish tendencies. I lost a really good friend to it as well.

Agreed. I think HN in general is too quick to dismiss the potential dangers of psychedelics. I know at least a couple people who have essentially lost their minds as a result of frequent psychedelic use. It's pretty terrifying to see someone slowly become more paranoid delusional and incoherent when they once were an intelligent and charismatic friend.

Agreed. I had a friend in high-school who was very smart, 2-years ahead in math, well-spoken and thoughtful.

After some amount of different hallucinogens he became lastingly weird. He would start saying things about "divine geometry" and "seeing yellow auras" when he closed his eyes and became a big believer in all sorts of supernatural (e.g. horoscopes)

He did come back to something not too far from normalcy maybe 8 years later, last time I heard from him.

It's true that these substances can change you. But then it is worth asking, who are you? And is that anything worth holding on to? And what is normalcy, and what exactly is that worth?

I feel like you're trying to derail the discussion by asking random, seemingly unanswerable questions.

Normality is a broad but pretty well-researched subject and i think it's safe to say, belief in horoscopes and other unsubstantiated supernatural phenomena ain't it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normality_(behavior)

The first definition in the very first sentence of the article you linked contradicts you. It defines normal behavior as "consistent with the most common behaviour for that person" (emphasis mine). That is, the first definition definitely doesn't depend on other people, but simply what is common for the individual.

In that way, "normality" is flexible: if you change your behavior in a consistent way, your new behavior is normal by that definition. You didn't become "abnormal" you simply redefined your normal.

Now the article goes on to mention that you could also define this relative to a larger population, etc, which supports your point - but the very fact the headline definitely doesn't align with your claim shows that this is not as straightforward as you make it out to be.

I don't think making this about definitions brings anything to the discussion. I meant to appeal to common sense. If your friend starts to see magic auras and find other patterns where there clearly aren't any, that's well past the point where you show concern instead of entertaining his worldview.

To say that psychedellics cause a deviation from normalcy would be correct. But if you're making that out to be a problem, than you have to support why normalcy is good and deviation from that is bad.

Totally fair. We shouldn't just assume that "weirdness" is bad because there's a social norm against it.

But I for one feel everybody around me finds "weirdness" unbecoming. I find it to be an inescapable reality that people will care about you less and not want to get you for any manner of tiny deviation (e.g. as an extreme example, just if you said "beep" outloud every 10 minutes this would be reason enough for I think half of the population or more to not want to associate with you)

In my friends case though, I think what scared me the most was he became very unclear/metaphorical in speaking about even basic topics and didn't seem to realize how much trouble people had understanding him.

Sounds like a person in the grip of a big idea, wrapped up in their own thinking. That can be a pain to deal with but it tends to be self-correcting. If someone stops communicating with people effectively, others will withdraw, and that isolation eventually causes pain. Eventually the person who's off in their head will start to notice their needs are not being met, and as they search for a way to return to earth to get what they need, they'll have to do the work themselves to understand others and present their new ideas in a coherent and sensible way. Pulling away from a friend who's talking nonsense can sometimes be the most loving thing to do.

I feel like some people are (unfortunately, expectedly) overinterpreting my statement as "normal > abnormal" instead of intended "extremely abnormal deserves extreme scepticism". Keep in mind that I'm an avid psychedelics supporter myself. Still, I see no excuse for superstition.

> "seeing yellow auras" when he closed his eyes

I want to demystify this a bit. I don't think it's as unusual as you suggest.

I assume you haven't had any substances lately. What do you see when you close your eyes? If you're like I've always been, you see floaters, a few spots of light here and there, maybe a faint "ghost" of the image your eye had seconds before, especially if it was bright. I first noticed that in childhood. In childhood I also noticed that in low light, like in my parents' car in the evening, I would see this light occasionally. I read in some places that this is a possible explanation for when kids complain about seeing monsters in the closet, or similar. As I got older I noticed this sort of thing less.

Later I started getting migraines, though, and when I get those symptoms I also see light that isn't there. Sometimes when I have a headache I can see it come in waves when I close my eyes.

Later still, I got a little into meditation, and I noticed I could make those perceptions come about by manipulating my breathing.

And finally, I did a low dose of psilocybin exactly one time in my life. I saw colors when closing my eyes. It was pretty much the same as all those experiences above, only a little more intense.

But you know, we also see faces in clouds. Sometimes we think we spot recognizable objects, then look closer and longer, and they're not there. Our brains are taking shortcuts based on limited data all the time, without drugs. What the drug does, in my layperson's understanding, is make your brain very eager to make these connections. Just as you might see a face in a random, noisy pattern when you're not looking closely, your brain is eager to interpret whatever visual data it gets and run with it. When your brain is deprived of sensory input, such as in darkness or with eyes closed, seemingly it can do this more.

I would say about your friend, don't rush to judge them for describing a particular wrinkle of how his brain works. Perhaps they got a little too into talking and thinking about it, or came to the wrong conclusion. But the experience itself is not that remarkable, and happens to sound-minded people all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(symptom)

You can abuse most things. Ive seen the same with people spending too much time online in strange communities without the drugs. But sure psykedelics breaks down ego and does other changes that from the outside might Seem a little wierd... but at the same time i see most people not being very charismatic and Im a firm believer the world would be a better place if everyone tried it atleast once. The entire world is somewhat delusional.

There is indeed a very thin line between psychosis and intense religious experiences. It is why in some religions, knowing God will literally burn the mind.

I would recommend psychedelics, but like anything, it depends on the person. There are dangers, but those dangers can be controlled quite well. At the population level, it is safer than coffee. At the individual level, it varies, just like anything else.

I will note that after taking ~110 μg of LSD-25 on several occasions, my overall cognition improved dramatically.

You cannot control HPPD.

