Disregard Everything I say

This article is technically a repost of a repost but it is a necessary one. This is because my understanding of this topic has recently increased so greatly since I have started deliberately reading up on psychology and neuroscience in general, that it has needed a complete overhaul. As a result of this, the original article will be broken down into two separate articles. For both, I will try my hardest to supply as much solid evidence for as I possibly can, but if you know more about these things than me and want to contribute ideas of your own or debate mine please do so. Any help with this would be great as my knowledge of neuroscience barely extends beyond what Wikipedia has managed to teach me over the past few weeks, making it something that is trivial in comparison to genuine scientists. 

For a long time I and others have suspected that during sober living, a large part of what our brain does is filter out the mass of sensory data and self thought into a highly streamlined package. This package is what the subconscious brain has deemed important and relevant to pass along for our conscious faculties. The underlying mechanism behind this must have evolved, because if it did not we would be immediately and constantly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of raw sensory input and our inability to process it all, causing us to be completely incapable of functioning. It’s because of this that we have evolved a brain which is able to filter out irrelevant information, using what I have named the Sensory Filter.

It seems to me that all visual and mental components of the psychedelic experience are generated by this one very specific mental component of the psychedelic experience, the partial or complete removal of the sensory filter. 
The effects of this are commonly felt in quite a direct way, even at low level psychedelic experiences, in a way that anybody who has ever tripped should be quite familiar with. These low level effects are the result of the partial removal of somebody’s sensory filter, which seem to be universally felt as:

• Being able to comprehend your entire visual field, including your peripheral vision. For example; the sensation of staring at a tree and comprehending the exact position of all of its branches in your visual field all at once, instead of just the simple few that are in focus.
• Being able to comprehend every layer of complex sounds, and the precise position and direction from which they are coming from in your surroundings. This results in greatly increased music appreciation.
• Being able to feel every nerve ending all over your entire body, whilst simultaneously having increased muscle control and bodily awareness.

The above effects are generated are all generated by a lack of filtering when it comes to external sensory information but this sensory filter does not just block out irrelevant external sensory input from being experienced. It also filters out irrelevant brain activity from the conscious faculties and it’s through this that the higher levels of psychedelic visuals are generated. 

This irrelevant brain activity includes many things such as the organization and firing of every neuron, every memory, every stored concept and every last structure of the mind, until something such as a mind altering drug forces it to stop. In simple terms, this means that once the sensory filter is shut down, we suddenly become exposed to the very fabric of our mind. This is due to the brain being chemically changed in a way that causes it to begin to reveal itself to itself.

To describe in depth how this lowering of our sensory filter results in the psychedelic experience, I will first break the visual effects of tripping into three separate categories, and explain in simple terms how I think they work (using my personal experience and research as a basis). After this I will explain the neuroscience behind it all, whilst trying my best to cite studies and articles as evidence. Before I begin, please remember however to keep in mind throughout this article that I am a teenager who has taken a whole bunch of drugs and not a neuroscientist of any sort. This means that although I have tried my best to keep this as scientifically accurate as possible I cannot promise anything and if anybody out there wants to team up and help me write a better thesis I would be all for it.

The first of these three separate visual effects that I am going to explain are Open/Closed eye visuals, which can be described as the sensation of a persons visual field being partially or completely encompassed by intensely fast-moving, kaleidoscopic and indescribably complex geometric patterns, shapes, fractals, structures and colour. These visuals somehow have a deep sense of profoundness and importance attributed to them and feel like perfect visual representations of your current mind state, and the vibes of your current surroundings.

It’s because of this, among other things, that I have been led to believe that Visuals are the experience of your lowered sensory filter allowing you to be exposed to the current neurological structure, organization and activity of the brain. This starts at lower levels of tripping, as geometric patterns that increase in intensity, until they eventually encompass and overwhelm your entire visual field. As the amount of neurological structure that is experienced increases proportionally with dosage, the sensory filter is eventually decreased to 0%, leading to a person being exposed to the organization of their entire mind all at once. This feels like you have suddenly become everything in the universe as the boundaries in your mind are completely broken down, and is described as profound and infinite in size. As this is happening, the vast data stream of neurological structure and geometric shapes that are experienced begin to cause the ego to go through complete sensory overload.

Since this sensory overload increases proportionally with dosage it can be thought of as a set of scales. As Visuals go up, the ego goes down, and vice versa. Because of this, once the sensory filter hits 0% and a person starts to feel one with the universe, the ego becomes completely eradicated. This results in a state in which you are conscious, but your short term memory has been destroyed, creating a state that can be very confusing and often negative to the unprepared and the unstable.

