Psychonauts! Let's talk about altered states of consciousness.

That's so interesting. Especially the part about the virtual reality generator. Sometimes if I try to sleep on LSD, that will kind of happen to me. I will drift off and then basically experience waking dreams that are very vivid and respond to my imagination. However, I have never experienced that with eyes open. Makes me want to take a really high dose now! What affect does Cannabis have on your trip? Does it just bring it out faster? For me it has a really interesting interaction with LSD or any psychedelic. First it intensifies the trip, by at least five fold, and then it completely transforms it into something that is not even similar to a normal trip. Generally it puts me in an extremely confusing, loopy, and weird psychedelic experience that is very similar to the mood of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP7lmTnqyxI
As opposed to my normal trips which seem very clearheaded and in which I have that "all knowing" feeling that you described.

That video was ridiculous, I can't really say I've ever had a trip with that kind of mood. :lol: When I smoke cannabis with LSD it tends to put me in a mood like this video:

Spoiler for Fairy Tail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nETAdy7nCpU

I sort of think of cannabis as a primarily mind's eye and body psychedelic. It gives my visual imagination a much more abstract style and intensifies it so that it has a stronger emotional impact on me than normal, which makes me more playful and I get lost in fantasy more easily. At the same time, it gives me this kundalini body buzz which gives me a lot of sexual energy. There was span of time a while back where several times a day I would smoke some high quality cannabis and then meditate while doing breathwork. I would get myself into that relaxed daydreaming mindset I mentioned before and would passively guide my thoughts toward erotic fantasies that grew and grew to maximize all the hedonistic pleasures, and I would start breathing more heavily as it grew in intensity. Once it hit a breaking point I would feel the rush up my spine and a melting feeling in my head that drizzled down my body, and I would feel like my body suddenly became opened up to the rest of the universe and all of my most sensitive areas started radiating energy. I haven't really done it that much lately but thinking about it makes me want to get back into it again....

LSD is the hallucinogen that I have tried that I would have to say is probably the most like lucid dreaming, at least from what I've experienced on it. The energy it gives me makes me feel exactly like I do when I'm lucid, I just want to run and jump around and go all kinds of crazy. Also, as long as you can be intuitive with it, I feel that most of the LSD hallucinations respond fairly well to typical dream control-type techniques, a lot of which seem to work through synesthesia. They are also mostly comprised of concepts that are passing through your mind being artistically portrayed among geometric patterns and fractals. However, really powerful hallucinations usually don't show up until the dose is pretty high. That's all when I take it by itself, which I almost never do, and I usually just spend the whole time in awe of what I'm seeing. It gives me a very deep appreciation for myself and for life and reality. When I smoke cannabis on top of it, first of all like you said, it intensifies every aspect of it many times over. All of the typical sensory distortions like patterns, fractals, tracers, breathing, and so on become much more significant. My cannabis mindset mixed with my LSD mindset also just makes me feel like I'm not only in a lucid dream-like state but my imagination is extra intense and I feel all the emotions even more strongly, so I just go totally nuts. Because the cannabis also makes my internal visualizations become more detailed and abstract, they blend with the LSD visuals more strongly and become realized to the point of causing those hallucinations to actually form all around me with eyes open in higher doses. Because of the kundalini feeling as well, it makes the mindset and the visuals all become extra sexual, and it just helps me feel relaxed too which allows the trip to flow in a positive direction more easily that also allows the experience to go deeper.

Cannabis has varying effects on different psychedelics for me as well, but there's a generally consistent theme of it potentiating the sensory distortions significantly and causing fully developed and usually erotic hallucinations to form all around me. It also makes the body high just incredible, there's really nothing that can compare to it if you ask me. Also, I suppose I should mention that orgasms on psychedelics alone are already great, but combined with cannabis they just become incredible.... I personally think that LSD and cannabis is the ultimate aphrodisiac combination, at least that I've tried so far. In really high doses it just becomes downright mind-blowing even if I'm just alone.... The best part too is that it seems to increase proportionally with the intensity of the trip, which means it follows the same reverse tolerance. The last one I had made it feel like a huge boom that shook the house! :shock:

I would definitely recommend taking higher doses if you want to see those kinds of things with eyes open. :teeth: Like with most hallucinogens too, the more you try to build a relationship with it the more it will show you. I think it's interesting to note that you should think of cannabis as a hallucinogen as well.... I find that the way you have to just go with the flow with it instead of getting lost in the confusion is similar to salvia, which would make sense because THC releases a significant amount of dynorphin, the endogenous kappa-opioid ligand, in the brain. Have you ever used nitrous oxide?

Short post now; this is almost exactly how I've been reacting during my past forays into deep levels of the experience and glimpses into ego death: http://youtu.be/HGVgHZHpxI0?t=6m40s

Lol this reaction and the music is perfect, it nails my reaction so well. I was trying to get a video of Dr. Crusher breaking her glass, as she breaks it in each time loop and gradually gets weirded out by it. This episode in general relates well to time loop situations I've encountered. The phenomena will start to intensify and a fight or flight reaction takes place within myself. In order to deal with the shifting headspace and visualizations manifesting around me I usually try to reassure myself that things are OK. Its just the psychedelic altering my perception while interacting with my psychology and environment, kind of thing. So will gaze around and try to establish normalcy, which ultimately fails due to the increasing effects of the psychedelic. And since this area is still relatively new to me I get the 'gawking around the room' thing going on until it sets in or until I reconcile with the state of being I will be in for the next few hours. Comedic in retrospect but was genuinely freaky in the moment. I keep trying to tell myself everything's ok when what's happening around me communicates distress. I am seeing how this can be changed though with practice, particular mindsets, and letting go, though. Just up until this point its been damn spooky for me. Alysendra you seem to have taken these things head on and resolved your fears though, or do you still get them?

Haha, that was pretty perfect. X) It really catches that feeling of waaaaait a minute....

Maybe you need to try reassuring yourself in different ways? This is what comes to mind for me anyway. Like, you tell yourself that things are going to be okay, and you try to reestablish normalcy, but you can't reassure yourself of things that you don't actually believe. You know going into the trip that psychedelics can be unpredictable and negative experiences can happen, so if you're already feeling anxious then just being told that everything is going to be okay by yourself, who cannot predict the future and is freaking out, isn't generally very comforting. Likewise, if you tell yourself that everything is normal you're going to know that you're full of shit because, as you said, the trip becoming stronger is making that very obviously not true. What if you tried telling yourself things like "I did this voluntarily knowing that it's safe." or "I made preparations to handle this experience well."? As long as you are actually educated on what you're taking and you actually did properly prepare your set and setting then these are things that you can actually believe and hold on to in those moments. You could also try listening to this song, hehe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgYsrfaFxm0

Instructions for ego loss. :)

That being said, some anxiety is pretty normal as the effects are increasing, especially if the dose is really high. That's another thing that's good to remind yourself though, that it's normal.... It's just a part of the trip. The more you're able to relax for those experiences too, the easier it will become. You can remind yourself that those thoughts loops are good, they aren't something you should try to deal with or avoid.... They're one of the first steps to really diving deep into the acid realm. The deeper you can spin into the loop, the further away from reality you'll get. The looping thoughts and actions are the first signs of your memory retrieval systems starting to fail and your imagination becoming more delirious. As it intensifies, you can become so separated from your memories that you'll essentially just be living completely in the moment, which is the point when all of those aspects of your personality are just stripped away and you're reduced to your bare self as you deal with just whatever's directly in front of you. In my experience, the thoughts you get as the loop deepens also become increasingly more abstract and connect to each other over multiple iterations in ways with a strong feeling of symbolism.

What I've noticed is that once you get past the point in the loop where your thoughts become so detailed and so chaotic that they're almost as vivid as a dream, that's when your reality starts to really transform into madness all around you. At that point, iterations in the loop for me start to become pieces of entire scenarios which materialize around me and I become one of the characters in them. In the past I'd gotten to the point where I just felt psychologically like I was that character and there were hallucinations that I was interacting with around me, but in my most recent trip I actually became them and had a new sense of self-image and everything. Usually too these scenarios are entirely within my control, I can make them be anything I want to, but everything I decide is immediate in the moment too. Generally something that I've noticed is that even when I am tripping this hard on LSD, I still tend to retain at least *some* kind of idea of the situation that I'm in. I think it would take a pretty hefty dose to get even further out than that, but I have some theories about that too.... But like, even if I can't remember anything about my life, I still know that I'm in my house, that I'm tripping at either day or night, and things like that... at least, at the times that I'm not just totally tranced out. However, it's interesting, because another thing I've noticed is that the deeper into the loop I get, the more of these details can become slowly altered without me noticing, until the delusion breaks.... For instance, I was once completely convinced that I was coming down from a trip at night and looked outside and could see the stars and everything, and then out of nowhere I just broke out of the delirium finally and the sky instantly transformed into daytime with clouds and sunlight and everything. One of the craziest moments of LSD for me is always when you realize just how hard you've actually been tripping.

It's interesting though, because no matter how hard I've tripped on LSD, there has only ever been a few moments that were really out-of-body, those flashes of ego death. It makes sense because it's normally thought of as a pretty lucid psychedelic, but I know it can produce more than that too.... So far, the most I've gotten is being in my body but just strongly delirious for most of the trip, and occasionally I will pop into third-person mode for a second or two before returning to my body. I think the next point down in the loop for me would probably be becoming so delirious that it starts to be more like a dream than a delirious reality, and then beyond that there's probably a point where it just causes complete ego death from start to finish.... I would very much like to see that point one day. :content:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alysendra

Generally something that I've noticed is that even when I am tripping this hard on LSD, I still tend to retain at least *some* kind of idea of the situation that I'm in. I think it would take a pretty hefty dose to get even further out than that, but I have some theories about that too.... But like, even if I can't remember anything about my life, I still know that I'm in my house, that I'm tripping at either day or night, and things like that... at least, at the times that I'm not just totally tranced out. However, it's interesting, because another thing I've noticed is that the deeper into the loop I get, the more of these details can become slowly altered without me noticing, until the delusion breaks.... For instance, I was once completely convinced that I was coming down from a trip at night and looked outside and could see the stars and everything, and then out of nowhere I just broke out of the delirium finally and the sky instantly transformed into daytime with clouds and sunlight and everything. One of the craziest moments of LSD for me is always when you realize just how hard you've actually been tripping.

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That song and video were spot on also, I think :)

Yeah this part has been the case for me too, at least for the most part. I've usually retained enough awareness of where I am or what part of the day it is ect. I know I started during the afternoon and will end at night. Funny thing about the "delusion" breaking though. I was out at night once (it really was night lol) and was walking around outside with some other people. We had all approached what we saw to be a expansive lake with glowy lights around the edges. I still swear that I saw ripples of water and light reflection from it. Then as we gazed and approached the lake, it turned out to be a house(?) or some kind of building. How I mistook that for a lake I'll never know haha. So I can definitely identify with that part.

I know that I should be relaxed and confident because I've known my approximate dosages and have stuck with "traditional" psychedelics when going into the depths. I just feel like this is some kind of mental barrier I need to break though before I can get to places you and others here have described. You're completely right about that first part and I think that's good advice in general. There was something recent that happened where it "felt" like I was dying, even though I had no rational basis for thinking that I would. I was in a safe setting and was using something I was familiar with. I even had a close friend with me. But I don't know why I was freaking out or feeling that way, it reminded me of something Terence McKenna said where the ego can tell you that "you're dying" even though you're really not. It felt like the illusion of this reality was breaking down around me and that loops where starting to happen. It was weird because this same car had passed by again during this experience, that had gone by earlier. More reasonable dosage ranges would actually calm down my anxieties so that I wouldn't be feeling any for the peak duration. In other instance it felt like I had no control over what I was doing, that reality was "fated" in a way. I'm not sure if this is true, and your degree of control suggests otherwise, unless you've had this feeling of your body being moved by something else. Would it be fate, or the subconscious? And also, how I noticed a lot of "nothingness" in my recent deep level experience. Its something I had felt before in previous psychedelic experiences before. Its weird, kind of how you mentioned about a lonely god splitting itself up into all of us to have more experiences and companions. Although I haven't experienced the void directly, I have caught awareness of it before. Like Ramdass elaborates in Be Here Now, is it really all nothingness? I am also generally open to metaphysical things so its also strange that I should have this many issues with this part of the psychedelic experience lol, but its also humbling to me as well. I think part of my fears is that I was used to dealing in a range of awareness that was "myself" in my body observing what has happening around me. And the difference with things that involve loops and forms of ego death are that you become fully immersed into the experience. I thought I would be prepared to handle reality dramatically changing and letting go of myself but then I learned that I still had a ways to go. And more practice.

Also something you mentioned in an earlier post definitely rang true for me as well. It seems that the more you try to form a relationship with something, the more it does show you. At least, I feel like it has been this case for me. It may be reverse tolerance too (its starting to seem that most psychedelics have reverse tolerance) or it may be that it also depends on the relationships formed with these things. I like using the term psychedelic, but I'm also inclined to say entheogens, because of all these other aspects at these immersion level experiences.

Another quick thing too, is your mention of a virtual reality generator. This is something I have felt for sure. When I was describing something to a friend, he mentioned it sounded like Saussurean linguistics, which describes our perception being made of symbolism. At the levels of loops and ego death, it seems that our usual waking life world is no more real or stable then what is happening in the psychedelic realm. I just find this fascinating. Anyway here's some more responses and explanations for why I am having my anxieties.

Edit: And that Ezra vs Ezra AMV, awesome lol.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

That song and video were spot on also, I think :)

Yeah this part has been the case for me too, at least for the most part. I've usually retained enough awareness of where I am or what part of the day it is ect. I know I started during the afternoon and will end at night. Funny thing about the "delusion" breaking though. I was out at night once (it really was night lol) and was walking around outside with some other people. We had all approached what we saw to be a expansive lake with glowy lights around the edges. I still swear that I saw ripples of water and light reflection from it. Then as we gazed and approached the lake, it turned out to be a house(?) or some kind of building. How I mistook that for a lake I'll never know haha. So I can definitely identify with that part.

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Hahaha, that's great. :chuckle: Walking around at night does some pretty crazy things to my visuals actually so that doesn't seem too unreasonable of a mistake to make lol. I actually had the reflection thing once too; the first time I ever took a really high dose of LSD I was staring at a bowl of cannabis when the greens shifted into (at least seemingly) an accurate mirror reflection. :shock: It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen, hehe. It's really nuts the kinds of things that psychedelics can do to your visual perception....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

I know that I should be relaxed and confident because I've known my approximate dosages and have stuck with "traditional" psychedelics when going into the depths. I just feel like this is some kind of mental barrier I need to break though before I can get to places you and others here have described. You're completely right about that first part and I think that's good advice in general. There was something recent that happened where it "felt" like I was dying, even though I had no rational basis for thinking that I would. I was in a safe setting and was using something I was familiar with. I even had a close friend with me. But I don't know why I was freaking out or feeling that way, it reminded me of something Terence McKenna said where the ego can tell you that "you're dying" even though you're really not. It felt like the illusion of this reality was breaking down around me and that loops where starting to happen. It was weird because this same car had passed by again during this experience, that had gone by earlier. More reasonable dosage ranges would actually calm down my anxieties so that I wouldn't be feeling any for the peak duration. In other instance it felt like I had no control over what I was doing, that reality was "fated" in a way. I'm not sure if this is true, and your degree of control suggests otherwise, unless you've had this feeling of your body being moved by something else. Would it be fate, or the subconscious? And also, how I noticed a lot of "nothingness" in my recent deep level experience. Its something I had felt before in previous psychedelic experiences before. Its weird, kind of how you mentioned about a lonely god splitting itself up into all of us to have more experiences and companions. Although I haven't experienced the void directly, I have caught awareness of it before. Like Ramdass elaborates in Be Here Now, is it really all nothingness? I am also generally open to metaphysical things so its also strange that I should have this many issues with this part of the psychedelic experience lol, but its also humbling to me as well. I think part of my fears is that I was used to dealing in a range of awareness that was "myself" in my body observing what has happening around me. And the difference with things that involve loops and forms of ego death are that you become fully immersed into the experience. I thought I would be prepared to handle reality dramatically changing and letting go of myself but then I learned that I still had a ways to go. And more practice.

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Hmm, let me think of a good way to organize this response.... First, I'll address what you said about fate.... Let me describe a little bit how I see life and reality....

As I see it, the universe that we inhabit can be consistently demonstrated to run on stable laws. The math and science behind it is everything.... If the laws of physics could change then the universe would just be a complete mess. With that in mind, I do personally believe that everything in our lives and on in this earth and in this universe has been "fated" to happen since the moment it all popped into existence. If one could theoretically be outside of this universe and these laws of physics and could observe us knowing every single variable as they were each set and the beginning of time and having full access to every equation that needs to be known to compute our reactions, I believe that they could deduce the state of absolutely anything anywhere in our universe at any given moment in the entire span of time. So, to answer that, I do think that it is fate and that we do not have control, in that sense....

Of course, within all that math and science that runs our world, there is something simply beautiful that can emerge... the metaphysics. While I'm sure that there must be some deeper version of this explanation somewhere out there in the background of the cosmos, as far as I see it, the reason that we perceive reality subjectively is just because it makes sense logically.... It exists on a whole other plane from these other aspects of reality, even if it is birthed by them. The mathematics of this universe seem to be set up specifically to follow repetitive patterns and fractal forms to throw subatomic particles and waves around at each other all over the place in trajectories that allow them to start cooperating with each other until some other force comes along and smashes them apart again. That's a pretty oversimplified description, but you get the picture.... Because in this at the time big empty void there is literally nothing but time to waste away, this reality behavioral pattern is allowed to continue until some of the cooperations become so complicated that they actually start building up mechanical processes that allow them to survive more effectively rather than just floating around in whatever constant path. This includes creating a self-replicating mechanism by which it can keep living on through extensions of itself even if the original meets its demise, but they're really all still just one machine. This goes on until those mechanical processes become so immense that one or more of these iterations starts to actually naturally develop hardware which allows it to record information about how it has survived in the past to come up with new ways to continue surviving in the present. At this moment, the metaphysical is born.

As I said in a previous post, I believe that our perception of reality is a snapshot of our memories being written into our brains. Every aspect of our subjective consciousness can be broken down to these neurochemical processes, but however, just because they can all be linked back to them doesn't exactly mean that we can understand them.... A question that occurs to me to ask is: if we were to create an artificial intelligence which worked differently than a human but ran on electricity and could store and process as much information as a human, would it have a subjective experience like we do as well? Though our normal understanding of the difference between life and technology might tell us no, we honestly don't really have any reason to even think one way or the other.... I can tell that any technology has a subjective experience just as much as I can tell that *you* have a subjective experience, or that you can tell that *I* have one, which is not at all. As far as we all know, we may be the only ones experiencing anything rather than just being a piece of hardware. But, if we decide to open up our minds at least a little bit and extend beyond that thought, how can we be sure of just where to draw the line, if there is one at all? Even today we have robots that can capture information and adjust to a scenario, so do they have a subjective experience? How could we ever possibly say that they do or don't? This goes back to how I said that the only way I can rationalize our subjectivity is through human logic.... Can that really be enough?

As an extension of that, I think it's important to remember that literally everything in our subjectivity is also a fake, as you referenced, the illusion of reality. A great example I think and one often talked about is color.... It seems like everyone's had that thought that the colors that you see may not be the colors that someone else sees. This is an entirely logical thought too, because what are these colors even in the first place? In your brain they are just physical values that correspond to visual input, they're like 0s and 1s, or the off and on switches, in a computer's binary code. The fact that we experience an entire array of distinct colors comes from our brains being wired to distinguish between these, just like a program being able to tell you that, for example, a value of 0x01 is red, 0x02 is orange, 0x3 is yellow... and so on. Again, very simplistic for the process actually being described, but it's an accurate comparison. However, with that logic, you have to think... what exactly are these colors anyway? The color that I perceive "green" as, where the hell did it come from? What are the laws of metaphysics that dictate that a subjective experience can include the color that I experience green as? Or what are the laws that make it so that my brain can't see infrared or ultraviolet, but some organisms can? Once again, it can all be rationalized by human logic.... It just makes sense. It has to be that way for our subjective experience to make any sense, that same experience that itself seems to just sort of exists because it should....

So, now there is life which has subjective experience, but at the beginning it was still quite primitive, to the point that such organic technology can be called primitive anyway.... I'm sure there was a lot of trial and error to be done. These organisms now had a mind to use, but that doesn't mean that they were the best minds or that every organism would be in the best spot to use it to its fullest potential. Over time, natural selection would happen and narrow down the survivors to only the fittest.... In the world of increasingly complex lifeforms such as ourselves, it makes perfect sense that the ones who would be able to survive and reproduce the most effectively would be the ones who had the strongest awareness of the separation between the physical correlate of their own subjectivity and the rest of the universe which they needed to avoid. The fascination of it all though is of course that everything that's happening to these organisms was still fated from the very beginning, and there's no way to "avoid" the predestined physics, but simply the fact that the amount of information to work with in reality is so unbelievably vast compared to the processing power of these organic machines and the mathematics involved in the creation of everything are so unfathomably complex and intricate, that to any subjective awareness here on earth it all is literally beyond comprehension, making the entire thing appear as complete chaos. In truth, each organism is not really doing anything to evolve... we're all just following the equations and chemical reactions. But, we just don't realize this because we're not wired to deal with anything more than what's directly in our perception....

