Mods if this is not allowed please remove, but I figured I try.

Hello everyone, hope everyone is doing well. As the tittle says, I'm considering doing IV ketamine therapy. And the reason that I'm making this post is to get some thoughts and opinions.

I've tried psychedelics before, psilocybin specifically. Both in micro dose and macro dose. The intention was to alleviate symptoms of depression and hopefully bring more clarity into my life; for the past years, I've felt really stuck in fight or flight mode.

The last time I did the macro dose (3.5g) was around probably 7-8 months ago by myself, and it was really a beautiful experience but at some point the trip stopped being pleasant and it became overwhelming and I kept thinking to myself that I made a horrible horrible mistake. I honestly thought I wouldn't be coming out of that.

Thankfully the trip came to pass and I was so grateful to still be here, in this reality. One thing that came out of that is that I'm more grateful for just regular day life. Literally being able to see sunsets, clouds in the sky, being to able to speak with parents. The beauty in the mundane. The lesson, if I recall correctly is that there's always a choice.

The reason I'm making this post is to hopefully gather some thoughts around the IV ketamine.

There's still some stuckness, some heaviness, some brain fog. I still feel that I'm stuck in fight or flight. But if I ever do psychedelics again, in this case ketamine, it will be on a professional and safe environment.

If you took the time to read this, thank you.

An essay exploring the concept of 'psychedelic apophenia', where connections are made between unrelated things so that we see psychedelics' influence everywhere.

It looks at Terence McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory, psychedelic theories of Christianity, and DMT-pineal gland theories.

We are a group of researchers at the University of Wollongong in Australia conducting a study about the emotional experiences people report during psychedelic experiences and whether these are linked to changes in social functioning, wellbeing, and attitudes toward death.

We are looking for individuals aged 18 years or older who have had at least one personally meaningful experience with a classical psychedelic substance within the past 5 years (but not within the past 3 months). Psychedelics include LSD, DMT (N,N-DMT), 5-MeO-DMT, Ayahuasca, Psilocybin (i.e. Magic Mushrooms) or Mescaline/Peyote.

If you are 18 years and over and can read English, we invite you to take part in an online, 30-minute survey. This survey asks about the emotions you experienced during a psychedelic experience and any changes you may have noticed in how you relate to others, your general wellbeing, and your outlook on life afterward. Please note that the survey includes questions about challenging emotions that may have arisen during the experience.

Your responses will be completely anonymous and your involvement will remain confidential. No identifying information (including IP addresses) will be collected.

Participants will have the chance to enter a draw to win one of two $100 AUD Visa vouchers. Entry into the draw is completely optional and is completed via a separate form that is not connected to, and cannot be linked with, participant survey responses. To participate or learn more, follow this link: https://uow.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6nuJn8BNBgWFYrk

For questions, contact: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Thank you very much for your consideration in participating. The following researchers are conducting the study:
Dr. Sam Moreton - Lecturer, School of Psychology University of Wollongong [email protected].
Alex Shuttleworth - Honours Student School of Psychology University of Wollongong
Mimi Han Honours Student School of Psychology University of Wollongong

Study Reference Number: H2026-0104

A little while ago, a friend and I took LSD together. It was his first time, and he took around 120µg. I’d done it once before, and I took around 300µg.

At first, we were just hanging out and watching videos. After a while, though, he started having a really rough time. He tried to lie down and sleep, but he kept laughing to himself, suddenly becoming terrified, saying things that made no sense, sitting up out of nowhere, and then lying back down again.

I was also tripping pretty hard, but I sat next to him and tried to stay grounded by meditating. I mainly wanted to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or try to go outside.

He seemed extremely aware of me the whole time. In particular, he kept acting out the scene from Fullmetal Alchemist where Ed sees Al on the other side of the Gate and shouts, “Wait for me. I’ll come back for you.”

He would suddenly sit up, reach his hand toward me, repeat the line, lie back down, and then do the same thing again later.

At one point, he suddenly apologized to me.

