[apathy]

The classical comparison that comes to mind is this:

LSD is like walking through the doors of perception.

DMT (as in ayahuasca) is like being shot out of a cannon.

I wonder if it has dawned on any of these "shamans" that a fistful of risperidone might be useful for the freakouts? Antipsychotics exist for a reason. Also, anyone on MAOIs is likely to have a very bad time, and people on SSRIs may not notice a thing (other than barfing).

The whole enterprise seems very poorly thought out.

[cnp]

> The whole enterprise seems very poorly thought out.

That depends on which circle you sit with. Some of them are straight up dangerous (meaning, whoever is running it has not been through the proper training), while others are incredibly well-organized and safe.

And "freak-outs" are oftentimes the point, not meant to be suppressed or dealt with, but guided through by a competent shaman / group. You get to a certain level of understanding when pushed a bit beyond your comfort zone, and that can be difficult sometimes.

[apathy]

Right, but if people are getting stabbed it's generally time to put an end to the offending freakouts.

[zardo]

One locus of the universe puts a "knife" between the "ribs" of another. The second locus transcends material existence and returns it's material to the whole which it was never really apart from.

It's all fine.

[wavefunction]

According to my friends and everything I've read on the subject, the cannon effect is achieved when you smoke DMT.

Ayahuasca is DMT + MAOI inhibitors and is more like the usual experiences of orally ingesting LSD, psilocybin or mescaline.

[azernik]

Plus fantastically uncomfortable physical side effects, and on the positive side an experienced spotter to help you along.

[monktastic1]

Depends. If the MAOIs are extracted from the caapi, leaving out the other alkaloids, even the uncomfortable physical side effects can be avoided.

[azernik]

A lot of the physical side effects are inherent to MAOIs - they have crazy interactions with all kinds of stuff present in most people's bodies. (Hence the psychedelic interactions with DMT that produce the "ayahuasca" effects, and hence the long and hard-to-follow list of things to avoid for 1 or more weeks pre-trip.)

There's a reason why MAO inhibitors are so rarely used in psychiatry. High efficacy, but the side effects are nasty to deal with.

[Nursie]

Ah but that's working around the 'plant spirit' and all that other stuff, you won't have an 'authentic' or 'real' experience and the hipsterswill laugh at you....

[chillwaves]

What's the point of the tone of your comment? Some people would find the processed drug to lack the "authentic" experience of what is found in nature. Doubt anyone really cares. Sounds more like a caricature to me.

[Nursie]

I'm sneering at people who make themselves sick unnecessarily by drinking random plant-juice with a side-order of woo rather than a proper preparation that would give the same effects without the discomfort or other risks, all in the name of 'authenticity'.

[aaroninsf]

More like, certainly... but I'd say, on a radically different level. It's a very powerful thing, much more of a tool for personal discovery than anything remotely like a recreational or party drug.

Source: first hand. :)

[stcredzero]

What did you discover?

[throwanem]

Well, that's the trouble with "personal discovery" - it tends to be personal, and insights thus derived to lack general applicability.

Speaking for myself, on the rare occasions in my life when I've taken a psychedelic (LSD or psilocybin, never DMT as here), I've found the experience useful simply because such a radical change of perspective offers access to insight which might not be available in a more ordinary frame of mind. Such insight is, in my experience, occasionally of value. Of course, such insight is, also in my experience, much more often the kind of thing that makes sense only in hindsight and with the benefit of confirmation bias, which is to say, it doesn't make sense at all.

I think it's very easy for people to make too much of experiences like these; to be taken out of the world, as these substances do, can be wonderful or terrible or both at once, but I can't imagine a case in which it could be neither, and our culture doesn't really provide a good conceptual framework for dealing with wonder and terror. And I know with certainty that it's very easy to talk such an experience to death; in the case where it does offer beneficial insight, such insight is generally of such an intimately personal nature, and so inextricably bound up in one's unique and individual experience of reality, that to try to make it comprehensible to others is often to make it incomprehensible to oneself. At the very least, you want to let it settle a good long while, and integrate into your personality if it's going to do so, before you try to elucidate it to someone else - and, beyond that, there's a very solid point to be made that, if it really is going to change you, it'll do so in a way that doesn't need to be explained to anyone.

Whether any of what I've just described has any use to you, I have no idea, and this is the kind of question you could ask five people and get twelve answers in any case. But maybe it's been worth your while; in any case, I hope it has. I'm happy to answer any further questions it might elicit, although of course I can't promise those answers will be any more useful than this one has been.

[soylentcola]

That was one of the better descriptions of psychedelics and their value that I've read in a while. No new-age "woo" while still not discounting the value that can sometimes be found in them. It's been a while since I've had any similar experiences but the main thing I always took away was that these things, occasionally used, can be valuable tools for deliberately shifting your perspective. Just as (physically) looking at something from another angle doesn't always offer great insight, occasionally it gives you some new bit of info that you can integrate into your overall concept of a thing.

