Hi,

I have yet to take it seriously. Only experimented with shrooms and meditation, and it is really intense but also very satisfying. Even if the meditation does not last long.
The overwhelming conscious awareness one have under influence is astounding.

I am actually looking at trying the coffee meditation, maybe to try and see how it goes.

However, classical meditation free from substances still is my preferred way

I like syrian rue with a small amount of cannabis and A. muscaria.

It can get really deep and relaxing.

/Y

Go to has always either been 0.5g-1.0g rue, or 5-10g worth of vine. Rue's definitely more plentiful for this purpose ime.

I'll join the others with recommending harmalas-- rue is dirt cheap, and extraction is effortless. Caapi is best, but harder to come by and much more expensive.

Yes!!!
Green tea especially, because of the teanine wich helps the brain to generate more alpha-waves.

It's counterproductive. That's my opinion.

Obviously there's many different definitions of meditation and what the purpose of it is for the individual. I think a lot of people are just pursuing the utilitarian approach under the guise of some purported spiritual aim - what they really want is to feel relaxed, elated, or away from daily stresses.

There's nothing wrong with that. But if your aim is self-investigation then adding another layer of distraction, another mood, a particular set of different thoughts that psychoactives invite.. that's completely counterproductive. Self-investigation through a deeply introspective focus is best approached sober, with high mental-energy, and eyes open.

I was simply stating what I’d done and what was helpful and what wasn’t. It’s a better use of trip time in my experience than watching Rick and Morty.

No need to take it personally, I was just stating my opinion.

If you're weighing up whether tripping is efficacious by comparing psychedelic meditation with not watching Rick and Morty, well perhaps it is time to consider that neither is a productive use of your time or energy?

Yeesh. Why are you on DMT Nexus, friend?

This forum is not a bandwagon. We don't all have to share the same perspective, mate.

Do you have any thoughts on any way or ways to approach psychedelics?

I was just thinking this and was going to mention it, then I read this. Definitely agree and good points made here.

Aside from using small amounts of harmalas, going from baseline without any other psychoactives is preferable to me.

What way or ways do you approach psychedelics?

Of course. Obviously it depends on the person; who are they, what are they trying to achieve, previous experience etc. But in the more general sense, and in my opinion, I don't see the value of repeated use of psychedelics.. you get diminishing returns vs increased risk of harm - once you get the message, hang up the phone. I really do think they only need be experienced a handful of times at most, just enough to give a point of comparison and get a person thinking, and that relying on them as a crutch under the guise of 'spiritual' or 'medicine' is detrimental to the health of the individual.

I'm not anti-psychedelics, but I do have a lot of reservations about the culture surrounding them.

It seems to me like psychedelics are better experienced if approached with reverence--that state of deep inner silence and seriousness characteristic of meditation. Most peoppe approach them with reverence naturally because we are sort of putting our bodies on the line for science and its scary.

But after the honeymoon when you hang up the phone, I think the winning move here would be to sober up, ababdon desire, and live a life of deep concentration and meditation, purifying the heart, and every 5 years or so maybe have a dmt/mescaline/shroom trip.

The intention of a person, how under control their mind is already, their capacity for revelation ("For many are called, but few are chosen" ), all play a part in the shape and direction of an experience. The best thing a person can do is try to go in without preconceptions of what they expect to find and conditions on how they wish things to unfold - spiritual or cultural traditions, narratives, ideas, desires e.g. meditation. It's like the more you expect, the more you reach, the more you fight, the more you work yourself up, all you're doing is making more obstacles for your attention to latch on to and get tangled up in. This is why I don't think psychedelics are useful for meditation - meditation should come prior to psychedelics.

I remember having a clear direct experience of this on DMT. This was probably on my 3rd or 4th experience. The others were profound - my first left me physically trembling in ecstasy - but I remember getting glimpses of this same revelation all along but forgetting it each time or getting too astonished with what I was seeing. What happened was that the direction of attention inverted to "me" and I perceived (without eyes) directly how the entire experience was emanating from "me" whilst simultaneously I was the experience and viewing it also. In the other experiences there were flashes of this revelation; I got the impression the visual element was somehow intertwined with my thoughts and inner emotional state all at once, but then I'd get sucked along with the experience and forget. It's that sensation many people speak of on DMT; a monumental revelation about reality, that you've been here before, it feels familiar, home, righteous, that you are whole and it all this makes sense.. your entire life, life itself, it's all contained in that feeling.. but you can't quite grasp it and forget it as suddenly as it came. There's a lingering nostalgia post-DMT for something profound and beautiful that you can't quite translate down into ordinary awareness.

It made me realise what I'm really searching for is the one point in the Universe that can't be seen but see's all. If you do a little ground work first I think psychedelics can massively accelerate a persons path, and their ultimate raison d'etre is to just be a mirror to help you see yourself, to remember who you are. If you go in expecting things then you get lost in the reflections rather than recognising there is a mirror in front of you.

You are under the impression of a European cultural notion about psychedelics, which is rooted in that culture's ignorance of techniques for using psychedelics.

Indigenous cultures view psychedelics as requiring sophisticated techniques for proper use - which means there must be training, which means there must be repeated use, in an intentional way with technique. An ayahuasquero who only did ayahuasca a handful of times would not be an ayahuasquero.