Most animals here on earth don't necessarily in themselves have an incredibly complex (by comparison, anyway) comprehension of reality, only needing to create any sort of sense of self to know when to run away from threats and respond to other basic sounds created by other animals of the same or different species.... However, as humans, we have managed to be the part of that original organic machine that has become so utterly amazing at surviving that it developed to the point of being able to easily handle computations far more complex than anything it would have had to deal with that was already on the earth, and as a result out growing societies and technologies and many, many languages began to emerge. Because our brains evolved to learn as many things as they possibly could as it promoted survival, we began to use these devices like language to take a grasp both on the external (the math and science, for example) and the internal, as the more that we allowed ourselves to be exposed to in this world, the more we both understood the workings of our own hardware and the more unique we became by building up a continuously novel blend of experiences that only you and no one else has ever recorded in memory in this exact order. These things contribute strongly to why humans seem to have so much more sense of self than other animals.... We have become so addicted to finding knowledge as our id demands of us that growing our own individual personality simply becomes an endlessly-developing consequence of our lives. And, because to us in terms of how much we can do about it reality is just chaos, it just adds to the feeling that our own experience is unique and is something we create by ourselves, rather than being simply another part of this eternal pattern.

It's incredibly important to remember though that this entire reality that we use to build our sense of self is again itself a lie. It's just the way that our brains developed to allow us to organize and work with our surroundings in the easiest way possible. However, that way is far from true and uses lots of shortcuts.... The color was one example, but what about solid objects? There are no solid objects in reality... there's always space between the particles. But the brain works at such a macroscopic level that it has simply become wired to work that way because it's more convenient to understand. But for me, a pretty major question comes out of that: aren't we solid objects? The reason that we see ourselves as individuals relies pretty heavily on the fact that we perceive ourselves as a force separate from the rest of reality, but we aren't.... Our brains are just a cloud of particles like anything else, and they constantly interact with our environments. Truthfully, "we", as we understand ourselves physically, don't even exist. Essentially, you are an illusion that has become so complex that it has convinced itself not only that it actually exists but that it is even capable of behaving independently in a world of endless possibilities. And, oh the possibilities.... What about things like happiness, sadness, trust, confusion, pride, guilt, lust, love? Again, these are all just metaphysical sensations with physical correlates, and so like colors, that means that they exist in our subjectivity because it just makes sense, it needs to be that way for our wiring to function properly in the laws of physics.... But this lie, this illusion, just happens to be SO beautiful... so perfect even that becoming aware of it doesn't even break it, because it's the only way we're built to exist.... And it's because of this illusion that we, this one cosmic pattern, can in at least one small pocket of reality through this one self-replicating organism experience this miracle of being able to observe and understand and appreciate our own utter brilliance, can share with itself this wonderful delusion of freedom....

So, I have a few different theories about the feeling of a loss of control.... They all center around the ego loss produced by psychedelics. 5-HT2A agonists produce a glutamate release from the prefrontal cortex that projects to areas all over the brain, and this causes strong excitation of these areas. This includes the areas of the brain like the amygdala which would be more associated with the id, and that would be a significant part of how that ego loss by id inflation is caused. I think it's worth noting that while even your ego is truly just part of a pattern playing out, you don't perceive it that way.... As I see it, the process that your brain goes through of many complex chemical reactions that will decide how you react to any given situation is experienced in your subjective awareness as your thought process. As I said before too, I think that our experience of reality is just a memory being written, so it would make sense that our thought process is just a part of that memory. However, because of the way the ego is wired, there's a real-time delusion to it fueled by how absurdly complicated of a process it is that allows us to feel like we're consciously working through everything, which you really are in a way, it's just not that free will kind of way in my opinion, you're just doing what you're programmed to. On the other hand, the id doesn't have this sort of design to it.... While it is influenced by the ego to a degree, what it contributes to your subjectivity doesn't have to actively worked on in your awareness, hence why it is called the subconscious mind. In the model that I proposed before, this would be what causes the loss of control in non-lucid dreams.... Those states of mind would be primarily id with only a little shred of ego to retain some memory, though that shred is actually incredibly important as it is what allows us to grab on to awareness and become lucid. Since psychedelics have even been proven to create similar brain states to dreaming, I think it goes to show that part of the loss of control that you feel on psychedelics could come from this same process of the id taking over your ego, shifting your awareness of reality from the delusion of control to the dissociated realm of simply being another part of the pattern.

There is another thought that I have that extends from this, though. If you think about dreaming as the most similar common natural state to a psychedelic experience, there's a conclusion you can draw from it.... The way that your id takes over your ego during the dream state is just a totally normal part of the machine that is you, a part that you've been wired with for your entire life. It's the same part of you that creates your regular imagination while you're awake, so even if you think of it as the more subconscious part of you, you still associate it with yourself. It's your imagination, your thoughts. But, when you take a drug... it's not the normal cycle of neurochemistry that keeps your brain afloat that's causing these changes, it's the drug itself interfering with or adding upon that cycle. So, for example, even if a psychedelic sends excitatory signals to the part of your brain which is the correlate of the id to suppress your ego, is it actually your natural id that is taking control of you, or is it the psychedelic? It may be hijacking your id to alter the way you think, and it's using your memories and experiences to do so, but really, it's just borrowing your brain. Nothing that normally technically fuels your id is causing this experience to happen.... It's something totally foreign to you. Now, the reason that I and others can still take so much control of a psychedelic trip is because we realize that this hijacked hardware, though not being driven by the system we're used to, is still just a part of our brains, and even if these processes are being activated outside of this complex loop, they're still processes that are so intricately interwoven into every other that they can still be manipulated if you know what you're doing. So, like if the id can intensify the mind and focuses mostly on primal feelings like euphoria and dysphoria, the id controls which the psychedelic has taken control of can do this as well, and that's why your mood will still have a significant impact on a psychedelic experience. One of the ways that this can manifest as well is that if you give into the feelings of loss of control, that feeling of being lost will be intensified as well. That's why experience and research are especially important to getting the most out of the psychedelic realm, if you ask me.

It's important to consider too though I think that ego loss is far from the only thing that psychedelics can do. I talked before about how as I see it our subjective awareness follows some metaphysical rule in that it exists because it's an inherent part of the laws of physics working properly, or seems to anyway.... Like I said, things even like colors, solid objects, and emotions are all illusions which exist solely to allow us to navigate the reality that we inhabit, that we never actually see. Every single thing that we perceive is just another aspect of this illusion, an illusion which can be alarmingly fragile. Our brains have actually evolved to create this, while still flawed, pretty amazingly accurate perception of reality at least when it comes to creating a subjectivity that we can deal with consistent success. The mathematics involved in allowing such an incredibly powerful system to develop naturally are nothing to scoff at.... It's a glorious masterpiece of geometric and fractal mutations four billion years in the making. But, because it is so unbelievably intricate and interwoven and structured in the most effective and most space-saving way possible, putting something into the system which seriously disrupts its natural flow can have some pretty severe consequences. And here's to the point.... If our subjective experience of reality exists because it is a metaphysical correlate of a physical process happening in our brains which are so delicately designed to cause this exact illusion to all come together so perfectly, if our minds can create subjective experiences like colors and emotions which, though stemming from the physical, are things that truly only exist in the metaphysical realm, then what is the limit to the possibilities when something like a drug causes this system which creates this metaphysical experience to function abnormally?

You mentioned the void and nothingness. This is my view on that.... In itself, I think the void is just what happens when you have so much ego loss that you just lose perception of your body. It's the final stage before full amnesia which is technically the true ego death, no memory processing whatsoever. It can feel very severe because it reveals in some respects just how detailed your normal perception of reality is, but I think it's just a perceptual shutdown really. However, what happens in that state can be truly profound, and what that is exactly just depends on that substance you've taken I think. There are three big changes that hallucinogens are measured by: ego suppression, psychological disorientation, and hallucinogenic strength. There are other factors at play at well, but these three things can significantly impact how a trip will play out. First of all, at least some level of ego suppression is required to take you to the void, so that's a given here. With psychedelics, dissociatives, and salvia, it will always be present even if just to a small degree. So, with them it's the psychological and hallucinogenic effect ratios compared to ego loss that really set the trip.... I feel like if all we had was our regular, non-lucid dreams, this might never even have occurred to me. But, this is what's significant to me.... Dreaming itself is the id inflated state so that your imagination is working extremely strongly to create an actual immersive world all around you. Natural states of psychosis as well as many drug-induced psychoses like from amphetamine and just the way that most people normally dream seem to generally suggest that this high activity of the brain may increase associative thinking and the ability to visualize and the like, but it also comes with a strong disorganization of thought. However, lucid dreaming is the response to that.... It proves that even when the mind is working that much in overdrive, you can still have clarity of thought at the same time, and that's why so many lucid dreaming experiences can be so incredibly profound, because it's just your normal imagination but working at maximum capacity.

Psychedelics, dissociatives, and salvia create these same dream-like states as well, so I always thought that there may be some kind of correlation between getting the most out of them and states comparable to lucid dreaming. However, it depends on what you're looking for out of them too.... The interesting thing about these drugs is that they can have functional selectivity at their main hallucinogenic receptors and bind to many other receptors and transporters and et cetera as well, meaning that each of their individual effects can be quite complex. These interactions are likely to contribute greatly to factors such as disorientation, as the more systems in the brain you alter at once, the stranger the result on your subjectivity is going to be. So, here's some examples for me.... I would say that nitrous oxide is ego > psychological > hallucinogenic effects. It takes a pretty high dose with a very smooth ego loss before I start to really feel significantly altered, though when that time comes the cognitive effects can become quite severe and delirious, usually feeling like I'm cycling through an extreme number of my behavioral patterns at once. However, the hallucinations on nitrous for me are always very simple, usually only two dim colors at most and consisting solely of basic geometry. Because nitrous makes me delirious before it even makes me hallucinate, it doesn't tend to seem overly mind-expaning, it just shows you some very bizarre places your consciousness can go. Salvia, on the other hand, I would say is psychological > ego > hallucinogenic. I barely even have to leave my normal perception to become very confused and disoriented on salvia, it definitely has the strongest mental effects of any psychedelic-style substance I've encountered. It certainly then has stronger ego loss than hallucinations after that, but the gap between them is much smaller than it would be for nitrous, with salvia being able to provoke a full range of powerful dream-like visions. But again, like nitrous, because it is so psychologically heavy, it can be difficult to bring things back from them, other than more awareness of just how complex your mind is. However, something should be noted.... At the level of hallucination produced by salvia, entities that are as animated as dream characters can enter your reality. Similarly to a non-lucid dream, these entities can often be weird and random, but also occasionally can be profound, especially if you're in the void, wherein messages received can become much more conceptual.

Then you've got the psychedelics.... Unlike dissociatives and salvia, they tend to be much more lucid. I believe that this is why they are known for causing such profound revelations.... For me, LSD tends to follow the pattern of ego > hallucinogenic > psychological. However, while I did put them in that order, it's worth noting that I don't feel like any three of these categories are very far from each other during an LSD trip. LSD is a strong hallucinogen, but there are definitely tryptamines that are far more so for the same level of ego loss that they cause. However, I do think that LSD may be one of the most delirious psychedelics.... In my experience, it seems quite easy for LSD to cross this line between lucid and non-lucid, the former producing dream-like states which are like your normal imaginative thought processes but more enhanced and therefore cover a lot of personal and profound and metaphysical thoughts, but the latter being more like insane nonsense or experiencing of paradoxical states or impossible objects or the like, more similar to dissociatives or salvia. At the level of the void, I have noticed it going both ways as well.... Sometimes its meaningful in a direct way, and other times it's just conceptual. A similar relationship to this seems to be observed with mushrooms for me as well, except that I would but them as hallucinogenic > ego > psychological. Mushrooms can be incredibly heavy on the mind like LSD and take you deep into that place beyond what words can describe, and the way they effect my ego is actually quite similar, but they're definitely stronger hallucinogens at the same level of trip, with the visuals being much stronger, more 3D or even hyperspatial, and just more overwhelming. I think that this is part of why they're seen as such powerful teacher psychedelics, because they can come with the same emotional maelstrom and descent into madness along the lines of LSD, but because their hallucinogenic state is more intense and dream-like it pushes your imagination even more thoroughly into full-on entity territory like salvia, but because mushrooms are still much more lucid than that despite the head warp it's more likely that the trip will be very deep and personal. Because of the ratio of hallucinogenic to psychological effects too, once the level of the void is reached the experience will start to feel extremely logic-defying, pushing your subjective awareness into states you'd never even dreamed were possible, like synesthesia and echoing perceptions and feelings of becoming everything in your line of sight, feelings that you can't possibly just convey through modern language....

Then there's DMT.... I feel that the reason that DMT is generally considered to be the most powerful psychedelic is because it has the same hallucinogenic > ego > psychological setup as mushrooms, except that the ratio of hallucinogenic to ego effects is even higher, and the ratio of both of those to psychological effects seems to be one of the highest of the known psychedelics, allowing DMT to create an extremely powerful dream-like state that feels incredibly lucid. My theory is that since DMT actually seems to intensify all of these areas of your mind that psychedelics work through to pretty much maximum overdrive and put you in a complete out-of-body experience while also keeping your conscious awareness balanced out and sane, it allows the DMT which is hijacking your id to create entity intelligences with at least the same fluency with which your brain normally produces your own intelligence that you experience at all times, or maybe even more so since your mind is so heavily stimulated at the time. This would be why once people reach the void on DMT they're actually transported to a completely separate reality composed of completely impossible structures which defy time, space, and logic and inhabited by seemingly super-intelligent hyperspatial entities which can communicate to you important personal, spiritual, or cosmic insights which have great relevance even upon sobering up and can be transmitted to you verbally, telepathically, conceptually, or through various forms of complex synesthesia. It's basically like it takes control of your brain to create new thoughts for you at an extremely high operating rate. And this is I feel why, even though some experiences like high dose LSD may be more of just a complete delirious tumble through the mind, DMT may be just unmatched when it comes to truly profound consciousness expansion.

So, I generally perceive that "nothingness" that you feel with the void to be a good thing, as it is a state which shuts out external reality, which in the process lets you let go of every attachment or anxiety you have which I personally experience much like an orgasm, and stimulates the internal reality instead where the real hidden wonders of the psychedelic world can be found. Personally, I think my favorite psychedelics are the ones that can take you there that are both strongly hallucinogenic and heavily psychological.... I love my psychedelic revelations as much as the next person, but one of the biggest reasons that I trip is to see the absolute limits of my consciousness, and for me that involves pushing every variable to the extreme for I push as far as I can possibly go before hitting amnesia. Due to the metaphysical nature of the mind, I actually think of strongly mind-altering substances like hallucinogens but particularly like psychedelics to be sort of like the key to consciousness.... Each psychedelic is unique, so I can use myself the machine as a tool to generate a different, novel logic-defying state using each of them as a catalyst, and that allows me to explore as much of the metaphysical aspect of reality as I possibly can. It's just something that I have to be prepared for at the time to make it actually work to the fullest, something I've been discovering more and more about the psychedelic state over time....

You definitely shouldn't feel any need to rush into it. When the time comes that you're ready for it, it'll happen. It took me years to be able to give into a psychedelic experience enough to start seeing things that are really profound, honestly. I was going in with a LOT of mental baggage, and I actually thank psychedelics for helping me to overcome an extremely large chunk of that.... The deeper you try to go into them, the more you're going to need to be willing to finally face your fears if you really want to see what they have to offer. But, it's okay to go slow until then too.... Psychedelics have a lot to offer even at levels lower than these heavy mystical trips, even when it just comes to fun recreation and enjoying life a bit more. Like you said, just practice.... The more you become used to the psychedelic state the easier it becomes to open up to it, and the more you start to see how useful it can be if you really do want to work on yourself. I think that's a big part of what I realized too.... I was searching for all these really moving experiences, but at the same time I was sort of expecting psychedelics to just kind of change me I think.... Really, the only person who can change you is yourself. The only person who can face your fears is you. The way to get something truly good out of psychedelics is not to go into them looking for change, but to first become ready to change yourself, and then the psychedelics will happily help you find the correct paths to take, and then it's just up to you to actually walk them....

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Also something you mentioned in an earlier post definitely rang true for me as well. It seems that the more you try to form a relationship with something, the more it does show you. At least, I feel like it has been this case for me. It may be reverse tolerance too (its starting to seem that most psychedelics have reverse tolerance) or it may be that it also depends on the relationships formed with these things. I like using the term psychedelic, but I'm also inclined to say entheogens, because of all these other aspects at these immersion level experiences.

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Yes, most definitely. :) I have yet to come across a psychedelic or dissociative that does not have reverse tolerance to some extent if treated properly, and all ego loss experiences seem to have at least some level of cross-reverse tolerance with each other. DMT is especially prevalent with this it seems, as I know several people (myself included) whose trips on all other psychedelics but especially things like mushrooms and LSD become much more hyperspatial after each time I smoke DMT.

I tend to use the word psychedelic just to refer to the serotonergic nature of the hallucinations. I don't really like to narrow down the substances too much personally, but sometimes it's hard to avoid.... If it was up to me I would just say that LSD is LSD, DMT is DMT, 2C-B is 2C-B. Calling all three of those compounds along with many others psychedelics is definitely not wrong and anyone who has tried all three can tell you that they cause an overlap in hallucinogenic style, but to infer from calling them all psychedelic that they all produce similar effects would certainly have some unintended consequences....

Entheogen is a good word, though a little subjective too, hehe. Like, some people might not consider 2C-I an entheogen because most find it to be mentally quite lacking, but I personally found it to produce an extremely intense sexual experience to the point of verging on ego death via maximum satisfaction of the libido, which to me is quite spiritual and therefore entheogenic in nature....

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Another quick thing too, is your mention of a virtual reality generator. This is something I have felt for sure. When I was describing something to a friend, he mentioned it sounded like Saussurean linguistics, which describes our perception being made of symbolism. At the levels of loops and ego death, it seems that our usual waking life world is no more real or stable then what is happening in the psychedelic realm. I just find this fascinating. Anyway here's some more responses and explanations for why I am having my anxieties.

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Oh yes, well as I discussed before, even our perceived external world is all a lie.... Who's to say just how much congruency there actually is between what we perceive and what really exists out there? I think even just things like time dilation show how different our own perception of reality can be from what's actually occurring; it's about what's easiest for us to handle, not about what's actually there.... It is truly amazing stuff, life is just nuts. :content:

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Edit: And that Ezra vs Ezra AMV, awesome lol.

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Isn't it though? :chuckle: Here's another video that is a pretty good example of how I've felt before on LSD:

Spoiler for Bravest Warriors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkm9rA0vudE

Where to start lol, I think this will be a long post from me again. Prepare for the wall of text.


I think a continuation of this train of thought is that it seems psychedelics offer a window into what the noumenon is. The thing in itself, as described by Kant, in contrast to phenomenon. From my frame of reference it seems that there are forces that exist beyond the mind, but lately I have been realizing how much the mind plays in the psychedelic experience. One area that I can stand to learn more about is brain chemistry, and which receptors are being acted upon depending on the substance. However I feel that other facets of the psychedelic experience, unexplored regions aside, I have a fairly good understanding of. I like how you ordered attributes of mushrooms, DMT, and Salvia. I have had those feelings about them but not such a concise and clear way of verbalizing it. So now I am acknowledging that there is a lot of mind/brain chemistry aspects to the psychedelic experience, as well as implying that there are links to consciousness outside of the mind/body system. And I think computer/programming terminology is also a great way of expressing these concepts.

Part of the reason I am taking the time to express my fears and ask these kinds of questions is that I just wasn't expecting these deeper levels to be the way that they are. What I mean by this is exactly how they feel; I had read about enlightenment before, and about mystical experiences. I've had one out of body experience, countless dreams and lucid dreams, as well as experience with Reiki, Chaos Magick, auras, and spiritual energy. But you are right in that doing psychedelics changes you. I think a natural progression of thought and experiment should lead to this realization. And not just in the mundane way of "now I've done 'drugs' so of course I would be changed". A change that takes place in core, fundamental values and beliefs. My beliefs had shifted around before, especially in high school. But this change was unique in that it shifted me back into a metaphysical paradigm but with the added insights I gained from psychedelics. My progression throughout my encounters was all well and good until my breakthrough trips into the realms of "mystical" experiences.

Its just one thing to talk about oneness, one thing to talk about sensing things like spacetime break down, but different to actually experience such things. I feel like if it weren't for my past experience with metaphysics and esoterics that I would seriously high tail it away from psychedelics. And I feel its been like this for many, who eventually reach a certain place they may have been looking for (whether its more experiences, pushing limits, or for genuine exploration or healing) that is just too unusual or too much to handle. I suppose a natural response would be fight or flight, or in my case to wait it out and commit to breaking through this barrier of fear. The fear may not go away, but as long as I can come to terms with it and deal with it, I know it will be ok for me. It shouldn't even be this scary, but for some reason the visualizations, feelings, and phenomenon I was used to had given way to the conceptualizations in these previous posts. It is because these feelings, perceptions, and information is so profound, that I believe it was causing my mind to recoil away from it. I say this because up until the "heroic" dosages, "Z" has been very friendly and peaceful. Now I know that there are deeper levels, and its not such a "scientific" or mechanical process of incremental increases in dosage relating to incremental increases in intensity.