“Just ignore everything I’m saying right now. I don’t want to say any of this.”

Then, out of nowhere, he said:

“You dress like absolute shit.”

Right after saying it, he looked distressed and said, “Fuck, I don’t want to say things like that. I’m sorry. Just ignore me.”

I didn’t want the mood to become even heavier, so I laughed and said something like:

“Dude, what the fuck, I barely go anywhere besides work and home. Why would I even buy nice clothes?”

He didn’t really respond. He just seemed to disappear back into whatever was happening inside his head.

After that, he kept doing things that looked like he was repeatedly creating and destroying something, until he eventually fell asleep.

The next day, he told me that during the trip, he felt like he was constantly moving through different worlds, like in Doctor Strange. At different points, he felt like he was the person praying, then the prayer itself, then God, then a demon.

His sense of who he was kept changing from one world to the next.

Whenever he felt himself returning to reality, he used me as an anchor. While he was constantly shifting between being God, a demon, a worshipper, or someone else entirely, I was still sitting in the same place, meditating.

He said I looked like a seated stone Buddha.

He also said that the strange things he said felt similar to the characters in Get Out saying or doing things against their own will. He could hear himself speaking, but it didn’t feel like he was the one choosing the words.

At one point, he even wondered whether I was somehow leading him into saying those things by asking suggestive questions, even though I wasn’t really questioning him at all.

Later, both of us mentioned The Anthem of the Heart.

There’s a scene where Naruse says something like, “Now I’m going to hurt you with cruel words,” and then tells the other person, “You smell.”

It isn’t really because she hates him. It feels more like her fear and guilt about how words can hurt people finally exploding outward.

The way my friend told me I dressed like shit and then immediately became upset about saying it reminded us both of that scene.

At the time, I laughed it off. The next day, he already seemed guilty and embarrassed about what had happened, so I decided not to bring it up again.

Still, I’d be lying if I said the comment didn’t stick with me.

I really don’t care much about clothes. I mostly just go to work and come home, so it wasn’t a completely random insult. It touched on something about myself that I already knew.

That said, I don’t see it as some perfect revelation of his hidden feelings or his unconscious mind. Things said on LSD can be a mixture of ordinary thoughts, random associations, fear, confusion, and thoughts that become harder to suppress precisely because you’re trying not to say them.

Looking back, I also don’t think the Fullmetal Alchemist gesture was necessarily a promise he was making to me.

It may have been a promise he was making to the part of himself that still existed in reality.

“As long as you’re still there, I can travel through any number of worlds and still find my way back.”

And when I laughed off what he said instead of getting angry, maybe that communicated something similar.

*Figured I would share this episode, as Psychoanut Wiki and Josie Kin's Psychoanu Wiki and other projects might be of interest*

One of the most systematic and comprehensive systems of documenting the effects of psychedelics and other psychoactives wasn’t made in academia, but was crafted by some drug nerds with high trait-level systematizing and a penchant for self-expirementation. In this episode, Josie Kins is the founder of PsychoanutWiki, the Subjective Effects Index, and the Replications Reddit tells us about the backstory behind how Josie got involved in subjective effect documentation. We discuss what her quest to describe the “ineffable” has led her to do, everything from poring over pretty much every drug effects system known to taking DPH to accurately describe its deliriant effects. Josie also tells us a bit about her brush with “McKenna syndrome,” her “DSM fan fiction” diagnosis for describing people who go a bit out there with psychedelics. In Josie's case, it led her to create a GitHub for her own religion, which she no longer fully endorses. We also talk a little bit about neurodiversity and whether psychedelics could have an impact on autism or not, and whether Josie’s experience with persistent depersonalization shaped PsychoanutWiki.

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6taAn6UId9zuqKayHEoz9F?si=7fe5541474be4e12

We are a group of researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin and we look forward to your participation in our study! The survey is completely anonymous.

