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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I've seen two people go down the Ayahuasca path in the past years and both of them have undergone such profound personality changes that I've had to stop seeing them. They've gone off the deep end in ways that are hard to describe. What also bothers me is that they've become incessant advocates for others to join them in their misery.

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This is just turning out to be the acid craze of our generation. We need a PSA. If you take a heroic dose of a powerful hallucinogen with little prior experience or preparation you stand a chance of breaking your brain. Doing ayahuasca with some unknown "shaman" in a jungle "wellness retreat" is not the same as going to a spa and getting acupuncture. It's more like going skydiving with an "instructor" that just hands you a parachute and says Jump!

Just take this 5-strip of acid at a 3 day music festival surrounded by 20,000 people for your first time bro!

Integration work is really important. Many people don't have the help they need to integrate their experience back into regular reality unfortunately. It's a shame, because the effects can be profoundly helpful, but meaningless if you can't continue to function in society. Many people try to bend every day life to a perceivable achievement of a new way of living for "us all". It's normal to realize certain relationships in your life are not positive, it's unhelpful to try and change others.

> Integration work is really important. Many people don't have the help they need to integrate their experience back into regular reality unfortunately.

It depends on what epistemological status you assign to the experiences of the trip. If the trip is access to a different part of you, or a different truth than you normally know, then integrating it is very valuable.

But if it's just random weird things that your neurons do while being poisoned, why bother to integrate it? Should I integrate the experience of having a stroke or a migraine? (On the other hand, in that case why bother to have the trip at all?)

And, is there any reason to suppose that poisoning your neurons should be a source of truth, or even of access to "a different part of you"?

Do you believe it's possible to have a "passive" ayahuasca experience? I don't know the answer. Should you work to integrate having a stroke, probably, a migraine... maybe, as much as smoking a joint? Maybe? I'm not sure.

I think the point being any altered sense of perception of routine in regular reality warrants some introspection, the +/- probably depends on how profound it is? You points are good. different part of you, who knows, some people say you're re-tuning the bring to access new vibrations that show alternative realities and dimensions. Lots of big questions here! :)

How old are you all and how long have you known these people?

Just curious

I have … “joked” that the mushrooms/plants have influenced their hosts brain in a similar way to some fungus or worm causing a bug to climb up a grass stalk to be eaten by a bird. The level of evangelism can be disturbing, viewed in this light.

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