Out of respect I will not say what Z is, but I would categorize it as psychological > hallucinogenic > ego. I've categorized it in this way because it wasn't until discovering and pushing boundaries to a very high dosage did I encounter ego death-like phenomena. It is also several hours worth of duration too, so a middle range dosage would be about 8-10 hours while heavy/heroic would be between 10-14 hours total. Its also interesting to note that post heroic dosages, when I had done medium amounts of Z again it has been a lot stronger than before. Again not sure specifically if it has to do with my own brain chemimstry, reverse tolerance, or my relationship with it. I would imagine that it would be a combination of them. Anyway, with this in mind it has been generally gentle, Earthy, and humanistic, up until the heavy/heroic level. This is where things begin to switch from psychological-hallucinatory to visionary-entheogenic-mind expanding and possibly ego death-beyond. I would definitely like to get to a point where I can seriously explore reality at the depths of heavy/heroic, since like you said there's more to it than just the ego death. From what I've seen so far, and the responses I've read in this thread, it definitely appears that the psychedelic space is vast enough that possibilities seem endless.

I also want to work to bridge the gap between non-psychedelic users and psychedelic users. Part of this goal is being able to communicate what I have encountered on psychedelics, and so being able to verbalize these phenomena is key. However this in itself is a challenge, although one I have accepted. So its nice seeing that there are others out there that are able to verbalize this stuff both eloquently and factual. It also shows me I'm not the only one thinking this way lol. (kinda jumping around here)

As with science and mathematics, I agree that these are ways to interpret the universe around us. I have both read and seen how it is that there are these very specific laws and attributes that make our universe (and life) possible. It is amazing that everything should be just right for the universe to form the way it did, and for life to appear on Earth as it has. I feel like these facts are emphasized even further on psychedelics and a greater appreciation is gained for them after the fact. At least for me it has lol.

Yes, I think that intellectually speaking that the void, nothingness, ect shouldn't be scary. I'll have to see if its good for myself :P, but your insights have shown me different explanations for these different things. I think once I can come to terms with these things myself, I will have a lot less trepidation that I hold right now. I think I said this above, but I don't think these things should be scary, but the felt presence of them is somehow daunting for me. The user Dreamer was outlining this area well, I think. Dreamer basically expressed my own fears as well as the way she dealt with them. This is something I can definitely learn from and apply to my future experiences, as well as the input you've provided. I want to be knowledgeable of these realms, since I want to be able to verbalize and express them for myself, so I will eventually be experiencing them for myself.

Right now I can mostly just meditate and read up on things, and do what I can to mentally prepare for future journeying. I definitely think that there's no rush, and see application for the less intense experiences as well. I started small with psychedelics and have been gradually building to where I am now. However there is a necessity for me to have these deep experiences too, since experiencially I need to eventually be where you and other experienced users have reached. This is for my own ambition and goals though, and for other people I can see only a few high dose experiences doing the job. I just know I'm in it for the long haul though and that everything I have been involved in has led up to psychedelics. Strangely enough, I was brought to this very area despite everything else that has happened in my life. I had said that I didn't believe in coincidence before, but now that phrase has new meaning.

Lastly, I think that "fate" definitely has a new meaning for me. Perhaps my ego, or id, didn't want to believe that to be true, but I don't know it seems like there is a set direction for things to move in. I had experienced the kind of "chemical processes and behaviors determining actions", or a kind of predestined biology, before under psychedelics. I guess I just assumed this to be confined to wild life and not humans lol, but I am beginning to realize the meaning of this for humans. What "free will" is seems to be the most likely course of action, determined by behavioral, biological, and chemical reactions and needs of the mind and body. In this sense it really does seem like we are machines, or mechanisms for the consumption of food and disposal of waste, although I know we are also more than that. There is the whole metaphysical side to take in. And also, there are the unknowable things too. So even if science can one day calculate out exactly what state the universe will be in, in regard to spacetime, I don't think it will cause me distress as it would have before.

Edit: So OK it wasn't that much of a wall of text, but it was more than my previous post!

I also tried to find a video to post, but all I could come up was something from One Piece lol. This is how I've felt on "Z", because in the medium dosage range especially, it is very calm and chill. Like whatever is happening around you, you'll comprehend it, but are in such a state of bliss/peacefulness/happiness that you can just relax no matter what lol. (and this will be a legit spoiler for One Piece fans if you've not reached this far)

Spoiler for One Piece Sabaody Arc:

http://youtu.be/JXk5w90U4aw

I actually had a nice experience related to this last night. :) I was just daydreaming about these topics after smoking a good amount of cannabis. Specifically about the links to consciousness outside the mind/body system. I always try to remind myself that I need to think about it in the most rational way possible. I try to imagine what non-human consciousnesses are like to train myself to think outside the box of my own perception, trying to imagine the concept from a more objective view.... Like trying to imagine the perspective of a fly, or a fish that has evolved to not have eyes, or just living as an animal like a cat either domestic or wild.... I imagine life from other peoples' perspectives a lot too. And in either case a lot of my fantasies focus on matters of life and death.... I think it helps me get a feel for a field of perception as just an instance of this metaphysical process instead of attaching myself heavily to my individual life.

I figure that we only know for sure that there is conscious experience in biological lifeforms, then that means that a subjective awareness can be viewed objectively as a sudden growth of information, a period during which that information is arranged into more intricate and structured patterns, and then a sudden decay of information. That's really fascinating to me, because as I see it these transient bursts of information are the only things that can ever be known to exist. My thought is that it seems like reincarnation of a sort would be the most likely after death scenario. All of the immensely populated life on earth shows that one thing that can be shown to consistently occur in this reality is that these information bursts come into existence seemingly out of nothing, in a metaphysical way of speaking. It already happened to me once, so who's to say it couldn't easily happen again?

I have never considered myself to be a religious person, but this is the only way I can view the idea of a "soul".... Because I feel like reincarnation is a likely scenario, it means I do believe that it's possible that our awareness can be carried from one life to the next.... However, I don't believe that it necessarily has anything to do with how you lived your current life and I don't think there's necessarily karma or anything like that.... I just think that if the perception of reality that we view, the only thing we can ever know, is actually just something that exists on this metaphysical plane of illusory sensations, then despite the fact that our physical bodies are the ones seemingly generating that potential, we are not truly connected to them because even our bodies that we see are just a part of that illusion, and who we are is *just* that awareness.... With that in mind, if your life ended and then a new one began in that same awareness, you would have absolutely no idea of your past lives or anything because your memories are still linked to just that body, but that would actually make perfect sense to me.... It just makes me wonder what we all are exactly... like, are we all separate awarenesses just living life to life, or are we just one awareness who lives every life one at a time? And how exactly does this awareness field work? What organizes the lives, and why are each of us living as who we are if we are separate awarenesses?

Anyway, I was just thinking about all of those things after that smoking session.... With the reincarnation stuff, it's like you said, with these metaphysical topics it's one thing to just talk about them and another thing to actually experience the feelings firsthand.... I just felt a total detachment from my worrying about my loss of self or chance to further experience reality after this life. That's something I've never really had before.... I never believed in any kind of afterlife and also had a lot of anxieties about death while growing up, and that's something that I really only started getting over after I had that experience where I died on salvia.... That was the first time I ever actually gave into it at the very end. I also while young fetishized death though, it was a psychological masochistic or submissive fantasy of mine. I always imagined it feeling like a release from this reality and a dispersal into something more omnipresent. It always made me uncomfortable because of my issues with the thought of my own death though, so I repressed that side of me... but I continued to connect the spiritual with the erotic for all of my life. That's why I did all that kundalini meditation and stuff too.... But so, when I had that sudden feeling of not just thinking it's logical but actually feeling some relief from my fears from those reincarnation thoughts, I had this feeling of interconnectedness with other human lives past, present, and future, as well as other organisms as well, but especially human as the whole thing felt very spiritual and filled me with love and empathy, so my thoughts were quite sexual as well....

In addition to just being a really refreshing experience, this has actually given me some ideas for future dream control and psychedelic trips.... I could see how the way I was feeling could theoretically lead to perceptions of leading multiple lives simultaneously, as I was getting a vivid visualization in my mind's eye (which has extended to further cannabis use at the time of this typing) of a hexagon tessellation with different potential lives playing out in it.... It seems pretty malleable too; I would really like to experiment with it on a 4-substituted tryptamine. =D

I actually do have more to say to your post so I'm sorry I have to cut off here for now, but I just wanted to talk about that experience anyway when I got up today and thought it was convenient to respond to the beginning of what you said. I need to go take a shower and then leave and I'll be gone pretty much all day though, so it'll take me a little bit to get to the rest though.... But don't worry, I will!

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Originally Posted by Alysendra

With that in mind, if your life ended and then a new one began in that same awareness, you would have absolutely no idea of your past lives or anything because your memories are still linked to just that body, but that would actually make perfect sense to me.... It just makes me wonder what we all are exactly... like, are we all separate awarenesses just living life to life, or are we just one awareness who lives every life one at a time? And how exactly does this awareness field work? What organizes the lives, and why are each of us living as who we are if we are separate awarenesses?

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Yes! I know exactly what you mean by this. And the part about one awareness who lives every life one at a time... whoa, at one point during one of my trips I felt like my awareness would eventually live through everything, including trees, but it may have just been a abstract thought and not a literal process. Still though, one awareness going through everything one at a time, wow lol. These I think are the hard questions of psychedelics.

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Originally Posted by Alysendra

I always imagined it feeling like a release from this reality and a dispersal into something more omnipresent. It always made me uncomfortable because of my issues with the thought of my own death though, so I repressed that side of me... but I continued to connect the spiritual with the erotic for all of my life. That's why I did all that kundalini meditation and stuff too.... But so, when I had that sudden feeling of not just thinking it's logical but actually feeling some relief from my fears from those reincarnation thoughts, I had this feeling of interconnectedness with other human lives past, present, and future, as well as other organisms as well, but especially human as the whole thing felt very spiritual and filled me with love and empathy, so my thoughts were quite sexual as well....

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Part of me doesn't want reincarnation to be true, since I just want to be done here and move on :P but I have had times where I have been serene and accepting of it. Its like no matter what life is, its all sacred and beautiful, no matter what the circumstances. Its easy saying but carries such weight as well, since it doesn't explain why people have good or bad lives.

I have only had a few erotic moments that stood out; one was on Z and it was like I felt this orgiastic feeling throughout my entire body. Like I was being bathed in this feeling which pervades the entire universe. It was only a short while but I wanted it to last a lot longer, I'll have to get back there again sometime :D And oddly enough the next headspace I moved into was the feeling of being a human sacrifice in the Yucatan. In my mind's eye I started seeing images of moving through a jungle, then up a temple. Didn't actually see myself die, but I was feeling the sacredness of being a sacrifice, and felt totally ok with it.

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Originally Posted by Alysendra

In addition to just being a really refreshing experience, this has actually given me some ideas for future dream control and psychedelic trips.... I could see how the way I was feeling could theoretically lead to perceptions of leading multiple lives simultaneously, as I was getting a vivid visualization in my mind's eye (which has extended to further cannabis use at the time of this typing) of a hexagon tessellation with different potential lives playing out in it.... It seems pretty malleable too; I would really like to experiment with it on a 4-substituted tryptamine. =D

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I was seeing a grid-structure of what looked like human beings, with my eyes closed, on Z. I think it represented humanity, I'm not sure why I was seeing or being shown that. During this particular experience I had also been in communication with spirits, and it felt like I was connected to the same space as other people who were tripping in these heavy dosage ranges. I was seeing multi-colored fractals appearing across my perception with eyes closed again, and had the thought of "I didn't know or expect it to be this intense" then I heard/perceived this message convey back to me "Well what did you expect to happen?" which I felt was quite comical at the time.

During the same experience I was seeing (again with eyes closed) rotating 3D geometric figures. One of them was in the shape of a wire-frame pyramid, colored black, but was also shiny. It had small lights floating outside the middle of it. And I could interact with it, I could turn it and manipulate it. And as I manipulated it I realized I was also changing myself, somehow. Perhaps it was an object inside of my aura? I'm not entirely sure, and haven't come across this before, but in retrospect it reminded me of descriptions of DMT (reading them, I haven't experienced DMT before). Just had to respond with that stuff first lol.

Edit: And there was this other experience were I was with a friend in their room. We were sitting across from each other, and they had a guitar out. I was getting this thought loop of walking from outside to in their room, over and over again, as if it were the only time frame that existed. Anyway, I was feeling uneasy so I asked them to play some. Then this next part is crazy, it felt like I was playing through them. In fact, it felt that I was about to become them, or become their perception/awareness. The notes they were playing felt as if I was playing them, as if I was deciding which ones they would play. Out of the times we've tripped together, this was the one instance we were both on the level, phew was it nuts even though it may not sound like it lol.

And that Bravest Warriors was hilarious lol, and can definitely relate to how that feels like. XD and the giant beers, will have to watch more of that.

I've had some very strange and interesting states within my own mind before. But, first I have to say I have been a diagnosed as schizophrenic since the young age of eleven-years-old. Since that is considered childhood onset schizophrenia, I had very challenging points of time in my life where getting past the cloudy depressing days was top priority but still I suffered and sometimes still do. Besides my whole life story of being mentally challenged at times and that did not benefit my state of mind I have had quite some time to unravel my own secret personal side.

Quite a few times during my years in High school, which was another challenging time in my life, I had closed-eyed hallucinations that where full of color. I had my headphones on, my eyes were closed, and I began to see an artistic display of colors that warped into a time & space contortion turning itself into a spontaneous scene of colors, sometimes 2-dimensional, sometimes 3-dimensional, and at times it was like a dream element of having myself apparent inside this...awkward element of my mind. So at the very last stage of this experience, I would see a very bright light and then came a mixed explosive confusion burst of emotions, feelings, and thoughts that just didn't seem to be anything but entertainment to my own mind.

It is very hard to explain what a closed-eye experience of hallucinations on a very individual basis. This was a positive one, no doubt about it. I felt happy and kind feelings, I got to express myself in terms of an art medium without limit of ability, it was quite beautiful. With that in mind, all I had to do was close my eyes and let myself free. Although it sounds simple, it is actually quite difficult but seems to come naturally.

Just a couple of days ago, I closed my eyes and started seeing pinpoints on maps from a video games I was playing, and it was like I was squinting in my mind 'to see' what was beyond this map. I'd like to see beyond the map/grid, that is my death wish ;)

I think being scizophrenic is like being naturally attuned to what a human mind is capable of. The difficulties lie in acceptance and education or lack thereof from the society which surrounds us. I love to use the mind as a canvas. A lot of these things you can come back to and reexperience later. There's something about this consciousness-visualization-programming that just makes sure that these are burned into the memory like a mental tatoage. My question is, where are they saved? And can we share them somehow :O

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Part of the reason I am taking the time to express my fears and ask these kinds of questions is that I just wasn't expecting these deeper levels to be the way that they are. What I mean by this is exactly how they feel; I had read about enlightenment before, and about mystical experiences. I've had one out of body experience, countless dreams and lucid dreams, as well as experience with Reiki, Chaos Magick, auras, and spiritual energy. But you are right in that doing psychedelics changes you. I think a natural progression of thought and experiment should lead to this realization. And not just in the mundane way of "now I've done 'drugs' so of course I would be changed". A change that takes place in core, fundamental values and beliefs. My beliefs had shifted around before, especially in high school. But this change was unique in that it shifted me back into a metaphysical paradigm but with the added insights I gained from psychedelics. My progression throughout my encounters was all well and good until my breakthrough trips into the realms of "mystical" experiences.

Its just one thing to talk about oneness, one thing to talk about sensing things like spacetime break down, but different to actually experience such things. I feel like if it weren't for my past experience with metaphysics and esoterics that I would seriously high tail it away from psychedelics. And I feel its been like this for many, who eventually reach a certain place they may have been looking for (whether its more experiences, pushing limits, or for genuine exploration or healing) that is just too unusual or too much to handle. I suppose a natural response would be fight or flight, or in my case to wait it out and commit to breaking through this barrier of fear. The fear may not go away, but as long as I can come to terms with it and deal with it, I know it will be ok for me. It shouldn't even be this scary, but for some reason the visualizations, feelings, and phenomenon I was used to had given way to the conceptualizations in these previous posts. It is because these feelings, perceptions, and information is so profound, that I believe it was causing my mind to recoil away from it. I say this because up until the "heroic" dosages, "Z" has been very friendly and peaceful. Now I know that there are deeper levels, and its not such a "scientific" or mechanical process of incremental increases in dosage relating to incremental increases in intensity.

Out of respect I will not say what Z is, but I would categorize it as psychological > hallucinogenic > ego. I've categorized it in this way because it wasn't until discovering and pushing boundaries to a very high dosage did I encounter ego death-like phenomena. It is also several hours worth of duration too, so a middle range dosage would be about 8-10 hours while heavy/heroic would be between 10-14 hours total. Its also interesting to note that post heroic dosages, when I had done medium amounts of Z again it has been a lot stronger than before. Again not sure specifically if it has to do with my own brain chemimstry, reverse tolerance, or my relationship with it. I would imagine that it would be a combination of them. Anyway, with this in mind it has been generally gentle, Earthy, and humanistic, up until the heavy/heroic level. This is where things begin to switch from psychological-hallucinatory to visionary-entheogenic-mind expanding and possibly ego death-beyond. I would definitely like to get to a point where I can seriously explore reality at the depths of heavy/heroic, since like you said there's more to it than just the ego death. From what I've seen so far, and the responses I've read in this thread, it definitely appears that the psychedelic space is vast enough that possibilities seem endless.

I also want to work to bridge the gap between non-psychedelic users and psychedelic users. Part of this goal is being able to communicate what I have encountered on psychedelics, and so being able to verbalize these phenomena is key. However this in itself is a challenge, although one I have accepted. So its nice seeing that there are others out there that are able to verbalize this stuff both eloquently and factual. It also shows me I'm not the only one thinking this way lol. (kinda jumping around here)

As with science and mathematics, I agree that these are ways to interpret the universe around us. I have both read and seen how it is that there are these very specific laws and attributes that make our universe (and life) possible. It is amazing that everything should be just right for the universe to form the way it did, and for life to appear on Earth as it has. I feel like these facts are emphasized even further on psychedelics and a greater appreciation is gained for them after the fact. At least for me it has lol.

Yes, I think that intellectually speaking that the void, nothingness, ect shouldn't be scary. I'll have to see if its good for myself :P, but your insights have shown me different explanations for these different things. I think once I can come to terms with these things myself, I will have a lot less trepidation that I hold right now. I think I said this above, but I don't think these things should be scary, but the felt presence of them is somehow daunting for me. The user Dreamer was outlining this area well, I think. Dreamer basically expressed my own fears as well as the way she dealt with them. This is something I can definitely learn from and apply to my future experiences, as well as the input you've provided. I want to be knowledgeable of these realms, since I want to be able to verbalize and express them for myself, so I will eventually be experiencing them for myself.

Right now I can mostly just meditate and read up on things, and do what I can to mentally prepare for future journeying. I definitely think that there's no rush, and see application for the less intense experiences as well. I started small with psychedelics and have been gradually building to where I am now. However there is a necessity for me to have these deep experiences too, since experiencially I need to eventually be where you and other experienced users have reached. This is for my own ambition and goals though, and for other people I can see only a few high dose experiences doing the job. I just know I'm in it for the long haul though and that everything I have been involved in has led up to psychedelics. Strangely enough, I was brought to this very area despite everything else that has happened in my life. I had said that I didn't believe in coincidence before, but now that phrase has new meaning.

Lastly, I think that "fate" definitely has a new meaning for me. Perhaps my ego, or id, didn't want to believe that to be true, but I don't know it seems like there is a set direction for things to move in. I had experienced the kind of "chemical processes and behaviors determining actions", or a kind of predestined biology, before under psychedelics. I guess I just assumed this to be confined to wild life and not humans lol, but I am beginning to realize the meaning of this for humans. What "free will" is seems to be the most likely course of action, determined by behavioral, biological, and chemical reactions and needs of the mind and body. In this sense it really does seem like we are machines, or mechanisms for the consumption of food and disposal of waste, although I know we are also more than that. There is the whole metaphysical side to take in. And also, there are the unknowable things too. So even if science can one day calculate out exactly what state the universe will be in, in regard to spacetime, I don't think it will cause me distress as it would have before.

Edit: So OK it wasn't that much of a wall of text, but it was more than my previous post!

I also tried to find a video to post, but all I could come up was something from One Piece lol. This is how I've felt on "Z", because in the medium dosage range especially, it is very calm and chill. Like whatever is happening around you, you'll comprehend it, but are in such a state of bliss/peacefulness/happiness that you can just relax no matter what lol. (and this will be a legit spoiler for One Piece fans if you've not reached this far)

Spoiler for One Piece Sabaody Arc:

http://youtu.be/JXk5w90U4aw

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I don't have very much time to type this all out right now but if I don't get it done now it probably won't happen until at least tomorrow, so I think I'm going to do this as straightforwardly as possible....