Have you ever taken a psychedelic substance?
Share your opinion and possibly experiences you have had with psychedelic experiences without (immediate) previous use of psychedelics with us!

https://psychedelicflashbacksurvey.info  

We would like to learn more about who has these experiences, what they look like in concrete terms, which factors contribute to the associated effects and how they can be dealt with.

Hi. I recently gave a talk (then published as an essay) at a psychedelics conference. I'm doing a philosophy PhD focused on psychedelics, and this is the first time I've put my more academic work out there publicly. Psychedelics have been a huge part of my life for about a decade (I even wrote a book about my own experiences with it), and I figured this sub would be a good place to share it.

Most of the field is stuck in a false dichotomy, typically viewing the mystical experience has nothing but brain dynamics (relaxed priors, default mode network, etc), or it's evidence we need to revise our metaphysics toward something like idealism/panpsychism etc (tldr mind having some more fundamental role and against materialism). Both sides quietly agree on something I think is wrong, that the experience is a proposition to be scored true or false, a report on whether you contacted something real out there. I'd argue that's not actually how cognition works. Meaning is co-constructed between agent and world rather than simply found or projected, so a "mystical" state is better described as a shift in disclosure, in what shows up as mattering, than as a metaphysical claim awaiting a verdict.

That reframing matters most in the part of the field I think gets underweighted: what happens after the self loosens. Dissolution gets almost all the attention, understandably, it's the dramatic part and there's ofc decent neuroscience behind it. But dissolution just flattens existing structure, and a flattened structure can reorganize in more than one direction, toward something healthier, back to the old pattern, or into something novel but still pathological (the person who keeps doing psychedelics, keeps feeling like they're leveling up, and is quietly getting worse, as sometimes pops up here). None of this is visible from the neuroscience alone, a real insight and a confident delusion run on the same machinery. So the honest question isn't just "did the self dissolve," it's "reorganize toward what," and nothing in the pharmacology answers that.

What actually seems to answer it for me is attention, and specifically that attention is morally loaded, not just a spotlight you point at things. Attention functions as precision-weighting that structures the whole field of what counts as relevant to you moment to moment, and since we're social animals that field gets shaped by other people's cares too. I lean on Weil and Murdoch here, who argued attention is less something you force and more something you become receptive to, letting go of ego enough that the real, other people especially, shows up undistorted instead of through your own projections. Murdoch's specific claim is that moral change comes from attention whose result is a decrease in egoism and an increased sense of reality. This is the same 4E picture that makes set and setting causally powerful in the first place: cognition is world-involving, so both what you register as relevant and what the drug experience amounts to are shaped by agent and environment together, not generated by the molecule alone.

Put together, I think "the sacred" is best understood not as a supernatural object but as whatever sits at the top of that attention hierarchy, your highest concern, the thing that orders everything else you attend to. That's one piece of a larger dissertation argument, but it's a meaningful chunk of the overall direction I'm taking. I think it also bears on two things the field tends to shrug at: why some people get nothing from a full dose (in the sense they don't heal), and why effects fade over time (even if they heal, they return to their pathological state). This aspect of both context during the experience + integration through attention-mediated cultural system what can likely improve both.

I'd love feedback from anyone more philosophy-inclined, but I'm especially interested if any of this maps onto your own experience, not just a single trip, but the longer arc of what psychedelics have actually done in your life. When you hear the word "sacred," what actually comes to mind for you? Does it make sense to you that a trip isn't really "true" or "false" but somehow beyond the dichotomy itself?

I wrote a piece trying to think through what I take to be the harder version of the psychedelic exceptionalism debate.

Not the lazy version where psychedelics are either miracle sacraments or uniquely dangerous drugs. The more interesting question is whether psychedelic-assisted therapies should be held to the same ethical and evidentiary standards as other treatments, but may still require unusually specific safeguards because they can rapidly alter not just mood, but beliefs: about the self, the world, metaphysics, trauma, and memory.

The part I keep coming back to is “doxastic vulnerability”—basically, vulnerability around what one comes to believe during or after a highly altered, suggestible, meaning-saturated state. I’m especially interested in the issue of recovered memories, where the clinical, ethical, and legal stakes seem much higher than the field has fully reckoned with.