This idea is mostly based on in-depth sceptical discussions with friends and the fac that all of my personal experiences pointing towards the idea that Closed Eye Visuals feel as if they are perfect representations of the mind because they are the literal spilling over of our neuroligcal structure into the visual cortex due to a dampened sensory filter. This does also however have a scientific basis that I will go into later.

The second visual effect that I am going to explain is Distortions. This category of visual effects is a very common one and does not behave anything like Closed Eye Visuals. Instead of geometric shapes, these visuals are most commonly manifested as objects and scenery in your visual field acting as if they are melting, bending, changing colour and various other distorting effects. These increase in intensity when stared at, but immediately reset once you double take.

In my opinion, these are generated by your sensory filter, allowing the conscious facilities to be visually exposed to your immediate short term memory. This creates a recursive loop that continuously builds up. As you experience this, you literally see your short term memory and then immediately your memory of your short term memory and so on continuously. This builds up a visual feedback loop of increasing inaccuracy, which must be based on some sort of recursive visual looping system within the brain. This looping system sends sensory input from the optic nerve into the processing faculties of our subconscious brain and straight back into the optic nerve as a loop. This happens because our dampened sensory filter allows us to be exposed to our sensory processing faculties and working memory causing it to continuously go around and around, allowing the distortions to build up and up, until the loop is broken by new visual input (when a person looks away or double takes).

It’s because of this that distortions increase when stared at, but reset when looked away from. Out of focus eyes allow the loop to continue undisturbed, but new input immediately breaks it. This is just like a visual form of the increasingly loud feedback noise that you get looping through speaker systems when a microphone is placed near them.

I think the fractal effects found within visuals are closely related to this recursive visual looping. Fractals are generated by recursive formulas, such as x=x^2. Therefore, it would make sense that the fractals you see within the visuals are simply the looping effect being played out onto visuals, instead of your external environment. These fractals are created because your brain’s recursive looping is reinterpreting the same stimuli multiple times, causing the geometry to flower out into these fractals that all psychonauts are familiar with.

Finally, the third visual effect that I am going to explain is the experience of Imagery and Hallucinations. These states begin as imagery within the visuals, which can be described as pictures of scenes, objects, people, place or anything you could possibly imagine. On many psychedelics, such as; LSA, Ayahuasca and Syrian Rue, these are manifested as exact visual versions of whatever you are currently thinking about that all come about when you slip into a mildly trance-like state. As these states of imagery become increasingly elaborate (proportional to dosage), they eventually become fully fledged 3D hallucinations. These could be described as induced mystical states, contact with autonomous entities, imagined landscapes and situations that seem so unlike anything previously experienced that they are in all probability untranslatable into English. It’s not uncommon for people to report that these sorts of hallucinations feel infinitely more realistic than anything a person has previously experienced in real life.

For multiple reasons, it seems to me that these hallucinations are caused when high states of sensory filter suppression triggers dreaming in fully conscious trippers. My reasoning for this is three fold; the first is pretty simply that psychedelic hallucinations look and feel exactly like extremely vivid dreams. This is even to the point where it is not uncommon for people to recognize places from dreams they have had during intense Ayahuasca trips. Along the same lines, the feelings of amnesia commonly felt after strong DMT trips are identical to that extremely familiar feeling of not being able to remember a vivid dream immediately after you have woken up. 

My second line of evidence to support this is that the imagery seen within closed eye visuals (that eventually leads onto hallucinations) feel exactly like Hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is the state between being awake and falling asleep where many people experience mild hallucinations, imagery and a fluid association of ideas. In fact, hypnagogia is considered to be characterized and based on a mental function, known as “auto-symbolism”, which are a person’s thoughts and ideas being made to manifest in their minds eye. This happens continuously when experienced, and can be either a vague and hazy manifestation, or completely clear and distinct ones depending on the persons dosage. Either way, this is exactly what states of hypnagogia are commonly described to be like. These two in my opinion feel identical, therefore making Imagery simply a psychedelic induced state of hypnagogia. These later lead onto full-on dreams, once they eventually become powerful enough as you finally fall asleep. This makes perfect sense, as Imagery leads onto Hallucinations in exactly the same way as Hypnagogia leads onto dreams.

All of this is happening along side the effect of a conscious person’s exposure to the neurological structure of their mind, and therefore visuals is what must cause the hallucinations and autonomous entities to commonly be made of what appears to be an impossible closed eye visual based material. 