There are definitely parts of the psychedelic experience that I could never have predicted how they would feel before actually having them.... Many things about higher dose experiences took some getting used to, but I think I'm honestly just now finally starting to being able to wrap my mind around it all. In another sense though, psychedelics have always felt like home to me. The first time I tripped and then did some research to see just what psychedelics are all about, my first thought was that this is exactly what I've always wanted but never thought I could have. I honestly love psychedelics way more than anything else, including lucid dreaming. Though there were strange parts in deeper experiences at first, now that I've learned how to handle them I've found that I was right.... Psychedelics are the kind of thing I dreamed out about while growing up. They can just take some effort to work with, but once you've got it down they're just incredible.... Even one psychedelic trip definitely changed me forever, but I do consider my experiences to be a natural progression. I think it's really that psychedelics just speed up the process, since they allow your mind to work at a higher rate....

What was your experience with chaos magic like? (Did you detail it in this thread already? I don't recall....) I actually had a trip a couple of nights ago which had a feeling very much like that, which I will be posting a report on here some time late tonight or tomorrow.... It was an extremely profound feeling, definitely the furthest out I've ever been. During that experience I actually thought about what you were saying here about people hitting a point where it's just too much for them.... I honestly worried that I might be frying myself too hard on that last trip, but for the moment at least I'm glad I pushed on anyway. It was just so bizarre... paradoxical... impossible.... It was also the most empowering thing I've ever experienced by a wide margin, I can't wait to get it all written out.... It's like you say (and as I referenced you saying before), it's one thing to talk about these experiences and another thing to actually live them.... It's beyond indescribable, it's completely unreal.... There's soooo much depth to them too, when you figure out how to work them it truly is like anything is possible. And like you said, it's definitely not just an incremental increase with dose.... Things can get pretty wacky pretty quickly in the psychedelic realm.

What you mention about the psychedelic getting stronger at weaker doses after higher doses are taken is definitely something I've noticed in myself and others as well. Personally, I like to think that it's because it's just the same kinds of patterns being made but stronger, and once you've seen more of the "big picture" it becomes easier to notice bits and pieces of it that before you wouldn't have been able to attach so much meaning to, and that really helps bring the hallucinations out by feeding it through that perception.... By this pattern though I truly mean in all of its effects, not just like visuals. I include the ego loss in that and I would say that while at the beginning of my tripping I felt like you expressed where I wouldn't notice much ego loss until high doses of things, nowadays I'm starting to feel it more at lower doses and can even think back to times I had it before and didn't fully appreciate it.... And yes, I would personally say that the entirety of the psychedelic space is significantly more vast than the dream world space, so I do believe that anything, even your wildest dreams are possible to achieve....

I can definitely relate to you on trying to explain psychedelic states to others. It's definitely possible to get a better grasp on if you really work on it.... I think that really the reason I'm getting such a handle on it now is just because for my whole life I've dedicated so much energy toward trying to understand myself and thinking of myself like a machine. I've also just read a lot of different reports and opinions and articles on drugs in general and have picked up some good terminology to explain my mind with.... I think it gets easier with time too, as you experience more you become more lucid for it and easier connections are made. I absolutely agree on psychedelics making you appreciate the structure of the universe more too.... I meant to say before that that's another reason I think that psychedelics could make you feel like everything is "meant" to happen or being guided too.... Psychedelics enhance your pattern perception so much that they can make it feel like all of the universe is just one great big inescapable pattern, which is a mechanism that only works the way that it does for the brain to understand reality because it's actually true....

Unfortunately I don't have time to jump back and reread which of Dreamer's posts that you're talking about right now, but I can understand the feeling of daunting.... Among other things (such as just the idea of these states being so infinite being a little overwhelming), I think the ego loss can just be a part of it.... If you're not quite ready for it for honestly any reason, which can be anything from personal issue to it just coming at a bad time to lose touch with reality (which would be much more common for schizophrenia) that fear coming from what remains of your human perception will be intensified.... When you're in the void, in my experience, there is no fear. No pain. Just bliss in freedom.... In the void I feel like I can experience literally anything in reality from the most hedonistic heavens to the most horrific hells, but even through all of it I will *feel* nothing but peace.... It's like an objective observation of infinity.... As long as you're able to relax into it and accept whatever happens, I really feel that there's nothing that can truly hurt you, no matter how intense it feels....

It sounds like you've got good plans for the future. :) I've honestly been using high doses of psychedelics pretty much since I first started, but it still really feels like I started small anyway. I was repressing so many feelings at the time that no matter how high I dosed I couldn't let go into it, I sort of just liked getting lost in the insanity of it throwing me around.... These days, especially with the reverse tolerance feeling I always get from hallucinogens in general building up over so many years, my experiences just feel sooooo much stronger than ever before.... I'm glad you aren't bothered by those thoughts on fate either.... It's definitely a strange thing to think about. Every now and then I feel a little weirded out about it, especially if I'm tripping really hard. But it's just one of those things.... Life is already strange enough as it is, just add that to the list of oddities. Honestly though I think that it's far too complex for human science to ever be able to fully comprehend, which just makes it even better if you ask me.... No matter how much order there is, to us it's all just chaos. It solidifies the illusion that we were wired to exist in. It's one of those magical aspects of life....

Hehe, I like that video too.... I can definitely relate to that feeling, so many psychedelics just give me such an incredible sense of peace. :content: Tryptamines tend to feel more like a strong, calming orgasm to me, whereas LSD feels like a hedonistic heaven on earth, and phenethylamines are more just like a crazy intense overwhelming body/mind high.... They're all pretty wonderful in their own ways. :D

I'm actually out of time now, so I'm really sorry I can't get to your other post yet.... I'll respond to it before I post my trip report!

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Originally Posted by LifeDreamer

It is very hard to explain what a closed-eye experience of hallucinations on a very individual basis. This was a positive one, no doubt about it. I felt happy and kind feelings, I got to express myself in terms of an art medium without limit of ability, it was quite beautiful. With that in mind, all I had to do was close my eyes and let myself free. Although it sounds simple, it is actually quite difficult but seems to come naturally.

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Thanks for sharing that LifeDreamer! Good seeing you around again :)

And a little off topic, but actually quite a few classical pieces remind me of psychedelic experiences, peaking, and these ineffable states of being. I have to wonder if composers had their own psychedelic or extra-ordinary experiences since listening to some of this stuff is just like "what the heck were they thinking? how did they do this?" lol. At least for me, as I'm into classical music. An example I'll use is the Mahler Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection". Its just as it sounds; the symphony is about the composer's beliefs about life and death basically, and he set it to music. The last movement has text which I think really hits home for a lot of people. It may stem from a somewhat Christian ideology, but I think the messages are universal. I'm linking the end part of it (with english subtitles!) but really the first movement reminds me a lot of how I've faced struggles on psychedelics. The last movement seems like how it'd feel during really amazing peak moments on psychedelics even though I've not had the epicness below yet lol. Just as a side note, some other pieces that come to my mind are the Verdi Requiem, Strauss Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklarung), and Beethoven's 9nth Symphony. And its interesting listening to how composers set music to themes of rebirth and transformation as well.

linked to a specific part in the youtube video here, be sure to watch it to the end as that is where I am talking about (although there are lots of harmonies in between that sound really otherworldly), and to get the full effect of the ending: http://youtu.be/7mphB6SwMQI?t=1h15m32s

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Yes! I know exactly what you mean by this. And the part about one awareness who lives every life one at a time... whoa, at one point during one of my trips I felt like my awareness would eventually live through everything, including trees, but it may have just been a abstract thought and not a literal process. Still though, one awareness going through everything one at a time, wow lol. These I think are the hard questions of psychedelics.

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Hehe yeah, I think about these things a lot while tripping.... So many abstract thoughts that you come up with on psychedelics though seem to turn out to be realistic in how they apply to existence, even if the idea that our brains which evolved in a simple natural world with no societies or anything could be so unbelievably complex as to be able to inherently understand such intricate details about the fabric of reality seems almost too absurd to even consider, somehow it seems to be true at least sometimes.... It really makes you appreciate what our brains can do, and it does make you wonder just about which of those abstract thoughts are more true than others....

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Part of me doesn't want reincarnation to be true, since I just want to be done here and move on :P but I have had times where I have been serene and accepting of it. Its like no matter what life is, its all sacred and beautiful, no matter what the circumstances. Its easy saying but carries such weight as well, since it doesn't explain why people have good or bad lives.

I have only had a few erotic moments that stood out; one was on Z and it was like I felt this orgiastic feeling throughout my entire body. Like I was being bathed in this feeling which pervades the entire universe. It was only a short while but I wanted it to last a lot longer, I'll have to get back there again sometime :D And oddly enough the next headspace I moved into was the feeling of being a human sacrifice in the Yucatan. In my mind's eye I started seeing images of moving through a jungle, then up a temple. Didn't actually see myself die, but I was feeling the sacredness of being a sacrifice, and felt totally ok with it.

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I really hope that the reincarnation thing is true. :content: Especially if it's the one awareness living every life one at a time variety. That would put our awareness into perfect balance.... We would all be just one grand being experience everything. Collectively we would do everything a being could do, it would be endless adventure.... Particularly in the human realm. We could have every job, be every type of celebrity, experience every type of love and lust and fun, even in the darker aspects of it we could know what it's like to not have to hold back our animal instincts sometimes, and we would also know what it's like to be the victim in those scenarios, but it would be okay because there would still be lives full of joy and wonder left to live.... I've always been the kind to want to see as much of reality as possible, so this view appeals to me. :) But who knows what the truth actually is.... And yes, I think whatever the truth of reality is, it's still going to be something just unbelievably amazing and beautiful.... How could it possibly not be?

That erotic universal feeling sounds fun. :movingmrgreen: That's really interesting about being a sacrifice too, haha. That's cool that you were fine with it.... I wonder what would have happened if the sacrifice had actually been competed. o.O I've had more sexual experiences on psychedelics than I can count lol. Pushing every possible stimuli to the extreme is kind of my thing though, so keeping myself in a sexual mindset helps that considerably.... That's going to be a big part of my trip report actually. >.> So I'll hold off on saying more on that for now....

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

I was seeing a grid-structure of what looked like human beings, with my eyes closed, on Z. I think it represented humanity, I'm not sure why I was seeing or being shown that. During this particular experience I had also been in communication with spirits, and it felt like I was connected to the same space as other people who were tripping in these heavy dosage ranges. I was seeing multi-colored fractals appearing across my perception with eyes closed again, and had the thought of "I didn't know or expect it to be this intense" then I heard/perceived this message convey back to me "Well what did you expect to happen?" which I felt was quite comical at the time.

During the same experience I was seeing (again with eyes closed) rotating 3D geometric figures. One of them was in the shape of a wire-frame pyramid, colored black, but was also shiny. It had small lights floating outside the middle of it. And I could interact with it, I could turn it and manipulate it. And as I manipulated it I realized I was also changing myself, somehow. Perhaps it was an object inside of my aura? I'm not entirely sure, and haven't come across this before, but in retrospect it reminded me of descriptions of DMT (reading them, I haven't experienced DMT before). Just had to respond with that stuff first lol.

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That sounds really cool. :3 I've actually heard people say before that they felt like they were in the same realm as other people tripping on LSD before. Whenever I perceive entities on psychedelics, I tend to see them almost exclusively as either personifications of my desires and current feelings or thoughts, personifications of the personality that the psychedelic is stimulating in me, or people who I know from my daily life.... I've never had my trip talk to me either, that's neat lol. I know people who've had entire trips like that though. The most I've ever gotten is a hypnagogic sentence while meditating on cannabis, but that did actually trigger a visionary hallucinogenic state....

Your experience with rotating the pyramid reminds me of my first really high dose of LSD. With eyes closed I saw a huge red and black checkerboarded cube which was rotating in place in the center of my vision, and by turning it with my mind or reaching out to it and pulling or twisting it in different directions I could alter the passage of time in my environment, causing things to speed up, slow down, stop, replay, and so on.... There was a movie playing in the background too so it was easy to notice how heavily things were being distorted. How were you changing yourself?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Neo Neo

Edit: And there was this other experience were I was with a friend in their room. We were sitting across from each other, and they had a guitar out. I was getting this thought loop of walking from outside to in their room, over and over again, as if it were the only time frame that existed. Anyway, I was feeling uneasy so I asked them to play some. Then this next part is crazy, it felt like I was playing through them. In fact, it felt that I was about to become them, or become their perception/awareness. The notes they were playing felt as if I was playing them, as if I was deciding which ones they would play. Out of the times we've tripped together, this was the one instance we were both on the level, phew was it nuts even though it may not sound like it lol.

And that Bravest Warriors was hilarious lol, and can definitely relate to how that feels like. XD and the giant beers, will have to watch more of that.

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That sounds intense! That actually makes me think about what I said before about how what you do is just a process of your brain but your ego is designed to interpret it as a free will kind of decision, so maybe what you experienced there was that system being misplaced into the perception of what your friend was doing, creating a seamless realtime feeling that you were controlling them.... I can imagine all kinds of strange and interesting scenarios in which it would be fascinating to test this effect.

:dreaming:

Actually, I sort of feel like I've gotten it already many times but in different ways.... I think this is one of the ways that visionary synesthesia can be achieved on psychedelics.... I often feel like the visuals I'm seeing are a part of my body, like I choose how to make them behave....

And yeah, Bravest Warriors is pretty awesome. :chuckle: I recommend starting out by watching the whole first season at once! It's only an hour long. And it's made by the creator of Adventure Time. :P

Alright, so I don't think I have any time left to type tonight really... but the next thing I post will be my trip report. I'm itching to get it down on record as usual. :biggrin:

Ok, so I just have to add something quickly lol. That last part about me and my friend, and me playing through them, was actually perceived by them as well. They felt as if I was choosing those notes on their guitar, and hence playing through them. That was the difference with previous experiences we'd had, that they actually felt something as intensely as I did at the time. Other times I'd be really far out and they wouldn't be at that level. In retrospect I'm not sure why they didn't connect as much to me, but maybe because we are both musicians so our awareness naturally focuses to music or music making. Anyway, had to clarify that last part that they felt this as well lol.

Last thing to take in before you post your trip report! And awesome responses, I'll get to responding later as well.

Alright, so here's my report of the other night....

Soon my schedule isn't going to allow me to trip very frequently and when I do it probably won't be in as perfect of circumstances as I can have now, so I've been wanting to make the most of the time that I do have left. For this evening, I decided to take about or a little over 25 mg of 4-HO-DET. I wanted the beginning of this trip to be everything already prepared and easy for me, so the first thing that I did is fill up two balloons of nitrous oxide until they were full and clipped them so that they wouldn't shrink. Then I ate the powder whole and washed it down with some water and pretzels, and finally I loaded myself a bowl of cannabis and hopped in the shower.

In the past I've found 4-HO-DET to be one of the most intriguing psychedelics that I've tried. When I was growing up, I was always interested in learning how to modify the reality that I was faced with.... I started with learning about computers so that I could mess with the video games I was playing. In middle school I actually met this kid just a bit older than me who I thought was clearly some kind of genius; he could do things with this one online game that we were playing that I had never even dreamed of being possible through hacking, and he and I actually became good friends and he taught me and introduced to others who also taught me many things about programming and reverse engineering. After that I took a 3D modeling course during the summer and then started actually trying to write my own programs in high school, including taking computer science classes. I found the idea of having my own domain where anything was possible to be exhilarating. During this time I also had my first lucid dream completely by chance, and some friends and I even had our own private server for an online game for a while in which we just went completely crazy and flew all over the maps and summoned huge monsters to cause chaotic destruction and just had all kinds of fun constantly bending the physics of the game. At the same time as all of this too, I was just constantly researching the mind and human and animal psychology.... I had been doing that in my free time since at least middle school.

I think all of these things that I've mentioned were key to leading me to be so excited about hallucinogenic drugs. I was already incredible pumped about lucid dreaming once I realized that you could live out any of your wildest fantasies in that way, but I truly found psychedelics to be even more interesting.... I felt like psychedelics just put the processing power of your mind even higher than dreams, and plus they allowed you to modify your perception of reality in realtime while awake, which to me always feel more meaningful than experiencing something in a dream. Nonetheless, I also got myself into an on-and-off habit of lucid dreaming that sort of ran its own unique time course but was still parallel to my use of psychedelics and other hallucinogens, and I credit this at the reason that I was able to dive so deep into and gain so much control over both of them. Expanding my awareness of my mind and how my hallucinations work helps both of these states equally of course. I should say too that I've always had sort of a set idea of how to work my control.... Another thing that I was really into while growing up was just getting lost in all sorts of abstract fantasies, and there were some consistent themes throughout these. One was that they often followed dark magical themes involving things like demons, insanity, and witches, and the presentation of different magic forces in my imagination being invoked was typically just intense and over the top like that anime AMV I posted.... I liked just throwing things around in my imagination and causing huge explosions and complex magical patterns filled with abstract hieroglyphics and such because I felt like it was training both my control of my imagination and my visualization capabilities.

With that in mind, one of my longest lucid dream goals has actually been to get to myself to a point where my dream body just kind of by default materializes in the witch form. Whenever I use powers too, I tend to cast them like magic and focus on things like flying, elemental control, and summoning. It's all just in good fun, but I think that having such a set idea of what I want has really helped move me to the point of having as much control as I do now.... So, generally when I take any psychedelic, as long as it's a decent enough dose, I see some hallucinations of humans in at least some way. I feel like each individual psychedelic sort of has its own personality, and that vibe meshes with my own personality to effect the kind of mindset I have during the trip, which alters the kinds of hallucinations that I get a bit from my normal imagination. As I've mentioned before, my visuals consist almost solely of female entities in erotic outfits, but they can still change considerably in style from one trip to the next. Most psychedelics cause this powerful euphoric delirium in me which tends to make the imagery all very cosmic and divine, and also very romantic or sensual in theme. LSD has always been a noticeable exception to this for me, as even though it is incredibly euphoric, the trip always felt like it had this dark and down to earth edge to it. And I don't mean dark in a bad way either, because as I said I had those kinds of interests while growing up and still do.... There's an aspect to this dark part of the trip as well which feels like causes this sort of delirium which, much more so than the mental effects I get from most psychedelics, feels like it's based more so on my regular thought process, and it causes it to start replacing my external reality. It actually starts to feel like my visual field completely breaks apart into entities' arms reaching out at me, and the more overwhelming it becomes, the more I get pushed into a realm where literally anything becomes possible.

On LSD, this intensification of the normal cognitive realm has a very curious effect.... I feel like one of the things that makes LSD unique is the fact that while it does strongly inhibit ego functioning, at the same time it's also incredibly rewarding, which allows that primal part of you that does remain to become enhanced and confident and in control. I feel that it's because it puts so much focus on that reinforcement that, for me anyway, the trip actually becomes pretty heavily focused on my perception of myself, which can change considerably during the trip. When the feeling of pure ecstasy is given into, I tend to even feel that there is no difference between my body and subconscious's conditioned idea of peak physical beauty.... This is something that actually helped me to get over a lot of issues that I used to have when I started tripping. Because my own self image is part of the hallucinogenic experience as well, the abstract erotic outfits that I normally see on other entities are also perceived as being on myself; however, this has always been conceptual rather than physical even if I was hallucinating it quite vividly over my normal body. LSD is also very human.... While the concepts do get quite bizarre, they never make me feel like anything more than just a very confident person. So, there is a reason that I'm covering all of this, I swear.... On 4-HO-DET I get much of the same grounded feeling, but even more so than LSD, but without the reinforcing feeling. In fact, it may be the least reinforcing psychedelic I've ever used. I actually describe it as tripping while sober... but somehow, still tripping hard. Though it lacks the focus on my self image that LSD has, it makes up for it being a far more powerful hallucinogen, and still quite delirious, even causing my perception of reality to become overwhelmed visually in much the same way. Also, even though 4-HO-DET feels even darker to me than LSD, it still retains many fantasy elements that LSD does not for me, and the feminine imagery I see tends to have a strong feeling of that dark magic, witches and sorceresses and the like, all very seductive and lustful.... This is what has placed at pretty far at the top of the list of my favorite psychedelics, along with LSD.

So, in the shower I could feel the 4-HO-DET kicking in, but it wasn't feeling overly strong. This was my first time taking it with some recent tolerance from tripping the previous week, so I had been a bit worried that it might not be up to what I was hoping for. When I turned off the water and dried myself off, I smoked some of the cannabis that I had prepared in the hopes of bringing it out a bit, which helped slightly. Afterwards I decided to go use the nitrous oxide that I had prepared to see if that would help really kick off the trip. It did make me feel very relaxed and a bit trippier for a bit, but it seemed like this experience was going to have some trouble launching.... It occurred to me that this was also my first time taking 4-HO-DET after being awake all day, and I was starting to wonder if the fact that it's so strongly based on my normal thought process rather than speeding it up and altering it might backfire on me when I'm tired enough that I don't really have much of a normal thought process. I was getting visual hallucinations similar to what I'm used to from it too, but they were weaker and more transparent in style, and they didn't seem to be stable enough to build up to anything. I could tell that there was genuinely something there though, and I really didn't want that dose to go to waste.... A thought entered my mind, that I could take another psychedelic on top of this that I know would work as long as I did it quick enough before too much tolerance set in, and then it would just be like tripping on that but with borrowed elements of this experience. The only one I have that I really felt comfortable with though is LSD. I was having a little bit of physical tension going on and I was afraid from reading around that 4-HO-DET might raise blood pressure, so I was a little hesitant too because I wasn't sure what mixing a high dose of LSD with that might do because I've honestly never heard of anything using this combination before and I already haven't been feeling at my healthiest lately, but around two hours after my original dose I figured that I didn't have much time to wait anymore and I had pharmaceuticals that could help with any dangerous systems if they occurred, so I decided to take what probably amounted to two or three hits of LSD. An hour after that I could tell that it was taking effect, but I was worried that it wasn't going to reach a high enough intensity to make something of the lingering 4-HO-DET trip.... Not wanting even more of my supply to go to waste, I took a strip of LSD worth at least another few hits.