I have it and you 100% can. I've trained myself to not react to it and it has faded from my perception

I'm sure many people can live with many discomforts, but a lot of people HPPD cannot function as before they had it.

I have eye floaters and I can live just fine with them jumping around, still doesn't change the fact they are annoying and if I could get rid of them I would; if they were caused by something I did and I could change that, I would.

I'm sure most people with HPPD, if given the choice, would never have done psychedelics in the first place; HPPD is why I stayed away from psychedelics.

In what sense did your cognition improve, and how do you know?

In terms of raw information processing. Focus, perhaps? Prior to taking psychedelics, I would struggle to process information, though I was an avid reader. Recall seems markedly improved too. Again, it is all anecdotal. It is a non-trivial problem to even begin to measure cognition, intelligence, consciousness, etc.

You can either demolish the brick wall or you can take it apart brick by brick. One of which is overwhelming and can cause collateral damage, the other of which takes longer but accomplishes the same with more safety.

My understanding is that many spiritual traditions have historically viewed psychedelics as ego’s way of “grasping” for enlightenment, for many before they are prepared for what they may experience.

A “bad trip” can leave someone in a state of confusion that they aren’t quite prepared to deal with.

Meditated for many years now and studied theravadin and others. And I still found Radiohead a great "drug": How to dissapear completely - Kid A(made me think of ego death more tangible)

I am sometimes sceptical of this because people experiment with these drugs usually around the same time that latent schizophrenia develops (early-mid 20s in males). I'm sure that they can do damage, and especially create a tipping point for people with a family history, but I'm still not sure how much is just because of the drug and not something that would have developed anyway.

Yeah, it's definitely a thing.

Here's an interesting post about it maybe being due to extremely high "openness" caused by psychs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched...

I suspect this is much more common than anyone realizes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-o...

> I'm a little skeptical of the claim that you can't overdose on them (overdose in the sense of using them too much, not lethal overdose

I meant lethal overdose, like heroin. I certainly I know some people who take too many drugs. Personally I don’t feel like I have to do any psychedelics ever again, but maybe I will, I don’t know. They are not chemically addictive anyway.

And your high school friend taking them at such a young age?! Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Maybe he’s mentally ill anyway? Maybe it was the drugs? Maybe it was other drugs? That’s why I would like to see more controlled studies from reputable places like John Hopkins. The data looks relatively promising so far, but more needs to be done I think.

They are not chemically addictive but my suspicion is that they can be psychologically addictive. I once knew someone who would argue for a Brave New World-esque world because of his (positive) experiences of psychedelics.

I don’t think his friend is mentally ill but he reminds me of someone like Eckhart Tolle.

I don't think Eckhart Tolle is mentally ill at all. There's nothing wrong with being like Echkart. But I just admitted to taking psychedelics, so maybe people think I'm mentally ill now :-) To clarify, I'm not much like Echkart: those same people would think I am doing "well": i work in SF in tech, I make 200k+, pretty normal. That's "good", while Echkart is "bad". it's a bit silly to me.

Anyways, I had a good experience, you know some people who, from your perspective, have not. That's why we need studies.

Are we not already living in Brave New World a la benzos and opiods?

Not all 'psychedelics' are the same, some definitely can have potential for overdose in the lethal sense.

Some people have underlying neurological issues that can manifest in teenage/early adulthood years independently of drug use, although use of psychedelic drugs does tend to exacerbate such problems.

It is possible the drugs permanently changed this person. It is also possible the drugs merely accelerated what would have happened regardless.

For most people, psychedelics are indeed pretty harmless.

You're confusing chronic abuse with overdose. A psychedelic overdose just means you're in a chemically induced psychosis. It's easy to die in this state, but by falling off a balcony, not because you stop breathing. Some of the newfangled psychedelics coming out of China can cause serotonin syndrome, however, which can be fatal. But it's not practically possible to overdose on the traditional psychedelics.

Yes, and your experience is not unique - Syd Barrett is a very well known poster child for frying your mind with psychedelics. He was also a brilliant mind whose use of LSD destroyed his coherence.

For every Syd Barrett, how many hundreds if not thousands of people play with these compounds, and don't end up there?

This kind of thinking scans to me like pointing at the severity of plane crashes as a reason not to fly, while poo-poohing their infrequency.

I have, for about a decade now, worked with a number of groups who ritually consume some of the most powerful psychedelics on the planet. I have journeyed with hundreds of different people, and seen truly adverse reactions, where it was more than just a bad trip and the person needed medical attention, all of once.

EDIT: Yes, absolutely, there are risks, but in my experience, they can almost all be mitigated with a little honesty and self-awareness. Maybe don't play with these things by yourself if you have a family history of some kinds of mental illness. Maybe don't play with them at all if you're on certain medications, or have certain, other mental health concerns.

Like schizophrenia. Yes, let's blame "drugs" for what happens when people whose brains are already wired to believe their own, demonstrably false narratives, take them.

"This kind of thinking"? I made no comment as to whether it's worth the risk. I was simply responding to "it’s not like you can overdose on them. The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them." Which is demonstrably false, as you yourself have personally seen someone develop an adverse reaction and require medical attention.

I wasn't singling you or your comment out as having said the thing. I apologize unreservedly if that's how it read.

I replied to you because your mention of Syd Barrett was the best place to hang my "don't extrapolate from your cousin's brother's nephew's uncle's former roomate's anecdata" point, without coming across that dismissively, because it gave me the clearest opening to talk about occult mental health concerns and such.

Of course you can overdose on them. Even a sub-threshold dose of psilocin can kill many rabbits. Some brains just can't handle the alterations in perception these agents induce. I still fail to see how that's the agent's fault, and not the person who put it in themselves, especially if they're being cavalier, or showing off, or mixing things they aren't prepared to handle.