I’d be curious how people here think about this. Are psychedelics genuinely exceptional in the sense that we'll need new protocols to avert--e.g., the arising of recovered memories during treatment-- or can we mostly adapt safeguards from psychotherapy, anesthesia, hypnosis, and other existing clinical contexts?

I'm born in a major city. Im suppose to get my degrees, and more work experience, and god damn RISE the ranks lol.

I dont want to. idk what to do. As a result of healing hardcore pain I can't be a outstanding citizen of this society.

Im content with very little. Which sounds alien to a lot of people, but in the same way they can't relate to me I can't relate to them.

Hey yall! New to this subreddit - so i apologize if this type of post isnt allowed delete if so - im trying to find some experienced info on morning glory seeds particularly in using Kash’s A/B tek… he uses HBWR seeds and says if morning glory seeds are to be used that it should be in a much larger quantity.. it calls for 100 HBWR seeds.. would one assume 300 morning glory seeds to suffice? Do the other increments of ingredients need to be equally upped as well?

I painted the feeling I sometimes get while painting, like a crack opens in my consciousness and an overwhelming wave of love washes over me, it is as if I’m being held by the hands of the universe.
Have you ever experienced something similar?

For those who don’t know, Soma is the sacred drink passed down from ancient Indian texts like the Rigveda. It was offered to the gods and described as giving whoever drank it immense strength, euphoria, inspiration, and even immortality. Because of that, many researchers and people interested in the occult have long speculated that Soma was a ritual drink made from some psychoactive plant.

The most famous theory has been Amanita muscaria, but it doesn’t really fit. The Vedic texts talk about pressing the stalks to extract the juice and describe the stems, which doesn’t match a mushroom at all.

Lots of other candidates have come up over the years, like Sarcostemma, but the big problem was that they didn’t produce a strong enough psychoactive effect to match the descriptions.

But after reading Stanislav Grof’s books, I think I’ve finally found the most convincing candidate: Ipomoea asarifolia, a type of morning glory that contains a decent amount of LSA, which is very similar to LSD.

It’s a climbing vine with strong psychoactive properties. It grows in India, and some people even suggest it might be native to southern India.

I believe the reason this plant has never been seriously considered as Soma before is that discussions about LSA have always focused only on the seeds. But recent studies show that LSA and related compounds are also accumulated in the stems, roots, and other parts of the plant. In communities like r/LSA, a lot of people say that using the sprout tek (germinating the seeds) makes the effects noticeably stronger.

If this is true, it’s honestly mind blowing. LSA has been right under our noses the whole time, yet it only became properly known after LSD was discovered. Such a weird twist.

Albert Hofmann’s story is really interesting too. After he discovered LSD, he later identified the lysergic acid amides in the Mexican Ololiuqui seeds. To him, it felt like coming full circle. LSD wasn’t some completely new synthetic monster. It was more like a modern chemical version of something ancient. His research on Ololiuqui was a return from LSD back to the old sacred plants.

One more thing (I can’t personally guarantee this is true, but it’s interesting): the famous guru Muktananda apparently said he knew what Soma really was, and that it was a climbing vine. Stanislav Grof mentions this story but doesn’t name the exact plant. He just subtly hints by saying something like “Ololiuqui type morning glories are also vines.”

After years of dismissing ideas like the simulation hypothesis, I took a deeper look at consciousness, perception, and the limits of scientific explanation. This essay explores the hard problem of consciousness, psychedelic experiences, and modern physics to ask a simple question: Are we seeing reality as it actually is?

https://medium.com/@m.bass/i-was-fooled-we-all-were-b92629beb516?sharedUserId=m.bass

Firstly, I appreciate anyone who takes the time to share their experience. I’m not claiming to know anything. I’m just explaining my thought process so you understand where I’m coming from. This isn’t a CMV and I’m not arguing the aphorism is undue. I’m skeptical of how it’s used, how it shaped my own interpretations, and I want clarity so I don’t overapply it.

