Hacker News Reader

Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

I've tried every psy except Ayahuasca: DMT, LSD, Bromo-DragonFLY, RC's from the 2c family, ketamine, MDMA, and so on. In each case, I had "profound" realizations during the experience that lasted a day or two, then I reverted back to my normal ways of being depressed in a messy apartment and slacking at my job. In this article, I see descriptors of Ayahuasca similar to those of other psychedelics (years of therapy in 1 day etc.); is it really more profound than what the other drugs do?

View on HN

What comes after the trip is often called “integration” and it’s even more important than the trip.

The medicine (and any other form of support like therapists, etc.) can only show you the path to healing yourself, the actual work of healing yourself can only be done by you.

The idea that the lessons seem profound, is rooted in the idea of ego death and listening to your higher self. As the medicine wears off the ego returns.

Your intention makes a huge difference too. If you take the medicine with the intention of healing, or with a healing guide like a shaman or medicine worker they can help support you through the integration.

Can you give an example of how the path is shown during the ego death and how one does the work of going down that path after the ego returns? Isn’t the ego the barrier to the path?

What are you doing during these experiences? What are your moments leading up to them? What are your weeks after it?

Are you doing them for fun or are you intentionally doing them to improve and analyze your life?

Psychedelics have had an incredibly positive impact on my life and have led to prolonged and drastic changes.

I've healed relationships, changed life long habits and truly feel as though I am on the continual path of self improvement and being a better person. Those were all seeds that were sewn during a psychedelic experience.

These compounds may change your life overnight (but only for a week or so) what they mainly do is plant seeds in very fertile soil. It is on you to recognize the seeds and water them in your normal, daily life.

+1 to everyone talking about the importance of integration after a psychedelic experience. Talking with someone else can help distill the important insights from the trip and separate wheat from chaff. Once you have that as a base, you can start to think about and plan longer term larger changes to your life, in whatever direction you want to change.

If you're ever need someone to talk to either during a trip or afterwards for integration, please check out Fireside Project[0] at 62-FIRESIDE. I'm a volunteer on the line there, it's a great group of people building culture and support to help everyone interested in self-transformation using these powerful tools.

[0] https://firesideproject.org/

> is it really more profound than what the other drugs do?

I suspect the drug itself is only part of the equation. A common theme among these newsworthy success stories is that the people had extremely high expectations going into their experiences. They weren't just seeking a recreational experience. They were convinced that this was the cure for all of their problems after reading a lot of glowing reports.

Some of them even paid thousands of dollars, traveled long distances, and participated in elaborate ceremonies with strong religious overtones:

> In February 2020, Whalen spent $3,000 to attend a seven-day ayahuasca retreat at the Soltara Healing Center in Costa Rica. On four of the seven nights, she participated in ayahuasca ceremonies with 16 other participants and two shamans.

> As each drank the brew, Whalen said, the healers sang icaros, or healing songs, meant to pull them deeper into the medicine.

> The woman pressed her lips against Whalen's head and inhaled deeply. "And just like that, I stopped crying ... and I knew it was over," Whalen said. "I could think of the people who hurt me; I could think of those times, all of the mistakes that I've made, and there was no longer that surge of shame and pain.

It seems the psychedelics may not be directly exerting an anti-depressant effect, but they may be pushing the right buttons in the brain to open the door for pseudo-profound experiences. Surround the psychedelic with enough high expectations and rituals and maybe it can help convince people that something amazing has happened.

But FWIW, I think most psychedelic experiences don't live up to the hyperbole in these articles or Michael Pollan books. I have a few friends who tried the Ayahuasca retreat thing. They said a lot of the people there were repeat customers back for their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th experience, hoping that maybe this time would be the magical time where they received the amazing benefits they had been primed to expect.

Ayahuasca is a much longer, heavier application (drink vs smoke) of DMT + MAOI, so you have had a taste. I have also had everything in your list too.

