Hi all,

I realize that this may be a very personal question. Trying psychedelics at this point in time seems to be for a select few as there is a great amount of substances out there. Very few people I know are drawn to a new perception and abhor the idea of ego-death/loss. I have many friends who consider psychedelics tantamount to opiates and amphetamines.

So what is it that draws us together on this mutual journey that society so readily labels as deviant?

For myself, it is the idea of pure naked existence. The idea of being one of the few who have a knowledge that many people do not have and being able to separate yourself from the masses. Moreover, some of the most admirable people in different religions have experiences that many of us have. There is also spiritual growth and the bettering of yourself and many other benefits. As Socrates said, "the unexamined life is not worth living."

So let me know yours

For me, it's about experiencing what I've come to believe is a certain level of truth. Psychedelic experiences not only have brought to me a number of realizations that have helped me personally, but they've allow me to touch something I feel I've known for a very long time. It's like a memory/feeling I have in the back of my head all the time; never able to fully visualize. And it becomes clearer to interpret what exactly that place/force is with the use of psychedelics. From this, there is both a personal connection with them, as they've earned a place in my heart, but it's also nevertheless an attempt at alienation. I've experienced the power psychedelics have to take you out of the boundaries of culture, and I think that this general effect may have been the intended purpose of them for everyone. To return us to the truth of the matter: We are connected in ways that move beyond the forms of artificial separation we've concocted.

The reason I'm intersted in psychedelics is mostly because they give me the ability to view the world and myself from a new perspective. Many ideas and concepts that appear very clear to me during a trip would be almost impossible for me to figure out while sober. Sometimes these these ideas can also be usefull in my normal life.

Another reason is simply to view the amazingly beautiful structures that DMT usually show me. There is no piece of art that I know of that can match that.

I wouldn't say that psychedelics are for a select few. There is nothing about "the masses" that makes them opposed to psychedelics whereas we are not. We are part of "the masses" until we make the personal decision to stray from "cultural norms". However, those cultural norms are not stored in a localized social hard drive. On the contrary, culture propagates through individuals who decide what the norm is for themselves. In that sense, I would say that using psychedelics are not a means of overcoming externally imposed culture, but are a means of overcoming the perceptual structures and mental patterns that we build within ourselves to make sense of the world in the tradition of those who made sense of it before us. Psychedelics allow us to break out of that tradition and discover new levels of abstract thought with which to make sense of who/what we are and our relationship to reality, which are matters that we usually either take for granted or neglect to consider altogether.

When I think of the psychedelic experience I think of youth, not just because I was young when I first started using psychedelic drugs, but because psychedelics have helped me to realize that youth is a mindset. When I use psychedelics, everything is new and fresh and experienced as if for the first time. Every experience is pure and is free of the perceptual distortion that the mind naturally comes to apply over time. In that state of perceptual infancy, I can see through the smoke and mirrors imposed by my mind, thus realizing that my previous state of ontological understanding and happiness result from a gradually accepted interpretation of reality that is a relatively poor local optimum on the landscape of possible interpretations of reality. Like finding the highest mountain in thick fog, if you can only see a few yards ahead then all you can do is walk uphill. Only when the fog clears can you see that you are climbing the wrong mountain altogether. On the other hand, the biggest thing that I have learned from psychedelics is that such optimization is not actually required to attain true peace and happiness.

So anyways, I started my psychedelic journey because I was young and adventurous and wanted to leave no stone unturned in my experience of life. "There's a first time for everything" was my motto, but of course I had no idea what I was getting into.

I've always been attracted to psychoactive substances, especially from plants. I remember being a young child and reading everything I could find about mushrooms, peyote, marijuana, LSD. It just always fascinated me. Fast forward to highschool and I had people offering me some of these things to try. It's all been interesting time from there.

I needed to know what was on the other side..

and now I know that it never ends.


What does death mean to you?

When i was a young(about 18-19) and experimenting with hashish and pot,
i once read an interview with carlos castaneda in a magazine(high times i believe)
which really made me curious about these substances(mushrooms ,peyote,lsd) he was talkin about.

