First I want to apologize if anything comes off as incoherent, or if it seems like I am trying to define you or people as a whole with this post. I just tried to detail all of the thoughts I have, and it's difficult to tell at this time if they are distorted or truthful, although I have an impending sense that these realizations are true to me.
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I have wanted to experience DMT under the influence of a MAOI for a long time now. I have been using some full spectrum Syrian rue extract in small doses to get accustomed to the harmala experience, which has treated me very well. Last night I did yoga for about four hours including a puja celebration honoring the full moon. A girl into astrology at the studio said something about how the moon last night was a very special one as it was “releasing a lot of energy that has been building up since 2012.” Now I am not really into astrology at all, but all of these factors came together nicely, so I decided to have my first vaporhuasca experience.
Now on the DMT Nexus I surprisingly could not find too many threads about vaporhuasca specifically. Most of the focus seems to be on vaped DMT, changa, ayahuasca and pharmahuasca. I did find a couple posts that helped me establish some basic things (like how long I should wait after eating the harmala to vape the DMT). So at 11:38 PM last night I ate 200 mg of full spectrum Syrian Rue extract. At around 12:10 AM, I smoked 30-40 mg of DMT. Now these dosage seemed right for me, but as always they might be too intense or too weak for others! I was in my house in a totally safe, dark environment as well. I covered the clock right before blasting off, so I lost any concept of time that I had.
What happened next was not too surprising at first. My mind flew into the square dimensions that usually comprise my trips to hyperspace. My perspective “fell out from behind me,” and I was completely immersed in the DMT world. Entities were running wild, some reading magazines for some reason, some dancing in front of me, making fun of me, etc. All pretty normal. I cannot tell how long this state lasted, but it ended fairly shortly.
To preface, I get extremely hypercritical during DMT trips. It’s like LSD for me but much more intense. I criticize everything, and it all just seems like a joke to me. Often this is a harrowing and very uncomfortable experience, but I do learn a lot about people and society from it. At this point, I have pretty much resigned myself to having slightly traumatic trips for the explicit purpose of improving myself and my analytical skills.
But with the MAOI, I thought I would be able to surpass this level of hyper-criticality. I truly thought that the hypercritical state could be passed up by lengthening and intensifying the DMT experience. I thought I would become a simple awareness, if that, floating through hyperspace and just letting the entities and environments come to me. But I was utterly mistaken.
After the familiar flash of vaped DMT ended, I opened my eyes to my dark room. I started having visions and babbling on like a crazy person. I kept thinking that if anybody saw me in that state, they would think I was completely insane. I was tossing my arms around and making critical little remarks to and about myself. I had a vision of killing myself with a knife which was quite terrifying. There were too many stimuli even though I was laying on the floor in a dark room. I kept yelling, “I get it! I get it!” I understand that everything is a joke. That our reality is fake. Nothing is serious. There is no meaning. I get it! But why did it have to hurt so much? Why did it keep being shown to me? Enough!
I wanted to end the experience, and I thought I had some Xanax around somewhere. But I had to know if it was safe, and to know that, I would have to look it up. At this point I struggled to get off of the floor, as I kept falling back and telling myself that it was just easier and more comfortable to lie down. Eventually I somehow got over to the light and switched it on. I winced at the light, but once I looked at my room I knew how hard I was tripping. And it was the hardest in my life. I stumbled over to my desk and tried looking up if the Xanax would help me on my phone. I couldn’t find anything, so I had to turn on my computer.
Google must have known I was tripping. Who searches “vaporhuasca dosage” followed by “does Xanax stop vaporhuasca”? People who are on vaporhuasca, that’s who. But this is beside the point, I didn’t care about that, but it was something that popped in my head. I couldn’t find anything definitive except that people on MAOIs shouldn’t mix it with Xanax, so I held off. But here is when I started becoming extremely cold. Mind you I was just in my shirt and underpants in a previously air-conditioned room, but while on a new combination of drugs that wasn’t something I was thinking about. I started to feel myself dying. And all I wished for was that nothing permanent would happen to me as a result of this trip. I did not want my future self to have to deal with any problems caused by my past self. I continued to feel anxiety over this, and it manifested in my desire to keep myself alive (no surprise). So I went on the DMT Nexus chat to seek help.