D is one of the few drugs I deeply deeply fear/respect, and folks should not take this lightly. The spirit molecule is nothing to be trifled with.

I’ve never heard of “D” but I know from experience actual proper LSD is not to be taken lightly either.

D = DMT

For sure, One should respect LSD also. It is not a 'party drug'. But DMT is something quite different. LSD will warp reality for a day. D will rip you right out of reality for 5 mins.

Comedy Central runs a Youtube series where comedians talk about their drug trips, and the DMT ones always seem INTENSE. It seems like if you take enough you basically check out of reality for a while, wondering if that's true/what your experience was?

Literally ripped out of reality. Teleported to another time and place. It totally disrupts your senses from reality, and substitutes something else. One time I recall seeing the walls growing with vines like snakes, and being transported to a place with purple light.

When you emerge, you feel refreshed and renewed.

Do you remember deep dream? When i first saw it, I thought we might have some kind of ML model of the human experience of D.

I also had that purple light vision. Curious if it was the same? Mine was our in space, purple and white lights all over the place, some kind of universal womb with souls.

I wonder if that connects at all to the pink beam of light that Philip K. Dick wrote about in VALIS, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valis_(novel)

It can be useful just to remember that it is possible to feel those profound experiences. That you have access to them, and that your normal, depressed experience is subjective too.

Much like if you read a good book, as time goes on you will lose the details and only recall the main gist unless you reread the book occasionally. There is concrete work to do beyond just getting in the right state of mind. It sounds like you're doing the surgery but ignoring the post-surgical physical therapy required to fully heal. I'd suggest a guide to help with the 2nd part. If you'd really like to learn some things about yourself and the experience that you'll likely forget soon after, record your entire session and rewatch it while sober. Listening to your words/questions and watching yourself will retrigger some of those experiences/lessons in much higher clarity.

Not with that mindset, no. The shamans in Peru consider ayahuasca to be medicine for the soul. It will bring up your worst fears and problems as visions, so you can face them.

I did ayahuasca 6 times and I'm not a drug user at all. Never even tried pot! But for me it was a life altering experience, and I think every single person on the planet should try it. It will change who you are.

I have not tried any; but I'just curious -- if you write your epiphanies down do they hold their values or turn into gobbledygook when you sober up?

I've tried mushrooms (both dried and natural) and LSD. In my case, "epiphanies" were basically the same as what you get when you smoke a lot of pot or drink a lot of beer: "the world is in 3d", "time is only a construct", "everything in the universe is connected", "our bodies can't physically touch due to the space between atoms", etc. I've written them down in journals, but it's all "gobbledygook" as you mention.

They may seem trite, but these are fundamental truths that 98% of the population will never know. You remember the feelings of subjective profound realization. This is what is important.

I tried MDMA many years ago. It gave me a different perspective of the world: one of wonder and extreme beauty. I don't carry it with me in daily life, but it's very easy for me to turn that perspective on at will, and at times when I come across extreme ugliness or extreme beauty, I do turn on that perspective. It's almost a spiritual thing, where you see with amazement that this world even exists as organized chaos despite all the random collisions of atoms in the universe.

Like most things with the mind, it's what you put into it. I wouldn't expect a magic pill to take that just fixes everything. I found this part of the article quite shocking:

> "I walked out of that office feeling hopelessly depressed," he said. "That was a real turning point. I realized for the first time that, if I was going to overcome my depression, it would have to be self-driven."

Uhh, ya it's going to have to be self-driven. If you're expecting to just take a pill and do no actual work yourself, then you're totally unrealistic about taking control of your own mind and life. This goes for any area of life, weight, depression, happiness, etc. That culture/pharma/whomever sells this idea of an easy out to Americans is quite sad.

Ayahuasca is usually tied to a complex ritual involving fasting and guidance by a shaman. Taking the drug is only part of it.

It is not like with recreative drugs where is is more like "take a dose and see what happens".