During this time I had still been smoking more cannabis, and did a couple small balloons of nitrous oxide while taking this LSD to help bring things out some more. It wasn't until about half an hour after my last dose that I started to get some pretty heavy time dilation though, and it was at that point that I knew that I had finally succeeded in turning this into a more worthwhile experience. Just before this I had also taken a small dose of benzodiazepines just to add an extra safety net for the physiological effects, and it was seeming to successfully reduce any considerable body load and relax me into the trip even more easily without detracting from the experience at all, which was great. I decided to load another full balloon of nitrous oxide, and was ready to dive into it at just under an hour since that last strip. What followed was one of the most intense things I have ever experienced in my life.... Normally, when I trip there is this sense or urgency or needing to "take things all the way", like my whole trip is a build up to that point and then finally things become incredible.... Almost without fail, a full balloon of nitrous oxide can take me to that point, and I know exactly what it happens because up until then I will feel like it's hard for me to vocalize as much, but as soon as I hit that point I burst into completely unrestricted laughter, and from that moment on the trip is nothing but euphoria. That happened from this particular balloon which was like the true start to the experience, but it went so much deeper even than that....

Whenever I've been using nitrous oxide on psychedelics, there's been a specific kind of trip that I get from the combination which seems to pick up exactly where it left off after each time. It will be like suddenly my mind will be sent into chaos and I will experience an extremely vast amount of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors, all at once. In fact, I'm starting to feel like each time this happens it takes me to a point where it feels like no time has passed since the last time I was in that place, which along with the increased amount of information to take in gives it an extremely believable feeling of having the trip last longer and longer with each time, even though I'm only dissociated for the same span of time with each one. It truly feels as though I am stretching further and further into eternity. So, these concepts which nitrous oxide allows my brain to cycle through rapidly become more and more complex, and because of the hallucinogenic potential of the psychedelics I'm on, they become represented vividly in all of my senses as well, no matter how completely insane or illogical they might be, or how realistic. Somewhere in that eternity I experienced the similarity dualities of heaven and hell that I've seen on nitrous oxide and LSD before, but this was even more real. I was completely unthreatened by the hell, but the heaven I allowed to wash over me, and I felt as though I was isolated in a cosmic cocoon in which every aspect of my perception was just completely perfect, completely satisfied, no worries or care or needs or anything, just complete bliss.... Further down in this infinity though was what really blew my mind.... All psychedelics tend to have some basic color schemes for me, having full spectrum visions but always having a few dominant colors stand out.... LSD has very dark neon colors closer to the blue end of the spectrum, while 4-HO-DET has vibrant thick colors closer to the red end for me. However, the way that this nitrous oxide experience ended was that suddenly I saw every color of the rainbow in complete vividness, all cycling through each other around a point one at a time, until they hit black and white which paradoxically existed simultaneously, and suddenly my reality snapped and I felt as though I was perceiving colors that don't even exist. One I only vaguely recall which might not be exactly right was one which I think was like a white, a green, and a red all at the same time, and there were two others I distinctly recall describing as a reddish cyan and a blueish magenta.... I should note that neither of these colors seemed close to purple in any way.

So as I said, I came out of that with a burst of euphoric laughter. The transition into ego loss always feels quite orgasmic for me, especially on nitrous oxide.... I was left in this just completely satisfied and immobilized state for a few moments while I regained my breath, and in that time the real trip had started to make itself apparent. I have experienced this with psychedelic combinations before in the past.... When I'm still in the come up or not quite tripping hard on enough on more than one psychedelic at the same time, it can really feel like the experiences are fighting each other or just not really working out that well at all. However, once that feeling of full peace is finally reached by whatever means, things tend to have a way of just working themselves out.... The mind becomes a canvas and the multiple sets of visuals start to work together in the most artistically beautiful ways that one psychedelic alone often just can't compare to.... The ways that they effect your mind begin to intermingle quite abstractly as well, putting you in a downright bizarro world. These are the things that I was starting to experience from the 4-HO-DET and LSD after this balloon. My perception had become filled with a large and highly complex visual that appeared to be like viewing the center tip of an information spire on some kind of of massive technological geometric structure. I feel like the center of this and three arms branching out in equal distances from each other were mostly black, but also every color of the rainbow at once and also those same colors I saw from before that don't even exist. The three areas in between the arms started out in a basic red, green, blue pattern, but then started becoming filled with vivid and fast-moving scenes such as reviews of the history of humankind. The longer that I watched this, the more it felt like I was sinking into a tunnel focused around one point in my perception, which would zoom further and further into the foundation of reality until the hallucinations turned significantly three-dimensional, then four-dimensional, and then just completely shattered reality in ways that I can't even begin to describe.

I got up and walked around the house a bit to see more of what the trip had become. I was actually getting an interesting type of kaleidoscopic pattern that had elements of delirium in it including things like insects in it which I have gotten from LSD alone before, but the geometric style through which it was portrayed here is one that I have only gotten once previously, also on a combination, but a phenethylamine and tryptamine one that involved neither of these substances. There was something very interesting going on with the visuals in general.... I actually felt like I had opened myself up to some kind of dark magic domain. I was getting what I'm used to with 4-HO-DET in relation to the dark themes like witches and sorceress, but while that like other tryptamines tends to feel very realistic or dream-like in its presentation, that concept was now synergizing amazingly with the demented, cartoony aspect of LSD, along with its energetic and lustful edge. I felt as though I actually had the same control of my visuals that I did on my previous LSD trip and they were even similar in containing hieroglyphics, but this time they were more like power runes streaming in mathematical trajectories all around me, and with my will I could direct and throw them any way I wanted to, causing all sorts of intense geometric shockwaves to explode into existence around me. This whole time, I also had the LSD effect of feeling like my self-image is intensified and feels completely perfect, but in addition to that I now perceived myself to in fact be more witch-like. I constantly felt as though my hair and clothes or bed sheets were flowing around me and with every action I did just because of how much energy I was giving off. My imagination had also taken on a highly vivid, large, and defined spherical structure. There were both dots and lines which each covered the circumference of the sphere around the center but at different angles to each other that were constantly traveling around the edge of the sphere, and again using my will I could speed this process up and cause all of these dots and lines to crash into each other furiously and create both intense visual distortions around me and cycle through many different thoughts, emotions, and feelings that I'm capable of experiencing.

At some point (during the rest of this experience time was heavily dilated for me and I kept no record of what happened when) after just enjoying the energy and dancing around and training my imagination like usual but with the added visual show, I decided to do another large balloon of nitrous oxide. What I can mainly say about it is that I've noticed that this spherical imagination thing happens a lot on nitrous oxide for me, but I think it's a part of my normal perception honestly.... But when I do it, it basically causes the same process that happens when I speed it up myself, but even more so. This balloon caused it to push even further that the previous time, again adding the feeling of extended time dilation, and my mind was pushed into areas of perception which attempted to conceptualize feelings of infinity. I honestly cannot describe it in any way other than to say that I indeed felt myself to be infinity... just everything at once. I came out of it feeling even more out of it than the previous time, and I ended up just getting up to play with my perception again.... This trip felt like it lasted so long to me, almost more than any other trip I've ever had, and there were so many intense and wonderful things that happened in, but unfortunately most of them are just things that I can't convey in a meaningful way through words, or at least were just so intricately complex that it's impossible for me to remember all the little details about every single one aside from just knowing that it was some of the most amazing experiences of my life.... However, there is one thing that I definitely do want to share.

There was one point during the night while the LSD was still peaking and the 4-HO-DET was still going pretty strongly, and I decided to smoke some cannabis and then just lie in bed in the dark and meditate. Almost immediately after getting myself into a completely and utterly relaxed position, I slipped effortlessly into an out-of-body experience. It was of a kind I've experienced before a few times where I feel as though I'm experiencing it both from a first-person perspective and from a third-person perspective which is pointed directly at my body, and I perceive a spherical space with my body at the center that ends directly at an equal distance from my body to my third-person perspective. I have only ever experienced it while on LSD, but not from just meditating before. It was always triggered by a very heavy dose or smoking salvia, and each time it felt very out of my control, just intense and overwhelming. But, this time.... This time, I perceived my body to be floating in a huge void, essentially as if the space surrounding my body that I mentioned is the only relevant thing in the environment. I was actually wearing a very colorful and abstract but also erotic with outfit, complete with the hat and a short dress that had some robe-like qualities to it. It actually didn't look cheesy or anything either, it was all highly psychedelic and far more intricate than any regular earthly clothes, it had a truly magical feel to it. My hands were outstretched to the sky, and since I could still myself in first-person even if I could see myself from third-person, I used this casting stance to simply release all of the emotion I possibly can into it, just like how I do strong dream control or throw my visuals around like normal, but with the complete freedom of being out-of-body in a void. Correspondingly, enormous crystalline tower structures comprised of rainbow fractals and geometric imagery including concepts relating to human sexuality shot out of the abyss below me and built themselves high into the sky out of my passion. They all had a slight twist to them as well and so they all formed unique patterns as they worked their ways up. I simply did this until the release was complete and that world faded into nothingness, and I was back in bed....

I don't believe that it was much after that that the 4-HO-DET started to fade a bit, making the trip mostly like a somewhat enhanced LSD experience. Considering that the heaviest part of the trip was also over anyway, I pretty much spent the rest of the experience just thinking about everything that I had experienced and the nature of reality. I actually felt as though I was still tripping at least a bit for most of the next day during which I didn't sleep, and I kept smoking cannabis and using nitrous oxide to extend the effects and keep myself lost in thought and fantasy a bit longer. I also started researching some different concepts and reading opinions and thinking back to what others have told me about psychedelics before.... This is the major reason that I became much more interested in chaos magic after this experience. I learned of the excitatory gnosis and the inhibitory gnosis that practitioners would get themselves into to reach the place where magic based on belief can be used.... It makes completely perfect sense to me that this state would be achieved by these means just based on what we've already been talking about here, in the metaphysical sense. All of our perception is based on our beliefs, and so if you can control your beliefs then you can control anything you perceive.... I know of others who have experienced this while tripping to the point of being forced with coincidences over and over again until they had to accept the reality of the magic they were experiencing, and even after coming down and telling themselves they were just tripping they still can't think of any possible explanation for it.... That you reminds me of what you said Neo Neo, and it certainly is a strange phenomenon.... Personally though, I like to think that "coincidences" are actually one of the most beautiful parts of reality, and can be considered extremely special in and of themselves.... If all of reality is just following this pattern after all, then every single coincidence is completely planned. But think about it.... People experience so many random coincidences so unbelievably often. It's to the point that they obviously must be an extremely common part of the pattern that the mathematics of reality create. So my thought is, couldn't even the most bizarre, psychedelic things like that simply be explained away as coincidence, or maybe even two people having their coincidence detection enhanced in a way that a psychedelic might open up your perception to? Of course it's all just ideas, but very intriguing to think about I think....

Personally, I'm liking to think of chaos magic as more along the lines of just like dream control.... It's the same thing that allowed me to create and manipulate all of those visuals in my trip, it's just me fueling my thoughts and emotions, which themselves are all just illusory beliefs, into my external reality. But, that doesn't mean I don't think that there isn't something incredible special about it, going back to all the metaphysical stuff I said before.... Experiences like where I became infinity come to mind for me. Trips like these are really starting to get me to understand the true magic of mixing psychedelics and dissociatives.... While psychedelics do touch on this mystical aspect of life, dissociatives are like a complete sink into oblivion. They can get you into that excitatory gnosis very easily, but they are highly conceptual in nature even if they do provide powerful dream-like hallucinations. But, mixing them with unique ability that psychedelics have to force your brain to take literally any concept that's on your mind and create a subjective sensory experience out of it is what just makes it so unfathomably intense.... It's one thing to actually experiencing things like reality crumbling or becoming infinity or registering all possible color values just in a delirious way, but another step up to have that come at your through a psychedelic filter which does an amazingly great job of synthesizing something real out of all of this in the metaphysical plane, no matter how ridiculous or abstract it is....

Another thing that I've really been thinking about a lot after this trip is how psychedelics and dissociatives effect your perception of time. I've been trying to think about as many possibilities as I can.... The main thought that I've had from the nitrous oxide is this.... I've been saying that true ego death would be loss of perception, and so if there is memory processing then there must be some shred of ego left. I feel that that is the general consensus too... but I just thought of something that I hadn't before, and I think it's possible that many other people might not as well.... Even if memory is normally run by the id which is fueled by the ego, couldn't it still theoretically be possible for the memory to become active without the ego if the id was being fueled by something else? Or hell, even if the memory systems were just directly stimulated in some way different from the id.... If our conscious experience is the memory being written in, then you would think that technically it may not even require anything else other than some activity in itself.... If this is true, it would mean that it is actually possible to experience complete ego death, which just from experience honestly feels as though it's not impossible, and it would have some interesting implications for time perception as well.... For one, I've been thinking that the brain uses similar states of mind and memories to tell how much time has passed.... If you are in complete ego loss and have no access to any personality or cognitive associations whatsoever and therefore you have no memory, then the only similar state that your brain can compare ego death to is past ego deaths. I think that this could actually be a logical explanation for why ego death often feels like "returning home", because without any memories to bridge each ego death experience, it would actually make all of your ego deaths feel collectively like one experience, corresponding to the feeling of continuously returning to the true reality, and providing a theoretical basis for why each ego death can feel longer and longer, essentially creating one form of time dilation that just grows and grows and grows over the course of your life as you experience that state more....

A different type of time dilation that I always think of would be one that comes with increasing the processing power of your brain, which would typically happen either by blocking your brain's natural inhibitory mechanisms or overloading your brain with excitatory information, which dissociatives and psychedelics do, respectively. I feel like this is a big part of why things that cause extremely severe hallucinations or at least an intensely focused state, a la DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, can cause such powerful time dilation as well, because there's just so much going on at once that you're processing at the same rate as normal, but to you you still feel like you're collecting information at the same rate, which slows your perception of the passage of actual time.... However, there's another idea that I hadn't even considered and wasn't my own, I read someone suggesting it on another forum, but after reading it it just made so much sense and matched up pretty well with things I've read about how psychedelics effect perceptual systems before.... What he was talking about was how our reality builds in layers, and our perception / snapshot is actually comprised of so many layers depending at once, which include the current moment and a few ones behind it. This trailing perception, which causes frames to slowly fade out, is what helps build our continuous thought process and ability to comprehend changing parts of our environment. What the guy was saying was that psychedelics make these frames fade out more slowly depending on how high you dose, which corresponds to what I've heard before, and that's why you get tracers and some texture distortions and the like, though there are other reasons for sensory effects as well.... But, when the frames hang around for so long, you can even get to the point where you have multiple thought processes at once, or you can re-experience past events that just happened, or see time rewind, or whatever, because since reality is also distorting so heavily at the same time as this, all of these frames can actually start interacting with each.

Now, this was my own thought based on what he said.... The reason that you could get things like multiple thought processes is because those frames would need to literally include every single aspect of your reality in them. So, I was thinking about how memory works, and I figure that logically in each memory there has to include a perception of what time in your life it is, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to logically string your memories together chronologically when thinking back on your life so easily.... This would actually play into another way that you could experience a form of illusory time dilation, which would be in the form of false memories. If your whole brain is activated strongly enough in the right places, you could get autobiographical memories of fake lives which could seem totally realistic, and those could be interspersed in delusions to make an event feel longer than it actually was... however, I'm even more interested in how it applies to these frames. My idea is, one of the other important ways that our brains create our understanding of the passage of time, through this system that makes us believe things just like anything else, could intimately involve how long each frame was in your perception.... The way that psychedelics excite the id and cause glutamate release is actually the same way that adrenaline does it in the prefrontal cortex. For this reason, I think it's reasonable to suggest that the reason that the time dilation from psychedelics (and also dissociatives, which disinibit this process) can be so profound is because it's of the same variety which causes time dilation in near-death experiences.... So my thought would be that the animals most likely to survive natural selection would be the ones whose adrenaline rushes worked like this: frames are kept around for longer, so you're able to deal with more information at once, and the longer frames makes it feel like you have more time to work with, so you can focus more easily, which is also intensified by the just having more information to work with. Those would be the animals that survived the life-or-death scenarios by staying collected and acting fast....

And, there is a hidden treasure in all of this.... It would suggest that the near-death and psychedelic time dilation is not produced by just extending perception in one moment, but by stacking several extremely extend moments together which will all be perceived as one continuous line. This would justify why people can feel like they've experienced absurd lengths of time such hours in seconds, or trips lasting days, weeks, months, years, or lifetimes.... Combined with the ego death memory functions, it could even be eternities. And since there's so much information going on in those states of mind in even just one frame, just imagine how immensely complex it gets when all of those different frames start constantly interweaving with each other.... It's almost feasible that people *could* experience that much time passing in all that data....

I actually wish I could say more but I really need to hurry out of the house right now.... I'll check back in later on today!

Okie dokie, so I was thinking about what else I wanted to say literally nonstop all day while I was out of the house, and I've expanded on it a bit.... I've been trying to wrap my mind around a new (for me) idea of how psychedelic and dissociative time dilation might work, and I think I've started to get a grasp on it.... The focus of the theory is basically that our perception of the passage of time is the product of a relationship between the rate at which we are picking up new perceptual frames and the amount of information that is processed, or written into our memory or subjective awareness stream, in between each frame. Allow me to explain as best as I think I can muster....

I was thinking quite a lot about what I mentioned in my previous post where the person on the other forum talked about perceptual frames stacking on top of each other and creating tracers and interference patterns and multiple thought processes and the like. One of the main ideas I could come up with is that glutamate release from the layer V pyramidal cells of the prefrontal cortex could increase both the rate at which these frames are picked up and the amount of delay before they degrade from our awareness, which I think could potentially be mediated by NMDA and AMPA receptors, respectively, though the NMDA receptors are more important to the central structure of the theory....

The reason that the AMPA receptors come up is because they're known to play an important role in the effects of both psychedelics and dissociatives. It's interesting that both of these types of hallucinogens can nootropic effects at low to moderate doses (and arguably at higher doses), because one of the most potent class of nootropic dugs are ones which enhance the activity of AMPA receptors directly by increasing the ability of glutamate to activate it, and rarely some of these drugs, like piracetam and aniracetam, are even said to have a somewhat psychedelic feel to them when very large doses are taken. It's likely that these drugs activate AMPA nowhere near as strongly as the glutamate release from psychedelics are dissociatives, particularly considering that they are only regulators of the receptor, and they would be much more specific in action, but they should still have some effects that are consistent between them. Having personally used a few nootropics, one thing that I can say about them, especially strongly the first time I used piracetam, is that they definitely increase my ability to pay attention to more things in my visual field at once. Now that I think back on it with this new information in mind, it seems like that could definitely be related to increasing my brain's ability to hold perceptual frames for longer, and thus allowing me to vividly detail my surrounding more easily.... The idea of being able to store information in working memory for longer just goes well with the whole nootropic field in general. In addition to that, it's worth noting that this class of drugs is well documented to drastically intensify the effects of psychedelics on many occasions. I certainly think there's reason enough to suspect that this receptor might be important to these effects anyway....

The NMDA receptor comes into play because of the way that psychedelics are opposite to dissociatives. Psychedelics progressively intensify our external environment; dissociatives progressively degrade it. My thought was that it would make sense that psychedelics cause this perceptual field to become more intense by the aforementioned increased frame delay building up more and more on the current stimuli, but that alone wouldn't explain if I wanted to connect those effects to AMPA activity which both classes of hallucinogens share, and it wouldn't explain why dissociatives also cause things like tracers and afterimages but have opposite effects on perception. What would make the most sense to look at is the fact that NMDA receptors are activated by the glutamate release of psychedelics, but blocked directly by dissociatives. My immediate thought was this: I've been thinking about our perceptual systems far too simplistically. I tend to place our internal and external worlds on the same plane because in many ways they are and we experience them that way, but I can't let myself forget that they're still separate hardware.... The part of our brain that creates those frames is just a camera. In order for it to run properly, it must be wired to normally operate at the exact frame rate that would provide us with a seamless image of reality, based on the way we're organized to experience it.... This would mean though that this camera could be modified just like any other part of the brain. I thought that a logical conclusion that you could come to from thinking about what you could achieve from modifying the camera is that in a scenario where the amount of delay before a frame fully degrades is proportionally consistent between both raising and lowering the frame rate of the camera, increasing the rate would rationally significantly increase the amount of junk noise and interference patterns all throughout the video feed, while decreasing the rate would cause the remaining degradation of the delay to become more apparent as old information disappeared with less new information to replace it. But, despite this, if you create this scenario and have the rate of delay increasing proportionally larger to the decrease in frame rate, you will still end up with afterimages in the feed, with just a very different breed of interference patterns.