[Diederich]

I agree with soylentcola: this is one of the better general purpose descriptions of the general effects and possible advantages of psychedelics.

I can share a pretty concrete benefit that I received in one of my very rare experiences: for the first time, I was able to clearly see some of the not so good edges of my ego. This awareness allowed me to make some substantive modifications in my life that have brought some big, long-term improvements.

Each of my once per year experiences have proved to be beneficial, though often in very subtle and indirect ways. As you said, it's easy to get that mixed up with confirmation bias.

[ktRolster]

One of the people in the article discovered that, despite the miserable physical pain, afterwards all his childhood self-loathing and anger was gone.

[stcredzero]

Which meshes with my own confirmation bias: It's mostly about the way people feel about things. Such experiences often don't offer any kind of concrete insight on their own. Instead, they put the person in a frame of mind where they are more open to new ways of looking at things. (Personal experience: I've tried psychedelics myself.)

[ktRolster]

tbh it doesn't sound like you have a serious confirmation bias; it sounds like you are looking at the evidence trying to build your ideas on firm foundations, and are aware when the foundations aren't firm. That is a healthy cognitive outlook.

[aaroninsf]

For me the experience that has made the most discernible difference in my everyday life has been to recapitulate in a waking [altered] state a recurring dream narrative I've had for decades, recasting [archetypal] its content (which had been a source of anxiety) in a much more positive way. This was followed by a 'coda' of sorts in which the previously unrealized reformation of one of the images was inhabited for some time and found to be a source of joy, as an affirmation of a personal observation/credo about human interaction.

The emotional effect of the easing of an almost entirely unconsidered but omnipresent background note of minor but real and adamantine anxiety is completely personal, but I would by analogy describe the before-and-after as if a decades-old background musical harmonic dissonance were suddenly reframed by the addition of a new bass note, which integrated them into a satisfying (and hitherto unimagined) chord.

I could describe the specifics, but I'm trying to avoid the cliché of sharing dream content with the expectation that its logic and e.g. discernible ties to everyday consciousness can somehow be translated and made of interest...

...I fear those are just deep-sea fish that are better discussed at a remove, or, alluded to rather than named.

If that makes any more sense itself. :)

Maybe a more direct TL;DR would be, _a long-standing semi-conscious fear which had resurfaced repeatedly in disturbing dream, was revisited and unexpectedly resolved in such a way that I came away with greater serenity, which has persisted now for many years after the experience_.

That might be akin to saying that the experience afforded the resolution of a long-standing emotional conundrum, apparently for good. The consequent sense of equanimity has stuck with me and is something I am grateful for.

(I am certain I myself might have come to the same resolution through some other path; my sense from the communities I am in is that one reason people pursue this one is that such experience are very common. Whether through intrinsic pharmacology or some alchemy of set setting and expectation seems almost not to matter, IMHO.)

[apathy]

I've only ever smoked it... No other frame of reference.

[rubicon33]

Just curious - Why would someone on SSRIs not notice a thing?

Forgive my ignorance but... Aren't those anxiolytic? Does that somehow prevent ayahuasca from functioning?

[rosser]

Why would someone on SSRIs not notice a thing?

In the case of ayahuasca, quite possibly because they're dead. You don't mix SSRIs and MAOIs unless you have a very good idea what you're doing, and even then probably not without a reasonably well-equipped clinic to hand.

Serotonin Syndrome is not something to fuck around with.

[spangry]

Not that I'd advise anyone take the risk, but there are lower risks associated with mixing SSRIs and MAO-B inhibitors (like ayahuasca). It's the older class of anti-depressants which are both MAO-A and MAO-B inhibitors that you don't want to mix with SSRIs (and lots of other things too). MAO-A oxidises/metabolises seratonin, noradrenaline and dopamine, whereas MAO-B is mostly just dopamine. MAO-A inhibition also causes the 'cheese effect' (consumption of tyramine causing hypertensive crisis).

As an aside, it's a real pity that the side effects of MAO-A inhibition loom so large in people's imaginations. They're extremely effective anti-depressants and many of the risks can be easily mitigated, but GPs and even shrinks are now too afraid to prescribe them.

[jaggederest]

Most psychedelic drugs operate through the serotonin pathways. SSRIs cause downregulation of postsynaptic serotonin receptors, meaning the effects of things like LSD and MDMA are reduced.

[MichaelGG]

Some folks have reported SSRIs dampen psychedelic trips. But maybe there's something more with the MAOIs in ayahuasca? Seems rather overhyped, with emphasis on "natural" and "discovered by ancients" nonsense. In reality MAOIs are rather dangerous.

[hosh]

You're making an assumption that "freakouts" is necessarily a bad thing. Freakouts can have some severe material consequences (including as we saw, death), but antipsychotics do not necessarily help. Humans have a normalcy bias such that, anything that is unfamiliar are to be considered with caution, fear, and even anger. There's a tendency to use antipsychotics to get someone to a state of what's considered "normal", but "normal" does not always mean healthy.

