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I had a similar experience. I was a burnt out YC startup founder in SF with a wife and kids whose life I was missing, and everything felt off track. I started working with a life coach, left my startup in the capable hands of my co-founders and moved to Raleigh. I soon thereafter had my first psylocibin experience. There were a bunch things shifting in me, but this experience blew my mind open and I haven't been the same since. (Much for the better, of course!)

During that first trip, in a few hours I went from seeing the universe as a mechanistic, "matter is all there is", reality, to directly experiencing that there is so much more. Since then I've gone much deeper down that path and I'm so very thankful for this beautiful medicine for opening my eyes and heart!

I think mushrooms can open us up to truths that we don't always want to confront and sometimes it allows us to cry and make peace with our existence.

When I grew mushrooms in college, I'd take massive doses of fresh mushrooms simply because I was flush with these amazing fungi.

So I took a massive dose of fresh mushrooms, which I think is a better way to go if you can make it happen, something like over 50g wet. As it sets in, I looked up at the night sky and a drop of water precipitated with all the moments of my life reflected inside it. It was as if I was a single drop from a large ocean. In some ways it was sad, this teardrop would pass someday and return to the ocean. I know it's okay, and I want to say that it's been a lot of fun spending time with everyone.

The experience reminds me of Blade Runner when the replicant confronts his own death.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

"All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop." - Kabir

50g!? That seems like an insane amount of mushrooms to eat in one dose.

Edit: my apologies. I thought it was dry, not wet.

It's a large dose, but generally the conversion from wet to dry is 10 to 1.

My mistake.

He said wet, not dried

This ties nicely into the two questions I have about the article.

First, have you seen clear, lasting changes in anxiety and depression? If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also.

Second, how well do those feelings of contentment stick around? The stories I hear of enlightenment on mushrooms, DMT, any other "entheogen" all have the element you describe of being unable to grasp the discovery after the trip, and once it's in hindsight I can imagine that memory being anywhere from comforting to aggravatingly out-of-reach.

I believe it's intent that matters here. It's possible to have a life-changing experience on mushrooms alone, but I've had better luck reprogramming unwanted neural pathways by explicitly going into the experience with strong intent towards a goal.

"If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also."

Set, drug, dose, and setting all play huge roles in the effects one gets.

First, a lot of drugs on the black market aren't what they claim to be. So someone who tried what they thought were mushrooms in college might have gotten something else.

The dose of psilocybin one gets from black market mushrooms is also difficult if not impossible to gauge. So someone who tried mushrooms in college could have gotten too low or too high a dose.

Many people are also completely clueless when it comes to how to optimally prepare for and take drugs, and believe all sorts of myths and misconceptions about drugs. So many of those who took mushrooms in college probably did so in very poor circumstances, with no intention or even self-destructive intentions (such as those that often go hand-in-hand in binge-drinking), and possibly with misconceptions about what the experience will be like.

This is all very, very different from taking psilocybin or other psychedelics in a carefully designed study, with trained therapists who typically give days if not weeks of therapy before the sessions, during, and after the sessions, are given pure, precisely measured doses. The setting is designed for maximum therapeutic effect, as are the resources available during the session (such as having pictures of loved-ones on hand to focus on at the peak of the session). The sessions are usually done with light blocked out by an eye-shade, and with music carefully designed to facilitate the session. The therapists are on hand to give support and help the patient work through any diffcult experiences, and are encouraged to work through such difficulties rather than run away from them. Acceptance is encouraged.

Because of this careful preparation, planning, and professional therapy, the results are likely to be much different than casual mushroom use in college by people who are likely to be ignorant of psychedelics in general, and of how to properly run a therapeutic session in particular.

The contentment can stick around. I guess it depends on the person and the drug, and what happened and what was sought...

Maybe the problem is in the rarity and ineffability of the experience. We don't have a huge frame of reference for mystical-type experiences, and we don't have much of a common language to describe them. We rely on metaphors, the way we do when describing being in love.

When it's all over, you might think, "What the hell was that?" A memory of the feeling-of-the-thing, but no real word for what-it-is-like.

> First, have you seen clear, lasting changes in anxiety and depression? If the single-dose effect for cancer patients really is this strong, it seems like everyone who messed with mushrooms once in college should be 'treated' also.

I think mushrooms can open the door, but you need to use them as a catalyst to take action in your day-to-day life to actually have lasting change. I've still been an asshole occasionally since taking mushrooms. Ultimately you're responsible for your own change, but mushrooms can help you want to change.

> Second, how well do those feelings of contentment stick around? The stories I hear of enlightenment on mushrooms, DMT, any other "entheogen" all have the element you describe of being unable to grasp the discovery after the trip, and once it's in hindsight I can imagine that memory being anywhere from comforting to aggravatingly out-of-reach.

I've had an egoless state for a couple hours or so afterwards, and then maybe for a couple days afterwards I'm generally more relaxed and happy: maybe I'll smile more and say hello to people I barely talk to. But the feeling fades after that. Lasting change happens if you really take the lesson to heart and create change in your normal life.

I've never dealt with non-situational depression or anxiety, but it might be useful to share a little of my experience with LSD.

On or around my birthdays for the past five years, I've been taking a moderate to very large dose of LSD. The lowest dose was around 100 micros, the largest was 10x that.

Me being me, with extensive planning, preparation, and a lot of help from my wife, my first dose in 2015 was the largest one.

The experience was moderately life changing. Things were already going pretty well, but after the trip, I was able to do even more 'personal brain cleanup'.