So, my new theory is that our perception of the passage of time actually critically relies upon this system of collecting perceptual frames. The way I mean that is that the subjective correlate would be that until that next frame comes, we don't feel like any normally perceptible amount of time has passed. This is an extremely important part of the system that just allows us to have a logical view of reality. As I see it, there just must be at least this much activity for it to act normal, an amount that allows you to perceive external reality at a rate which is consistent with what your rested cognitive abilities allow you to handle, which shouldn't have too much variance from one person to the next, and thus lowering the activity only destabilizes the system.... However, the system can be made to work even more efficiently. As I mentioned in my previous post, it would be theoretically helpful for a biological machine to be able to drastically enhance the amount of environmental data it can hold on to and work with in a potential life-or-death situation, which can justify the lengthening of delay of degradation. But, it would make more sense that the machine would be even more protected if on top of that, it also fueled its camera intensely so that it could pick up a higher rate of frames than normal, which would synergize with the delay to create an extremely intense amount of information all being collected in a very small amount of time. This is what would happen in an adrenaline rush which also releases glutamate from those pyramidal cells, and it fits perfectly with my theory, which is that our subjective perception of how much time has passed can be enhanced by causing the highest amount of information to be perceived in between each frame.... One of the most important things to remember about all of this is that even when these factors like your perception of time feel altered, your perception of the rate of your own inner workings never seem to change anywhere near as significantly. That is to say that even if you can physically see time moving incredibly slowly, you still be able to think at a normal rate, if not even more fluently or rapidly than normal. This is incredibly significant, because it highlights how our actual inner self is just this timeless mesh of concepts and perceptions, and our perception of the passage of time in the external world is just an illusion based on belief like anything else. So, the reason that you could say that this illusory concept of time passing in realtime is based on one frame passing to the next is because you could propose that if every frame which has the same amount of delay is perceived as lasting the exact same amount of imagination time to us, then increasing the rate at which these frames are collected could physically slow your perception of external reality by causing you to register more equal units of perceptual time passage per the same amount of actual time passing. Having this ability would of course be extremely useful in the situation which calls for the adrenaline rush to bring it out, and it would pretty well explain this aspect of psychedelics as well I think....

I said before that lowering activity of this system significantly below normal would only destabilize it.... This is where you start to get into the even more metaphysical side of it. It's worth noting that the time dilation caused by psychedelics seems to be one that is actually true, in the truest sense that it can be anyway, because it genuinely does allow you act more quickly in the external world and have significantly more processing power for it. The way that I see dissociatives causing their time dilation on the other hand is more that they abuse the delicate system which is required to allow psychedelic time dilation to exist in such a way that it allows the passage of time to feel much more intensely dilated than it actually "is", in the way that psychedelic time actually is. Much like seeing colors that don't exist, it is only a trick that takes advantage of the way we are programmed to cause experiences that are impossible, but again like seeing colors that don't exist, the results of these completely paradoxical states on subjective awareness can just be beyond incredible, and as always to you they are completely real experiences in the moment.... I touched on before that the default level of frame rate of our camera would have to be one which was on our par with our body's ability to actually physically collect and interpret information. I said that the time between frames is normally imperceptible.... This makes perfect sense if you think about it, because if our frame rate wasn't at least as fast as that, the image wouldn't actually keep up with reality and would strobe and lag consistently. What's interesting though is that these kinds of visual effects are actually more common on dissociatives.... This would be perfectly logical if it's true that NMDA receptors are responsible for the frame rate, as dissociatives specifically work through lowering NMDA activity. However, you then have to consider something: what happens when there is a lag at a normally subjectively imperceptible time?

One of my old thoughts for how memory seemed to be the base of our subjective awareness of reality was that drugs like benzodiazepines which could cause amnesia and completely inhibit the functioning of these consciousness-related systems of our brains for a while are able to cause complete blackouts with no subjectivity in between, even when the body is still up and operating for parts of it. It seems reasonable enough to me, but now I'm starting to think of it from a new angle.... The reason the benzodiazepine thing interests me so much is because my first experience with amnesia caused by them resulted in me suddenly waking up the next day and feeling like almost no time whatsoever had passed since the previous night. Throughout the day I frequently kept forgetting that it wasn't still the previous day. Now I'm starting to think that while the loss of memory encoding would be responsible for a total loss of subjective experience, it may not be enough to explain the feeling that I had that next day.... Today I was considering that lucid dreamers were found to be able to count time pretty accurately from inside a dream. It also crossed my mind that there are certain perceptual systems such as hearing which never completely shut down even while dreaming, and just other things that make you think that your mind is still running normally in at least some ways while you sleep.... My thought was that perhaps going to sleep normally still allows this process of collecting frames to happen on at least some level, and this could relate to why we still generally feel like a pretty good amount of time has passed even if we've mostly felt unconscious. On the other hand, it the dose of a benzodiazepine was high enough that it actually has a strong inhibitory effect on the frame-collecting mechanism, and our perception of the passage of time depends on these frames being collected, then wouldn't it be possible that pharmacologically inhibiting any frames from being collected until the drug wears off and it kicks back in would cause a feeling as though no time had passed between the two, just as normal? Even though a good amount of time had passed in actually, it would seem just as imperceptible as one normal moment moving to the next, and this would match perfectly with my blackout experience.

This is all fine and good, but there's something more to consider here.... Drugs like benzodiazepines will inhibit other systems like memory, focus, anxiety, and so on at least as much as they will inhibit our cameras from working. They clearly are too potent in this way compared to any sort of mechanisms that would cause some severe perceptual alterations as evidenced by the fact that the dose for total amnesia is generally not too far above when which leaves reality still pretty easy (even if you are a bit sloppy) to interact with. However, something that makes dissociatives quite unique is that they actually work by blocking a self-regulatory mechanism in the brain's primary excitatory system. In other words, the brain has a backup mechanism to stop its excitatory drive from being too excitatory, and dissociatives stop that mechanism from kicking in, in addition to doing other things. The result of this is a strong net increase of excitatory activity and net decrease of inhibitory activity, leading to a very intense subjective state. Far from just shutting your systems down, dissociatives will actually pump most of your brain's systems into overdrive, while conveniently having anti-epileptic effects through the very mechanism of action which causes the rest of these effects, basically allowing your hardware's capabilities to reach a critical mass without interference. Since both psychedelics and dissociatives share some downstream neurochemical processes, the state induced by full dissociative out-of-body experiences is in some ways comparable to that produced by the most powerful psychedelics such as DMT and other strong tryptamines which can also transport you to a dream world, though they are of course unique in other ways as well. One thing that can be seen as a fairly common shared property between them in these states is some of the most ego dissolving or splitting psychological and hallucinogenic effects, and one that I would like to explore specifically relates to living through the lives of other people. I think I mentioned autobiographical memory before, and this would be the perfect example.... Autobiographical memory is a complex system that involves several different areas of the brain, but we all know people who have or just ourselves have even just lived as other people with actual (fake) memories in dreams, or had dreams that felt like they lasted for days or weeks convincingly due to false memories.... When all of those areas of the brain are activated intensely such as during the dream state, they can still come together to work relatively correctly even when they're not supposed to, instead just creating false memories and lives, and if you stop and just consider how much memory you have that builds up your perception of your life that you actually carry with you at all times throughout the day, you should realize just how vastly powerful this system is and just how intricate and deep it could get similarly to other perceptual systems such as sight and sound when it is put into overdrive....

I said before that I think that psychedelic time dilation is more real, while dissociative time dilation gets a lot of its power from delusions. Something to consider is that if you were to smoke DMT enough to have a complete breakthrough, the rules of perception would change significantly. In the external world, you are inhibited by the rate of actual time happening around you, which all physical objects are bound by. This is why when your frame rate speeds up, everything around you slows down. But, as I said before, your perception of the passage of time is wired to match your cognitive abilities. That is to say that it's your external perception that changes, not your internal; like I mentioned before, the frame rate changes while imagination time stays the same. In the case of taking these hallucinogens though, your imagination becomes significantly enhanced, no longer being just a background image but actually creating an entirely structured dream world in which you become completely immersed. When it comes to psychedelics, the amount of excitation that it takes to reach this state will also bring a severe amount of time dilation, and that's something that makes it so special... because, even though time around you in the external world is now moving extremely slow, you have no external sensations to judge by, but are rather stuck in an entirely internal world which appears to running in regular time, just like your imagination. At the same time, you will be picking up so many frames at once and having each and every frame delay last for so long that the amount of information populating your dream world will be extreme and mathematical and completely and utterly mind-bending. This is, I believe, the way to cause your brain to actually be able to process as much information as possible in as little time as possible, essentially being the maximum potential of actual time dilation. However, it is notable in that there is a maximum to it.... It is physically impossible for your brain to push this frame rate to infinity, it's just illogical in the world which our brains inhabit. This would also mean that the backwards psychedelic time dilation caused by collecting an extremely high amount of frames in a short amount of time, giving the delusion that an extremely long amount of time has already passed when viewed in retrospect, is limited in the same way. That's where dissociatives come into play....

Dissociatives, given this theory, would seem to have the potential to completely shut off the frame rate similar to benzodiazepines. This makes them unique compared to psychedelics, which cannot reach the other extreme, the infinity. It is worth mentioning I feel though that technically dissociatives cannot completely shut it off either, as that will only happen during death. That scenario aside, there will always be a point where the next frame is collected eventually, even if it's not until the drug is out of your system, though more logically it would be on the comedown. However, it's also worth considering that a dissociative dose that strong may require complete NMDA antagonism, which would also disrupt memory to the point of just sending you into a complete blackout regardless, no subjective experience. What's really special though is not that point of complete nothingness, but the unbelievably massive scale that exists between that and our normal consciousness.... Consider the fact that, actually pharmacologically quite literally the opposite of benzodiazepines but much like psychedelics, dissociatives actually push the brain into overdrive. So, when you take a continuously higher dose of a dissociative, what you're actually doing by this theory would be increasing the delay to decay of each frame, lowering the frame rate, and intensifying internal activity potentially all the way up to the point of complete out-of-body experience just like the powerful psychedelics. What the first two of those effects would account to is that it would begin to feel as though there is an extreme stretching to the perception of time, because the mechanism that allowed you to actually feel a moment passing is lagging, but because our internal worlds run on their own separate rate to the camera's frame rate, similar to how I said on psychedelics the external world would be slowed but your internal world would seem normal, the dissociative's steady intensification of your internal processes will still continue despite this mechanism failing.

So, picture this.... Imagine being in the benzodiazepine situation, where you're on the drug, things start getting a little hazy, and then suddenly it's just the next day, but it literally feels as if almost no time has passed whatsoever. Try to picture that feeling very vividly, if you haven't actually experienced it.... Even though likely many hours have passed, you literally feel as though your last moment of awareness was only seconds ago, or minutes ago at most. Now, picture the same thing, except that in those hours that on the benzodiazepine just had you knocked out, instead you are entirely conscious, immersed in a rich inner fantasy world which can attain and surpass the complexity of a dream just like a psychedelic, and can activate every part of your brain in harmony to create experiences like the false autobiographical memories of living different lives.... Imagine being lost in a dream just like one of those dreams where someone lives through weeks or months of time, and even if it's not *really* that you're experiencing that much information, in the moment it feels completely real and undeniable, you have the full emotion and mindstate for it, and the false memories are so real that you honestly don't know that you haven't experienced them all, and even afterward you won't be able to tell which ones you did and which ones you didn't. Picture all of that... and then the next frame comes. Bam, reality picks up where it left off. To you, as real as anything else you've ever experienced, you just experienced what felt like an entire lifetime of possibilities... in the imperceptible space of time in our perception between one moment and the next, in the most microscopic definition possible. Picture all that, and stretch over hours of time.... Hours during which countless lifetimes could be lived, in which you could simply exist for what felt like eons, experiencing infinity over and over again in the spaces between time.... With all of these thoughts that I'm having now, this is what I'm beginning to think that dissociatives do. Of course, as I have said, it's all just a delusion.... You're not really experiencing a lag in time in which anything can happen, you're just not processing the passage of time properly. Logically, if an increased frame rate can make you look back afterward and feel like more time has passed than actually did, then a decreased frame rate should be able to make you feel like less time has passed than actually did. And considering that memory loss is frequent with dissociatives, this may be at least partly the case.... Regardless though, the general overwhelming intensity of the high dose experiences and the severe psychological impact can work around this. Even if it seems like less time at the end, it doesn't change the fact that in the moment you were experiencing completely relentlessly physics-defying time dilation, right? As far as I'm concerned, that's still a pretty fucking intense thing to experience, and it's not like you still won't remember it that way afterward... just like seeing colors that don't actually exist, or experiencing synesthesia, or becoming infinity, or any other perceptual trick we play on ourselves.

I can actually relate this to my recent experiences with nitrous oxide, which are a big part of what motivated me to think about these things in the first place of course.... I have actually quite often noticed the feeling that once I get to complete ego death on nitrous oxide, I feel like I have the same experiences but going progressively deeper into infinity, which would just be a reflection of me opening myself up more to the experience and forging a relationship with it with each trip, but yet as soon as it starts wearing off, every time I feel as though it was just a quick blip out of a reality and then I'm just right back to where I was a second ago. Just as I described, it felt as though all of that infinite experience happens within a single moment. Though salvia is not technically a dissociative in the same that drugs like nitrous oxide are, it does lower the activity of NMDA receptors and GABA release in the prefrontal cortex and should have some similar outcomes on perception, which it is well-known to. Before I had ever even thought about anything like this, I was definitely aware of having the effect on salvia of going into complete ego loss (that state of "Oh shit, it's this again!" that I have worked so hard to overcome) which felt like its own separate reality, just to pop right back into my room and feel as if almost no time had passed whatsoever. I feel as if this theory could actually explain at least parts of those experiences pretty well.... I really need to experiment more with dissociatives honestly, I don't have nearly as much experience with them as I would like outside of nitrous oxide... but I have also used DXM infrequently and once mixed it with LSD, causing the most intense time dilation of my life. I believe that having the LSD in there to add sensory hallucinations and increase the delirium while having a much higher dose of DXM that could allow for a net lowering of frame rate collection while synergizing strongly with it for increasing delay was the right way to go, of course I didn't even remotely think about it like that at the time. What I found though was that my perception of time was much more like what I covered here for dissociatives.... I was trapped in a fantasy world that was actually half my real external world and half completely dream-like hallucinations with moments of complete ego death, and I actually had an entire completely insane but highly elaborate stream of false memories that was constantly feeding my delusion as well. I could've sworn that I experienced at least days if not weeks of just utter madness and states of perception beyond that which can be explained by language, only to suddenly snap out of it as if nothing had happened and check my phone to find that only about an hour and a half has passed so far, and I still had almost all of the LSD trip left and a less intense but still strong DXM trip going over it. It was by far one of the most intense experiences of my life, and really opened up my mind more to just how abstract our perceptions of reality can get....

Anyway, that pretty much covers the rest of what I wanted to say after that trip, and what I was thinking about all day. :content:

Actually, there is something else that I want to mention too, which is kind of a separate thought....

It's about feeling like you're in control of your reality. I've been trying to think of how the feeling of control is technically an illusion as well... just like everything else we perceive. This could apply to dream control and it could apply to moving hallucinations during a trip, but I'm thinking about how it could even apply to the feeling of moving your own body while awake. It's like what I mentioned before about how the idea that you have free will over your own train of thought is just an illusory parts of the memory being encoded, when it's really just that your brain followed the laws of physics to compute the outcome of all of the stimuli being fed to it.

I've been thinking though, normally your imagination has no solid place in your physical environment, more so it's just a background thing, but you can feel that you move the imagery in your visualizations in some abstract way.... I'm starting to understand more of another part of what people mean when they talk about the ego separating the self from the other. My thought now is, what if your external environment is actually treated by your mind exactly like your internal environment, except that while in your internal world there is nothing but you, your brain has to be wired to understand what part of the external world represents "you", your physical correlate, and what is anything else that could theoretically be either a reward or a threat, or something that would help lead to or away from those, respectively?

What I'm getting at here, is... move your hand. Flex your fingers. Move your mouth, legs, butt, whatever.... That feeling of moving your body that you get when you do that? It's all a lie.... There's absolutely nothing different about it compared that abstract feeling you get when you move things around in your imagination. It may feel slightly different, but they're of the same metaphysical origin.... Your imagination and your body are the two things that both technically exist in your consistent perception of reality which you are actually capable of controlling yourself at all times, and so our brains seem to have developed an extra subjective perception which reassures us that both of our two personal domains are still active and doing as we choose. Furthermore, these perceptual signals act as guides for us.... They allow us to learn from the patterns that our bodies and imaginations take and refine them for the future, giving us even more control than we have now. Which again, is technically an illusion in the free will sense, but is actually true and significant in the sense that our biological machine is becoming more capable of determining its own processing, but it's still just a part of the pattern of course.

The reason I'm thinking about this truly though is because of what this feeling can do when it is intensely or inappropriately activated, of course.... The most logical way to do it seems to be through the use of hallucinogens or dreams, and I have a pretty good hunch why. I was thinking, if the feeling of moving your body and the feeling of moving your imagination are both instances of the same kind of control, then wouldn't it be logical that if they were activated on a similar level there would be a good deal of overlap? The way to think about this would be that your body is normally on a much higher level, as it's much more important in terms of survival for you to have an extremely vivid perception of your body versus your imagination. On the other end though, the perfect example of how these would actually be the same is a dream, especially a lucid dream.... Your dream body is no more real in the external environment than any other part of the dream. Every physical sensation you've ever had of moving your dream body has just been a more intensified version of you moving things around in your imagination, and it works because you feel confident from your normal waking life that it will, because you're just wired that way. But, as anyone who has truly practiced dream control will know, there is so much more to it than that....

As I've mentioned before, the way that I've learned to manage to get my dream control pretty strong is by just relaxing myself into it and letting my mind do what it does, just like daydreaming, or just running around letting my imagination go wild on the fly. This is what I do during my LSD trips where I have this kind of control as well, and it always works perfectly. Everything always moves exactly as I make it, and I love it. But even that, while still being a pretty impressive level of control, is still not as strong as it can go.... I've been thinking back to what I was saying about how normally the id would be influenced by the ego to create memories, but that from taking a drug it's technically possible that the id would generate information influenced by the drug instead and not by the ego, though since it's still your id working with your memory banks it's of course still going to be personal in theme. I've been trying to think about other systems in the way that their maximum potential could be experienced by taking advantage of an illusion, similarly to how dissociatives can make you feel like this immense amount of time is passing by inappropriately abusing the perceptual system that measures time.... With that in mind, I think a way to abuse the system of control just came to me as well.

If all your imagination is normally is your ego informing your id about what to project into your reality, then that feeling of you choosing what to think about is just a perception that the id also includes in that memory encoding. In fact, dopamine is known to play strongly in dream and hallucinogenic states, including in psychedelics and dissociatives, and should be involved in imagination as well, and it also serves as a very important neurotransmitter in motor control.... This is highlighted by the fact that dopamine releasing agents increase locomotion. These motor control centers of the brain are actually largely overlapping with the areas of the brain which cause dreams, and I've thought many times in the past that the massive dopamine rush in your brain during a dream just intensifies your imagination to the point that you feel like you're moving all over the place and doing things, seeking out goals and the like, while your body is actually resting.... Now that I think about it, what if the way that dopamine controlled movement of the body and movement of the imagination actually worked on a similar overall field of control that determines the things we can manipulate in our external world?

Tying this back to what I was saying, these hallucinogenic drugs cause a strong stimulation of these parts of the brain including lots of dopamine release.... Even the only one that really doesn't, salvia, still works through the kappa-opioid system which like dopamine is heavily involved in both movement and memory encoding, and obviously causes hallucinations with strong activation. Sticking to the simple idea for now though, if these drugs work through these same chemicals and processes that the id normally uses to encode your imagination for you, wouldn't it make sense that any perception that you experienced as a result of that exogenous body/mind movement data coming into your system would feel no different than any endogenous motor signals that your brain is sending you? I mean, to you it's all just one solid blend of reality, there's no difference... and as I've been saying many times, whatever your perceptual engine functions to have you believe in the moment, to you it's completely real at that time. So, just what would the limits of that be?

Like I said, the level of control that I get from LSD and that I got from this last trip seems to be close to the level of lucid dreaming, maybe even a bit stronger but less intricately hallucinogenic. My thought is that it's entirely possible that by allowing myself into that daydreaming mindset, I'm preparing my memory encoding from the id to feel as though I have the maximum amount of control over my imagination possible, as daydreaming would be the time when you experience that in a waking state. This would influence my id to create largely positive perceptions since I just relax into it, but because the parts of my brain which are the correlate of my id are so unbelievably enhanced by the hallucinogens, the amount of movement data that gets sent to my imagination is extremely strong and complex. Rather than just making these minor background visual patterns that are just barely perceptible in the back of your mind, the data starts to become significant enough that it "moves" your imagination in far more developed and clearly mathematical patterns, and the subjective experience that they give of you having controlled your mind's movements becomes significantly stronger, closer to, but still not quite at the level of you moving your body.