I decided that a part of my life(the other parts are music and engeneering) i would spend on exploring my mind with different substances.
No idea why excactly , but i blame the fact that i was under narcosis in hospital as a kid quite often , and nearly drowned and suffocated a couple of times as a toddler.

Had my first entheogene experience a couple of years later when a friend of my brother
supplied me some mexican"magic"mushrooms,
this was amazing , seeing sounds , hearing colors , patterning reality , introspective thoughts. loved it , except for the bad belly feelings

Next step was mdma , used it some years like monthly(raving and clubbing) and then decided it was time for lsd25

Always was a bit carefull about doing acid because i have seen people go really mental on it

Loved it even more then shrooms , no funny belly feelings that distort your trip , and the best high combined with mdma.
Next step , DMT

Once i was offered DMT at a party , but i said no cause already outta my head on a candyflip
(mdma/lsd),

Until about a year and a half ago, i got a bit of DMT from a friends friend ,discoverd the nexus and started my own extractions . Sometimes things go fast
Sometimes vape 3 times a week , sometimes once in 6/7 weeks ,

Next step , a ayahuasca session , maybe soon , maybe not

Why did I start my psychedelic journey? That is a great question.

I've been interested in consciousness and human interaction (both social and environmental) ever since I reached puberty. However, when I was 7-13 years of age, the idea of some "drug" that could change the way you look at the world strongly fascinated me.

Now having been down the rabbit hole multiple times. There are sometimes I think what I would be like if I never took the plunge. But, I am always grateful for the endless knowledge I've gained and still gain through such experiences.

P.S. To anyone who hasn't experimented with these substances and would like to in the future.

Word of Warning: Get ready for a non-stop journey of re-evaluating your beliefs about reality, yourself, and other "selves".

not going to lie here, when i was a stupid little teenager i smoked really intense salvia as my second drug after pot, expecting to get super high and see trippy rainbows and laugh my ass off... trust me, i got the ass-kicking i deserved. and after that i stayed away from psy drugs thinking it was just awful, only to find myself wondering in amazement how something so complex and raw can be created by your mind and a few milligrams. it really taught me a lesson. and now i dont regret it for one bit.

WARNING: WALL OF TEXT AHEAD! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! CARRY ON!

Is the question: 'why did I start my psychedelic journey,' or 'why did I continue it?' because those are two very different questions.

When I started using drugs, I had never tried psychedelics, only heard of them, and for me they were really no different conceptually from amphetamines, opiates and ecstasy. Just a different kind of high.
I entered college having suffered from depression and anxiety my entire childhood, and nothing had ever worked for it, and I had resigned myself to a life of crippling fear and unhappiness, with the assumption that before too long, I'd end up killing myself and it was only a matter of time.

When I got to college, I discovered drugs for the first time, and after some initial trepidation, I feel in love. Ecstasy in particular really touched me, but in any drug I tried (stimulants, opiates, weed, whatever), I found temporary relief from fear and doubt and I became obsessed with it.

Some of you may recognize this as a start down very bad path.

In that time I tried a lot of drugs, most of the common, addictive ones (and I was heading that way), but not mushrooms (acid had been a bust: one tab of weak stuff). I had done enough research to know that it was a good idea to wait for a nice day, so I saved up my shrooms until a warm spring day. Then, three friends of mine and I went out tripping.

I won't go into boring detail (although I already may have ), but I knew instantly that the mushroom 'high' (as I thought of it) was different from any other drugs I had tried. It wasn't the pushy confidence of cocaine, or the stupefying euphoria of weed or Fentanyl (which I still sometimes miss), but instead, for the first time in my life, I felt like everything was going to be alright.

Instead of being afraid of the world and trying to wall it off, I found that, with the veil of anxiety and depression lifted, I could look up and out and actually engage with the world. I found beauty in things that I hadn't thought of as even remotely interesting since I was a very small child, before everything bad started to happen.

The highlight of the trip was, standing out in a field, I felt an overwhelming urge to think about God, and to turn my mind outward. I had no idea how to do this, learned as early as middle school that cynical nihilism was the only way to deal with the horror of the world, so I ended up saying a prayer I remembered from when my parents used to take me to church as a child.

