Definitely with jamie on this. Mushrooms and aya are similar in many ways. I've experienced ayahuasca roughly a dozen times and mushrooms around a couple dozen and id say there's honestly not too much difference. Mushrooms can be just as hairy..if not mnore hairy than ayahuasca. Ayahuasca for me, even when i took higher dosages was easier to manage imo then mushrooms. You could say the NMDA effects from the harmalas could potentially help 'soften' the deeper experiences with aya, whereas mushrooms for me in the higher dosages can be utterly bizzare and alien.

mushrooms and aya are not the same for me at all. i never purge on mushrooms only felt like it once on a higher dose. every time on aya even on moderate/small doses I purge. on mushrooms i'm able to walk around fairly well for the most part unless if on a high dose or during an intense peak. with aya, I'm stapled to the ground for the entire trip if I walk I feel drunk, no matter what. on mushrooms I don't feel anywhere near the body/head load as I do with ayahuasca, specifically I never get the same body vibration effects with mushrooms that I do with aya. also, with aya I experience distinct drops & valleys combined with sudden intensity in the experience where as mushrooms it's pretty much the same setting straight through. finally, none of the visuals I've had on mushrooms are comparable to the auditory and visual effects of ayahuasca.. there's always a more blurry/fuzzy feel to the visuals of mushrooms compared to the sharp/crispness of elaborate aya visions.

at higher doses of mushrooms are they comparable, sure, but OP is a beginner asking for beginner advice. if he's gonna take mushrooms he's not doing a higher dosage to start off with. is your advice to OP that he should take a high dose of mushrooms? I'm sure not. So please compare a low dose mushroom trip to an ayahuasca experience....

I believe building up on mushrooms is better for the beginner, before just diving in.

Agreed. Half the time I wouldn't be able to tell if I took mushrooms or aya cause the visuals can be so damn similar. While they can both be rather sedating IME, I do find aya (at least the way I make it) to be much more highly immobilizing. If you plan on posting up in the dark, and not using those legs, aya would probably be the way I would go. Just make sure to have a puke bucket with you!

you can't tell the difference between when you're on ayahuasca or mushrooms??? come on man, the vine (ayahuasca) plays a huge role in the experience, it's not just DMT vs mushroom visuals.....but even with that there's still distinct differences...

endlessness put's it well:

To be honest, both experiences can be so unpredictable that I find it difficult to categorize them in any consistent way.

agreed, all psychedelics can be unpredictable, but I've experienced distinct differences between the ayahuasca and mushroom experience every time.

can I ask what dose of mushrooms were you on that you couldn't tell the difference between it and ayahuasca? I mean I understand where jamie and you are coming from when talking about large dose mushrooms and aya...but remember OP was looking for beginner advice, and to allude that a small dose mushroom trip is no different than ayahuasca seems misleading to me.

You're right, it might not be as relevant to the OP. I'm probably not a good example for trying to make any kind of reasonable comparison though because whenever I take ayahuasca, I always smoke DMT on it (multiple times throughout the duration) which can simply create for a completely different experience altogether.

My personal recommendation is for changa all the way...

The way it allows you to test the waters a bit and ease into the experience is great.

It also doesn't last too long if it does get to be too much. You just have to remind yourself, "it will be over soon".

I've seen people freak out on mushrooms and someone unprepared could make life a lot harder on themselves as it gives them more time to make stupid, freaked out decisions, especially when alone.

With changa, there is a better chance that everything will return to normal before bad choices can be made.

dang, what was your dosage for mushrooms to be similar to aya + smoked DMT?

I've done a lot of things alone and was generally fine, sometimes better off, but I avoided excessive or large doses as well just because there was nobody around to make sure I was safe if I was unable to recognize myself or my surroundings.

You quoted my fiance, who I have seen personally attest in front of me that she had never been so high as she was on mushrooms one night.

I just asked minxx what she thinks about the whole thing atm after taking mushrooms with me many times over the last few years and her responce was that ayahuasca is more straitforeward but that mushrooms are a harder trip to deal with due to them taking you all over the place.

I was not talking about really high doses of mushrooms compared to moderate ayahuasca doses though haeratic. Moderate doses of ayahuasca and mushrooms are about equal in intensity in my experience. Most people who drink ayahuasca seem to not hit that moderate mark at first in my experience. They either underdose or they get a large dose..and many people only take up to like mid doses of mushrooms. I find a light dose of ayahuasca much easier to deal with on a physical level than even a light dose of mushrooms. I dont know why that is..but it is that way for me.

You have to factor in here the vine doses also..if your making jungle style ayahuasca and downing like 2-300g of vine in a sitting than everything changes. Thats not something most people want to do though, trust me. That is where for me ayahuasca becomes something else altogether.

ah had no idea she was your fiance, nice. tell her I've enjoyed reading her posts, she's got a wealth of knowledge. I guess things have changed for her in terms of ayahuasca and mushrooms. and they can for me as well, i've always experienced a distinct difference with aya on the more difficult end, but maybe in the future things will change.

