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Shrooms: What You Need to Know

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41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#41
This is a great resource to anyone interested in psychedelics in general. I've only done psychedelics twice in my lifetime, both with the same friend, and both times NOT in ideal scenarios (because we were both tripping without a sober person trip-sitting us). I would like to warn anyone interested that *tripping is risky if you suffer from high anxiety or OCD*.

My first trip was an incredible experience, I couldn't wait for my next chance to trip. Unfortunately, my second trip went south very fast; I became very anxious and I started having fears that I would unreasonably kill myself or murder my friend. What I didn't know at the time was that I suffered from "Harm OCD" and that the psychedelics were magnifying my OCD tenfold, and thus triggered a horrendous panic attack that wouldn't end until the effects of the drugs wore off.

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#42

Keep in mind that “harm reduction” material shouldn’t be interpreted as a guide to avoiding all potential negative consequences. When it comes to psychedelics, the pendulum of popular opinion has swung from an extreme of “extremely bad for you” to “actually good for you” but neither extreme is good, IMO. It’s worth reading some of the material about how psychedelic users are weirdly prone to picking up strange belief…

> “thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t real...”

I mean, in what possible way are they “less real” than thoughts and feelings imparted by any other cause? This is your body, doing the thing in reaponse to a stimulus. This may be an atypical stimulus generating very different than usual responses, but they’re certainly real

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#43
I feel like I'm alone in this, but I don't like mushrooms. I usually have unpleasant body effects, and I don't like the trip generally. I'm fairly confident in my ability to have dosed as responsibly as possible with a biological product. Usually, though, I just feel weird and uncomfortable for 10. LSD, by comparison, is positively therapeutic for me.

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#44
post #14

Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this. Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc. Psychedelics obviously cause you to halluci…

Last year there was a pretty public case of a guy dying during a ceremony where they used psychedelic toad venom. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52920291.amp

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#45
post #25
post #14

Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this. Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc. Psychedelics obviously cause you to halluci…

The hallucination affected by psychedelics such as mushrooms isn't what you might expect. It's not a fully synthetic kind of "i now see an object that is not actually there". There won't be a floating pink elephant in the middle of the room. Instead the effect at most normal doses (3.5g) is more that the walls and floors seem to take on a slightly ephemeral breathing characteristic. You may see patterns in things of…

This sub reddit has a lot of examples of people trying to recreate what they saw while tripping. There are some pretty good examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/replications

Also, I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve heard that some of the hallucinations you see on psychedelics are signals/noise your brain normally filters out, but stops getting filtered during the trip. I believe the context was for so called “sacred geometry”. For example, if you look up the “flower of life”, this is a pattern people regularly see while tripping and it’s one I saw myself the first time I took shrooms.

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#46
post #38
post #14

Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this. Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc. Psychedelics obviously cause you to halluci…

From what I hear, the idea of doing anything complex like driving a car is extremely unappealing under the effects of mushrooms.

I've wrecked a car on mushrooms...not-really-driving like a maniac with a bunch of friends hanging out the windows was arguably the most fun I ever had.

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: psychedelics helped me overcome a lifelong problem with social anxiety and helped me to overcome fear of dancing in public. Over a decade later I can still say that the changes they made have had a profound and long-lasting positive impact on my life.

How specifically did it help with your social anxiety?

Not the same person as the parent comment.

An LSD tripped helped with my social anxiety as a second order effect of helping me become more empathetic.

Through a dozen different thought loops + the psychedelic driven introspection of my first trip, I became much more sensitive and appreciative of my fellow humans. I was able to more properly emulate what someone might be thinking/feeling, and that has continued to bear fruit for me personally and professionally. Additionally, I became more tolerant of others and their differences in all dimensions. The idea of homosexuality in the past had left me queasy and suspicious. In the days after my first LSD experience, that difference no longer gave me any negative feelings.

Any more specific than that and we would be getting into neuro-chemistry. I am not well versed and you would have to do your own research. I do recall that LSD boosts some neurotransmitter/modulator sensitivity, and dis-inhibits the Default Mode Network - allowing for a wider range of introspective experiences which may explain my above experience. I like this articles [0] comparison to defragging a hard-drive. I often phrase psychedelics as a chemical way to observe your mind being stuck in some high dimensional local optima of state/opinion. Then you can choose to pull yourself out of those optima and reform your deeply held beliefs.

Another related term of interest might be ego-death/ego-loss.

https://psychedelicstoday.com/2020/02/04/psychedelics-and-th...

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#48

I feel like I'm alone in this, but I don't like mushrooms. I usually have unpleasant body effects, and I don't like the trip generally. I'm fairly confident in my ability to have dosed as responsibly as possible with a biological product. Usually, though, I just feel weird and uncomfortable for 10. LSD, by comparison, is positively therapeutic for me.

I think everyone is going to have different experiences. I saw a wide variety experiences among people taking Ayahuasca, and my own experiences were each different.

LSD wasn’t uncomfortable for me, but I also knew at a deep level that it wasn’t something I needed to explore further. By contrast, there were many times that Ayahuasca had been at times uncomfortable and disturbing for me … but I also knew I needed it.

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#49

I feel like I'm alone in this, but I don't like mushrooms. I usually have unpleasant body effects, and I don't like the trip generally. I'm fairly confident in my ability to have dosed as responsibly as possible with a biological product. Usually, though, I just feel weird and uncomfortable for 10. LSD, by comparison, is positively therapeutic for me.

Exact opposite for me. LSD is nice, but the visuals can be overwhelming. The visuals on mushrooms, for me are more “organic” I guess, and the mental state more natural. I haven’t done either in over a decade, but that’s what I remember. I used to do a heroic dose of mushrooms once a week - the feelings of euphoria once you peek and the subtle visuals were amazing.

It’s also possible to go to sleep on mushrooms once you’re at the end of your trip, as the trip is really a lot shorter. I remember lying awake in my bed on LSD with the room melting around me, wondering if it would ever end, just wishing that I could go to sleep.

Edit: As far as being alone with your experience - I had a lot of friends that preferred LSD over mushrooms. It’s really a personal preference as to which one suits you best.

Re: Shrooms: What You Need to Know

#50
post #25
post #14

Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this. Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc. Psychedelics obviously cause you to halluci…

The hallucination affected by psychedelics such as mushrooms isn't what you might expect. It's not a fully synthetic kind of "i now see an object that is not actually there". There won't be a floating pink elephant in the middle of the room. Instead the effect at most normal doses (3.5g) is more that the walls and floors seem to take on a slightly ephemeral breathing characteristic. You may see patterns in things of…

One trick to understanding what psychedelics are doing is to recognize that what's happening in those visual effects is also happening to all your other senses and cognitive processes. Having your sense of depth go into a reflective fractal spiral is a fascinating experience. People often hear sound go into a robotic type modulation. The circuits that trigger when you feel the meaningfulness of things go into overdrive.

Smaller thought loops can take you over the exact same sequence of input/ output over the course of several minutes of nothing jars you or if it.

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