I can't go into the details of my friend requiring medical attention without violating confidences, but I can say their own behavior and attitude towards the experience beforehand were, let's call it "materially contributory" to their experience during and after.

EDIT: Phrasing.

You can overdose on LSD. I dunno about other hallucinogens, but you can do enough LSD you just never really come back properly. Doing a lot regularly over a long period also seems to have dome lasting effects.

Even after only doing it once years ago, I still see strange waves sometimes when I see ripples in water or the wake from boats. At the end of it, I was on the beach staring at the waves and the rippled the same way. I never used to see this in water before that.

This can be true of any experience. You probably did experience similar distortions of visual perception previously, you just didn't associate them with an LSD experience and thus they casually passed from memory un-noted. Waves and ripples in water are certainly not so abnormal.

Also overdose is too strong a word, and has a different connotation here than elsewhere. One can take 100 micrograms and have a wonderful experience, or one can take 100 micrograms and see the devil and never be the same. The mind is the difference maker, not the quantity of the drug.

People have taken extremely large doses and not perished (one story of people mistakenly snorting crystals thinking it was cocaine comes to mind).

You're right, overdose is the wrong word. I was thinking of a friend of my dad's who ended up doing a large bag full of LSD rather than get caught by the cops and ended up in a psych ward permanently, or some of the older hippies I know who spent several years doing lsd every day who do tend to have some issues formulating ideas coherently at times.

Are you entirely sure? I've experienced a small amount of this myself, but its so small, I'm really not sure if it wasn't there all along (and I wasn't looking for it)

Well, even if it's something that was there that I.never noticed before, it's changed my perception at least which would.be some sort of lasting effect.

Personally, I liked acid, it was far more pleasant than any other hallucinogen i've done and has the added bonus of not making you feel sick(if it's pure).

I would like to propose another explanation.

Schizophrenia typically starts manifesting in people in their teens and early twenties. It is not uncommon for people who are feeling that things are not quite right to experiment with drugs as a way to self medicate.

It appears that stressful situations can be the triggers for this, such as: Moving away from home for the first time, personal relationship issues, or experimenting with psychedelics.

It's not clear to me that the arrow of causality necessarily points the direction that you think it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD

> three thousand times the human recreational dose

Dang.

Perhaps it is possible to die from an overdose of psychedelics, I stand corrected. However, it seems like you can technically overdose from anything after a certain amount. You can technically die from overdosing on potassium if you eat something like 1000 bananas in a day. What I meant is that you can't overdose, just like you can't from weed (even though, I'm sure, if you smoke 1000000 blunts you would). What I mean is that you're no way near something like heroin where the difference between death and bliss isn't much at all. You'd have to be pretty insane to die from overdosing on psychedelics.

There's a name for this. LD50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose Sort by %, you'll find that caffeine, nicotine and vitamin D are more lethal than most illegal psychedelics.

Is there a name for the width of the LD curve? The LD50 is useful information but also useful is knowing the intensity of that onset.

This is technically not what you're asking for, but you might be interested in the therapeutic index (the ratio between LD50, 50% probability of lethal dose, and ED50, 50% probability of effective dose).

The term you're looking for is "therapeutic index".

It's easy to overdose on 2c-e, for example. Around the time I was getting interested in phenylethylamines there was an incident in my home state where five teenagers overdosed and died by snorting lines of 2c-e.

That was probably actually an nbome (e.g. 25-c-nbome)sold as 2-ce.

No, it was 2c-e according to the toxicology reports in the newspapers at least.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. I've seen plenty of people go into nonsensical ramblings without drugs involved. Or maybe your friend was "awakened" to pseudo-spirituality first and then got into psychedelics? That seems very common as well.

I think what he’s trying to say is you can’t overdose in the sense of most other drugs, unless you take a stupendous amount of it (say >50 the regular dose). There is some correlation between dosage and whether the experience will be positive or negative though.

As for your friend, from what I’ve learned on psychedelics, it can give people a “religious experience”, for a lack of a better term. It seems that’s what happened to him. However, how much weight one should give those experiences is debatable. If one is going to believe in those positive experiences, shouldn’t one also believe in the negative ones?

Avoiding all human interactions capable of inducing love and shunning psychedelics might prevent a small number of tragic people from going off of the rails. Logic and the knowledge that chemicals are behind all of these profound human experiences make them unusually safe for the rest of us.

>after a few years of this, it became clear he wasn't even the same person anymore

I mean, is anyone really the same person after a few years? Especially someone you knew in high school?

I've witnessed something similar, and I later discovered the person was developing schizophrenia. It seemed like the drugs were setting him on a bad path, but I believe he took them to self medicate in retrospect. I suspect that's fairly common now.

He's still very intelligent, but all of his mental resources are wasted on fighting his illness so to speak. To some it might seem like he ruined his brain with drugs but I sincerely doubt the drugs did much damage at all.

Changing yourself due to increased neuroplasticity is a feature, not a bug. That isn't the same thing as "overdosing."

Being in an environment or situation where that can be a problem is still not preferred. It may not be an overdose, but the outcome of drug use by their friend doesn’t seem positive.

Agreed. You can have good trips and bad trips. It is highly dependent on environment and state of mind.

The only guarantee is that your ability to change increases due to increased neuroplasticity. Whether the change is good or bad is ultimately up to you, which is why I think if these drugs were to be legalized that the intake should happen in conjunction with in-person therapy in a controlled environment and not at all something you'd just pickup at a pharmacy and take on your own like anti-depressants are today.

Was this person in their late teens / early 20s? Many people who have latent schizophrenia end up initially triggering it around this age via LSD - these people would have most likely triggered it eventually through stress.