In my opinion, this has a genuine neurological basis, as the leading theory in the generation of dreams ties perfectly into the sensory filter. The leading theory can be found described in detail, here and here, but put simply, it is believed that once a person falls asleep, the level of activation in the conscious part of the brain descends to a very low level, as the inputs from the sensory are basically disconnected. This triggers what scientists have called the “continual-activation” mechanism, to generate a data stream from the memory stores to flow through the conscious part of the brain. It’s suggested that this pulse-like brain activation is the inducer of each dream. It’s proposed that, with the involvement of the brain associative thinking system, dreaming is, thereafter, self-maintained with the dreamer’s own thinking until the next pulse of memory insertion. This explains why dreams have both characteristics of continuity (within a dream) and sudden changes (between two dreams).

The supposed “continual activation” mechanism is, in my opinion, a loss of sensory filter. This is caused by the complete loss of ego that occurs to the brain as it falls asleep. This loss of ego happens because the activity in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex is lowered to a near halt during sleep. The function of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex when awake has been implicated to be planning complex cognitive behaviour, personality expression, decision-making and moderating social behaviour. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals. All of these are the essential components of the ego and it is this cortex that is said to in charge of our Exectutive functions.

Executive functions are a psychological umbrella term for some of the essential components of the ego. These components are:

• planning
• working memory
• attention
• problem solving
• verbal reasoning 
• inhibition
• mental flexibility 
• multi-tasking
• initiation and monitoring of actions

The medial prefrontal cortex is presumed by scientists to manage these executive functions via a high level gating system or filtering mechanism, that enhances goal-directed activations and inhibits irrelevant activations. This filtering mechanism enables executive control at various levels of processing, including selecting, maintaining, updating, rerouting activations and emotional regulation. 

Simply put this is the physical location of the sensory filter and it is completely tied in with our ego in a single cortex at the very front of our brains. It’s this unity of these two systems that causes ego and psychedelic experience to act as a set of scales as when the ego is suppressed, so is the sensory filter and vice versa. This means that as activity in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex goes down so must the level of the psychedelic experience go proportionally up to compensate.

It’s the similarities between this dampening of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex found during both sleep and the psychedelic experience that is what leads me to believe that both dreaming and hallucinations are caused by a suppressed sensory filter. This allows our conscious mind to become exposed to a completely random mixture of concepts and events stored within the long term memory of the brain. This means that states of dreaming, states of meditation and states of psychedelic hallucination are the essentially the same thing, caused by different methods of simultaneously suppressing both a person’s ego and their sensory filter.

This has led me to a conclusion that is now greatly supported in a recent study by British scientists. This was a study that tested patients under the influence of psilocybin during a brain scan, and managed to determine that psychedelics do not increase brain activity, but actually reduce it. They were shown to do this by binding to the serotonin receptors within the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and the Posterior Cingulate Cortex, and greatly reducing their activity. The Posterior Cingulate Cortex is also related to ego and has been shown to serve the function of dealing with internally directed thought, for example, memory recollection with an active role in the control of cognition. This is done through signalling an environmental change and the immediate need to alter behaviour.

Psilocybin cuts activity in both of these nodes, destroys their filtering abilities along with their connection to other brain areas, allowing the senses to run free. It’s this dampening of the ego and our sensory filter that psychedelics have now been shown to cause, which allows information to flow freely across the brain and the senses to run wild. 

Psychedelics have now been proven to cause a decrease in brain activity in hub areas that deal with the self and moving information. This results in a) the subconscious mind taking over and b) the sensory filter being lowered.

However, there are still two more component beyond the visual components of a psychedelic experience that still needs to be categorized. These need to be tied in to the sensory filter, so that we can have the full picture when it comes to understanding how they work. 

These is much rarer than anything found during the visual side of tripping, but still common enough to be worthy of mention. This is what is known as an Audio Hallucination. Audio Hallucinations are uncommon but happen occasionally and are more likely to occur on substances such as Ayahuasca, DMT, Syrian Rue and any 2C* compound. I have broken these noises down into two distinct categories that both tie into the sensory filter. 

The first of these two I have named as “Audio Effects”, and they come in many forms. They are commonly described as hearing noises such as; reverb, tones, and general sound effects, that seem to follow thought patterns and processes. 

Examples of this include hearing the very mechanics of your brain on Ayahuasca or DMT, in a way that can either sound like a soft purring or multiple tones and phasers in a completely rhythm-less tune. On DMT this can sound like a rocket launch as you begin to take off or as rhythm-less and unaggressive soft-toned dubstep, but are essentially limitless in their possibilities.

After personal experience, I have come to the conclusion that Audio Effects are essentially the heard equivalent of visuals and work by means of a lowered sensory filter, allowing neurological structure to pour over into a person’s audio cortex as opposed to their visual cortex.

