many people claim that rue/caapi gives substantial potentiation to mushrooms.
like 2 to 3 times, even.
though in his famous scientific skepticism, Jonathon Ott has long opposed this claim due to his having seen 3-4 fold variation in potency of mushrooms from the same batch.
when people say they have gotten a 3-fold potentiation from eating rue with mushrooms, some have remained skeptical thinking maybe they are just picking the "good ones" out by chance when they do that.
my own experience seems to render this "scientific skepticism" a humorous absurdity.
i have eaten mushrooms close to 40 times from only 2 or 3 different large batches....hence i would eat the same mushrooms out of the same bag for like a year.

now, i'm quite sensitive so adjust these following numbers to apply to you....
my normal doses were in the .8 to 1.7 gram range. the middle doses or higher would bring a full plus 3 experience.
they were always cubensis, and always very potent, and always produced similar trips with similar doses (once i got the "hang" of the batch.)
whenever i would eat rue beforehand (probably a dozen experiences) i would only eat .3 grams.
even with my absurd sensitivity, that is barely a threshold dose of shrooms on it's own for me.
every time i ate rue plus .3 i would experience full-spectrum effects. easily plus 2.5 on the shulgin scale.
one time i ate .4 with rue and was completely floored. full-on plus 3 effects!
it always felt like a 2 1/2 times potentiation.
.3 felt like .8 grams.
.4 felt like 1 or 1.2 grams.

friends of mine who only eat 3.5 grams or so were given rue and told to eat only 1.5 grams of their batch.
no complaints were made of an insubstantial dose!!!! quite the opposite! they were utterly floored by a normally sub-par dose.

i feel like i've experienced it with such utter fool-proof consistency that the odds of it being coincidence seem astronomically improbable.

what do you guys think??? any experiences with this?

I agree with Ott..harmalas dont potentiate psilocin, bufotenine etc..they synergise with them..there is a BIG difference. Harmalas have effects even on they're own that can be quite psycedelic..those effects blend with and augment the effects of the trptamines..

very strong synergy between the two. The experience is definitely much stronger and very different. Much more other worldly/somatic. A+

yeah, i agree with that too, actually.
but in reality: synergistic effects....potentiation....it doesn't really matter.
to clarify the point, i only meant that combining the two equals greater RESULTS, regardless of what causes those results.
Ott seemed to be saying that even experiencing heightened results was a fallacy, and was only due to psilocin variance...not from rue.
he seemed to not even acknowledge the law of synergy....that's what was most confusing to me.
but what do i know? not much...i could be misunderstanding him.
all i do know is that it's rare with any substance to be able to combine two threshold doses to achieve such epic results.
if i combined a threshold dose of LSD with a threshold dose of mushrooms i don't think i would experience as epic of results than if i combined rue with psilocin.
whatever it is, they have a special affection towards each other that few plants have to such a degree.

though, in my experience, it seems more like the psilocin potentiates the rue, bringing the rue-calmness to an other-worldy intensity.
the doses i always took of rue were only threshold, producing practically zero effects on it's own, so it was always a sharp contrast.

Damon could not post here but had some good insight so i will quote his PM to me here:

"I've used rue with shrooms for years. At higher doses, 7g rue, 10g PF cubensis, it becomes more ayahuasca-like. I am a big guy and 10g by themselves would just give me somewhat strong effects, but I know they are strong because friends would take much less with no complaints. I also liked the longer duration, I usually would go for at least 10 hours. I have never had an OBE, but I have been quite submerged in visions, received messages, entities, etc, much like ayahuasca. It almost made me wonder if there might be some DMT in cubensis, or something else being potentiated, besides the psilocin.

I've never tried caapi with shrooms. It's been over 10 years since I've seen a shroom.

To me, it was almost necessary to take the rue to get where I wanted. It wasn't tolerance, I would only trip once a month or so, I liked to trip heavy.

Mescaline seems to work very well with me at not-so-high doses, so I am very happy about that. I have smoked some rue base towards the end and it lengthened the effects, but I haven't tried it full on because I am hesitant. It lasts quite long enough already. I went on a three day low-dose "binge" and by the third day it was awesome, it seems the long-lasting effects accumulate, it started to feel more like LSD at that point. The visuals were minimal, but the mental effects were incredible."