To be fair, I don't think anyone is claiming that LSD won't change you permanently. Indeed, many would say that is one of the reasons people should try it.

I was so unlucky that my sister when completely manic for about three months, just by doing LSD once (Not sure if it was something else, sold as LSD).

>He started posting tons of strange, nonsensical pseudo-spiritual ramblings on facebook

See, it worked!

>The worst that can happen is you do something stupid while on them.

Not so fast. I had a bad LSD (and some marijuana) trip once and had flashbacks for 2 months. I would be going around my day and suddenly reality turned into a videogame or an evil simulation.

That was like 3 years ago, it has all passed now, never had flashbacks again and I'm glad I had that bad trip, because it showed me reality in a way that I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. But maybe if I had had a higher dose, or had been in a worse place in my life, I would have gone completely mad.

There is a point in the come-down from LSD where pot is actively contraindicated. The ... for lack of a better word "slope" of the fading LSD experience coupled with the short-term memory inhibition of pot can cause people to get stuck in a loop where they forget they're tripping, are reminded of that by an altered perception, and then experience increasing anxiety with each cycle of the loop over when it's ever going to end.

Not saying that's what happened to you, or anything like it, but the general wisdom in the psychonaut world is "don't mix things unless you know what you're doing".

EDIT: Phrasing

I have a friend who had that experience. He was coming down from LSD, vaped some THC-heavy pot, and experienced a powerful burst of anxiety which momentarily interrupted his short-term memory. He then had the experience of "coming-to" with his body on full alert, for no apparent reason. As he struggled to understand what it was about the world that made it feel so terribly wrong, but failing to find anything in his safe, cozy environment that might explain it, his anxiety mounted - until it got so bad he experienced another short-term memory interruption and the cycle began again. This went on for close to an hour, a repeated cycle of panicking, blacking out, waking up, looking around, panicking, before he was finally able to communicate with his friends, who helped him take a benzo and end the experience.

While it sounds like it must have been a nightmarish experience, what's remarkable is that my friend doesn't regret it at all. As he worked out what was going on in his mind, he discovered that he had to force himself to remain calm in order to maintain a continuity of consciousness. Every time his focus slipped, he'd black out again - so he spent that entire experience focusing on the physical sensations of anxiety, separating those perceptions from his understanding of reality, and directing his consciousness away from worry and toward calm. After it was all over, he says he came away with a much, much improved ability to maintain awareness of his anxiety and to choose how to respond to it appropriately, instead of just freaking out and reacting.

I think that this is one of the big values of psychedelic experience: by inducing intense, unfamiliar states of mind, we can gain perspective on the inner operation of our cognition, and learn to distinguish between the sensations we experience and the physical realities they respond to. Over time, by bashing your consciousness to and fro in a variety of directions, you can gain more and more insight into its operation, which can help you increase your conscious control over your internal experience and therefore improve your life.

> by inducing intense, unfamiliar states of mind, we can gain perspective on the inner operation of our cognition

Yes, this. I've found, though, that the intensity can often be dialed back significantly, while still achieving comparable, certainly more comfortable, and sometimes even better effects.

I think there's absolutely a time and a place for nuking one's ego psychedelically, but it's broadly better to chip at it — if, to torture the metaphor a bit, with a plasma cutter instead of a chisel...

I've recently read a seminal work on LSD and how it affects human psyche: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196573.Realms_of_the_Hum.... Cannot recommend it enough. I feel it demystified a great deal of uncertainty and unknowns I had about LSD. The book was based on roughly 2500 LSD sessions (mostly high dose, in 150-300mg range) that the author conducted in 70s with different patients, including himself. AFAIK, it is the first book to systematically approach the topic and map psychedelic LSD experiences in roughly 4 categories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof#Encounter_with_....

Each patient would have series of LSD sessions in a regulated environment (usually in a room with an interior that feels secure and comfortable, a psychoanalyst guiding the session included). First sessions were used to test an individual high dose threshold. Once the high dose for a patient was established they would stick to it. According to the book, 'bad' or traumatic LSD experiences are mostly related to the 2nd (BPM II: Cosmic Engulfment and No Exit) and 3rd (BPM III: The Death-Rebirth Struggle), reliving of birth- and prenatal traumas that are suppressed. It takes usually several high dose sessions with a psychoanalytic integration work afterwards in order to 'resolve' traumas. Once they are resolved they don't resurface and the person generally can lead happier life.

Regarding 'bad trips' with lasting consequences in the aftermath: the author mentions that _in some cases_ when a trauma was not resolved or properly addressed in the course of one session the patient could suffer from various psychotic episodes after the sessions was over. As far as I could tell, simplistically speaking, this was attributed mainly to the fact that the traumatic content (normally suppressed) resurfaced and was sort of left uncovered and 'half-processed'. It was stressed in several places in the book how important is that the 'set and setting' is right for an LSD session and how it could be dangerous and counterproductive if LSD is consumed in a wrong environment or not followed up with an appropriate 'psychoanalytic' work after the session is finished.

This is why either having a good grounding in meditation techniques and having a guide on hand during a trip is a very important precaution to take for safe experiences. An experienced guide could have helped you break out of the negative experience. If you had better conscious awareness of your mental state, you could have recognized the slide into a bad state and prevented it.

The flashbacks you were experiencing were very real traumatic flashbacks, like what a victim of violence would experience.

The promising results that psychologists are having with psychedelic drugs all centers around having a trained operator guiding the experience to get a desired effect. It's not just a matter of dropping acid and you immediately see GOD and fix your PTSD.

I knew someone once who took a lot of LSD. Her line was that LSD was the most economical of the drugs, because after a while, the effects would happen even when you weren't taking them. I thought this sounded more similar to "permanent brain damage".

Were you on any other pharmaceuticals at the time?

No.