The Second of these two components is a genuine Audio Hallucination. These can be described as hearing voices, music or any sound that is genuinely not there. The most common version of this seems to be hearing music that has been played throughout the day, within the sounds of your surroundings, even after it has stopped. For example listening to ambient music all day and then stopping can often cause a person to hear said ambient music in the sounds of the wind, the cars and any noise that may be around them.

This is, in my opinion, because Audio Hallucinations are not the heard equivalent of Visuals, but are in fact the heard equivalent of Imagery and Hallucinations. This must mean that they are the result of a person’s lowered sensory filter, granting them access to heard concepts within their long term memory, as opposed to ones that are seen. This puts forward another supporting line of evidence towards the idea of long term memory access causing imagery and hallucinations.

The more I have thought about the sensory filter, the more I have come to the conclusion that it is without a doubt the most important component of a psychedelic experience. It seems to me that it is the “base component” that leads to all others. This idea, or ideas similar to it, seem to have been on the tips of everybody’s tongue since the 1954, when Aldous Huxley first wrote about a similar idea in his book the doors of perception which he called the “Mind at Large”. 

Many people (including myself) have come to similar conclusions across reddit and various forums over the internet, before the recent Psilocybin study, that provided some concrete evidence to base our musings on. 

Although it’s important to note that even though none of these people ever defined their ideas beyond a few sentences and some vague metaphors, this still shows that one of the most important tools that we have when it comes to making sense of and mapping out the psychedelic experience is first hand experience and rational thought.

This may be mostly based on personal experience but I’d like to think that based on my extremely basic understanding of how the human brain works this does seem to be how the visual components of a psychedelic experience are generated and I challenge you to debate me at any point.

To express my ideas on how this works simply I have created the chart below. The concepts on it show what I’m trying to express and each part depends on the component to its left and leads on to the components to its immediate right. You’re going to have to click to enlarge I’m afraid.

Note: there is most likely going to be a second section to this article. I will get working on it immediately.

DMT is a short acting smokeable psychedelic tryptamine that provides a trip of only five to ten minutes in length but is still universally considered by anybody who has tried it in a positive environment to be the most incredible experience a human being could ever possibly go through.
It is so vastly different from anything else a person has ever experienced that not even the most extreme of sober circumstances could ever come close in terms of profoundness and intensity.
DMT is the drug that people are looking for when they buy and smoke Salvia without knowing what to expect and is in my opinion the pinnacle of the psychedelic experience yet despite this very few people outside of the psychedelic community have heard of it and even fewer have actually gone ahead and tried it. It’s said that DMT is not only stranger than you suppose but it is stranger than you can suppose and there is literally nothing that could ever truly prepare you for it until you’ve tried it for yourself.
In this guide I will do my best to describe in as much detail as I can manage the different stages and effects of a typical DMT breakthrough.

The Visuals:

To ensure as clear of an understanding as possible I will first have to describe the specific style of Closed and Open Eye Visuals attributed to DMT that are found throughout every stage of this trip but as usual I can only describe them in comparison to other psychedelics.
These visuals are unsurprisingly extremely similar to Ayahuasca and are in my opinion the most complex and intricate species of visuals known to man as they simply have so much more detail and structure to them when compared to anything else. In comparison to the visuals found on LSD and mushrooms they are just as bright and colorful as LSD but with the depth and structure of Mushrooms and more. These visuals appear to be much more solid and less abstract as they look so much more like physical 3D shapes floating in the air or layed out on the back of your eyelids as opposed it’s flatter more ill defined (but still incredible) cousins.
It’s these complex geometric shapes, imagery, fractals and colour that almost all of the hallucinations and structures experienced on DMT are based on as they seem to be made entirely of a condensed solidified Closed Eye Visual based material.

Now that I’ve at least vaguely discussed the basis material for everything seen during such a trip I can walk you through the 4 different stages of a DMT trip and explain to you what they are like:

1. Taking Off
   The first step of a DMT trip is the come up that leads onto breaking through and this is something that seems to have at least a few different ways of presenting itself to a tripper as they start to smoke DMT, for example the first thing that a person notices is that it looks as if all the air has been pumped out of the room leaving everything in sight crisper and clearer than you could possibly imagine. Outlines become extremely well defined and it feels as if your sensory filter has immediately been eradicated.
   This is followed by a sudden onset of high level 3 visuals and a warm tingling sensation and the feeling of your body being pleasantly tugged in all directions at once from the inside.
   This is often but not always accompanied by the soft crackling sound and an extended tone that quickly increases in volume and pitch proportionally as the visuals increase. This sound becomes all enveloping and sounds like some sort of interdimensional rocket launch that abruptly ends as one of a few different take off options are experienced.
   
