[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.