Thanks Damon!!

after fractal enchantment's post, i started wondering to myself, "what is the difference, really, between potentiation and synergy??"
i mean doesn't the word "potentiate" just mean 'render more potent?' i couldn't see the "big difference."
so i looked up the definition in a dictionary it said:
POTENTIATE- "to make potent; esp : to augment the activity of (as a drug) synergistically."
i know the dictionary isn't God, but it doesn't seem to make a distinction between synergy and potentiation, it calls them the same thing!

can anyone clarify what the difference could be, i don't seem to understand, especially in light of the dictionary definition reading my mind!!

I've done this many times, I never need to eat more than .2-.4g mushrooms after a full dose of Aya.

*STRONG*!!!

I've also had gatherings with friends, where, we would drink Ayahuasca, and then after peaking, split one gram of mushrooms and all peak hard again... so it isn't *just* me. (Though, I get particularly floored. )

Many people that I have spoken to in real life talk abot taking harmalas with mushrooms thinking that hrmalas have no effects other than to make tryptamines stronger..they talk about potentiation of the mushrooms as if taking 2g with rue is jsut like taking 5 grams of mushrooms..

It's not like that for me at all when I combine tryptamines and harmalas..the harmalas change te experience so much that it's not really something you can just compare to taking the tryptamine alone at a higher dose.

Good point, thanks for that!!
my experience lies somewhere in between. the experience is very, very different for me with harmalas added, like a totally separate medicine.
i think when i speak of taking .4 and it feeling like 1.0 i'm really just talking about the "force" or intensity of it.
since rue doesn't hit me hard at all in the doses i've taken, i have nothing else to compare it to but the mushroom intensity.
i came to prefer the mushroom experience with the harmalas and never took shrooms by themselves again!!
it's that different! not just a modification!

Okay here's what Ott had to say about this:

"I have heard considerable anecdotal evidence, to the effect that pre-treatment by Syrian rue seeds, B-carboline-rich seeds of Peganum harmala L. used in anahuasca,(5) can potentiate the effects of psilocybian mushrooms, pursuant to this general notion of B-carbolines as all-purpose potentiators of visionary drugs. However, nobody has proffered hard evidence of this, even with the most rudimentary controls. All the anecdotal evidence I have heard concerns vague bioassays involving psilocybian mushrooms as the psilocybin source, sometimes not even weighed doses, but counted, by pairs! Since potency of psilocybian mushrooms is notoriously variable, even in commercially-cultivated Psilocybe cubensis (Earle) Singer (in commercial-style Mason jar cultures, there was up to a four-fold variation in potency of individual mushrooms from a given jar,(13) even up to nearly three-fold variation in psilocybin content between caps and stems of the same mushroom(14). Given this gross variation in psilocybin potency, even of cultivated mushrooms, and the fact that, as we have seen, MAOI weaken, rather than potentiate, DMT and LSD, we will need controlled human bioassays with pure B-carbolines and psilocybin in pharmahuasca capsules to establish whether or not MAOI can truly potentiate psilocybin. Vague reports to the effect that when I took three pairs (or three grams) of mushrooms after swallowing a handful of ground-up Syrian rue seeds are worthless for the purpose of establishing synergy or antagonism. Nevertheless, inasmuch as so many people have avowed that Syrian rue seeds potentiate psilocybian mushrooms, there must be some truth to this. I am not claiming this is not true, only that we have no solid proof of this. Since data on related visionary tryptamines DMT and LSD suggest conventional wisdom on this point is wrong, any potentiation of psilocybin by MAOI would be an anomaly, hardly expected - certainly not to be taken for granted."

it seems an anomaly indeed!! the reason why i posted this is because i started to wonder, "yes we don't have 'scientific proof' of this, but is there really anybody who has tried this with utmost sincerity and not found a smaller dose to be quite effective, regardless of the explanation or reasoning behind it?!?!"
has Ott tried it and found it to be negative? any negatives? anyone??
anybody??

ahhhh....... this is so awesome.... diablo was talking to his friend about this the other day... only wondering about it with no experience.......hmm... quest!