Now I often have problems with the chat because I never know if it’s appropriate to interrupt people’s conversations. I am not great with a lot of informal social situations, and I certainly don’t want to make a bad impression on a forum of people I like and get along with. But since I felt like my life was at risk, I just came out with the fact that I was on vaporhuasca. The people on the chat were nice and helpful. Special thanks goes out to DeDao for telling me to put socks on. It seems simple but that little tip greatly improved my life at the time, so I am very grateful. I can’t remember the names of the others who helped me calm down, but thanks nonetheless.
I looked up symptoms of vasoconstriction and worried that my coldness might have arisen from the 200 mg of harmalas since I have never taken that much before (I have only taken like 50 mg max). I didn’t match any of the symptoms, and I got a little happier once I knew that I probably wouldn’t die. I was just so concerned because even with all of the DMT/MAOI experiences I have read about, I have never come across anyone really saying extreme coldness would occur. But after putting on pants, socks, and a sweater, I felt a lot better physically.
As humans however, we tend to just latch on to the next worst problem. I kept saying to myself, “If I know I’m going to live I’ll be ok. Once I get that solved I’ll be totally fine.” But once I solved it, it was on to the next thing. I couldn’t remember what I was doing ten seconds ago. The crazy part is that I have dealt with a person who lost his mind on LSD. He wasn’t able to remember anything, but he did not have a logically functioning mind either. In this vaporhuasca induced state, I had a “functioning” mind (I was able to interact with the people on chat, write, type, etc.) but just not much of a memory. I suppose this is due to the extreme stimuli I was receiving. I have yet to mention that everything I wrote above took place over the course of maybe only 20 minutes. But now I understand when people say “it lasts an eternity.” I had previously discounted or maybe just not thought about that before. But it’s very true. I couldn’t believe it when I looked at the clock on my computer at that point and saw that only 20 minutes or so had elapsed.
Anyway, since I knew I was not able to remember things from 10 seconds ago, I started questioning myself. “Well maybe I was just running through the streets? I could have been since I don’t remember it.” Although realistically I would have remembered such a change in my environment, but again I could not make the thought leave my mind. My thoughts also felt extremely powerful, and I did not want to take the risk of manifesting something I was thinking about (I did not want to break into the neighbor’s house for example). I realized it was a negative thought loop but it was still a difficult thing to escape. I decided that I would be much happier if someone was there with me to make sure I wasn’t going too crazy. So I texted my friend who lives nearby to come over. It was 1 AM at this point but he agreed to run over after a while.
A lot of time elapsed from when I first texted my friend and when he actually arrived. So I took to writing. I had a sneaking suspicion that I would not remember any of that experience in the morning, and although that ended up being false, I wanted to record as much of my mindset as possible. So I started writing my thoughts and experiences down on the paper I laid out before the trip.
The first thing I wrote in giant, serious letters was:
NO SYMBOLSAs in, no symbols had meaning. Meaning was destroyed. That is where the title of my post (a phrase I realized later on) comes from. I was in a state of total existential agony. Nothing had any meaning at all. And you know, it’s easy to say that, but feeling and experiencing it first hand is a totally different and much more powerful thing. I went on the write, “Everything is criticized, I am a joke, it’s all meaningless. All mocked. Any action, work, gesture, object.” And of course:
YOU DON’T WANT THIS
THIS IS TOO INTENSENow at this point this seems like a bad trip. And I guess it was, but I do not like to classify trips as good or bad really. It made me feel horrible during, I suppose, but the realizations are golden. I do not like to lie to myself. I refuse to live under any lies. And what vaporhuasca did for me was bring out my beliefs and thoughts from my subconscious. It dug up memories from the past and gave me the tools to analyze the world. I was completely honest with myself during. And I wasn’t going to hold it back in my notes.
I continued to analyze everything. I would just continue to analyze the joke of our existence, whereas on normal vaped DMT I would just get a thought like this and it would be gone shortly after. But what the MAOI basically does is extend the experience. I thought it would boost me further into hyperspace and I would not have to deal with all of the social criticisms that I normally have to endure. But as I said, this is not what happened at all. It did not extend hyperspace for me; it extended the physical and mental feeling of being on DMT. Not the entities or environments. Maybe it differs for others and with other methods, but I cannot speak to that.