   
   
   These include but are certainly not limited to feelings of suddenly being pushed through and onto the other side of a membrane, the room infront of you splitting in two down the middle leaving a gaping infinite chasm filled with incredibly fast moving visuals as you separate from your body shooting directly into it at light speed and often enough the slightly simpler experience of visuals simply becoming so all enveloping that absolutely nothing of the room is left anymore. This all happens within the space of about 30 seconds to a minute and leads directly onto the next stage of a DMT trip which I have taken to calling…

2. The Waiting Room
   Immediately after a person has smoked enough DMT to have taken off and have now broken through they often find themselves spending a brief amount of time in what feels like some sort of cosmic waiting room. This can take any form but generally takes the shape of a tunnel or space comprised of fast moving visuals that lasts approximately 10 – 20 seconds and feels distinctively different from the main bulk of the trip and starts off quickly but immediately begins to slow down and form into the next stage.
   Personal experience has led me to speculate that this is some sort of psychedelic loading screen and its during this moment that the trip ahead of you is being generated and planned out.

3. The Other Side
   Once the chaos has cleared and the trip has been generated this means that the tripper has finally broken through onto the other side. It is here where literally anything can happen to you but despite this most trips seem to follow some extremely common themes and plots that happen across pretty much all people who try DMT.
   These generally consist of coming too in an alternate reality so real it feels better defined than real life with a single or multiple external entities in front of your line of sight. These entities are usually completely unsurprised by the trippers sudden appearance into their dimension and immediately begin to greet and welcome you with open arms giving off a sense that they are deeply concerned with what they have to show you in the short amount of time that they have before you comedown.
   At this point it is pretty common for the tripper (unless they are very experienced) to be completely overwhelmed by the nature of what is happening to them despite feeling completely sober mentally, often screaming and shouting in amazement as the entities encourage you not to give into astonishment and simply try your hardest to pay attention to what is happening. It’s here that they start to communicate with you using a variety of different methods such as directly manipulating what you can see and view, by telepathically beaming information into your thoughts, by using a visual language comprised of pure linguistic meaning and mathematics or any combination of the above and it’s through these that they teach you their message or show you what they want to show you.
   This message is often something personal to you or something that only applies to the logic of the universe in which it was taught in making it impossible to integrate and apply it into your everyday life. 
   These entities often appear to be all knowing and although they can take any form there are definitely more commonly experienced entities present and these generally include bodiless super intelligent humanoids, Aliens, Elves, Insectoids, Giant Spheres, Beings of light, Plants and complex robotic machines.
   If a lower dose is taken however but a breakthrough is still achieved these entities will always manifest themselves as an obvious but difficult to put your finger on sensed presence of the Other. The Other feels as if it is somewhere in the background of it all, capable of hearing what you tell it but incapable of telling you what it has to say due to too low of a dosage.
   This stage of the trip can last anywhere between five to ten minutes before heading onto the next and final stage of a DMT trip.

4. Coming Down
   Just as quickly as the DMT hit you after several minutes it begins to leave you at this final stage of the trip. This is experienced as the sensation of being pulled further and further away from the scenario in which you were placed as the entities wave good bye and encourage you to come back as soon as you can.
   Once this is over you immediately find yourself back in the room tripping extremely hard as an incredible sense of euphoria and confoundment washes over every part of your mind and body, the moderate to mild visuals stay for a further 10 – 15 minutes before disappearing completely leaving an afterglow that stays for up to an hour. This afterglow feels like a warm fuzzyness and leaves behind a sense of well being and clarity that can last up to weeks after a good trip.
   Before trying DMT keep in mind that it’s best to record what happened during your trip immediately after it is over via either telling somebody or through a voice recorder as DMT trips can sometimes be extremely difficult to remember in exactly the same way that dreams are often difficult to retain.

The things experienced on this drug are incredible and completely logic defying, if a single object could be somehow brought back into the real world from such a place nothing would ever be the same again as the sheer impossibleness of these things would instantly break reality for the better.

Misconceptions:

Before I finish this article off I am going to address the extremely common misconceptions and borderline mysticism that surround this drug all over the internet. These misconceptions are the widely held belief that DMT is naturally produced in the Pineal Gland and is routinely released every night when we dream, at the moment of birth and at the moment of death. There is not yet any conclusive scientific evidence that this is true yet despite this many people on the internet claim it to be fact on a regular basis.
These ideas were first hypothesized by Rick Strassman in the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule and have since been popularized by the likes of Terrence Mckenna and Joe Rogan.
This is not something that the scientific consensus supports but it has been conclusively proven that trace amounts of DMT have been found in the blood, urine and cerebreal spineal fluid of some mammals, including humans and a great little list of them can be found here.
Stopping the spread of psuedoscience and misinformation across the psychedelic community is important if we want our position to be taken seriously so this is not something that should be tolerated.