You might enjoy reading the book How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan. It describes exactly what you are saying, has lots of different testimonials and has a great overview of the whole psychedelic therapy research world going from the 50s all the way to now.

> Buddhists would call it going egoless. I just felt very at peace: we all live, we all die, and it’s all okay.

My Mom raised me to feel that this is putting yourself outside the picture as a passive observer. I was taught from a very young age to remove myself to this state whenever I felt I couldn't understand the world. The older I get, the more I observe the world and behaviour of people around me, the harder I find it to escape this state, silently watching, observing, trying to understand the chaos that is humanity.

That sounds like dissociation. Many people who use ketamine have talked about similar states of mind.

While in this state, what kind of thoughts/feelings run through your mind ?

That's really difficult to put into words effectively... I'll try.

I'm not aware of any thoughts or feelings while I'm in the moment I'm in that state. It's not about me. It's about everything going on around me. I'm in the mental place of an observer - In that state I'm evaluating everything from an academic standpoint. Self isn't a state I analyze in that moment except from perhaps a diagnostic analysis. If someone were to ask me right in that moment how I feel, I would never be able to truthfully tell them. If you asked me right this second how I feel, I don't have an answer for you - when I'm in diagnostic mode, my emotions are... unavailable, or like trying to divide by zero, undefined.

Do you like being in that state?

Honestly, it can be depressing and confusing.

I equate it to being in the mind of a therapist. You're there in the moment, but you're not really there in the moment. You're watching people, thinking about who they are and why they are the way they are, observing behaviour, understanding the nuance of how they interact together.

It's interesting. Fascinating even from an academic standpoint. But life isn't academic. The beauty of life can only be experienced if you let yourself experience it.

You know that scene where he wants to be put back in the Matrix because ignorance is bliss... yeah, that.

There is a meditation experience called the "Dark Night" where some people are overwhelmed by the dissociative "no self" feelings after meditation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...

> Honestly, it can be depressing and confusing. ... The beauty of life can only be experienced if you let yourself experience it.

It sounds like your state differs in some key ways from what the Buddhists are aiming for. Nirvana isn't meant to be clinical, depressing, or confusing.

The funny thing about emotions is that they don’t really care what is "meant to be."

I agree, but don't understand how this connects to our conversation. All I mean is that there are many interesting and profound states that one can achieve through meditation (or other means), the vast majority of which are not nirvana -- though they may seem to share some surface similarities when described in rough English.

Agreed, sorry, I wasn't meaning to appear to disagree with your statement, rather more suggesting that feelings don't tend to care about any intentional outcome, only what is.

This is a very different answer to the other one. How interesting.

I think if you're asking a question like "do you like it", you're not yet in that state.

I'm no expert in meditation or psychedelics, but I get into what I imagine is this state when I, for example, hike the top of a mountain. I can look out at the trees around me and, it's odd, but concerns kinda fade away. Good/bad or good/evil just don't really exist, things just are. You see both the trees and the forest, and you get a sense that these have been here for a long time and will continue to be long after you're gone. So "do you like it" is kinda irrelevant because it's not about a "you"... it's just one long infinite flow. Then it's time to descend and you snap back into your head. /shrug

I've also heard astronauts get this a lot and call this the "overview effect" or something like that. Type that into youtube and you'll listen to some people who've been into space talk about it way more eloquently than me, all while streaming earth flybys from that 360-view cupola room on the ISS.

> I think if you're asking a question like "do you like it", you're not yet in that state.

Haha very true. Most meditates are trying to achieve a particular state, not happy with the state they are currently in ;-) But thanks for answering my real question regardless.

> "The overview effect"

This is perfect... this is exactly it. There aren't any thoughts about whether you like it, it just is.

This was beautifully written, and very, very much captures my sentiments (and experiences) with psychedelics as well.

Actually, reading your post was moving. Maybe the most impactful HN post I can remember reading (perhaps with some amount of recency bias in it's favor. Still...)

Thank you!

Indeed, you might not have to use the drug to get some benefits :)

We live in a culture of (economic) winners and losers, and if you get hung up on this mindset, which is encouraged btw, you could imagine a low place for yourself. Get stuck long enough and it’ll grind you to dust.

If we can break out using psychedelics, so much the better. And I agree with others here, it’s best as medicine, not a diet.

Thank you.

Could you elaborate why are you calling experience "enlightening", considering you can not put it into words?

There is a joke about a guy, who could not remember a brilliant idea, he got under drugs. He left a piece of paper and pencil around, and wrote it down during the next trip. A day later he found the paper, which read "The Water is Wet".

It was enlightening, but what I mean is that I simply lack the language skills to adaquately describe it. Can you describe a rainbow to a blind person? Sort of: you might try to explain it in terms of sounds being next to each other, but we lack the language to do it adequately.

My original post is sort of the best I can do I think. It’s not like “enlightening” like knowledge I learned. It was just enlightening in a kind of spiritual way, to feel that way. To know I’m capable of feeling that at peace and empathetic, I guess? Doesn’t give it justice but that’s an approximation.

Certainly true you can come out and say some stupid, non-profound things when on drugs though :-)

I can attest to this 'enlightening' on mushrooms too, experienced when coming down from height of the trip. I am not spiritual at all, but spending months in buddhist places like Ladakh or Nepal made me realize I was closest to that compared to say christianity.

It is some sort of unity with whole universe, living or not, profound and deep peace of mind with whatever life will throw at you, because in grand enough scheme of things it won't matter and its OK that way. These are mere words that can't describe the actual state, but the whole experience is still in some ways part of me and makes me a better person overall.

I can understand "a speck in a grand scheme". But how exactly the experience is making you better person? I know some people who do psychedelics, and they seem quite like anybody else.

