Hi guys,
I'm happy to join your community. I've been looking for a forum since my interest in psychedelics has been renewed as of late. So I did some googlebased research, and many of the good hits were in this community.
I've had some experiences with Mushrooms more than a decade ago. It was very random, some guy at a party had them and I tried them without asking many questions. It was an incredible experience, from then on, the clique started experimenting with it. Until that point, we only smoked weed. Some were experiences were nice, a few really groundbreaking. I've been thankful without end for these. Unfortunately, being in our early twenties, we were greedy and didn't have a lot of respect for the plants. So we did it very often after a while, and things went south. Most of the other guys had nasty experiences, some have been haunted by them for a long time (but all recovered). I was a bit more lucky, since I had been practicing martial arts and meditation for a few years, and this helped me enormously to navigate difficult experiences.
My most extreme experience were 8g dry Hawaiians. This was so intense that it makes me giggle when I just think about it. Downside is, I had OEVS for weeks! For a while, I thought that now I had ruined my brain.
Still - after a while, it was enough when a close friend had a nasty horror trip. It had happened because someone brought a person to the occasion who has serious borderline syndrome. I didn't know, I relied on the fact that the others knew what they were doing, and she seemed nice. But she, well, let's say, did not bring a very good vibe to the situation.
I was the 'guide', and the guy was rather young (19), he trusted me. He wanted to have the shrooms, I never suggested this to anyone, I just agreed to accompany him. But still, I should have insisted on knowing all the participants. Well - it was all great until she started throwing a tantrum when we were all tripping and no one was willing to take care of her / to give her attention. She didn't have a bad experience, but the young guy went downhill really bad.
He had to take therapy for months, this was a nightmare for me. He did turn out fine, after all, but it took him more than a year to get over this. Obviously, I felt very responsible, which I partly was, and didn't know if he would recover.
After that experience, I was done with it - only thinking about shrooms made me sick. Healthy and natural reaction to massively overdoing it, no doubt. Lack of maturity, responsibility and the right framework. Thank god, no permanent damage occurred, this could have been easily prevented by respecting the prerequisites.
Back then, I read Leary's book and got more interested in Buddhism. I found that many of the things I sought out through the plants could be accessed via meditation also, and later, the realization came that this blissful state is actually always there. Not that I always feel it - but a small part of my mind never left there, and, as weird as this may sound, I can never be 100% afraid again. But there was absolutely no interest in trying again.
Now, many years later, I have the impression that it is time to seek out the plant spirits again. I'm not sure where the journey will lead me, thinking mostly about Cacti at this point, but we'll see. I feel more drawn towards something plant-based, even though this is probably just idealizing things. We'll see - I'm in no hurry.
But... I bought some "peruvianus" back then, and more or less forgot about them. They have been identified by a knowledgeable cactus person as Cuzcos, which is a bit unfortunate, since they had many years to mature. True peruvians would be a sight to behold now.
Still - I'll try my luck with them anyhow. I always needed smaller amounts than the other guys, so a marginally active cactus might still be a good conversation partner. And the fact that I've been growing them for so long makes for a special connection. Actually, i find it very difficult to even think about cutting away from them
. But I guess there is no way back now...
Right now, my head is spinning with all the different preparation methods. Extraction is out of the question for now, too many things I need to buy and do. So, I'll be thinking about whether I should do a boiled tea or freeze-thaw. Since they won't have too much oomph, if any, I'll have to get every single molecule out of there. But I read a lot about it and obviously, there are 100 opinions on it, with the boiled tea seeming to be the most commonly used teknique.
I'll make a thread once I get to work on this. Haven't found really good experiences on Cuzcos, even though Brett Lothian wrote
Quote:No doubt some of them are active
(Source)I'd love to be the first one to post a successful experience with Cuzcos
Thank you for reading, I'm looking forward to partaking in the community!