If you are motivated to try this drug it is completely possible to make it through some very simple kitchen based chemistry found here that requires only legal and freely available ingredients all of which can be found on Google. Keep in mind however that this is very very illegal and I am in no way responsible for your actions.

psychedelicreplication:

Flowing textures.

A simple gif to demonstrate the flowing of wood grain, one of the most common distortions experienced during a psychedelic trip.

The popular and freely available hallucinogen known as Salvia, is in my opinion probably one of the most confusing experiences a human being can possibly go through making it perhaps the most difficult of all substances to explain. This is a substance that feels completely unlike all other psychedelics and is technically classed as an A-typical dissociative by erowid.
The reason it is so unique in terms of effects is due to how it effects the brain, while pretty much all of the classic psychedelics work by simply happening to fit into our serotonin receptors Salvia does not do this and instead targets the brains k-opoid receptors creating for a completely bizarre style of tripping that many people find terrifying. So I will attempt to break down this thing down into it’s base components right here.

Bodyhigh:

The physical sensation of this sort of trip is almost entirely characterized by what I call “Salvia Gravity”. This is present at even mild trips and increases proportionally with dosage until it is all encompassing, beginning with a heavy sensation that pulls and tugs at the body. As this increases it inevitably becomes so powerful that it swiftly lifts the tripper up and out of their body in a direction that simply doesn’t make sense and into a place so different from anything previously experienced that words fail to describe it.

This is sometimes accompanied by the sensation of pins and needles all over a persons skin that for an unlucky few can become very uncomfortable, most people however never experience this feeling at all.

Headspace:

While most drugs usually enhance or heighten certain cognitive functions and simultaneously lower others Salvia does not do anything like this. Instead it literally lowers everything all across the board, it’s this effect that contributes to Salvia being extremely confusing and creates for an experience devoid of introspection for most people as this isn’t a substance that creates profound thoughts, just profound experiences.
The average first time user of Salvia generally experiences a mixture of extreme gigglyness and confusion. Paranoia and panic are also very common for the unprepared and this can be accounted for by the fact that k-opoid antaganists have been shown to cause such feelings in people, you combat this in just the same way that the paranoia induced by weed can be handled. Simply take Salvia in a safe, comfortable environment away from noise and brush off all negative thoughts as irrational paranoia before they can even begin to develop themselves.
This only really happens at mild – moderate dosages, however a breakthrough Salvia trip feels completely different mentally with a huge amount of egoloss but not necessarily egodeath being very common. This is egodeath at 99% and feels as if you are receiving the sensory input of your trip, but not fully conscious enough to think about the implications of it until you come down.
Language use is also extremely affected with many users going as far to report that their thought processes become replaced with a completely garbled and nonsensical alien language. This can be described as pure syntax that is completely devoid of meaning.

Visual effects and Hallucinations:

The visual effects of Salvia have a completely alien and unique style to them not found anywhere else, instead of the typical fast flashes of geometric patterns found during a typical trip these visuals are of a completely different nature.
Salvia’s typical open eye visuals are unimpressive but rather confusing, a sensation of being flattened into one unified surface is common when a persons eyes are kept open and this seems to play heavily on different sections of your vision as the objects in front of your face become devoid of meaning.
Closed eye visuals however are instead most commonly experienced as murky yet defined shapes that are not quite as abstract as your typical closed eye visuals but instead more heavily based on mathematical constructs such as extremely elaborate fractals that come with a sense of physical scale and depth to them. These constructs are often so huge that they expand for hundreds to thousands of miles and do not change by means of quick morphing flashes but instead change by panning, zooming and rotating slowly into view as more and more detail is gradually revealed. A sensation of folding between frames of still constructs and visuals is also quite common and these often behave in a similar fashion to the structures found on dissociatives such as MXE.
The hallucinations at low to high doses, these are very murky to look at but still extremely detailed as most of the details are felt instead of seen. For example you may be hallucinating during a breakthrough trip that there is a crowd standing in front of you and although you can barely make them out using your sight you can sense and feel every last one of them in a level of detail comparable to normal vision.