Sort of a foresee: a philosophy of "won't matter" is definitely not the one driving the personal growth.

> But how exactly the experience is making you better person?

Look at the original post: The John Hopkins study.

This seems really trivial to argue. Look at the studies. Yes, there needs to be more, but the evidence looks promising. You arguing back and forth with everyone here is clearly going nowhere.

One can definitely describe a rainbow to a blind person. Your explanation is perfectly valid.

Does that mean, that before that experience you never felt at peace or empathetic, or were you just enlightened, that you can induce that feeling by drugs?

> One can definitely describe a rainbow to a blind person. Your explanation is perfectly valid.

My explanation is just an approximation though isn't it? It doesn't help the blind person to actually see the rainbow, just to get a sense of it.

> Does that mean, that before that experience you never felt at peace or empathetic, or were you just enlightened, that you can induce that feeling by drugs?

No. But the mushrooms caused a difference experience that I can only explain to you like I can only explain a rainbow as sounds to a blind person. Of course I feel empathy to people without drugs.

> My explanation is just an approximation though isn't it? It doesn't help the blind person to actually see the rainbow, just to get a sense of it.

What you are talking is physical experience. And I doubt drugs somehow give you that. How is it different from "a sense of it", except you being very excited about it by a drug?

It's just a different kind of experience. Psychedelics gave me this particular one. But plenty of other things, like having eyes or skydiving, give you a different experience too. You get a pretty accurate idea of what skydiving is like if you bungee jump, but nothing really compares to psychedelics so it's very difficult to explain, like explaining a rainbow to a blind person. Because no experience is really similar, words feel especially inadequate.

It doesn't make me better than anyone else because I took some shrooms. I'm not sure what you're arguing with me about.

I am arguing about the constant use of the word "enlightening" in relation with drug use. People don't call skydiving or bungee jumps "enlightening".

Ok, well, I choose to use that word. Given the actual dictionary definition of the word, I'm okay with using it.

You can describe anything to anyone but that doesn't mean they'll actually understand it. A blind person who has never seen anything, let alone colors, will never be able to comprehend what a rainbow looks like.

Sure, you can describe it in a technically correct way, maybe even provide an analogy, but what you can't provide is the context for understanding the experience of seeing the rainbow.

The context being "being on drugs"? How is it related to enlightenment?

It's not that you lack the language skills to describe it, it's that you accessed a state of consciousness that exists before/beyond language. This is a state that has been extensively explored through meditation by yogis and which the foundation of Vedantic teachings if you want to learn more. The way I (poorly) understand it is that language is part of the veil that separates us from Source. You can't communicate what lies beyond the veil because the tool of communication is of the veil.

So, basically, some unscientific bullshit, that probably has no real effect, except the bragging rights?

It's astonising to see what lengths people will go to in order to dispute something they simply don't comprehend because of pre-existing bias.

It's a bit like trying to explain what being in love is like or what you feel when your child is born and he grabs your finger for the first time. You could just as easily dismiss those two, despite the fact that they are some of the most beautiful life experiences for any human.

It doesn't really matter if one writes a sentence or a novel about a psychedelic experience, you won't be that much closer to understanding it either way.

I am not trying to understand the experience. I am trying to understand if it actually provides any enlightenment apart from "wow this brain failure mode is fun to experience".

You probably won't understand by reading our HN comments. You come across as quite argumentative and not really ready to listen to a contradicting view. Maybe you're offended by the word "enlightening". I don't know why that's such a big deal?

I suggest you either try some mushrooms to understand for yourself, or chill out.

> You probably won't understand by reading our HN comments.

Why not? If nobody here, who had "enlightening" drug experiences, actually can mention something enlightening which they learned during a trip, it would reassure others, that there's no enlightening.

> I don't know why that's such a big deal?

Because we are talking about addictive and potentially dangerous chemicals, which people continue to suggest for some reason.

Your attitude is not one of desire to understand, but rather of desire to dispute. Someone that comes across as you do can rarely be budged, so I won't waste a lot of effort.

First of all, the archetypal psychedelic (e.g. mushrooms, LSD) are some of the safest substances one can consume from a physical health standpoint. The dangers come only psychologically and, to be fair, you cannot know beforehand what your reaction will be. However, these risks can be mitigated by doing research beforehand, taking an appropriate dose, testing your substance. As for addiction, psychedelics in particular are on the lower end of the scale. Caffeine and sugar are more addictive by orders of magnitude (though this is personal anecdote).

> actually can mention something enlightening which they learned during a trip

Now, it seems like, for you to be content, you want some pearl of wisdom or utterance that would sound unlike anything that's ever been said before. That will not happen and it is an unfair yardstick. Enlightening is the state you experience during and after the experience; you simply would not believe that your brain is capable of taking you to that place.

> Your attitude is not one of desire to understand, but rather of desire to dispute.

That's how understanding works. In science this process is called peer review.

> Now, it seems like, for you to be content, you want some pearl of wisdom or utterance that would sound unlike anything that's ever been said before.

Nah, anything, that person did not know/think before would be good.

> That will not happen and it is an unfair yardstick. Enlightening is the state you experience during and after the experience; you simply would not believe that your brain is capable of taking you to that place.

That's about as enlightening, as having your brain before bungee jump to believe you actually gonna do it.

> That's how understanding works. In science this process is called peer review.

Who are you trying to fool here, really? Your comments have been tendentious and definitely not on the neutral or inquisitive side. Your agenda is quite clear, despite the perfunctory attempts of proving the opposite.

> Nah, anything, that person did not know/think before would be good.

Fine. Quoting from a friend below, of course...