It was The Lord's Prayer (Our father, who art in heaven, yada yada yada), and even though I am not, and never will be a Christian, that seemed to be enough to flip a switch in my head and suddenly, there was God. I could understand and conceptualize my relationship with the being I once thought of as God and understood now to be The Universe, and that, contrary to what I had always believed, The Universe loved me.

Terror of death, Hell and damnation instantly evaporated when I realized that it was not a game of myself vs. the whole of creation,but rather, I was a part of it and should be proud and happy with that fact.

The rest of the trip was pleasant enough, but it was that moment that lasted for maybe 3 seconds, tops, that changed my entire worldview.

Over the next few weeks, I found that my depression and anxiety had evaporated and that I had been able to carry some of the understanding that everything would be alright, in the end with me. Once life stopped being a burden, my desire to alter my consciousness dropped significantly. Why would I want to change my head-space when the natural one was so unbelievably wonderful?

After that, I realized that there was power in the class of drugs known as psychedelics and that I should treat them, and myself, better. Tentative steps with DMT and others followed, but it was that moment of wonderful understanding that got me to this place, and away from a much darker one.

TL;DR - I saw God in a field once tripping balls on shrooms and thought it was neat.

When i took my first psychedelic, (2 grams of strong hawaiian shrooms) and stood in front of a mirror and watch my face morph into every ethnicity possible, i realized that this is not a fun drug, its something more serious. I saw Inca/Mayan Warriors and Shamans. Especially shamans. I saw Matis, Shuar and Shipibo Conobo as well other indigeous people.
The really strange part is that i've never seen them before. I looked up south american shamans in an encyclopedia in the library, and you could imagine my suprise when i found images of shamans EXACTLY like the ones i've seen in the mirror.

When i realized that this realm is the source of all spiritualism, mysticism and religeons i had no choice but to accept it and indulge myself further in it.
There was no choice.

It seems to me that there never was an actual conscious decision, it was just naive curiosity.
But the shrooms left me no room, the first trip was way deeper than i could ever imagine, they didn't go soft on me like they did with all my friends.
They invited me, and i, unknowing what i was doing, accepted without even thinking.

Now 15 years later, when i look back on all this, there is a distinctive straight line conecting all things i did, and now it becomes obvious and clear to me.

Somebody who is not me, made the decision.

I simply needed to know what exactly it was that people experienced on these substances. Grandiose curiosity you could call it.

Imagine there is a massive cave complex in your front yard.

There are a few types of people:
1. Put cones, signs, and a fence around the entrance. "Do not enter!" "Danger!" and avoid this at all costs.

2. Entered cave unprepared, slipped, scuffed their knee, decided caves are dangerous. Become person #1.

3. Can't resist the cave. It is interesting and must be explored. Will spend as much time and energy as possible to discover/explore entire cave complex.


I don't know about you, but I know what kind of person I am.

What really pushed me into the realm of Psychedelics, reality,ancient history,Sacred geometry, mystery religions was mainly from DMT The Spirit Molecule, Joe Rogan, Duncan Trussell, the Masta Buildas, some documentary & Terence Mckenna This things combined really pushed me in this direction. Knowing that are current paradigm is complete rubbish and that we need to change our behavior.

Entities, altered states, psychedelics, consciousness, reality ect. .... = a lot of its uncharted, waiting to be explored and understood.

Simply curiosity, I wondered if these things could actually heal the way some purported. There was also more then that for me. I was a sick child and just learned to live with this sickness and depression, so I think I was drawn to these experiences for healing firstly. When I first used ayahuasca I experienced healing of another order, I guess you could call it faith healing because I went from full blown nihilism, to God lover in a matter of 4 hours.

With ayahuasca I knew for a certain fact everything would end up okay no matter how bad it was before, all my guilt, shame, depression, essentially all my negativity began to vanish. I can't say I am totally ridden of fear and negativity, but to have experienced such amazing grace the strength necessary to change myself is easy to find.

I have to believe it was destiny that brought me to these things. I am now in my senior year about to complete my biology degree, hopefully go to medschool, and from there eventually, hopefully learn to use these so called psychedelic substances for healing others.