Although these hallucinations are limitless in their potential and can encompass anything there is interestingly enough one very commonplace scenario found on Salvia which is the sensation of becoming a random inanimate object. This object could be literally anything but the most common seem to be, a conveyor belt, a brick in a wall or a book.  

Leaves vs Extract vs Oral:

There are three different forms of Salvia trips with the leaves providing a much more relaxing trip when smoked that is equally as intense visually and the extract being much more intense when it comes to the body high and the physical sensations of tripping on Salvia. 
Orally active Salvia is taken by creating a tea or chewing on leaves/extract, this results in a trip that lasts upwards of two hours instead of 15 minutes and eases you in and out of trip slowly rather than hitting you like a tonne of bricks before you can even exhale. It’s worth noting that the traditional method of Salvia consumption is orally with the Mazatec shamans claiming that Salvia “does not like to be smoked”.

I personally prefer smoking Salvia leaves as it seems to be a much more pleasant experience and are extremely cheap and available all over the internet.

Some statistics:

A survey performed 6 months ago involving 170 people performed on the r/psychonaut board over at reddit provided this guide with some very useful charts and statistics on the topic of what your average person experiences during a Salvia trip and can be found right here.  

I’m writing this article because the general consensus online seems to be the exact opposite of what all of my personal experience has led me to believe. Many people (including myself at one point) around many psychedelic communities on the internet hold quite strongly the opinion that Ayahuasca is serious business and not a sensible option for a person’s first trip, stating that it is extremely difficult to handle, with some even going as far as saying that you need to be guided by a genuine shaman to avoid being crushed. I’d like to suggest the exact opposite, as it seems to me that Ayahuasca is a much better option for most beginners than even LSD or mushrooms – providing the tripper cares enough to have a very basic understanding of how an Ayahuasca trip plays out beforehand. This really isn’t a very difficult thing to achieve.
The reasons that this isn’t considered to be the case are based on three different factors and people’s inability to find some basic solutions to them. These problems are:

1. The Nausea, 
   Ayahuasca is very famous for its painful nausea, violent vomiting and the diarrhoea that it generally causes during the first 45 minutes or so, but this is not an effect caused by Ayahuasca – it is an effect of poorly brewed Ayahuasca, and can be avoided by some simple steps that completely remove this problem. All of them are found in the Ayahuasca recipe right here.
    
2. The Exponential Enhancements of all Emotional and Physical States, 
   One of the biggest characteristics of all Ayahuasca trips is the way in which it enhances your present state many times over in a unique and often overwhelming way. This can be either incredible or horrifying, as it works in both negatively and positively, but most people seem to completely miss just how easy this is to control. If Ayahuasca starts to loop and enhance a simple but negative state, such as being irritated or exhausted, you can stop it by changing your state to something else by simply acting the way you want to feel. If you begin to act out and force an emotion or state it immediately becomes genuinely felt; moving in an energetic fashion will cause you to feel extremely pumped, and smiling will cause you to feel extremely euphoric. This is a completely unique effect and once you understand how this works it no longer becomes a problem.
    
3. The Sacredness of it all,
   I don’t need to go into depth with this one as I’ve spoken about it here already, but I will say this: even if Ayahuasca truly is a divine connection to a sacred and infinite universe, it’s pretty arrogant to assume that it would give two shits about small petty things such as which humans are using it, where they are doing it, and how they are preparing it, especially when I have yet to see any evidence of Ayahuasca being angered by such things beyond “but it’s sacred, bro! These substances are a calling!” With these problems gone it’s pretty difficult to find any reason stopping people from moving straight to Ayahuasca and skipping the so-called ‘starter’ psychedelics altogether, and after taking many people on multiple first trips with Ayahuasca, with all of them having positive experiences, I am completely confident in my position and would go as far as saying that it might even be a better option than LSD or mushrooms since this is something that anybody can be self-sufficient in producing – providing they have access to a kitchen and the internet – and it also has many properties that are simply not found with other trips.
    

The first of these is that judging by personal experience, Ayahuasca does not seem to increase a person’s HPPD as the visuals behave completely differently to that of other psychedelics; instead of the constant stream of visuals being fired into your face, Ayahuasca visuals only appear when you are paying attention to them, and disappear as soon as you concentrate on anything else. This is extremely practical as it allows you to do anything during an Ayahuasca trip that you could do sober once you have a feel for it, and combined with the light sensitivity of Ayahuasca visuals, an Ayahuasca-based hppd is rendered near-impossible to become any kind of nuisance in your day to day life.
The second thing that Ayahuasca really has going for it is its extremely rational head space that is surprisingly less of a mindfuck than more common psychedelics, and how it seems to completely reorganise your brain in a way that lasts so much longer than anything found elsewhere. Not only does Ayahuasca leave you with the sensation that your cultural filter has been destroyed, that your hard drive has been defragged, and your thoughts completely reorganised – for sometimes weeks after a single trip – but it literally forces you to become a better person with regular comments, such as:

• Stand up straight!
• Stop being an idiot!
• Eat more fruit!
• Spend more time with your family!