I think when she wrote that she was working with doses usually under 1g of cubensis..and more like .2g at the end of an ayahuasca experience to boost it. Potency might be a factor also. Minxx had way more experience with ayahuasca when I met her and did not take mushrooms often and the first time I took mushrooms with her I think we had about 1g each in a tea, of cubes I had and she spend about an hour in the floor trembling as it came on..and said that the mushrooms she had taken before never gave her visions ever. Who knows really.

I know that for me mushrooms have an aspect to them that is more warping..that can freak me out at times becasue of the way they twist my mind around and make me feel sort of wacked out. That aspect can also really bring new insight though. In general I find mushrooms to be extremely similar to DMT and can take me to essentially the same hyperspace, just with some extra mental warping or pushyness that makes it a more diffucult expeirence. DMT can do that same thing though, I just find mushrooms do it the best..could be baeocystine or other alkaloids.

I am also only referring to psilocybe cubensis. Get some psilocybe cyanescens or a few other species and the intensity and clarity only seem potentiated. There are some mushrooms that are just so insanely potent.

Many people on the ayahuasca forums experienced with both will attest to that sort of trickster nature of mushrooms that can make them difficult to work with at times.

After ayahuasca now I purge with cubensis as well..and I get more of that heavy body load sickness with mushrooms than I do with ayahuasca at normal doses of vine. Basically I go into a mushroom experience with more aprehension than I do with ayahuasca these days.

The heavy body load of mushrooms, the mental warping and the durration have made me decide that I want to seek out perfecting extractions that I can use sublingual for shorter experiences that bypass the gut, and experiment with vaping it..becasue I love mushrooms too much to ever stop working with them..but if I can find a way that works for me more these days I will take it. Maybe I grew spoiled with all the ayahuasca. I grew accustomed to the usual 3-4 hours and back to baseline clarity of the tea..it can go much longer though by raising vine doses.

Mushrooms and ayahuasca are definatly not the same thing..but they are the closet related I find of the entheogens I have worked with.

Edit..also I want to add that for me my largest dose of ayahuasca and my largest dose of mushrooms(psilo cyans) were about equal(intensity wise)..both were full on OBE into hyerpspace that to onlookers prob seemed like I was either passed out or just insane. We are talking like the equivalent of maybe 10-12g of good cubes I would think cus I must have taken 5-6g of cyanescens..and a couple times the normal dose of vine I would drink. Both doses are something I do not wish to repeat any time soon and were not pleasant at all..but this is to my mind how some jungle curranderos and mazatec curranderos probly both dose. A high dose of mushrooms to us might be a moderate dose to a currandero..or maybe not. In the amazon among the Napo Runa(I think) I read before that they concider people who need large doses of admixture to be weak ayahuasqueros..so who knows really..a large dose to them could be real weak for some people.

Ayahuasca in our culture still has this sort of "shamanic" sort of vibe people attach to it..and many go take it in that situation. Mushrooms in our world dont carry that same vibe to many people anymore and so I find they are approached differently and this is somewhat reflected in how people assume they are not so deep like ayahuasca can be.

I would make mushroom tea, personally.

^

i would go with lemon tek (i personally do half a shot of soda for acid, half a shot of 100 proof ethanol for solubility), but my recommendation is mushrooms as well.

easier to find.
easier to dose with (especially for low doses - plus the potency of aya is incredibly variable).
little to no chance of a dud (definitely not the case with aya)
plus not worrying about the purge is nice (a lot of times i purged too early to even feel any effects. it took me 3 brews/5 doses to get my first voyage, in which i purged before i felt something, and the experience was still kind of weak).

also i have voyaged on aya a few times without meeting any entities...
same with changa.

which isn't to say you won't meet entities. but there is no guarantee either way.

I've actually read several words from Terence Mckenna where he suggests eating mushrooms alone and in a dark environment. In fact if I remember correctly, he said in his opinion it was the only way he would recommend. With my experience with mushrooms I would have to agree that they are much more of a self-exploration trip, as apposed to something like LSD where I can actually (usually ) express my thoughts without being tongue-tied, or very confused which seems to happen to me on mushrooms. I don't think it's a bad idea at all for that to be your first trip with psychedelics, I would just suggest reading up on it some more from other sources, and of course asking people around here

~300mg of bridgesii alkaloids, wandering around in the woods somewhere, or riding trails on my mtb. Nothing like the comfort of nature, and mescaline's overall good vibes.

Ayahyasca is usually reserved for special ocassions, at night, alone in a safe set/setting. Same thing with pretty much any trypt, including lsd, 4-ho-mipt, and 5-ho-mipt may be an exception. But mescaline i can just wander around like the world is my oyster.