The shamans who are trained in the jungle and work with this stuff uses a variety of methods to work with those kinds of episodes. These are not fun, and they aren't really safe either. Some of the groups in the US are not trained or equipped to deal with it, and the more responsible ones will refuse to let someone drink if there are prior cases of psychotic breaks.

I do remember in one ceremony, one of the persons there went off on a journey. This was a group I don't usually participate with. To me, it wasn't unusual for someone to go into an episode like that. I've seen it happen in others and in myself. (And granted, I have heard of those who go somewhere and never come back but I have not seen it directly myself).

What was unusual in that case was that there no separate room set aside. Usually, the energies being whipped out of a person like that is intense enough to start inducing things in other people. What it usually induces is fear (fear of the unknown). As people started to get more and more uncomfortable, their own consciousness transmits feelings of judgement and censure ... which does not help the situation.

Ayahuasca is tricky like that. She'll allow situations like that to arise, and see if you're going to be mindful of things; or to facilitate an empathy exercise where you feel what it is like to be on the other side of those judgements. Freakouts like that can happen to anyone -- and likely, the more rigid, the more closed-minded, the more judgemental you are, the more likely it will be your turn next.

[apathy]

Once upon a time I took everything under the sun. I don't judge people for doing the same.

But if you're claiming to "guide" people through a trip with potential for physical harm (and in an inustrialized, urban environment, that's pretty much all of them), you're goddamn right I'll judge you if you fuck someone up.

If a hospital pulled this shit and didn't even try to mitigate potential harm, they'd be shut down. Would you claim it should be otherwise? People certainly have out of body experiences in the ER on a fairly regular basis...

So, no, I don't take issue with people using hallucinogens. I used a ton when I was younger and had a vanishingly small number of bad trips. The part I take issue with is where people get irresponsible. Humans are pretty fragile (stop by the ER some time, they can survive a lot, but not everything). I judge those who won't take care of each other.

[hosh]

You make some good points.

However, I'm not speaking about whether someone's action is worthy or unworthy, but rather, the specific reaction of judgement itself as a form of conscious energy. When examined energetically, the intention of judging itself is often a form of social aggression, usually in reaction to aversion.

Aversion is a natural instinct when we come across something that is toxic, or more precisely, perceived as toxic to our bodies. Toxins get expelled. This is very natural, at least for human bodies.

The thing is that Consciousness spans more than being human, and it persists beyond the our given lifetime as a human. We trade roles and act out this theatre where, sometimes you are the one judging, and sometimes you are the one being judged for the same actions. What is toxic at some level of teaching is not toxic at other levels of teaching. The teaching that an individual needs is specific to that moment, in that setting.

Also, 'harm' and 'potential harm' is not so simple. There are physical, emotional, and mental damage that can be inflicted, both accidentally and deliberately. However, it's been my experience that people generally confuse pain with suffering, and conflate the two. Pain can be measured and compared, but suffering cannot. Suffering does not result from pain so much as it results from going against the natural flow of consciousness. So when we speak of "harm" in the conventional sense, we measure it in terms of pain, but we are often really speaking of "suffering" in the subtext, or subconsciously.

When people are reacting to freakouts, they are not usually reacting to the potential danger so much as the suffering from the arising fear of that danger. The aversion to suffering is so strong, there's this spiraling effect as the fear in participants start resonating, and then compound out of control. From this perspective, judgement is a kind of immune response to toxic energies, and while it might be appropriate outside of ceremony space, it isn't necessarily helping you as a participant if you focus too much on judging others within the ceremony. This is, after all, gaining insight about yourself. A good question to be asking at that point is, "What am I learning from this experience of me judging someone else?"

To come back to your points though: what I said above comes out in groups that act responsibly, and can provide a reasonably safe place to explore dangerous aspects of life like that. They don't spike the brew. I've been with groups where there are EMT or an MD on hand. There are sufficient facilities to isolate someone going through an intense journey (which always look like freakouts). There are sober helpers to make sure people get what they need ... and keep the knives hidden away. The shamans know how to deal with the really nasty stuff that will pop up once in a while.

While the nature of medicine is such that many will experience a safe way to explore some very dangerous stuff, one of the things people explore is life, and the inherent dangers and risks of life. At some point in someone's journey, they learn by taking falls and getting back up.

[apathy]

It seems like at least some of the groups you've sat down with had these things nailed down. At some point there are objective hazards in life, and I'm comfortable knowing that we can't possibly control them all. I've done some pretty irresponsible things to my brain (18-hour trips on alpha-methyltryptamine, that sort of thing) but in the end I am the one who pays (or will pay) the price for that.

Honest-to-god shamans that are the recipients of generations' worth of accumulated cultural traditions aren't my concern; I'm hardly fit to judge them. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on in some of these ceremonies. It's irresponsible (and kind of shitty) to act as a guide unless the guide is prepared to handle extremal behavior.

As far as judging others for taking hallucinogens, nah. People's brains react differently to different agents at different points in time, and that's something that you either learn to deal with or you stop taking hallucinogens.