I went to my window and watched for my friend. Maybe 30 minutes had passed at this point. I felt like a dog waiting for its owner to come home by just staring out the window. And as an example of my “continuing trains of analysis,” I started to imagine what it would be like to be a dog. I felt as if I could see what they see. I thought about their existence and how they interpret the world. I began thinking about how powerful this state really is, as it gave me the power to freely consider and dive deeper into anything I wanted to think about. I suppose this is one of my goals for psychedelic use (to be honest I think we all have reasons we do it), but at the time it didn’t seem like it was worth the near-insanity I was experiencing.
My friend arrived shortly and calmed me down. This is the same friend who lost his mind on LSD, so he knows what goes on. He talked with me and asked me about what I was thinking. I prefer doing vaped DMT alone because of how short the experience is, and I thought that would be ok with the vaporhuasca too. But for me, I think it’s better to have a friend nearby on this so I don’t spiral toward insanity and worry about my actions. He did not necessarily agree with the things I was saying, as he is much more laid back than I am and does not care about a lot of things, so it is easier not to be critical.
As we were talking I began to regain a little bit of clarity, and after an hour or so I was composing and verbalizing complicated thoughts and ideas. But the crazy part is that my vision was still completely distorted and my mind still critical. I started to have some better realizations here. I realized that I am human too. I am a monkey. As a psychedelic drug user and armchair-philosopher it’s easy to want to be removed from the disgusting human-monkey world that we live in. It’s easy to want to be removed from the concepts we see on television, like people being popular, social, outcasts, smart, ignorant, etc. We all want to think that our lives are unique or special in some way. But they’re not.
This is not a new realization for me. I have gotten it on pretty much all my LSD uses before. I think it has to do with the dissolution of the ego. Once my identity was shattered and analytically torn apart, it’s easy to see how absolutely nothing in my life is special or unique. I am just 1 of over 7,000,000,000 people on this planet and am nothing really. There are so many people with so much going on, but no one person is really that special. And when you consider the size of our universe (if there even is a limited size), our existence seems plain trite.
I realized that the only reason we really get up in the morning is to feed our animal instincts. That is how we got here. We evolved and if you don’t eat, drink, go to the bathroom, sleep, and take care of your body, then you will not be around to spread our existence. It’s like a Darwinian thing in my opinion as well as a philosophical idea. The only beings that are alive are the ones who do things to stay alive. And that is us. And no matter how we try to distort it, disguise it, or claim otherwise, we all share these needs. No one is above being human. It’s easy to say and even believe we live for other reasons, but I am starting to have serious doubts about why we even keep this whole system going.
Now the question comes down to so what? There’s nothing I can really do about this. At this point I had a little internal dialogue going about meaninglessness. So am I just an awareness, a little bit of consciousness, trapped in a physical body? Well yes, but it’s about how you handle it. Will you be a depressive who lies in bed all day and wants to kill himself? Or will you be someone who treats life like an art project? How you choose to respond to the abyss is what defines us, not how we accept it. Yes as humans we live to feed our instinctual desires and we will die out and simply not be here if we don’t. But humans have this interpretation of existing as form before function, existence before essence. We are born and have to fulfill our needs to stay alive. But besides that, any purpose we think we have was probably instilled by society, meaning it is not intrinsic to our existence. So it appears as if we have agency to define our own meaning, even if the meaning we give ourselves has no meaning behind itself. Again, it’s how we treat the absurd.
I live for hedonistic pleasure, and I very well think most people do. Every choice we make is pretty much based on selfishness at least on some level. I do not want to lie to myself and give myself a fake reason for existing. So I think what it comes down to, for me at least, is continuing to exist for absurd pleasure. Our reality is a joke and there is nothing meaningful at all that can really be found here, but it does not matter that things do not matter. I think it helps to be honest with ourselves though, as the lies about our purpose here just seem to cause strife, which ultimately takes away from us feeling good.
My friend eventually left, and I was grateful for him coming and talking to me. I could have just isolated myself in my bed and let the experience ride itself out, but I actually laughed and realized new stuff when talking with him. I went to sleep and slept for about 8 hours. I am feeling much better now, although I am definitely still a little out of it. I think I am going to take a break from the DMT and MAOI combo for a while to integrate. I do like the intellectual and happy state that harmalas provide however, and I foresee myself becoming a much larger proponent of using harmalas. They really are a fascinating (and legal) substance that match my intellectual interests well. I can reserve the DMT for when I think I need to take another dive into the absurdity and meaninglessness of our existence.
"Think for yourself and question authority." - Leary
"To step out of ideology - it hurts. It's a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it." - Žižek