What effects you get deeply depends on what substance you ingest, and your mileage may vary, but generally speaking, your thoughts get a whole new dimension to them, a dimension that you never knew existed. You are not necessarily smarter, but you can quite literally _see_ avenues of reasoning stemming from your biases, opinions, thoughts. While sober thoughts are somewhat garbled up, without a clear beginning or end, on psychedelics they become like flipping through stack of books - visual, clear, compartmentalized, distinct. You can take an idea and dissect it by means that are just not available while sober.

There are many nuances to this and a text will never capture them all.

On mushrooms, as an example, I become objective to a fault. I know the notion of good and bad, but nothing is intrinsically so because my biases and preconceived ideas have gone out the window. I can think of a topic as if I became aware of it for the first time. I also get this state of constant awe at the beauty and the complexity of everyday life - be it a ladybug, a plane, a tree, a painting. This is not a state I want permanently, it doesn't necessarily _feel good_ by definition and it can be overwhelming.

Now, as for examples of what I "did not know/think before", there are plenty. Some of them too personal to post here, but I guess I can give one example.

My childhood was a happy one, but I never realized how much school has shaped me and affected me in negative ways. Since I was not brought up in a Western country, the school system was absurd in many ways, most obviously in terms of the authority issues I got from it. I always saw my school years as a given, an immutable part of my existence, and never once pondered the question of "how much different would I have been as a person in different circumstances?".

Think of this what you will, I have tried my best to convey a very complex experience that I myself have forgotten a lot about. The realness of the experience tends to fade away with abstinence.

> "how much different would I have been as a person in different circumstances?"

Are you seriously claiming that thought never crossed your mind before?

This can go on forever.

Have you never thought of the possibility of your parents passing away? Of course you did, but you don't internalize that until it happens.

Rather than criticize that which you have utterly no knowledge or understanding of, why don't you go see what it really is for yourself?

Because of the alleged negative long- and short-term effects.

Also, I am not actively seeking joy, that is induced by a drug.

This is far from sufficient to support the statement "some unscientific bullshit, that probably has no real effect, except the bragging rights."

And if you've read this thread and come to the conclusion that "seeking joy" is all that's going on here, it suggests yet another benefit you might realize from some small experimentation: a substantial improvement in your epistemological abilities.

>> Because of the alleged negative long- and short-term effects.

> This is far from sufficient to support the statement "some unscientific bullshit, that probably has no real effect, except the bragging rights."

Your question was formulated "why not just try". Why are you referring to the other part. If I have two choices, which you provided, and I kick one out with this answer, the other one is the only one left.

> a substantial improvement in your epistemological abilities

Are you claiming my "epistemological abilities" are somehow lacking, because I claim there's nothing enlightening but "wow, I can feel it on drugs" in drug-related experience, because multiple opponents on this thread fail to provide any concrete examples?

How about you guys are just delusional, or unable to adhere to Occam razor? The later states, that the explanation of drug experiences via a failure of participants to recognize bullshit in their dreams due to their brains being partially off, is superior to the explanation, that throwing a random chemical into a complex system designed to live a normal life can somehow produce a very deep though via a mechanism unknown?

My theory also have a very good easily falsifiable prediction, that the opposite does not: that none claiming to have an "enlightening" would be able to produce anything enlightening in this thread. And it holds so far.

> Are you claiming my "epistemological abilities" are somehow lacking, because I claim there's nothing enlightening but "wow, I can feel it on drugs" in drug-related experience, because multiple opponents on this thread fail to provide any concrete examples?

There is a very large difference between objective reality, and reality as we perceive it. If you'd like to see that difference, there is a way. If you'd like to remain ignorant (in the technical sense of that word, not the pejorative sense), and in your case overconfident in your beliefs, that is your choice.

> How about you guys are just delusional, or unable to adhere to Occam razor? The later states, that the explanation of drug experiences via a failure of participants to recognize bullshit in their dreams due to their brains being partially off, is superior to the explanation, that throwing a random chemical into a complex system designed to live a normal life can somehow produce a very deep though via a mechanism unknown?

Maybe, maybe not. But it's rather foolhardy to speak down to people who you know have more knowledge and experience than you, is it not?

Occam's razor is a popular rule of thumb, a heuristic, for cases where you lack information. In this case, more information is available to you.

> you know have more knowledge and experience than you

Experience maybe, but knowledge?

Either way, these alone mean nothing, if proper disciplines are not followed during accumulation process. You don't think all older people somehow understand life better, than you do, just because they have more experience, and, often, knowledge.

> Experience maybe, but knowledge?

Yes.

> You don't think all older people somehow understand life better, than you do, just because they have more experience, and, often, knowledge.

It depends on the topic.

On this topic, you have precisely zero first hand knowledge, yet extremely high confidence in your speculative opinion. And seemingly not the slightest curiosity in obtaining facts. It's kind of interesting if you think about it that way don't you think?

That is not "first hand" knowledge. You are referring to experience again.

knowl·edge /ˈnäləj/ noun noun: knowledge; plural noun: knowledges

1. facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

2. awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

Speaking of knowledge, you seem to be strangely unable to recognize the limitations of yours, even when a thread is full of people discussing things of which you are utterly ignorant. And I choose the word ignorant deliberately - you don't just lack knowledge, you choose to ignore that which is inconsistent with your existing knowledge, at least on this topic.

Of course, there is a very simple solution to this, but for reasons I doubt you are interested in, you will likely choose to remain in your current state, which is well within your rights.

I think the most basic of observations can feel extremely profound while on hallucinogenics in that they might set off a cascade of ideas and recognitions that make the world feel more intimate. A phrase such as "the water is wet" could've been akin to an input to a particular function that unlocked a slew of realizations.

Possibly.

I could buy that. What I've found is that a lot of the most fundamental truths of the universe are really simple. So simple, they can often be expressed as, or nearly as, tautologies. Here's one for karma: if you put good into the world, there will be good in the world.