I see this aphorism plastered everywhere. I don't know what it means apart from, "stop taking psychedelics, you don't need them anymore". The question is in how that inference was made in the first place.

The only time it ever made sense to me was after one particular trip, and like many trips, it had a lot of different parts and different experiences, many of which were ontologically unsettling and unpleasant, but one of the "lessons" was: the search never ends, and there’s no ultimate truth waiting at the end of it

I wrote the story in this comment if you're curious.

I stayed away from shrooms for 10 months because I thought I "got the message", so I "hung up the phone". The message I interpreted was something like "stop taking mushrooms, there are no answers to be found, only fear to be felt". This was not my first "bad trip", nor was it even close to my worst (for reference, my worst one was thinking I had to kill myself to end the simulation and its suffering, but when I sobered up, I just felt like, "damn, that was so powerful and my whole perspective on life has changed for the better"). I think a combination of the fear and the "there is no real end or truth" combined together to connect me to the aphorism.

Anyway, I ended up doing a low dose trip a couple weeks ago with my buddy, and that trip was really awesome, and I even had a few insights I've since integrated into my behaviour / worldview. So looking back, that whole “I got the message” thing I felt 10 months ago, now feels like total BS and it feels like I just shoehorned that aphorism onto the closest experience I had, because that aphorism is everywhere in psychedelic spaces, so it was the first thing my brain grabbed onto as an interpretive lens.

Then today, I read a brief discussion (will post it right below in italics) and it got me thinking about the super subjective, abstract nature of the aphorism and how: what if it collapses a whole spectrum of phenomenological experiences into one vague phrase? And whether the phrase is so overapplied that it becomes a template people unconsciously force themselves into?

--------

Person 1: It's like Alan Watts said about psychedelics : Once you get the message, hang up the phone.

Person 2: He was quoting Ram Das.

Person 3: Both are kind of full of themselves, Watts especially was. He had multiple failed marriages, was barely present in his kids lifes and died in his 50s from alcoholism lol, he clearly didn't get the message.

The real secret is the phone doesn't exist, you're talking to yourself. You probably shouldn't hang up unless you can stay on the call when sober, enlightenment is a journey not a destination. Anyone telling you about it has probably already forgot it. Even Jiddu Krishnamurti didn't really embody it and struggled with materialism, ego and uncontrolled lust, even though he absolutely experienced non-duality when sober, what he described as "the process" in private journals that came out after his death.

Person 2: So because Watts is a flawed messenger, we should stay on the phone even after we get the message?

Person 3: I'm saying Watts clearly didn't get the message. There is no "phone" everything you experience on psychedelics is created by your own mind. You are talking to yourself

---------

So I want to ask you guys, you who all have felt like you've "got the message and hung up the phone", what was that like? Was it an intense fear? Was it a realization the psychedelics were a crutch for you? Was it a realization you weren't integrating anything? Was it something like, "I found the cheat codes to life"? What was it? How did you make the inference that the message was to never do psyches again? I don't know. I can imagine it being so many different things and I imagine there will be a large array of different experiences that caused the inference.

Thanks to again!

An article on psychedelic horror, looking at films such as Midsommar, Mandy, Climax, and Altered States, how they depict bad trips and psychedelic cults, what other aspects of the psychedelic experience could be portrayed through the lens of horror, and if there's a risk that some of these films feed into stigma surrounding these substances.

I was looking into how neural networks process images and the parallel with human psychedelic experiences is mind-blowing.
In machine learning, if you take an artificial neuron trained to recognize something (like eyes or geometric shapes) and you intentionally "overload" or saturate it, the AI generates images that look exactly like classic psychedelic visuals (fractals, pareidolia, breathing geometry).
It made me realize that it's the same process behind psychedelics in our brain. By agonizing 5-HT2A receptors, they facilitate uncontrolled cross-talk and hyper-activate our visual cortex. The brain starts seeing patterns where there are none, just like an AI trying to find a dog's eye in static noise.
I wrote a short blog post exploring this philosophical connection and included some of the AI "trip" images for visual comparison. I think studying AI might actually be the key to decoding the human visual cortex during trips.
What do you guys think?