There are two times, however, where I would say that it did feel that strong; once on mushrooms, and once on DMT. Both times were extremely similar, the differences being mostly superficial in relation to objectively understanding the experience, of the visual or emotional variety. The time on mushrooms came first, and it was one of the most euphoric experiences of my life. Both times the experience came at a point where the trip crossed a very clear threshold, one where it almost feels as though perceived space between myself and my external environment, a space without space just like the dissociative time without time, starts transforming into human shapes right in front of me. I have experienced entities on many substances, and these are not normal entities.... I've even experienced both vividly on DMT so I can say that for sure, and I've experienced the regular entities to some degree on mushrooms. While those entities tend to feel like dream characters, these perceptions feel less like autonomous (to the extent that that word is applicable here) beings and more like an extremely intrinsic part of me.

An example of the difference would be that I feel like I have control over dream characters, I can extend my awareness to what they are doing and influence how they act, and I often feel the same way about entities on hallucinogens... but these human shapes during these mushroom and DMT experiences, I literally felt as if they were a part of my own body. On the mushrooms I saw my typical beautiful female hallucinations covered in abstract and erotic outfits and jewelry, but with this woman, as she would move her head I would actually feel her head moving as a part of my own control, as vividly as if I had moved my own head but as a separate part of my body, one which was just as valid as the regular part of my body. I actually felt like her entire being was an extended part of me, which is a very difficult thing to describe.... There were other images around her as well of objects such as articles of clothes which represented different aspects of her sexuality and femininity as well, and I could even feel those as an extension of my body. This experience was intense, but very abstract.... When it happened on the DMT, it was even more intense.

Honestly, I've almost never measured any dose of DMT that I've used, so it's hard for me to say exactly what kind of dosage range I fall in.... I do often feel though like I use doses that are pretty far above what most people might do. I've noticed that there is a point at maybe about half of what I got used to using where I could close my eyes and view the hyperspace that people talk about, and I haven't used it since I got good at this but I bet I could even fully enter it through meditation now.... Really though, the DMT trips that have always been the most meaningful for me are the ones where there's just so much freaking information being communicated all at once that there's really nothing you can make of it other than being completely blown away. Like most really intense trips, it took me a few experiences of doing this and remembering almost nothing about it before I realized that I actually was having some crazy hallucinations each time, and it's just that it was so far out from normal consciousness that it takes some practice to be able to bring able back with me. The way these trips go for me is that I tend to just be completely slammed by a wall of constantly changing sensory information which appears to be extremely vast and includes more information from my life than I could possibly ever imagine in one nanosecond of the visual, of which literally the entire thing changes nonstop. It's an extremely intense and overwhelming experience....

Normally when I do that, I don't even remotely think about opening my eyes, since I always close them after I've taken my hits. This one time though, I just felt like going for it.... I actually wasn't really getting that great of a body high, more like a really heavy anxious stimulation, so maybe that's why I just wasn't getting as into getting lost in it and figured I'd see what else was going on. Anyway, once I opened my eyes I found that the visual experience was completely different, and it's usually not very intense at all for my with eyes open on DMT, but to be fair I don't think I'd ever had my eyes open before or since during a dose that strong before.... Basically though, it was just like the mushroom trip. It wasn't quite as inherently euphoric because of the body load and so my entities turned out to be more like random guys than my typical daydreamy girls, but they were at least buff guys, so there's that.... In comparison to the girl I saw on mushrooms though, they were soooo much more developed. First of all there were just multiples of them, and second they actually had completely detailed bodies from head to toe, and third they actually rapidly transformed into other guys and moved around in all sorts of sexual poses as I would move my body or react emotionally, which was happening a lot as it was quite overwhelming with psychological pleasure, even if the physical didn't quite match up.... Just as on the mushrooms, and no matter how intense it got, I felt as though these male entities were just another extension of my body, I could feel all of their movements as an additional movement of my own. It was to the point that they were actually starting to become so strong that my actual body sensations were disappearing behind them, it makes me reaaaally want to experiment more with high doses of DMT, maybe particularly with eyes open....

The major reason that I'm so interested in this now particularly is because I've been thinking a lot about what I read about that chaos magic.... I'm definitely the kind who works through an excitatory gnosis over an inhibitory one. I like to push things to the extreme... and I really like the feeling of power that comes with it. It really does feel like magic to me.... I feel like the more I learn about these things too, the more control I can have over it. DMT for instance is not generally a psychedelic that I have been conditioned to think is one that is particularly easy to control, but I have had a couple of pretty controlled trips on it before.... These managed to by my typical erotic female entities and the trip playing into my pleasures just like anything else. It's notable that those were on lower doses than the kind I mentioned before for feeling the entities as a part of my body, but back when I was using those doses I hadn't pushed nearly as far into the psychedelic realm as I have these days.... I do personally think that it will be perfectly possible to reach even the very intense DMT experiences without having to fully relinquish that control, in the same way that I was always led to believe that salvia is just intense and frightening and yet I have managed to make something very orgasmic and sexual out of it as well.... I think an oral DMT preparation would probably be the best way to go about learning how to control it really, and combining it with the right other tools.... With the things that I was able to do with control during my last trip, I could only imagine what would be possible in a similar state of mind during the kind of DMT trip that produced the experience I detailed above. Hopefully I will have the good fortune to find out one of these days....

So yeah, that's just another thing that I think is really interesting about consciousness that this last trip has got me thinking a lot about too.... I think these last few experiences I've had are really starting to help me get a grip on my mind in a way that I never quite have before....

So, I've been thinking a lot about the laughter produced by psychedelics, cannabis, and nitrous oxide as well.... When I've been trying to think of all the different ways to modify perception, I've been trying to relate it to the natural ways to produce altered states.... For example, I'm starting to think of just letting your imagination go wild, in relation to how the imagination would be responding to motor controls, as a form of dancing. That would definitely help connect dancing to altered states as well, which it very much is....

This laughter is something that interests me so much though because the interaction between psychedelics, cannabis, and nitrous oxide has caused in me bouts of laughter that were so euphoric that they actually felt more euphoric and just incredible than even some of my best orgasms ever. I always thought that this would just be because the the combination of drugs was extremely rewarding to the point of causing me to burst into strong laughter, but now I'm starting to think otherwise.... I just decided to do a little research on laughter and found that the physical mechanism of laughing itself actually causes the release of endorphins, though to be similar to exercise or touch. That changes the dynamic completely. :shock:

If genuine laughter itself actually releases endorphins, then it can in itself be considered the means to an altered state of consciousness.... I kind of thought of it as that already due to possibility of fainting from intense laughter which I have almost experienced before, but this adds a whole extra dimension to it. I find dissociation fascinating, but I do personally find that I enjoy nitrous oxide more than other dissociatives because it just has something special about it, and I knew that that laugh was part of it, so now I'm trying to fit this retroactively into my perception of my experiences.... I wonder if that's why a trip becomes so incredibly euphoric for me after I finally get that laughter on nitrous, more so even than because of the ego loss? Though, it is entirely possible that they are intrinsically tied in its effects as well....

What's really interesting to me is that I've never experienced a spontaneous orgasm as the result of a drug, but I know that it's possible. I know people who've had it happen to them many times from psychedelics, and I think I'm starting to reach the point where this may happen to me as well with stronger experiences.... The closest I ever got to it was on a very high dose of 2C-I, which was overwhelming me physically to the point that I felt like if it had actually climaxed it would have been like a kundalini awakening or something. Oh, if only I had had nitrous oxide at that time... but I wouldn't even try it for the first time until years later. But, I do feel pretty confident saying that I bet that I could have orgasmed from that combination if I had had it around to use....

What I'm thinking about here is the fact that naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioid receptors such as those worked on by endorphins, actually inhibits the oxytocin release of orgasm, which has been shown in humans to subjectively reduce the feeling of euphoria. This oxytocin release has long been thought to be a very important aspect of the orgasm experience.... One would think that taking a drug which activated opioid receptors could then increase orgasm, and it does cause euphoria of course, but exogenous opioids actually end up lowering oxytocin levels, which would be likely why opiates can cause lower libido.... But my thought is, what if you used a natural endorphin release instead?

I've had feelings that felt near orgasm just from laughing from this use of nitrous oxide on psychedelics and cannabis before, so I know that this laughter won't inhibit those feelings.... In fact, I've actually known someone to experience both laughter and orgasms at the same time on psychedelics before, and it was never until now that I feel like I can start to wrap my head around just how intense it would have been for her, and she did describe it as a very moving experience.... If the endorphin release caused by laughter didn't inhibit oxytocin, and based on how it plays an important role in social behavior it really shouldn't, then theoretically couldn't the high endorphin levels caused by laughing potentiate the oxytocin release of a simultaneous orgasm?

With this in mind, the most intense experience possible would be to experience a completely unrestricted manic-level laughter at the same time as a completely overwhelming full-body orgasm.... It's an interesting thought for me, because I've actually for a long time psychologically associated that manic laughter with sexual stimulation.... I think it just plays into my same desire as always to push everything to the extreme and have that feeling of power which is often associated with that unrestrained crazy laughter, which also fits into how I like things to be dark in theme sometimes.... The way I assert my control over my reality while dreaming or tripping after all is fueled by just releasing as much emotional energy as possible, and this seems like a way to push that into absurd levels.... So I don't really know how much this idea would appeal to other people honestly, but I freaking love it. I really want to see if I can manage to get to this state! I think what it would really come down to is just finding a psychedelic which is both extremely high in the giggles like LSD and has that incredibly sexual body edge like 2C-I....

Has anyone here had a full-body orgasm while laughing mad? :D

Geez, feel like you could write papers or books about this stuff lol. I have to get through your last two posts but have had some thoughts in the mean time. More like remembering thoughts that I've had.

Part of what happens to me, which I think has already been communicated in this thread, is that psychedelics tear down social norms and going through the motions. Another way of putting this is saying that we break away from the acts that we put on during our daily lives. Its like each of us play a role like in a play, and psychedelics show how much of it is just "putting on a act" as well as the metaphysical side to reality. Which a lot of it is just acting. Going to jobs, being socially acceptable, being literate, using appropriate language, most of our lives revolve around context and observing learned behaviors. Then psychedelics bring you out of that modality. So this first part is about being an actor/actress in a play and then breaking out of that wall. Or "breaking the fourth wall" kind of thing.

Then relating to this feeling, is the idea that humanity could a kind of multi-dimensional reality show. It continues on with the premise that we've got roles to play, but adds in the definite presence of observers outside of our spacetime vantage point. Part of why I think this could work is that there are several experiences were people report they are being watched, observed, or the classic "eyes" everywhere. I suppose they could be a facet of our minds, but why should we feel this extra ordinary feeling of being watched? (excluding feelings of paranoia) It was interesting because something triggered a flashback to experiences with Z, and I felt my headspace shift into a mini psychedelic mindset. First I was thinking of the actor/actress play scenario then transitioned into this lifetime really being a reality TV show for beings in another dimension or universe.

I also had this thought again, that perhaps lines up with other belief systems or religions. If everyone had boundary dissolving experiences all the time, like if we transitioned into a state of consciousness where we are "connected" all the time, then I think our world really would be transformed for the better. I think we naturally would tend toward peace and mediation since we would constantly be tuning in to each other. Just my opinion though :)

Also, just thinking out loud, but I'm not sure if I ever left chaos magick. Now I focus on what would be called "right-hand path" stuff since I am involved with mostly positive things. Like lucid dreaming, meditation, introspection, and Reiki on rare occasions. It could also be referenced as service to others, but not solely helping others. Just more like a positive-ish end of the spectrum. I used to be into the left-hand path and that's more about service to self and disregard of other's will/manipulation of others. The left-hand path isn't inherently darker but I feel like people tend in that direction. It could involve stealing energy from other's auras, using sigils to manipulate others, forming servitors or other astral entities, and just lots of sigils for any purpose. And a brief description of it: At its core pretty much anything magick is possible with chaos magick. It doesn't impose any moral standards such as Wicca, and there really isn't a sense of community either as with covens or anything. It is truly individualistic in this regard and any goals can be sought. I liked it before because it put my beliefs into a coherent framework. I could practice my aura control and interpreting auras, practice energy work, and for me gave an arbitrary view on spirituality. I say arbitrary because chaos magick doesn't have that set of morals and whats right and wrong to do spirituality. It offers what is possible for the user. To me this made sense, and still makes sense, just because of the variety of experiences available and little dependence on belief systems and more dependence on what someone believes to be true. And back to myself, I suppose I could still use sigils but I've been experimenting with the "trusting the universe thing" and just having a strong willpower, and its been doing great so far so haven't had the need to use sigils. I think I've also phased out of the chaos magick mindset so sigils aren't as strong as they were before. That was a depressing time when I got into chaos magick, which led me to the left-hand path, and then it also turned out to fit with my beliefs the most so I went with it. I still don't identify with any other religion (I did Christianity-Baptists for a while :eek:) but I've been back to what I was before plus psychedelics lol. I've been keeping anonymous here for the sake of jobs (I've seen the 'Post picture of yourself here' thread and am tempted by it) but one day may just be like screw it :cooler:. I don't know I really feel like any belief system/paradigm is fair game just because reality at its core is so diverse, and the aspects that are consistent seem to be universal cross-cultural "things" anyway. And the chaos magick mindset gets very individual since one of its core aspects is being able to change your paradigm/belief system. And you are right Alysendra, gnosis is a big part of it and is where the actual "magick" takes place. Kind of adding on to what you are saying, I feel like chaos magick in particular is one way to access the altered state by the way it works (gnosis) and the varying belief systems one can approach it (by paradigm shifting). Again it reminds of me of the Force lol, since its like theres a light side and dark side to it. There's also a middle path of chaos magick but that seems passive aggressive to me. I've kind of been in both the left hand and right hand paths so I'm not sure where I would fall now, maybe I should just make the jump back into chaos magick for real :P

I got really into it at one point but have phased out of the mindset, but I see how it could be used in psychedelic trips. To me psychedelics seem similar since there can be morals (as with ayahuasca) but largely the experiences and goals are very personal. And the deep levels of the psychedelic experiences literally open up into the described realm of gnosis and magick, which can be exactly navigated by thought, imagination, and mindsets/belief systems. So I find this both curious and amazing, that these supposed "mystical" realms can actually be accessed through these plants and substances. Granted not for the faint of heart, but they are there. And not only through psychedelics, but the trance state and gnosis state as well.

Here's a video that induces hallucination for a couple of seconds.
Make sure you have it full screen and on HD, being somewhat close to the screen.
And no, its not one of those silly jokes where a mutilated face etc pops up with a scary sound...its legit.

This Video Induces Natural Hallucinations | IFLScience:

Dreamer thank you for sharing that! i really hope i am able to have a breakthrough experience through pscychedelic use. I tried 25i a while ago and it definetly opened my eyes to the inter connected ness of things. well idk at leasts thats what i perceived. im going to try another Rc called al-lad in hopes that i can get a fresh perspective on who i am vs who i think i am. theres been a lot of questioning of this identity since my 25i experience and hopefully these altered states of conciousness are a gateway into ....something that will help me see things with more clarity. i think i just want to strip away this role i have been playing for so long and just be a human..

Been away for a while, gotta lot of reading to do to catch up with this conversation! I am going to be experimenting with Salvia again this weekend. Hoping to use your advice, Alysendra, to incubate a good experience.

I am missing a few of these... I cannot find all my trip reports. All of these on mushrooms :) So I'll share what I can find.

Pardon grammar and some words... these are extractions from my own trip reports in a psychonauts community.

Spoiler for 5.5 grams cubensis trip - solo:

This was a late night trip in my home. A couple hours after a light dinner I ate the mushrooms. Right after I ate them (with OJ) my wife went to bed (she did not trip this time, it was a solo trip.) I waited until I started to feel the effects and then went to bed as well. The room was almost pitch black, just very faint light coming from the window. This trip was done in silence.

This was by far my most profound experience and very long trip ("mushroom time" wise, not "real" time)

During the come up, I started to hear a lot of different noises, mainly like buzzing and electric type of noises. As far as visuals I saw a lot of sacred geometry type of shapes, all colors and shape. The colors were amazingly bright and very detailed (despite being in the dark.)

After I while tripping, I felt a very intense jolt that it almost popped my hearts and my whole body felt it.This usually happens when I start to peak.

Time dilatation was beyond amazing, is like time literally stop. To the point that once I heard a bike accelerating on the distance and after for what it felt a very long time, the same bike was still passing by. I realized I was nothing, I did not had a body, I was just consciousness... and realized that our bodies are just illusions.

I was able to travel in time, go back to when I was a small child and tap into those memories, see through the eyes of myself as a child in this very own life time.

I was also able to do remote vision easily, there was a chopper flying by and I focused my energy on the pilot. I was able to see through his eyes, see the chopper controls (never been in one) and even I would hear the noises of the radio transmissions among the pilots.)

I realized that life is exactly a joke like "A Truman show." Everything is just a projection of our mind and our consciousness, but I believe that we are in an illusion that does not exist. Everything happening around us is just an illusion and I was able to prove it during this trip. During the entire night, several events repeated (a chopper flying by, a dog barking, a bike driving down the street...) and when you stopped focusing on said events, they just vanished... we are in a dream and our brains are projecting the reality, until brains fuctionaily is compromised (shrooms) and reality just falls apart.

I started to realize how awesome life could be if we all where in the same boat. I felt absolute bliss and I felt amazing feelings of love and gratefulness for my work here at earth. I felt very happy to be able to do psychic readings for people who are lost as well as being able to enjoy life myself. I wished for them all to reach the bliss I was able to reach.

I then realized that time did not exist. I was in some sort of void of nothingness and for what felt several hours or maybe even days, it was only a few minutes in the clock. That brought me even more bliss because I was able to break the space/time continuum and almost control the time dilatation during this trip. It felt to me like the shroom trip was never going to end, but at the same time, time in "reality" would never pass either. I've been under this for what it felt days.

I took huge travels around our planet, our galaxy and even other galaxies. This would be a tedious to read trip if I shared all...

I then started to realize that we take all for granted, the air we are breathing, our eyes... everything, and started to thank everything that surrounds us and keep this "reality" alive.

Time was so frozen that I was able to withness how many amazing things happen during just one second of "real time." Have you ever imagined what happens every second around this planet? You would not even imagine how many things are happening at the same time.

In addition of all of this, I went into the "classic" mindfuck that we all love about the purpose of existence, about how much of a spec we are and that there is always something bigger and greater, a loop that never ends.

I then saw some sort of beings of light... They had a greater light that Source/God itself... much, much greater and mightier... Source/God as we know it, it is just another spec... the greatness of existance is much, much more. I then took a journey that lasted months... I appeared myself in a different planet, where beings of light were creating universes, constantly... new existance being created in front of my eyes, and some of other of these beings were feeding on those galaxies... I was able to witness colors that are different from the colors we know here, this is hard to explain but I am sure some of you know what I am saying... I tried to keep going further and deeper, and just trying to go higher would take hours... And I would feel huge buzzings in my body and hear massive electric sounds... as I tapped into trying to go higher, the intensity of these buzzings increased... this was an amazing experience...

I had moments of laugh, a lot of silly laugh realizing how self-center the human being is and how we focus on our little nose and forget the amazement of the world around us. I also started to realize that we were surrounded of symbolism, both good and bad, and thta we were just like puppets.

At about 5am my come down started. My come downs are always pretty positive, but this one I felt a lot of nausea and dizziness, I went back to bed (needed to go pee when this happened) and had cold sweat and nausea, but I focused my mind and did some reiki on mysef and within one minute everything went away. The come down kept happening but it was comfortable.

Spoiler for trip 5.06 grams cubensis with wife (1.4grams):

Substance / Amount

P. Cubensis from Guadalajara, Mexico. A close friend gave me a couple of spore syringes and I grew these with my wife. These shrooms were originally collected from the wild by other friend, who made a print and then a bulk tray growth. From that growth, my close friend gave me the spores for my own growth.

Took 5.06 grams dry and then I also ate one small shroom from my FC that just had the cap opened (just to taste it.) I did not weight it, but it was about 5-6grams. So it could total about 5.2 dry.

My wife tripped for her first time. Initially she was going to eat 2 grams, but she left the biggest shroom for last (0.63g) and she could not eat it due the taste, and she getting a bit afraid. Despite her low amount, she had a level 5 trip, we were in the same realm.

Location

At home. We stayed the whole time in the bedroom. When the trip started, we got ourselves into bed. We were in darkness.

Diet

Had a decent breakfast and then we had a snack about 3 hours before eating the shooms. We ate them with a glass of OJ. My poor wife had half bottle of OJ to deal with the taste. I can tolerate it.

Come up

Wife had a bit of upset stomach. This was due the stress and anticipation of the first trip, as this happened to her before even eating the shrooms, but just that, upset stomach. I was fine, no effects.
Wife started to have visuals before than me, it was hard to focus her sight and she started to see wavy stuff. She asked me for feedback but I was still coming up. After a while, I noticed my mind going insane and my body feeling very heavy. Same feeling for my wife. At this point, we got in bed.

Trip

We were listening to some tunes in the radio. It was very nice music so it was very nice to enjoy and chill. As we were getting deeper, the music started to sound more metallic and like from the distance, like my wife's cell phone was very far. I decided that for once I was not going to miss to record a trip, so I went to my living room and grabbed my phone. My phone felt weird in my hands and when I turned the screen on I felt like if I had no idea what to do with it, my phone felt almost unknown to me. However, I was able to start to record it and to connected it to the charger.

After a while, I told my wife to turn the music off.

