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How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

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Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#121

Post by saiya-jin »

bheadmaster wrote: post #100
vga805 wrote: post #70

Ayahuasca ceremonies are among the most profound, cherished experiences of my life. I prepare for months before partaking in them to make sure my emotional, physical, and spiritual health is in a good place. And I can't imagine taking this drug without being under the care of experienced guides. I also wouldn't recommend it for anyone except those who really desire to push the limits of their mind. Some trips have fe…

It doesn't seem far fetched to me that your own mind could've manufactured such a reaction - especially if the shamans all tried to convince you that the spirits are real, and you felt "guilty" that you didn't believe them. Your mind could simulate the reaction you'd have feared you'd get if you shared your thoughts with the shamans, perhaps? I am personally very skeptical of the "realness" of anything that happens d…

I am beyond skeptical to be honest. True I've never done this specifically, but I've done few intense mushrooms trips lying on the bed with eyes closed, where my mind dissolved, I lost connection to my whole body and all senses, danced as a mist of atoms to (real) background shamanic music and then very, very slowly coming down from all this, joining atom by atom, sense by sense, limb by limb.

Felt very spiritual and almost religious at the end, interesting to experience as an agnostic (but this changed nothing, in fact just reinforced this opinion).

It just tells us how little we understand our brains, how creative it gets when receptors who provided 100% feed all life give suddenly only a garbled mess. And maybe that all of us have inside some innate desire for good, beauty, connection with all living, nature, universe. I mean, isn't that enough to marvel? Especially when such experiences often permanently change participants for the better.

Which is all fine but none of this needs aliens from other dimensions to explain. But in same vein some folks see conspiracies everywhere, ufos flying and monitoring us etc. while rest of us just see world as usual go by.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#122

Post by nikisweeting »

DenisM wrote: post #86
Trasmatta wrote: post #16

Bad trips are a real risk with all psychedelics. I don't like the attitude in psychedelic communities that there's "no such thing as a bad trip, only a challenging one". I had a couple bad trips. It felt like living in hell for a literal eternity. It's almost impossible to describe the agony that the human mind is capable of experiencing. It's absurd how much suffering the human mind can experience. The main message…

You had a couple of bad trips? They way you describe them it was awfully bad, and yet you did it more than once?

"Bad trip" is a huge space of possible levels of bad. I've had tons of uncomfortable trips but none were "bad" enough to deter. Each person has a widely varying level of comfort with discomfort and resolve to keep trying. Same thing with extreme sports or any voluntary exposure to discomfort with perceived gain.

Just like extreme sports each painful experience also has a non-zero risk of deterring you forever and no longer seeming worth it. Whether you're willing to keep rolling the dice is up to how much you gain from each experience and how you integrate it.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#123

Post by boppo1 »

macrolime wrote: post #114
vga805 wrote: post #70

Ayahuasca ceremonies are among the most profound, cherished experiences of my life. I prepare for months before partaking in them to make sure my emotional, physical, and spiritual health is in a good place. And I can't imagine taking this drug without being under the care of experienced guides. I also wouldn't recommend it for anyone except those who really desire to push the limits of their mind. Some trips have fe…

There's been scientific studies on whether people can get "machine elves" to tell them some actual factual information that they didn't already know. In all of the studied cases the things that were told by the "machine elves" was either something that got verified as false/made up or something the user already knew.

I think machine elves a BS but if you're gonna claim they verified it with a study you'd better link it. Idk how they could verify the elves were created by trippers' imaginations, sounds like disproving Jesus.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#124

Post by nikisweeting »

xs83 wrote: post #101
DoreenMichele wrote: post #89

As someone who has thrown up a lot over the years and has a love-hate relationship with vomiting -- because sometimes it alleviates some of my symptoms -- I would be interested in hearing more about the experience of vomiting in reaction to taking this and why people apparently seek out the experience of vomiting.