Any specific realizations, that are unlike "water is wet", that came to you or your friends on drugs?

I wasn't speaking of my specific experience[], rather I was guessing what might lead to profound moments while under the influence.

"Water is wet" isn't the realization in what I'm hypothesizing, but could be a spark of an idea that sets of a chain reaction of tangentially related concepts that seem to make a whole lot of sense as a whole and impart feelings of great beauty to one who is high and might inspire that person to write down the "big bang" of their experience, if you will. So, someone writing "water is wet" is writing the map, not the treasure.

Maybe?

[]I've done mushrooms once and it was mostly a horrifying, traumatic experience. The drive home during sunrise with my car's radio set to the local classical station playing choral music felt particularly affecting, though.

> seem to make a whole lot of sense

Sounds like its similar to experience of being drunk then. E.g. you get a bunch of unrelated uninteresting ideas, that seem impressive to you, because the part of the brain, that is responsible for filtering bullshit is off/operating poorly.

Maybe!

from Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7QgOSmco4&t=87s

In my experience, the sense of "enlightenment" that came from experiments with psychedelic drugs arise from the realization that a very small quantity of chemicals (a dose of LSD is measured in millionths of a gram) can have such a profound effect on your perception of reality and sense of self-awareness.

That said, psychedelic drugs do not inherently bring the user to any kind of spiritual discovery or intellectual awakening. The path to enlightenment requires one to make the conscious choice to continue down it on a daily basis and the self-discipline to not get stuck in the murk and mire.

Drugs are just one of many tools available to facilitate meditations on the nature of being.

Unsurprisingly, however, hallucinogenic drugs are likely more often used as a distraction from reality. This is certainly a valid use-case for many people, but it does not have anything to do with enlightenment.

Yeah, when people ask me what LSD is like, I tell them it's like those decals people put on large windows so that birds won't hit them. Your perception of reality is mediated by the lens of your senses and mind. The drug distorts that lens, allowing you to see it and study it.

I think LSD gives you that feeling of unity, that everything makes sense, and so, yes, you may feel enlightened by trivial stuff.

I don't think LSD puts ideas in your head, it just gives you a different perspective over the stuff that's already there. So it's a silly idea to believe it'll enlighten you by itself, but if you've been reading poetry, philosophy, if you're in contact with nature it may help you see things you didn't see or realize before, which is enlightening.

I think that's one of the properties that help with depression/anxiety since it may help you deal with trauma or with inconsistencies in your own personality that you have repressed, ignored or just don't know how to deal with.

Or you can blunt these feelings using alcohol. I would not call it "dealing with", if you are not actually solving the underlying problem.

How do you "solve" a loved one dying or being diagnosed with terminal cancer, for example? Sometimes the issue is a fundamental fact of life that can't be "solved". Psychedelics can help you come to peace with these things and let you live a less painful life (obviously this isn't true for everyone but there are many studies that show it helps for a lot of people).

Alcohol does not make you come to peace with such things, it just makes you forget for a time. Then you eventually have to deal with it again.

It's like trying to explain to somebody what love is. You can try, but it's really impossible to put into words.

Quite a bit of people writing and reading certain kinds of books would disagree.

"There is a joke about a guy, who could not remember a brilliant idea, he got under drugs. He left a piece of paper and pencil around, and wrote it down during the next trip. A day later he found the paper, which read "The Water is Wet"."

William James, the legendary pioneer of psychology and pragmatic philosophy, experimented with nitrous oxide (aka "lauging gas" -- the stuff they still give you at the dentist), and experienced revelations, which he wrote down[1][2]:

    What's mistake but a kind of take?
    What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
    Sober, drunk, -unk , astonishment. . . .
    Agreement--disagreement!!
    Emotion--motion!!! . . .
    Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
    Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
    It escapes, it escapes!
    But--
    What escapes, WHAT escapes?

Musing about this, he later wrote in his seminal work "Varieties of Religious Experience"[3]:

"Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.

"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

"Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself.

"This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind."

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nit...

[2] - https://erowid.org/chemicals/nitrous/nitrous_article1.shtml

[3] - https://www.fulltextarchive.com/page/The-Varieties-of-Religi...

"I took a walk alone last night. I looked up at the stars To try to find an answer in my life

I chose a star for me, I chose a star for him I chose two stars for my kids and one star for my wife Something made me smile. Something seemed to ease the pain Something about the universe and how it's all connected"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RwlGRtanvs

I have a question though. Have you ever had a bad trip on psychedelics? The closest analogy to that seems to be an episode of psychosis. The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those. Sam Harris wrote about his experience with it in Waking Up. He had numerous good experience with it, a good setting and state of mind but yet he still had a bad trip and it has stuck with him ever since, like “a door left ajar” in his words.

I had multiple bad trips on mushrooms where Strange thoughts would enter my mind.. usally happend the second day if i did it again or when i did too little. Also with too little lsd it just gives you time to Think and feel yourself rather than enough and be sweept away by it. Did Perhaps shrooms 50x. With 2cb it was Strange and I just had to accept that the Ground below me wasent really crawling with snakes and it was also beautifull. With changa every trip is everything ... its scary its a bad trip and the Best trip ever, Ive made ot myself and given it away under my supervision now 76 times/hours and many go through a Very scared part before they feel the love abd beauti of it ... Perhaps 10 percent even the experienced ones who did All other stuff. Thats Why i tripsit and make them accept and enjoy but otherwise try to make it an undisturbed private thing. Most scary i did was mandrakeroot Where we Two of us did it a day apart but became almost possessed and drawn to eachother to fight for No aparent reason.

> The enthusiasm for psychedelics seems to drop significantly for anyone who has had one of those.

Plenty of people on reddit think they are very worthwhile and say tehy learn the most from bad trips.

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