Specifically, it allowed me to release a big chunk of the personal arrogance I still carried. This has been a nearly life-long process, but the trip grealy accelerated it.

It also helped me further improve my (already pretty good) work/life balance. It's not that I loved my family more, it's just that the things that I already knew (time at work is a means to an end, time with my family is truly the most important thing) became more easily actionable.

Lastly, (for this reply...there more aspects than I have time to type up right now) it allowed me to read, understand and empathize with other people's actions more effectively.

I went through a similar realization when I consumed mushrooms a few years ago. Truly beautiful understanding about how connected everything in the universe is, how we're all just a single thing. Even outside the trip, it is an objective notion, it is just that I had to go through the trip to really "know" it in my bones.

However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this?

There was an article here a few days ago talking about mental flexibility that described it as "a vice" is going too far on either extreme and "the virtue" is being balanced... too far one way and you're stubborn, too far the other way and you're gullible.

That article was on a different topic, but the lesson is being aware of the extremes and taking a bit of both is to be balanced, not to be contradictory.

> However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this?

I think if you're concerned about it, it's probably not a big problem for you. Being kinder to all living things includes being kinder to yourself and your family anyway :-)

Just to note and call out that not everyone has enlightening experiences with heroic doses.

I've had horrible experiences with a very large dose. I essentially passed out and when I awoke I genuinely thought I had died and was roaming as an invisible spirit. It wasn't until a friend interacted with me I realized I was still alive and began to come down.

I really think anyone should take care when experimenting with powerful hallucinogens. They aren't for everyone and have been known to trigger psychosis and other adverse reactions if one has a family history of mental illness.

The people that really suffer from drugs don't post here. Camille Paglia mentions some of the radical thinkers from the 60s lost their minds on drugs. Most people have little incentive to talk about having a bad trip on illegal drugs.

I have found that there is a mid-range of dosage that is "dangerous". In that range, one's perception is altered in an unpleasant way, yet the rush of joy that comes with a higher dose has not kicked in. You are left feeling nervous and even paranoid that the experience will never end. Take a bit more and it shifts into joy; you can embrace the weirdness and just let it take you away.

Here's kurzgesagt's rendition of "The Egg": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

Out of interest, at what kind of dosage did you have the enlightening experience? I've had plenty of introspective experiences, but not much further, at what seemed to me to be fairly high doses.

My apologies. It’s not exactly like “take this amount and you will experience this trip”. It’s like how one day you may only have a few drinks of alcohol and yet feel way more drunk than other times you’ve drank a lot more. But to roughly answer your question, I had a breakthrough experience on about 5g of magic mushrooms. I’ve also had it on 22g of magic truffles.

By the way, ever since these trips, I can’t enjoy much marijuana in the same way. Marijuana feels like the start of that trip now. It’s very weird.

Oh my God, 22g? As someone about to try it for the first time soon, I thought 4-5 was considered a high dose, I would have thought 4x that amount could be dangerous. (I'm not knowledgeable about drugs.)

Magic truffles need different doses to magic mushrooms.

Accurate dosing of mushrooms and other non-synthetic psychedelics is very difficult anyway, as the active compounds can greatly vary even within the same species and even within the same batch.

Also, with psychedelics the effects will vary from person to person, and even on the same person depending on that person's mood, body chemistry, how much and what they've eaten, what's going on with their life and their subconscious mind at the time, what their expectations are, their stage of development, where and with whom they take it, etc.

I have always stuck in the 1.5g range, and feel comfortable doing that in public or alone. I think anything over 3 is entering dangerous territory. Not physically, but you are going to need to be cautious about when/where/why/who at that level.

I took 5-6g when I was much younger and it was not an enjoyable experience on the whole, forgetting who/where I was, thinking I was other people. The most interesting part was everything arranging itself in sensible geometric patterns. No matter what I looked at, tree bark, the ground, the wall of a house, a pile of leaves, everything would appear structured as sort of repeating hexagons or octagons. That affect combined with occasional moments of profound peace felt revelatory, but I did not take mushrooms for a few years after that. I will almost definitely never do it again either.

I have not experienced the marijuana thing though :).

It’s somewhat problematic to determine the exact dose of psilocybin you’re getting when ingesting raw material. 1.5g of dried material might give you a range for the upper bound of psilocybin content, but it’s difficult to say. And dose is VERY important in planning what kind of experience you want to have.

I apologize if I violate some sort of code of conduct by asking this but is there a reliable, safe way you can recommend obtaining magic mushrooms or truffles? I found some online sources offering them but I’m not sure who is trustworthy?

At least in the EU you can legally buy the spores online.

Not at all crazy, I share your experiences. The mushroom is a method to commune with something larger than ourselves. Although I share your lack of faith in traditional religions, the mushroom has me believing that the spiral does indeed go up (just as we know it goes down).

As someone with both relentless death anxiety and normal anxiety, this piques my interest. Have you had any full blown panic attacks while tripping?

I have with LSD, a truly terrifying experience. I think it can still be worth trying but things can surely go very wrong with anxiety and hallucinogens.

I've had uncomfortable experiences. I don't know what would constitute a panic attack exactly. Get some supervision, stay in a safe place away from people. It's a journey. Even the good enlightening trip wasn't really a pleasurable experience: it was scary at times, but worth it.

Exactly this. And doing post trip integration work with a therapist or a group is particularly helpful in weaving the experience into your life.

Hey, that was a good story. Thanks for sharing.