Do you see the Eurocentricity of Allan Watts' "hang up the phone" metaphor? That metaphor only makes sense if you are imbibing these substances in a passive way while hoping for an epiphany. If that's your approach, power to you, but it's not mine. Hang up the phone doesn't make sense in the context of what I'm describing, because what I'm describing isn't passively hoping for epiphanies. It's yoga. Epiphanies might come, but the greater emphasis is on achieving deeper states of unity.

You seem to have a bit of background in Zen. I do too, but I prefer Pali suttas to Zen literature. Eyes are closed in Theravada, by the way, and the Pali suttas say nothing about eyes open or closed. I only open my eyes if I'm drowsy. The Pali suttas describe increasingly unified states of fabricated consciousness until you reach the un-fabricated, Nibbana. These states are pleasurable and healing, and the Buddha in the Pali sources encourages meditators to seek these "pleasant abodes", because achieving them encourages further practice. The approach is different from what Zen describes. So, that's another difference between us.

Jumping back to psychedelics: the techniques shamans use are varied. The general thread that binds them together is sustained, repetitive, often simple action, for very long periods of time - percussion/dancing/singing being the most common, with inflections bringing different, repeatable results. This can be done sober or with psychedelic drugs, but in these cultures psychedelic drugs are not done without these techniques.

Not feeling particularly skilled as a drummer or a dancer or a singer, I decided to use my meditation practice as a focus point. It is simple, sustained, and repetitive, and I found that after some hours of doing it, it qualitatively changed the experience in a way I had never experienced before, in a way that is repeatable and predictable, though always with new content as it seems to just go deeper, and deeper, and deeper. I do not trip any other way now. The Santo Daime church has a similar practice. My point of departure from the Daime is the emphasis on breath awareness and the need to do the practice on a daily basis while sober as well.

Finally: if you have not done this, you do not know what it offers. Taking a psychedelic does not mean you know what it can do. Shamans seem to report quite a lot more than I in my humble practice have yet encountered. I just know that in my humble practice I have encountered far more than I ever did prior to practicing, back when I, like many other trippers, just passively waited for epiphanies. You do not drop your practice when you take the psychedelic. A shaman doesn’t go, “Oh Lord, I’m too fucked up to keep drumming.” They drum as the technique. They should be doing it while they trip. What is the value in that? Read what they say, or try it yourself, and find out : ) Hint: it might be an epiphany, but it will probably be something more interesting. An ability, a healing, etc.

Re-read the original post.

You are presuming that these indigenous cultures know what they are doing and have it mapped out. You don't know if that is true. If you believe it, ok, but I don't. The romanticism of shamanic practices and culture is no different from the romanticism of eastern practices and culture. That's the real European cultural ignorance. We look to exotic systems and project on to them what we wish to find because it's easier than working with our own cultural system, and ourselves, and finding the ignorance there.

In my opinion both shamanic and eastern practices have their merits of discovered factors, just as European psychology has its own too, but all of these are still relative cultural systems. They all have different views on psychedelic use also. There are parts of each cultural systems views on psychedelics that I agree with. I don't agree with repeated psychedelic use as implied through shamanic practices - it is the equivalent of European psychological schools, e.g. Jung's, implying there is some 'shadow' that requires extensive work. It is the 'selling point' of that particular cultural system.



This is sophistry and related to the 'selling point'. It's the carrot on a stick of the shamanic system. If you're in unity with something that does not change on account of your current emotional or perceptive state.. you're either in unity or not. You also either recognise it or you don't, there isn't a halfway state.



They are milestones perhaps but ultimately serve no real purpose, they are distractions ultimately. I'm not familiar with Buddhas methods but I would suspect there is more to it than that, or rather a misrepresentation through language - seeking pleasurable states is does not bring wisdom. If we look to the physical world the opposite is often true, and it promotes deterioration and degeneracy of the individual.



This isn't any different from mantra chanting or repeating syllables that have a soporific affect on a person. They do produce legitimate effects in the body and brain, but no real wisdom or revelation.

I think you are spot on about the false sort of romanticism of westerners towards eastern, and particularly, indian spirituality.

Many people are disilusioned about western civilisation, don't realy feel they are a part of it, and choose to isolate themselves from it.
They dream of a better world that is supposed to be out there, that is more spiritual and in balance with nature. But that world is a mirage, a fantasy.

I personally do not believe that rejecting the world you happen to live in, is the answer. In my view there is something fundamentally wrong with that attitude.

I don't mean to judge. I very often feel the same way. But i have come to realise that if i choose to go with those feelings, i am only cultivating my own victimhood and powerlessness.

By accepting that you are a part of society, with all it's obvious flaws, you also accept your own responsibilities.

And i find that by taking responsibility, even though i am way too small and incompetent to fix all the flaws of this world, at least i lead a better life, than when i am dodging responsibility by pretending i have nothing to do with all these people i live with.

I would realy love it if india indeed, would be that wonderfully spiritual place that people believe it is. But unfortunately you don't exactly need to look very hard to see that it realy isn't. They are every bit as materialistic and superficial as we are.