Safety Edit: Consuming crude Phalaris extract may contain dangerous byproducts. It is always the safe bet to ID the alkaloids first.

So I'm a little confused why this worked. Ton's of P. arundinacea grows near where I live. To test if I could make an aya-ish tea, I collected a large fist-full of grass and took it home. I prepared the tea in the following way:

1 - I put the grass blades in a steel pot. I covered the grass with a mixture of water and vinegar.
2 - I boiled for 30 minutes. The resulting tea was a murky green color, typical of plant matter.
3 - I strained out the grass, kept the tea, discarded the plant matter. It measured about 18 fl. oz. of tea
4 - This was the time I remembered that I don't keep rue or pharms in the house for MAOI. So I thought, what the hell, I have this huge container of fresh, ground black pepper, let's see if I can get it to work with that since it has some MAOI properties. I didn't really expect it to work.
5 - I added 3 tablespoons of black pepper, all at once, to the glass of tea. The tea instantly changed color from murky green to deep red. It looked like a glass of red ale.
6 - I added baking soda to the tea until it stopped reacting with the vinegar.

0:00 - I drank the tea. It didn't have a strong taste.
0:20 - I started feeling a little excited and anxious, as I normally do with psychedelics.
0:30 - I got a happy rush of energy.
0:45 - The world looked different. It was the same world, but things were somehow foreign. Unlike anything I've experienced previously.
1:00 - My version of the purge - I had diarrhea for 3 minutes. At the time I welcomed it and it felt very cleansing. It happened at exactly an hour.

1:00 -> 8:00 - It was at this time that I got a feel for what the experience was going to be like. I felt deeply connected to the universe. I'm not normally someone that says things like that, but that really is how I felt. I felt that all things were connected to me and I to all things. That I was so important and interconnected, and yet also so incredibly small and insignificant compared to the Infinite around me. My vision was off - I could see object's "energy fields" so to speak, for lack of a better term. Colors were not exactly brighter, but they certainly weren't normal. I went to places that I visit every day - shops near my home, the factory I work at, the neighborhood - and while I knew where I was and I felt comfortable, it was all different at the same time.

Not only the places were different, but I was different. I looked in the mirror, and saw the flaws on my skin and the dirt on my clothes from a day of work. Normally, I can be a rather depressed person, and think nasty thoughts about myself, but not now. I was fully accepting of the present moment. All was exactly as it should be, including me, and suddenly all these things about me that had bothered me so much were just blips on the screen of my Being and Oneness with God, creation, and everything.

This acceptance made me much happier than usual, and much calmer and placid. Everyone noticed, but no one actually ask why I was in such a good mood. I usually have a burning desire to smoke cigarettes and drink a lot of alcohol, but I didn't have either at this time. It seemed so silly to me, when only hours before I would have loved to go out with the boys and indulge. I passed and just kind of hung out. And it was wonderful.

So ...

I don't know what in the phalaris made this happen. But something happened, and that something was AWESOME, life changing, and incredibly powerful.

Did I accidentally make some weird compound when I added the pepper? Maybe pepper is a lot stronger than most people think? Maybe there is something else in the grass that is currently unknown but caused this?

All comments and suggestions are welcome, because I'd like to get to the bottom of why this worked. If it could be this easy all the time, then that's pretty interesting.

that is pretty remarkable. wow

Not recommended to ingest orally crude preparations of phalaris without properly identifying the alkaloids before. As you know, toxic alkaloids may be present in different phalaris plants. You should consider yourself lucky to be fine, I wouldnt do it again and wouldnt recommend to others. I hope you understand the risks and next time you tell the story be sure to inform others of the risks too

endlessness, I have edited for safety at the top of the original post.

But although I value your thoughts, my question is still - why the hell did that work?

Really impossible to say without analysis... Some phalaris have a high beta carboline content (for example Fractal's wild arundinacea phalaris with 2-Methyl-6-Methoxy-THBC, check my signature), so it could be they acted as MAOI.

You could try looking into paper chromatography (or thin layer chromatography), its actually a quite simple process, all you need is whatman papers (or silica plates), a mason jar, some ethanol or IPA, and ammonia. My signature explains briefly how it works, I can help out with anything needed. This could also easily show if a different compound is created by some reaction (I doubt it in this case but who knows).

If you even dont want to look into chromatography, you could at least get a bit of your phalaris tea , evaporate, and drop some marquis reagent (buyign at dancesafe.org for example). If it has gramine (one of the potential toxic alkaloids), it will turn black.

Another simple way to at least see if there are beta carbolines is having your phalaris tea, diluting it with water, looking under UV lights. Beta carbolines usually glow (though there might be exceptions, Im not sure about 2mthbc and 2-me-6-meo-thbc that are found in phalaris).

I dont know, these are just some ideas that pop up in mind. In any case thanks for sharing

Could it be ,MAO B and phenethylamine compunds like hordenine.