I could share the whole trip, everything we spoke about, but that will make this a pain to read. To make this quick and not painful I will just state that we experience heavy time alteration. It felt like months, like a whole eternity passed during the trip. My wife would share with me that it felt to her like if she was waking up from a dream, like if she was reborn again. She was able to see more clearly (and so I was) with her eyes closed, focusing on her minds eye.

We were flying through space, going to the Pleiades and just staying in the middle of nowhere, in the here and now. We both felt eternal bliss, we even forgot we had a body anymore. My wife was saying that she believed she did not have a body, that she was just light, consciousness. She would say that on all her memories, we were together, but that I was nothing, I had no body, like I was only light, I was there... in form of energy.

We tapped into the Akashic Records (I am a Psychic Medium for a living) and told my wife that she could access all the information she wanted. She was able to see one of her past life in Egypt, pretty cool and amazing.

We also connected with my deceased grandfather, I taught my wife how to speak with those who have crossed over and I asked her to tell my grandpa to give her something he used to give to be. She was spot on in telling me what it was (and I never told her that.) She was able to see that she has psychic abilities as well and that her third eye was just clouded out of the crap from this world and system we are confined into.

We connected with my wife's mom and two dogs of mine (all in Spirit) and it was a loving experience.

We had to go to the bathroom a couple times. We both had to go together because is like we would get lost if we did not go together. Everything felt giant and we felt so small. All we wanted to do was to get in bed and let go again, the outer world did not feel safe.

Laughter was present all the time, we could just feel eternal bliss. Some outside noises started to make us laugh harder and some dogs on the distance started to fight making a lot of noise, giving us laughter. We would stare at our hands and see the huge amount of energy around them. We would touch our feet and realize how strange it felt.

I am sure I am forgetting a ton of stuff (I will listen to the recording soon.) But it was amazing, mind blowing and eternal bliss. Nothing mattered anymore, just the fact we are together and in bliss. We even said things at the same time, so we had telepathy.

Come down

As usual, my come downs are no bother for me. I slowly allow myself to be dragged back to this world of limitations.

My wife on the other hand experienced some anxiety. Her brain was trying to analyze everything and she started to sweat hard. She was saying, "I am done, I want this to end. My brain is trying to find a reason, I do not like it... I want to finish." I told her to focus on me, on my energy and to let go, to focus on my calming voice. That helped her to come down easier.

We went for a small walk around the block. Some retarded with a tiny penis and a huge car engine decided to hit the gas hard to feel good with himself (I guess...) and he made a lot of noise, disturbing me because I was not completely sober. We had some dinner and relaxed in the living room until we went to bed.

Trip rebound?

This was something weird that happened to me. When we went to bed, it was like 7 hours after eating the shrooms. My vision was back to normal and everything, but as I closed my eyes in bed, my mind started going crazy and it was like I was tripping again. I had no visuals, my body felt normal and I event stood up and I was sober, but I was able to get lost in my toughts and I would experience some time distortion... very curious about this.

Spoiler for solo 4g cubensis:

This will be a different report, instead of using a chronologic occurrence of events, I will just share the most amazing stuff that happened and that I can recall. Even though is very hard to put into words, I will write my thoughts, but I got from the trip. I tripped on 4g of Cubensis, strong potency, with my friend F. The shrooms came from F%u2019s harvest.

Hallucinations/stuff that occurred in addition of mind expansion%u2026
I could see during most of the peak of the trip the entire world collapsing. The walls were melting, bent; it felt like if the room turned into a triangle. The noise from a far TV that was in other room was disrupted, sounding metallic, very distorted and without volume at some points. My own body did not feel it existed. I could not feel it. My thoughts and consciousness was the only thing that it felt real. Time was massively distorted, heavy time dilation occurred. Gazing without focusing the eyes lead to sacred geometry, I could literally see through solid objects, I could see the very energy forming other objects, different shapes of flashes of light.

Questioning Source/God. What is the Purpose of Source? What lies beyond source?
Something indeed lies behind Source. There is a greater light, a much higher awakened being behind source that our bodies literally cannot access. During my trip, I attempted to seek Source for answers. I started to float and to get closer to Source. I went past our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, went pass our Universe, pass our Spirit Guides and even past a void of nothingness. I was energy, I was consciousness, I did not even existed anymore, I could not feel my body at all, I could not even remember I was tripping, I knew I was tripping, I knew my purpose, but nothing mattered anymore, I was in the here and now%u2026
I reached a very high state of awareness and I was surrounded by the Light. I was connected to Source and Source wanted to receive me. I received love, bliss, joy, happiness, all these positive feelings we seek so desperately. Are these feelings even real? I questioned instead of accepting it. We are based on acceptance; we accept whatever crap they show on TV, we accept whatever junk we see online, videogames, food we eat, literally everything. What if these so called feelings of joy, bliss, etc are there because we just accept it? I decided not to accepted, I decided to keep going forward, breaking my believe system and my acceptance of Source being the highest step.
I faced Source and questioned its own existence, its own purpose and what was sitting behind I t, as there is infinite wherever you look into. I demanded information about the very purpose of the Universe. If we are just a spec of a bigger existence yet that existence is a mere spec for something even great to an infinite amount of times, what is the purpose of all of that? I questioned Source without allowing it to distract me. I receive no response so I decided to keep going forward, to enter the Light, to find its core, its meaning.
As soon as I got into the light, I felt a huge jolt around my entire body. My ears buzzed very loud and my whole body was stunned. Despite my eyes were closed, I saw a flash of light, brighter than you can imagine. I recalled that this happens usually once in all my trips, so I refocused again and tried to enter Source%u2026 Once again, the same zap, but even stronger%u2026 I never felt it twice on a trip before, so I was surprised. I tried a third time, I was zapped once again, but this time, I was able to see something behind. There was in even brighter light, very intense and there was a much higher existence behind. There was a bigger consciousness that Source felt like a fragment off%u2026 Or maybe it was a deeper state of Source%u2026 who knows? What if this was just another mental defense, to distract us from something much greater sitting out there.
Every single time I tried to access this information, I felt zapped and pushed away. It was done with love, it did not provide fear, but I was pushed away, not allowed to tap into this information. Now I ask, why? Beings of Light do not hide the truth, why there very Source, as we believe, the highest being of light, Is hiding its very own truth from those who want to know? How about the Law of the Free Will in the Universe, why some information it is prevented from us? This is something that I shall keep seeking and discover.

What is the true meaning of being Spiritually Awakened?
Many of us might have a greater awareness of a higher existence and yet, we know that religion was made by men. We acknowledge we have Spirit Guides, we all come from God-Source and that we are all energy. Some of us do not believe on the so called Bible%u2026 book of life, whatever, as these were written by men. We believe that what is not written by men is where the truth lies.
But%u2026 what is the truth? Isn%u2019t Spirituality another religion? Maybe it is a different type of religion, one where we do not need to go to church, to donate money so %u201CGod%u201D can %u201Cbless%u201D the pastor with a BWM. Religion made by men is just a distraction, a lie and an illusion%u2026 Have you ever questioned the fact that Spirituality is just another illusion? How sure are we really that Spirituality it is not another lie, another distraction, an illusion preventing us to know a greater truth, to have answers to our most profound and deepest questions.
When we %u201Cawaken%u201D spirituality, we believe we know the truth. A Christian believes they know the truth, a Muslin believes they know the truth%u2026 even the atheist believes they know the truth (of not being truth at all) but where is the truth really? We cannot find the truth on man-made information; neither can we find it in higher realms, as always additional questions lie ahead. Is there a truth at all? Isn%u2019t all of this a lie? If so, why do we even exist? What it is the purpose of our existence?
The shrooms were a gift from our ancestors, from higher beings that give us the opportunity to tap into a greater reality. But not even the shrooms are able to answer all our questions. The shrooms allow us to question everything, to realize the illusion we live into, but do not provide answers. What is the purpose then of knowing where the truth lies, if there is any truth at all, and if not, what is the purpose of existence as a whole?
I connected with my Spirit Guides, my most beloved beings that help me in my work as a Psychic Medium, beings who work with me and protect my human vessel. I went into them seeking for advice, but they literally closed my eyes. They told me there is information even unknown to them, and information that it is too big for me to handle. That is a reality and my guides avoid me to know that information in order to protect me, but apparently, denial of information is what the darkness gives, why I am denied information from beings of light?
There is this Law of the Free Will from the Universe, where each individual has its own life and makes its own decisions. If the information is so much, vibrates so high that could destroy us, it might be our own decisions to %u201Ctake the risk%u201D or not to, but if for the mere excuse of protection, we are denied this information, then the Highest Beings of Light are breaking the v very first rule of the Universe. No one seems to be able to give the ultimate truth. Wherever you seek, you just find another lie, or you just find another mental block, or an incomplete answer. Only tapping into what we call or believe what the Highest is, there is a major block, a small peak to see that there is much more behind of what we call Ultimate.
This was literally amazing, and my mind is still going at hundred miles per hour. We know nothing%u2026 everything is infinite yet everything is nothing%u2026

Next time I trip, I will do it with my own grown shrooms, using the spores from the shrooms we used for this trip. Wish me luck growing them%u2026 will inoculate in a couple of days probably!

Spoiler for 4 people each on 5g cubensis/ all spiritually awakened - wife present and sober:

Reality? Time? What are you talking about? Group of 4-trip
5 grams ~ Cubensis


Trip Group: F, G, D and me. A was there, but sober.

Trip Date: 9-9-13

Trip with: 5 grams of Cubensis mushrooms each.

Trip location: Outdoors. Surrounded by trees and grass. There was a lake as well.

Consumption time: We ate the shrooms around 2pm.

Start of trip: Effects started to kick in around 2:45pm.

Peak and duration of trip: Effects started to be very intense at around 3:15 or so. It was hard to know exactly due the high dose and effects being strong. Peaking lasting till about 8:00pm or so.

Coming down: After 8pm the come down started to happen, effects were still felt (on a decrease) until around 10-11pm. The end of the comedown was very negative for some reason for F and D, but especially for F. It was okay for G and me.

Recorded (recalled) hallucinations:
These will be more explained in the detail of the trip.
Me: I will explain these more in detail later. These were my hallucinations: Breathing effect on pretty much everything around. Considerable big waving on grass. Color distortion (green becoming intense and twice everything becoming blue. Heavy time dilatation, at some points feeling lost in time. Seeing faces on the trees (both among the leaves and curiously, on the highest part of the trunk) Massive mind expansion. Looking at faces would like pixelate, like seeing the energy constantly forming the face and moving around to keep the face to look the same. Very lightness feeling, like in a lucid dream, loss of reality perception. Realizations about how small and insignificant we are at a Universal level, how meaningless our reality is.

F: Effect of waves of energy when looking at a certain direction. Everything congested and expanded very lightly. Time became meaningless, value became meaningless. Realization of all existence being an illusion.

G: Quoted from G: “The shrooms provided my theories of how much of an illusion this ‘reality’ it is. I felt a lot of love and bliss. This was more of a mental trip for me rather than a visual.”

D: Not much recall, heavy feelings of dreaming, feelings of being able to overcome any challenged. Quoted from D: "The peak felt like complete bliss, happiness... it was so intense I started laughing and crying"

Trip report in detail:
I am going to base the report in my own experience mainly, as I am the one writing it. A drove us four to a very nice park with lots of trees, lots of grass and a very nice lake. Despite it has been very hot lately, the day of the trip was partially sunny and there was a very nice breeze, it felt awesome just before we even tripped.
We skipped lunch to be on an empty stomach. G also skipped breakfast. We each had five grams of Cubensis shrooms, all grown by F! We had the shrooms with Orange Juice. D felt nauseous for about 30 minutes. G, F and myself did not feel nausea.
About 45 minutes after eating the shrooms, the trip started. G was checking on us if we felt something. D and I did, but F was still not there.
I started to see breathing on the grass. The grass had the same effect as the sea waves, but it was very peaceful and very evenly. I felt a lot of bliss and happiness as the shrooms were kicking in harder. I could feel how the energy around my arms and legs was escalating and I felt more and more energized. I had a couple jolts of energy, they usually happen at the beginning of all my trips for some reason, but the jolt was not very strong this time, which is great.
My mind was expanding fast and I started to get that feeling of being able to control everything with my mind and I greeted my mind as a “I am so glad to see you back.” My thoughts were going at high speed, but all positive and very amazing thoughts, I was so happy to be at that state. I cannot recall all my thoughts now, but it was all about how meaningless this so called reality is, and how little and insignificant the human being is. I started to question the purpose of the very Universe and the infinite Universes within other Universes. I recalled a memory as when I was a kid, to not destroy a flower, as there could be countless universes within… after all, we cannot see beyond the tiny particles that form an atom… I realized we might just be a tiny fraction of an atom to something greater… and that something greater is still a fragment of something even greater… and so on for an infinite amount of times.
I had this state of mind for a long time and allowed my mind to go wild.
As I gazed into the trunk of one tree, I could see the face on an elder human being, but it had the same colors as the trunk itself and It felt to me it was the very consciousness of the tree. The face was sitting in a meditative state, staring into the horizon. I found it to be amazing. I could see the trees connected to each other, sending waves of energy among themselves and very powerful. I could also see faces forming among the leaves and the branches of the trees. At some points, these faces were crystal clear, cleared than what we perceive as reality. The faces were looking into every direction and there were like communicating among themselves, it felt to me there was some sort of speech going on.
I had a couple times a very strange visual. The intensity of the green increased dramatically, to the point that it was very vivid, not a type of green we normally see. Suddenly, everything started to become blue, it is the same exact effect as if you take the red color from the RGB option in Photoshop. For a few moments, everything looked in different tones of blue, until I blinked and went back to “normal coloring.”
I had to go to the public restroom, so I grounded myself to not call attention. It was a little hard at first, but I was able to control pretty well. As I walked and I felt the breeze in my face, I felt I was in a lucid dream, I felt splendid, it was a very strong positive feeling, I felt free, without any oppositions, I was in the here and now. I wanted to spread my arms. I reminded myself there were more people around and that I shouldn’t call attention. When I washed my hands in the restroom, the soap gave me a huge jolt that even my ears buzzed. As I walked back to where we were hanging out, it felt like hours passed for me. I loved that. I love to prove how meaningless and fake time is. I needed to focus to know how to go back to where we were hanging out, as I was a little disoriented.
We were hanging out there for several hours, laughing nonstop all evening. A told me she has never seen me laughing so much. The energy was amazing and seeing others tripping (especially G) made it an even greater blast.
Everything felt much greater than it really is and very insignificant at the same time. A mentioned the time a couple times and it felt very weird, as I felt time was not needed. I just felt a lot of joy.
Almost at the end of the trip, I tasted some snacks (Secret Stash is called) and it tasted like cardboard (while I normally like, they are salty.) G also tasted a cracked from F and he could not eat it stating, “What is this crap you are giving me man…?”
This is pretty much the trip, there was more, but this is all I can recall.

Conclusion:
Amazing… incredible amazing. At the end of the day, I just wanted to lay down and meditate, thinking of the experience I had and dozing off to sleep. The end of the trip was not as pleasant for F and D, but it was very well worth it.

One more (last week)

Spoiler for 22.5 grams of fresh Sclerotia:

Trip data
Last trip, about 5 months ago.
22.5 grams of fresh Sclerotia (truffles.)
Consumed at 10:30 PM with orange juice (ate the truffles whole.)
Last meal around 3:00 PM plus a tiny snack around 8:30pm.
Tripped in my bedroom (laying down in bed) pitch black and completely silent room.
Wife asleep, sober and willing to help me in case of need.

Consumption
Around 10:30 PM I started eating my truffles. Three of them for some reason had an extremely bitter taste, pretty much unbearable, my face while chewing freaked out my wife a little bit (my first time with truffles) but after those three, the rest had a bit of a nutty taste, not bitter at all. Texture was fine.

Come up
The Come up was way more intense than cubes. About 20 minutes later, I started feeling a lot of energy building up within my legs. This is a good sign for me during the come up that the potency is high. The energy on my legs kept raising until I started feeling a bit more of the body high so I told my wife and we went to bed. She reminded me several times if I needed something, to please wake her up (gotta love your caring wives)

I felt slightly different that from Shrooms, it is hard to explain, but I felt the energy different. This might be because I am very energy sensitive and this is my first trip in my new house, where the energy is very different than what I am used to. Energy is great, don’t get me wrong, just way more Earthy than were my previous home was, so this might have made an influence as well. I was happy because I felt that the trip was going to be strong.

I am the lucky few that do not get any nausea on the come up (which compensates the fact that I am a bit resistant against psilocybin and need a bit of a higher dose.) A bit of weird thoughts came to me, but I experienced psilocybin before and I knew I was in control, so those thoughts left away pretty fast.

Trip/Hallucinations
As usual, hallucinations were very mild almost inexistent, but I do not seek hallucinations, so it does not bother me at all, I just point it out for a more complete trip report. I usually get very little to no hallucinations in my trips, yet the trips are very intense. Putting into account that the potency was strong, for someone more hallucination-sensitive, they would get plenty. I got mainly auditory hallucinations (one of the reasons probably because of pitch black room.)

After a while of laying back in bed, my mind started to expand and my consciousness to break the veil of what the human being can perceive. The trip started out very weird, it felt pretty awesome for me to be honest, but maybe it could have freaked out some people, I don’t know. I first (auditory hallucination) stared to hear a lot of strange noises. Nothing creepy or whatsoever, but very metallic noises and like computers. But this description is not even accurate… is hard to describe the sound I heard, but it was like very Matrix. From here, I could clearly see (but I know this was my third eye seeing) that everything was information. Somehow like in The Matrix, those green numbers and letters, but not exactly the same. I really felt that the world we live in is fake. Nothing is real and the way human beings perceive everything is way inaccurate. Reality as we perceive it is programmed, our entire world is programmed, and we are programmed. Why, psychedelics, which creates no harm at all to the physical body, are banned in most countries? Because these allow to perceive the truth behind the mist we live within, we truly open our eyes. Collective consciousness is an extremely powerful weapon that can both control the masses as well as freeing the masses. If we all saw through the veil, the world as we know it would definitely fall apart and we all would ascend (nothing to do with death, passing) to a higher state of consciousness and so, a more blissful life here on Earth.

I knew that in that moment, I could just walk through a wall or just make stuff to cease to exist or to start to exist, but I was aware that due collective consciousness I still have the same boundaries (despite my believe) and that it would not make a difference, so I did not move from bed, lol. But I really felt how much we are missing with our 5 senses… I could hear energy, I could see in total darkness and I could feel everything around me.

I want to make a note here, as you probably know, a trip comes in waves. They are more noticeable when losing the peak, and there are stronger and softer moments. I found this to be extremely true and noticeable for truffles, as I had moments of very intensity and then, out of the blue, everything going away, even a relaxed and silent mind, and suddenly, bang! Mindfuck back.

Most of the trip was about the feeling of freedom, woe-less existence, bliss, love and joy. I could feel very grateful for my life and especially for my wife. It was a sensation of peace and love very intense. I kept wondering why human live is so full of crap, pain and despair, and why we could not be in this constant state of bliss all the time (don’t get me wrong, I do not mean an endless trip/mindfuck, but a state of perceiving the world how it really is and not how we are programmed to believe it is, that a sober life would have no room for negativity at all as well as complete free will.

I was also very aware that my thoughts were not my thoughts, that it was everybody’s thoughts and all their thoughts were mine also. I realizing how much a single thought can affect universally.

All I wanted was peace and detachment from this controlled world. I have seeking beyond Source in other trips, and witnessed the infinity of the worlds and the universes, so pretty much I remained in a state of healing and recharging batteries as well appreciating how beautiful the world really is (from beyond of what we perceive normally.)

I know I had some other thoughts, some silly thoughts about insignificant things and laughing over them, but I do not believe these were wisdom-thoughts to learn from, since I asked my Spirit Guides to help me retain the memories of what matter the most. I have vague memories of having huge desires to write stuff down, and thoughts I had, but I had no idea how. Being in a dark room in complete silent, warm under the sheets of my bed, I ceased to exist. I forgot I had a physical body. I realized I was only consciousness (which we truly are, despite being programmed for the opposite.) So for a very long time (time dilation was heavy, so it is impossible to keep track) I was just consciousness, in a state of bliss, peace, happiness, love and joy. Nothing else mattered. Even I was not consciousness, I was nothing and I was all at the same time. I did not even questioned where I was, or what I was, nothing really mattered, it is very hard to explain, but I am sure some of you know this very well. The truffles detach me from this massive programmed computer we are part of and my energy ceased to be donated to whoever is leeching us (I really do not want to get into conspiracy, etc. Did not happen during the trip, so there is no room in this report for that.)

Come down
I am also lucky that my come downs are not bad at all. I never experienced problems on a come down and neither did I on this one. However, I feel that the come down from truffles was gentler. I did not experience the classic, “Okay, the trip is ending. I am done. I want it to end.” And other states of confusion that I could slightly experience with mushrooms. Physically, I did not experience anything bad (I never do, only once on a trip type ago felt some nausea, but that was due an energetic issue.) I slowly went to pee and slowly walked back to bed, feeling my body, feeling my breathing without doing any abrupt moves. Relaxed in bed on my back, breathing peacefully for a while, while experience very tiny waves (I did not experience any rebounds like happens with Shrooms) until I ended falling asleep.

Next day
I had a bit of a weird stomach for about 20 minutes or so, nothing to really point out, pretty insignificant that upon breakfast, it completely went away.