Following up on my earlier post: we're now at 540 responses and getting closer to our recruitment target of 1,000.

About the study: We're developing and validating a new psychological scale measuring lasting positive change after serotonergic psychedelic experiences (LSD, psilocybin, DMT, Ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT). This is a collaboration between UCL and Monash University.

What's involved: 10-minute anonymous online questionnaire. You'll rate statements about how you've changed since your most significant psychedelic experience, plus a few short validated wellbeing measures.

Eligibility: 18+, at least one prior psychedelic experience.

Link: https://qualtrics.ucl.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_8vS3TcUSKWQ9xfU

Ethics: Approved by Monash Research Ethics Committee (Project ID 49992).

Thank you for your time, and if you took it before, thank you again!

Long story short, I'm an LSD addict. I don't do it every day or anything like that, but I start thinking about my next trip within days of my last one. I usually only wait 1-3 weeks at most to trip again, and even then, when I set a date for my next trip, I tend to move it up. But I generally respond to LSD really well. It grounds my headspace, it alleviates my symptoms of OCD, it motivates me to live my life to the fullest and dedicate my time and energy into worthwhile things, and I almost always get an afterglow after the trip. Admittedly, I haven't been doing a lot of good with that potential, but I don't use LSD as some kind of escape from my demons. In fact, I'm incredibly introspective on it (and when I'm sober as well), and I usually use that time to organize my thoughts and process things I'm dealing with. The reason I use LSD so often is that I can't get enough of it. I love that state of consciousness, I love the extra detail to my senses, I love the beauty and color it gives to the world around me. I don't feel like I need the drug to see beauty in the world. In fact, since I've started using LSD, I've started getting these feelings sober as well. Yet I can't stand the thought of only doing LSD occasionally or not at all because that state of consciousness is truly my greatest passion, and I acknowledge that it means I'm addicted to it, that it shouldn't have this strong of a hold on me, but I truly do have an authentic love for it.

​

Honestly, I have plenty of other addictions and vices, and two trips I had at the end of a particularly destructive month have inspired me to make big changes in my life. I'm set on quitting all other drugs and starting to live a more balanced lifestyle, and I was even going to quit LSD entirely, but the truth is, the thought of disconnecting from that state of consciousness for the rest of my life is unbearable, and as much as I'm now confronted with the truth of my addiction to it, I can't help but wonder, is it really that bad? It's certainly my least destructive vice, and as of right now, I'm set on giving up everything else. Weed, MDMA, cigarettes, porn, binge eating, there's a lot lol. I've been having big trips multiple times a month (think around the 200ug range), and that's terrible, I get it now. It's been throwing me out of balance and I don't want to live like that anymore. But I don't feel the need to take high doses. I have an appreciation for the gentler 100ug experience, and frankly, it's a less obsessive one, which is essential for me going forward. I know I also shouldn't feel the need to do LSD more than once a month at most, but as much as I do care about other, more important stuff, I can't help but crave frequent access to this headspace. Is that wrong? Is it inherently toxic for me to feel this way? I'm not ruling out the possibility that I'm lying to myself right now, which is why I'm trying to get external feedback, but that love is genuine. I have so much admiration and respect for the experience. I'm sure you all get it, even if you do think I should just let it go. At a minimum, I'm going to take a month or so of full sobriety to get my head and my life straight. After that, if I'll end up going back to LSD, I'm definitely not going to keep less than two weeks between trips anymore, and I might even make it three. Any feedback is appreciated, I'm just trying to understand my situation as best as I can. :)

https://pastes.io/Rd7qcdBP

Alternative link: https://pastebin.com/NP3rAur9 (`unmanifested.md`, `unmanifested.md-liberation-serif.pdf` or `unmanifested.md-victor-mono.pdf`).