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Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

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Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#31

Post by cageface »

gnosis wrote: post #4
NatW wrote: post #2

True story: A close friend of mine took Ayahuasca with a shaman and was then committed to a psychiatric facility in New York for almost a week. She was badly shaken up by the experience. I guess she didn't have good support, or she wasn't suited to taking it, but obviously the experience turned out to be horrific. So be careful with decisions like this...

It is very unfortunate that this happened to your friend. However, brief anecdotes like this are not incredibly useful without a great deal of additional information. * Did your friend or others in her family have a history of mental illness? * Was she depressed or otherwise suffering from mental illness at the time of the trip? * Was she on any other drugs (prescribed or not) apart from ayahuasca? * Had she had much…

I have two good friends who did themselves some serious harm with psychedelics. One has been in an institution for years as a result, the other needs daily anti-psychotic meds to function.

I certainly have also seen people benefit from psychedelics but the danger is real and it's difficult for the dilettante to predict who is at risk and who is not.

Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#32

Post by exodust »

davidtanner wrote: post #22
exodust wrote: post #12

"Perhaps they ARE all 'within the brain' as skeptics say". Right, so it's only "skeptics" who point out the bleeding obvious? I think we can safely say it is most certainly all within the brain. That's what the drug is directly influencing, and as a result your mind goes over the waterfall and you are forced to just go along with it, or suffer if you put up resistance. The problem with long term fans of DMT, cannabis…

Castaneda was a fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda#Reception http://www.amazon.com/The-Antipodes-Mind-Phenomenology-Exper... It's rigorous. It has tabular data. It's about ayahuasca phenomenology. Why is it that so few here actually research psychedelics seriously?

I think we all agree that "non-ordinary" states of consciousness exist. Yay for agreeing.

I'm sure the book with the long title you linked to is a solid psychedelic reference and scientific companion, with a little adventure thrown in.

Castaneda was heavy on the adventure. "A Separate Reality" is hilarious and insightful. Stories can pass knowledge and Castaneda certainly supplied stories. The books are like psychedelic Mexican westerns, an average westerner protagonist on a quest to match the great Sorcerer's tripping skills and make new inorganic friends.

How could you possibly cast a dark shadow over that synopsis? :-)

That some became disciples of the books is no surprise, but Castaneda's words did the heavy lifting.

Romanticizing the word 'Ayahuasca' is annoying. It's just a name for an organic substance. The "mother" thing is SYMBOLIC guys - symbolism was HUGE way back in native times. Symbols and static icons also act as a safety net for the chaotic nature of our own minds under the influence, and the right symbols can turn a bad trip good.

The key here very much being "under the influence". That's chemical influence, on your very sensitive brain, which has a natural chemical balance that you are disrupting. No wonder dream states emerge while you're awake.

Seriously.. it's completely the wrong track to mix belief in intelligent other-worldly ghosts that say hi during your trip, and rigorous scientific psychedelics.

I would like to visit Brazil one day, I'll never say never. Does the Ayahuasca jungle-cafe serve peyote?

Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#33

Post by jrogers65 »

exodust wrote: post #12

"Perhaps they ARE all 'within the brain' as skeptics say". Right, so it's only "skeptics" who point out the bleeding obvious? I think we can safely say it is most certainly all within the brain. That's what the drug is directly influencing, and as a result your mind goes over the waterfall and you are forced to just go along with it, or suffer if you put up resistance. The problem with long term fans of DMT, cannabis…

If you haven't already tripped on DMT, do yourself a favor and seek it out. It's not quite like mescaline, psilocybin or LSD.

Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#34

Post by Nursie »

dougk16 wrote: post #20
exodust wrote: post #12

"Perhaps they ARE all 'within the brain' as skeptics say". Right, so it's only "skeptics" who point out the bleeding obvious? I think we can safely say it is most certainly all within the brain. That's what the drug is directly influencing, and as a result your mind goes over the waterfall and you are forced to just go along with it, or suffer if you put up resistance. The problem with long term fans of DMT, cannabis…

> I think we can safely say it is most certainly all within the brain. Occam's razor says you're probably right, but personally I'm holding out the slim hope that there's something much cooler going on, call it primitive telepathy or whatever. The next few decades will hopefully tell. > But you shouldn't need to go to Brazil for that and drink sewerage tasting cocktails of God-knows what and vomit your guts up. That…

No, it's just chemical action on the brain. We can even isolate the chemicals and reproduce the effects.

Just because you can name a pharmaceutical with dodgy side-effects doesn't mean that drinking ayahuasca brew is a great idea either. 'Western' medicine has enhanced and lengthened countless lives.

I've done a lot of things in my life and I very quickly came to realise that all this talk of mothers and teachers and mind expansion was basically crap.

Hallucinogens can make you think differently about yourself and your place in the world. Awesome. Lets not dress it up as a psycho-religious experience where we tap deeper levels of the universe to reunite with the mother-goddess and retune my soul-wavelength to that of my inner dolphin spirit from the world beyond... You got f*cked up, saw some shiny stuff and now you feel better about yourself. Hooray.

Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#37

Post by LatvjuAvs »

One lives his life loving all things and finding place for everything, connecting everything.

One lives life weeding out things he do not like, burning down bridges, building new ones, exterminating problems and severing connections, building new ones when needed.

Sadly, only one of them will accept other.

Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#38

Post by NatW »

gnosis wrote: post #4
NatW wrote: post #2

True story: A close friend of mine took Ayahuasca with a shaman and was then committed to a psychiatric facility in New York for almost a week. She was badly shaken up by the experience. I guess she didn't have good support, or she wasn't suited to taking it, but obviously the experience turned out to be horrific. So be careful with decisions like this...

It is very unfortunate that this happened to your friend. However, brief anecdotes like this are not incredibly useful without a great deal of additional information. * Did your friend or others in her family have a history of mental illness? * Was she depressed or otherwise suffering from mental illness at the time of the trip? * Was she on any other drugs (prescribed or not) apart from ayahuasca? * Had she had much…

My friend did NOT have a history of mental illness. I think her dad may have had a little OCD, but nothing else that was obvious to me. I haven't followed up with her to ask her these, but this is what I think is true:

She was not on other drugs at all as far as I know.

I don't think she'd ever done psychedelics before.

I don't know too many details of the environment she did it in, but it was with an apparently-experienced shaman I think recommended by her yoga teacher friend. It was the yoga teacher who recommended to her that she try it. All that she knew, she likely heard from this friend who had done it before.

She is a Buddhist, but I don't know what her intentions were.

I don't know anything about the shaman.

I know that it was a medical doctor good friend of hers that committed her to the psych ward afterwords, so she really needed it.

anyway, hope this helps. be careful!

Re: Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers

#40

Post by endianswap »

DigitalJack wrote: post #23
endianswap wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck that drug. I'm currently on 37.5mg every 4 days in an effort to taper down to nothing. I feel nothing but sympathy for those who have been taking 150mg+ daily doses, I was only on 75mg a day for a couple weeks before I thought it prudent to read stories of the drug online, which terrified me and pointed out some of the same effects I had been having but had assumed was coincidental. I took cold medicine with DXM…

You should really talk to a doc about how to come off that. Or maybe you have. What I've often heard is a good route is a couple of tablets of prozac. The half life is on the order of weeks, and so you can take these for a few days, instead of the venlafaxine, or maybe with (whatever your doc says). Then, after building some up in your system, you can just stop. As you go through the half life decay, it's a built in…

Oh, I have talked to a doctor about coming off of it; it's her plan I'm executing right now as far as dosage goes, and it's already going better than most peoples' experiences. I started taking it because of anxiety issues, but the prescribing doctor didn't warn me about any of this. I've since found better ways to handle my anxiety problems, and even if I still run into a mild anxiety episode once in a while I'd rather work through that with my partner and a counselor than mask it with an SSRI/SNRI.

Thanks for your reply :)

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