I vomited so hard that I gave myself 2 black eyes and burst a blood vessel in my eye so it went completely red. I literally thought I was going to spew up a kidney. Its called La Purga for a reason though, prior to vomiting, because you are starting to trip, you get into a negative thought spiral, this builds and builds and you feel vile. Then all of a sudden - blam. Kidney coming through your nose level spew.... alo…

I have the same approach. I think given how many smart, rational people I know say there is something to purging I'm inclined to try it once, but once I have that experience I think I'm likely to revert to thinking it's stockholm syndrome for long-term exploration / future trips.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#125

Post by nikisweeting »

froh wrote: post #107
stevev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had dreams where I carry on actual conversations with people in my own life and or strangers. Realizing that I’m dreaming, I ask questions and to my surprise their answers and reactions are not of my doing. I ask in the manner of only listening immediately (clear minded with no thinking) so as to not influence their response. The brain is truly mysterious. I wonder if hidden personas are created and stored and r…

"internal family systems" gives a useful framework for this ability of the brain to take on multiple more or less independent perspectives, almost personalities. our brain can hide different memories in them and getting free access and interaction and integration of them is seen as part of personal development by the IFS approach to the phenomenon. They leverage it without psychedelics, btw.

Yeah I think empathy under the hood is just a very good modeling engine that models other people's brains without our conscious awareness.

IFS, DMT, and other experiences can surface those models to the conscious layer and allow us to introspect them more directly.

In that vein I think sympathy is our intelligent/conscious level modeling of other people's emotional states, which is a higher level process that happens with conscious awareness. In some ways I think sympathy is actually harder, and I respect it more because it shows conscious effort put into modeling experiences you haven't already had / can't intuitively relate to without effort.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#126

Post by nikisweeting »

koonsolo wrote: post #120

I always find it surprising that so many people here have such a positive attitude towards drugs. I never touched it, am very happy about it, and hope my kids stay far away from it. I know people who did all kinds of drugs, and nothing positive ever came out of that. Sorry that's just my opinion.

Meet more people.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#127

Post by saiya-jin »

koonsolo wrote: post #120

I always find it surprising that so many people here have such a positive attitude towards drugs. I never touched it, am very happy about it, and hope my kids stay far away from it. I know people who did all kinds of drugs, and nothing positive ever came out of that. Sorry that's just my opinion.

Wow, you must be one of those few in western society that never touched alcohol, never smoked a cigarette and never consumed sugars! Not that its something to marvel at, but for sure you are a curiosity, just like your kids will be in society.

On a more serious note, some drugs do much more good than harm. Some psychedelics have extremely good results when treating hard psychiatric patients with conditions our modern medicine has absolutely 0 cure for. I mean way beyond anything current pharma industry can produce, much less side effects. Its abhorrent and primitive medieval mindset to ban such treatments to those whose lives are completely destroyed by their conditions, just because you were brought up in some primitive society that scaremongered you/your parents into clear falsehoods and lies (ie nixon ban on drugs when demonizing hippies and Mexican immigrants in 60s, which through mandatory UN charts was pushed to the rest of the world even to places like India, where cannabis is a sacred plant of god Shiva).

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#128

Post by sph »

koonsolo wrote: post #120

I always find it surprising that so many people here have such a positive attitude towards drugs. I never touched it, am very happy about it, and hope my kids stay far away from it. I know people who did all kinds of drugs, and nothing positive ever came out of that. Sorry that's just my opinion.

"I don't know much about something, here's my opinion."

The fact that you don't distinguish between categories of drugs is, no offence, a major indicator of ignorance in the subject matter. Hallucinogens are not stimulants are not depressants are not dissociatives are not alcohol.

If you mean "illegal drugs", do you really think that the objective, scientific threshold between harmful and harmless is legality?

You are free to do whatever you want, it's your body. But perhaps learn more about something you don't know anything about before passing judgement.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#129

Post by bheadmaster »

koonsolo wrote: post #120

I always find it surprising that so many people here have such a positive attitude towards drugs. I never touched it, am very happy about it, and hope my kids stay far away from it. I know people who did all kinds of drugs, and nothing positive ever came out of that. Sorry that's just my opinion.

I don't find it surprising that the hacker types, typically curious and rebellious people, would be naturally inclined to experiment with drugs. It seems like a way to hack around with your own mind and see what happens.

Re: How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores

#130

Post by [deleted] »

DenisM wrote: post #87
aricz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edibles can kick your arse in a major way and go on for hours. I've had a few experiences that surpasses most of my trips on LSD. But I agree that a moderate-high dose of LSD that goes south is much harder to control. Sometimes it's just like a bomb detonates in the center of your mind, and you're using the next days (weeks, months or years) collecting the debris and trying to piece them together. "Take it easy duuud…

What is moderate-high in your book?

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