the brew was broken down into 2 drinks 2 hours apart

finally got to eat some of the san pedro i bought in Lima a week ago. Only ate .4 of a foot long fat cactus. Very disorientating and feeling of being pretty fucked up. Not pleasant and pretty harsh. Ended up drinking 6 beers to chill out. Some interesting cev,s. But to be honest not something i´d rush to repeat. San pedro isn´t a walk in the park, and can be anxiety promoting. I certainly do not agree with people saying that pedro is a gentle teacher. Maybe it's because it was a threshold dose, maybe this was the anxious part dose, maybe if i ate the whole foot i would have passed that stage and got very visual. Regardless, she´s heavy stuff, and not a bunch of laughs!

i was scared of cactus style entheogenic doses for 2 years, now, i respect it but have joy and passion for it, not trepidation nor anxiety. remind yourself, this is what you sought, and you are harvesting such a majestic experience.

if you practiced with any teacher frequently youll become attuned and trusting in it, for those without innate or learned trust any psychedelic can yield total pandamonium. ive seen cacti deliver this to 2 *of the 100* ive given it to, have a harsh experience.

you must go beyond threshold into psychedelia for the side effects to be overcome by the energy of the healing

Why does every psychedelic need to be associated with a female entity ...

I don't know...never had anxiety from low dose cactus. I recently ate resin made from 1 foot achuma. It felt cleaner than pedro in the way that it wasn't so sedative and "confusing" (even though the confusion level is nowhere near mushrooms for instance)....less mindfog. Just a nice flowy feeling, swimming in the world as a painting. No visuals ...but it promoted kind and gentle ways of dealing with the world and ambition to grow this interesting plant.

I really wonder what a "proper" dose is like. But i'd propably need to eat at least 3 foot worth. 1 was very subtle.

Tried cactus for the very first time yesterday.

Harvested a 6 inch section of a peruvian torch I've had around for a while.

I cut it up into little 1 inch stars and let it sit out over night.
Then I froze it for a night.
Next I boiled the pieces for about 30 minutes then filtered.
Next I froze the cactus pieces one more time.
Came back and did two more extractions on the cactus.
The last one was a 30 minute pressure cook.

When I finished I had about 3 shot glasses worth of dark green/brown liquid which I drank.

About 1 hour later I noticed a slight pang of nausea and then radio silence for another hour.

At the two hour mark I started to notice a soft warm glow coming over me. I wasn't sure if it was just a placebo being aided by the pot I had smoked a few minutes earlier.

By the third hour I was really starting to feel a very warm glow. I was in a very positive high energy state of mind.
Very very little nausea at this point. I was up playing guitar hanging with the wife.
We decided to go out and get lunch and have a few margaritas. WOW the flavor of food was definitely enhanced.

This trip never approached the visionary level with only 6 in of cactus, but man oh man I am in love. I am planning to step up to 12-18 inches on the next go around.

Honestly it's hard for me to imagine cactus not being gentle, but as i said I have not taken a visionary dose.

I will say this though. It is the only psychedelic that I think I could take a low dose of 4-6 inches and easily go out into the world and interact with people....really want to interact with people. Just a really really nice warm glow.

Oh I ingested it at 11:30am an I could stil faintly detect some trace energy at midnight last night when I finally decided to go to bed. It was a nice long, warm day trip.

Peace

phenylthylamines like mescaline and other san pedro related alkaloids are adrenal in nature and have a more extroverted reaction on non visionary doses. it is a true empathogen and at higher doses a true entheogen. i prefer to use a foots worth of achuma to go to a concert and really feel the music, vs how i have no desire to do that with an equally innebriating dose of mushrooms or aya, which working as a serotonergic psychedelic yields a much more introverted experience.

a foot is a good place to start, and as far as ive pushed it (3 feet, maybe a half foot more) was still safe but the potential for psychedelic pandemonium was obvious. ive found 2 feet to be a nice blend of both stimulating and entheogenic effects, whereas anything less seems to be more empathogenic. at 2 feet i had moderate ego dissolution and psychedelic perspective, enough of both to be able to navigate here in the physical world but be mostly in tune with what the cactus had to teach. at that dose nothing was too overwhelming for me to forget it later, it was the closest to my "sweet spot" i have ever been. the 3+ feet experience was more intense than any dmt ive smoked or drank through aya, and consequently i forgot alot of it as i realized by remembering parts of it later both through day to day life and through other psychedelic experiences (lsa seems to put me in a review of dreams and visions, especially in conjunction with cacti)

yesterday i had a nice 350 mg acetate experienced followed by a shot of aya that knocked me right out, i highly reccomend pursuing aya post cactus as the empathogen seems to open you up to yourself and leave aya a more direct access to whatever it is in you it activates (soul or what have you)

in chimbre, a site for cosmic change/healing, they perform a san pedro ritual the night before the ayahuasca sequence. i feel its for the purpose i just explained as when the "shaman" was translated he seemed to say the same thing.

MOAR responses lets let this thread be an inspiration to those participating and yet to participate in the benevolent entheogen, san pedro/achuma

p.s. i do not affiliate cacti with a female entity, i see it as a genderless teacher unlike masculine mushroom and feminine aya IMHO

Were you still comming up? With peruvianus I actaully get anxiety and speedy like effects as it comes on, before(I think) the mescaline hits..I think this is other phens in the cacti because this comes on within 15-20 mins and also is very MDMA like as well and only lasts about 30-40 minutes and then it changes as the mescaline seems to hit.

