Shrooms: What You Need to Know

Everyone is suggesting taking more but you can have a decently profound experience with just 2g.

Try it with an eye mask and just music next time, and no other distractions, maybe with a trip sitter nearby.

Also, there's this from the link:

"The third possibility is the one that really intrigues me. A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this."

The fact is everything IS able to do this and it's up to the person to choose it. Most people don't.

The idea that personality is a stable feature after adulthood is simply a cultural phenomena. As a person who has accidentally/intentionally constructed different identities with different voices in the head after out the mouth, it's very clear to me people's identities are incredibly malleable and most people are simply unaware/unpracticed in how to do it.

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 varying complexity and intensity. The patterns may seem to shift and meld into eachother in a kind of loop... Psychonaut wiki[0] has several approximations of varying quality, a lot of the gifs in particular (the cat lying on the couch and the wolf drinking) resonate with me.

Sensory input can also include audio hallucinations, as well as perceptions that are simply normally filtered out of our experience by our brains--a sense of the organs inside your body, or the teeth in your mouth, or whatever.

A lot of the effects are mental, prompting often amusing and revelatory departures from your normal thought patterns. Everything old is new again. You may find yourself deeply examining the complexity of your hands, or the bizarre fact that we're not always "like this", or in deep awe of the staggering complexity of civilization or the chemical machines that are our bodies. That kind of thing.

The realization that we collectively have no idea what we're doing here, that a whole lot of what we believe to be real and permanent is imaginary and temporary, and that there are no rules to life, no winners, that we should take care of nature and each other, and that you should follow your muse to do what you find interesting and beautiful.

Media portrayal of this varies but some shows do hit it quite on the head, actually Mad Men has an interesting trip episode that understates the visual component and emphasizes the mental[1]. Broad city's was particularly colorful and fun (S4e4, full ep. isn't on youtube).

Some media can give you a bit of a taste of the experience, others grossly exaggerate it or flat out misrepresent it. You know how it goes.

[0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects_-_Psychedelic... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWlKCfSPcU

What you need to know is that it will make you dumb and stupid, and you'll sit there giggling to yourself incapable of any coherent thought, like a drooling idiot. At least that's what it'll look like from the outside. From the inside, you'll feel like you've opened a door to a magical land of true understanding, like the veneer of convention has peeled off the world and you can finally see the underlying superstruture of reality. So not only do you turn into a drooling idiot, you turn into a delusional drooling idiot.

And then it takes over your life because it takes days to really get down from those dizzying heights of sudden chemical revelation, only you don't realise you're still high so you still think you really made all those lofty realisations. Then you go and have some more because you 're still incapable of rational thought and who's going to stop you anyway? It can be years before something breaks you out of this vivious cycle of making yourself stupid and being too stupid to understand how stupid you have become as a consequence.

So don't do it. Life's too short. Go read a book. Go learn a craft. Go get a hobby. Learn woodcutting. Learn to bake. Learn to cook. Have more sex. Maybe get a degree or two. But don't do shit that burns your brain because you only get one brain. And it is very easy to damage irreparably.

Most people when tripping wil be fully aware that they are tripping, and therefore usually more careful than if you were drunk.

Of course I'm reminded of Bill Hicks who cautioned, "when on drugs, if you think you can fly, take off from the ground"