I think it is the real difference, there is a lot of conditioning happening, both when sober and under influence. In the same way, dropping mescaline and participating in a Native American ritual involving Peyote can be a totally difference experience even though the chemical is the same, and in psychedelic therapies the therapy is the important part, the drug is just an assistance.

From what friends have described, it is very different. I’ve seen it transform a number of lives, including one guy who started out with a single visit to Peru to do it and the decided to live there permenantly. I think context matters as well — these people were all doing it as a group to accomplish something with a shaman, and not just for fun at a rave or whatever.

Did he move there to continue the use? How is that different from an addiction?

You don’t need to go to Peru to get it (there’s plenty of drugs in the Bay Area). He moved there to fundamentally change his life.

Ok. Does he consume it regulary?

I can't tell you as this particular example was a colleague that I didn't know that well, but from talking to him I don't think it's what you think it is. These kinds of drugs aren't really fun party drugs. They're deep, introspective, intense things that aren't fun at all. And literature shows hallucinogens generally aren't addictive.

Even if you want you can't!

Tolerance to hallucinogens grows exponentially. If one take a blotter of LSD, wait 24h, then take another blotter, it will feel like [¼,½] of the original dose. If one wait another 24h and take another dose it will feel like [⅛,¼] and so on. With LSD one must wait a few day between doses to feel the full effects.

With psilocybin, the period of abstinence required to feel the full effect is measured in weeks.

I have no personal experience with Ayahuasca, but administered daily it is probably not too different from medical treatment with Isocarboxazid as the psychedelic component should dissapear and the MAO inhibition should persist.

Ayahuasca actually is different. There is no noticeable tolerance, unlike most other psychedelics.

Most people take these substances at most a few times a year, similar to going on a travel vacation. You need time to reset and you don't feel like doing it again for a while. This is far less often than the most addictive drug many of us use, caffeine. Would this mean going on vacations is an addiction? Maybe.

I have heard tales that the Andes are full of Westerners, mostly young men, who blew out their modern brains and now wander forever..

source: psy-friendly people who have been there

I've not tried Ayahuasca but I doubt it. The real trick is to hold on to the memory of your profound realizations and meditate on those lessons every now and then, without needing the psychedelics.

Yeah that relief only works in the long term with actively changing how you think and feel about “all this”, I imagine that’s why it’s applied in the context of therapy rather than a one-and-done panacea that I feel is being pushed popularly. Don’t get me wrong, regardless of the tool used therapy takes a lot of work, and for me personally it took a lot of years and requires constant vigilance for me to keep it together. Eating some caps on its own isn’t going to fix anything.

Ayahuasca is DMT + some maoi to prologue the effect (and make you puke). Beyond the longer trip the only more 'profound' thing is the rituals which presumably put you in a more spiritual setting. If you've done DMT and so many other psychedelics there's little reason to think you'll get that much more from Ayahuasca.

I have tried both everything from your list and Ayahuasca (multiple sessions in a jungle retreat in Peru). From my experience nothing comes close to LSD. Ayahuasca is definitely an intense experience - both physically and mentally - but the “effect” did not last much longer compared to other substances.

You're not doing the hard integration work, so the window of opportunity closes and you haven't healed.

Almost the same experience with most psychedelic drugs here except I wouldn’t say I had any profound realizations, more so that things I knew and understood in my subconscious I was more more open to myself about.

Ofc a few days later and I’m back on my bullshit.

I happy for you, that you've been able to access so many psychedelics that many others will never come close to, but how much therapy have you had? How many different types of therapy have you tried? How many mainstream pharmaceuticals have you tried?

By your own admission, you're depressed and are slacking at work, have you tried looking into an ADHD diagnosis?

Yes

Netflix has show about some stuff like that and one episode is about Ayahuasca. My TL;DR from that episode: it helped for at least one person, but some people do to get anything from that.

Heh maybe stop doing so many drugs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com