With a high dose of pedro(peruvianus) and a little bit of cannabis I actaully reached san pedro hyperspace one time..and it was *very* alarming and freaky as I was outside in the fall on a cold day at the beach surrounded by stoned people. I ran off into the forest in a frenzy and walked all the way to the road and then walked through the city right downtown for a good few hours following the beaches stopping from time to time.

I was really not fully there and inbetween complete schizophrenic or shamanic awe and full on panic. I remember looking into some guys fence post and seeing an entire village with people bailing hay and donkeys walking around etc. I stood there until this guy came out of his house to look at me like he was gunna call the cops so I took off.

I also believed I was a time traveler. I dont know how else to explain that part! I really had the idea in my mind that I had achieved time travel..

I had been tripping for hours on that beach okay, because I was eating a bag of dry cacti flesh with another friend there all day. He was also on mushrooms but this guy will eat like 10g of mushrooms and then eat acid an hour later if someone gives it to him so it is like he either has some insane tolerance or just nothing phases him..but god damn man about 6 hours after I began to eat this stuff and smoked a bit of weed I remember closing my eyes and thinking "oh frak this is like DMT!"..suddenly I was falling through this mescaline mandala into hyperspace..it was interesting as it was sooo much like DMT but also very different..mescaline patterns and not tryptamine patterns..

I opened my eyes and reality was dissolving. There was this old lady from holland there smoking her joint and all these other stoned naked people sitting around me(I was at a clothing optional beach)..This lady looked at me and then at my other friend and said to my friend "hey Joe what the hell is up with you guys?" or something like that..and when she said that I heard her say it about 10 times..time started to split into segments or frames that would stack up along side each other. Frame stacking I guess people call it.

The present frame of the now would echo as time moved foreward sort of..it would very very slowly fade as time moved along so that at any given time there might have been like 10 or 20 frames from previous moments in time all trailing slowly behind the present, and at the same time the present frame would be sort of stuck in this time echo so that I would get caught up behind my present self so that it was like a future time frame was already stacking up in front of me.

This is when I lost it all and grabbed all of my stuff and just ran out of there! I remember this guy george comming down the trail in the woods to the beach on my way out and he tried to talk to me and I said something but it just echoed and I experienced myself saying it numerous times, and then the frames of me, or other versions of me as it started to seem kept on saying it over and over until they began to say different things and the thoughts of my present self began to get responces back from these alternate time versions of me.

This is when I started to believe I was a time traveler. I actaully thought I was going insane for about 2 hours and it was not pleasant becasue I knew I was on mescaline but thought I had gone fully insane, but I als beleived fully I was a time traveler and stuck that way. It was a highly unpleasant experience but also extremely interesting afterwords. After wandering around the city in a frenzy I finally started to come down a bit from the peak and made my way to my friends house where his gf was making thanksgiving dinner. I was still tripping all night though, I ate some food and had a beer and that calmed my nervous system down.

After that I did not take mescaline again for quite a while, and never as much as I did that day..I also decided to never smoke cannabis with mescaline again.

I had another really intense experience with pedro that was really powerful and frightening for a short period but extremely healing. I was also at the beach but a different one and it was pouring rain. At the peak it was like the earth was actaully speaking to me through the rocks on the beach which is hard to explain but I spend about an hour curled up in a ball beside a log soaking wet in the rain crying.

one thing about mescaline is, that it is *extremely* draining on my physical body. It is sooo healing though. I have once been high on cacti for nearly 3 days when I ate small ammounts for a 24 hour period. Every time I have taken it it feels like a very healing medicine on par with ayahuasca, but it takes sooo much out of me physically I spend the next few days just resting wanting to recover. It is worth it though.

Compare that to ayahuasca where I can drink for 3 nights in a row and still wake up the next day at 8am feeling better than before.

So for cacti it is a trade off for me..but a fair one IMO.

Edit..another thing I have noticed is that the day after cacti if I take a decent dose, my muscles are really sore..maybe hot baths and massages might help that I dunno.

Interesting insights Jamie.

Would you be able to guess how much cacti flesh you ingested at the beach that day? Sounds like a hell of a lot.

not any more I dont think than 20g of dry outer flesh from peruvianus. I think this cacti was more potent than most though becasue I have given 12g of it to people before and they always had a great trip even at that dose.

I can microdose this cacti enough to feel it as if I took MDMA for the day at only 2-3g as well.

I never had pachanoi so I cant compare it.

cannabinoids inspire paranoia in me

the uncertainty of being stone on top of psychedelic quickly snowballs into panic, i avoid smoking until i have reached my peak on cactus and feel comfortable to take it to the next level. the same is true for any psychedelic i participate in. so many times i had smoked too soon and was walloped by the culmination of the psychoactives.

i find that achuma leaves me feeling energetic the next day if i dose in the afternoon and get a full nights sleep, anything more than a foot though (especially at night) i am physically drained.

for the love of cactus I've just started my first grow from seed

after two days away from home, I was greeted by 9 of these little guys tonight.

fantastic, please document the growth!

hows your growing going bro!