These comments feel like spontaneous thoughts popping into your head and are often snide, but envelop everything from the big things in life to the small things and force you to follow them by making you too self-aware to be capable of rationalising any other options. It is extremely difficult to fight what is best for you when it’s clearly the most reasonable option, and it’s this head space that removes your cultural filter quicker and more efficiently than any other psychedelic I have found.
Lastly, a small but very practical thing I have found is that you really can have an Ayahuasca trip on any work night with no problems. Its shorter duration allows you to fall asleep feeling absolutely pumped for the next day, and upon waking up you’ll feel extremely refreshed, clear headed and reorganised. This shorter duration, combined with its lack of tolerance, allows you to take many people on life changing trips throughout the week.
So, this drug is a great option for a first-timer – you just need to be sensible and understand how it works – but not only is Ayahuasca perfectly fine for a first timer, it can even be used in situations outside of the usual chilled-out bedrooms and nature. Many people would tell you that it would be completely irresponsible to use such a powerful/sacred psychedelic outside of a traditional environment, but as a person who makes a hobby out of taking a wide variety of psychedelic drugs in completely random places I can tell you that not once did it suddenly go wrong for no reason at all, or show any signs of doing so. For example, here are some of the things I have done and the places I have been whilst on Ayahuasca:

• At the cinema.
• At multiple bars with live and very loud music.
• During a game of Dungeons and Dragons (holy shit the immersion was intense).
• In very public places such as town centres, fast food restaurants and supermarkets.

None of these places are where I would prefer to trip, but in all of them I was tripping balls yet not once did it feel any different from being on any other psychedelic in a non-traditional environment, and the same goes for my friends – some of whom were literally on their second-ever trip. I am not saying Ayahuasca is a party drug, so go take it at a rave, but if you already have a feel for the substance and want to do so there is nothing stopping you. You just have to know your limits, and you also have to know that due to Ayahuasca visuals being so light sensitive, you’ll want to take at least double the usual dose that you would take in an environment without so many disturbances to compensate for them. People might think this is dangerous but I’ve yet to find a real reason why – providing the person doing it is comfortable doing so, are familiar with the drug and aware of their limits. Nobody is selling this drug on the street to random people, so it’s safe to assume that if somebody has gone through the effort of learning to brew their own Ayahuasca, they must have done some research.
If I had to choose a single substance for society to base its values on it would be Ayahuasca, not LSD, and certainly not alcohol. At some point this year we are going to work on a guide that would let people brew Ayahuasca and extract DMT using the extremely common Phalaris grass that grows all over the northern hemisphere. It probably grew in your school field, and it might already grow in your garden – it should be easy to do this long before our governments start to notice Mimosa Hostillis Rootbark, and once this is done there would be literally nothing that they could do from preventing Ayahuasca and DMT from being available to the masses. This is going to be so goddamn hilarious you have no idea.

LSA, although well known across the psychedelic community has a pretty bad reputation for making people feel incredibly nauseous to the point where I’ve seen many people say that LSA simply isn’t worth trying but it is completely possible to eradicate all of the nausea using what is in my opinion the simplest extraction technique there is. It’s literally just putting crushed seeds in cold water and then adding garlic a few hours later and sieving it out. That’s the whole extraction technique and it removes all of the nausea, it can be found in more detail right HERE.

Headspace:

the headspace of LSA is much more subtle than that of most psychedelics but it is definitely there and feels like relaxed yet alert thought patterns combined with a greatly increased ability to visualize concepts. This leads to one extremely vivid day dream after the other that play out in a style unlike any other psychedelic that I’ve found, these day dreams eventually become intense enough to envelop the entire trip.

Bodyhigh:

The LSA bodyhigh is one of a pleasurable tingling and is more commonly found on higher doses. This tingling sensation is also accompanied by spontaneous mini rushes of euphoria and these become longer and more drawn out proportionally to the amount of seeds consumed.

This bodyhigh is accompanied by a feeling of wakeful sedation which can be described as a dreamlike state, all sedated however it’s worth noting that you do no longer feel sedated the moment you try to stand up or do things just ever slightly off balance.

Visuals:

The visuals on LSA are well known for not being particularly impressive unless a heavy dose is consumed. They are definitely present but do not become very well defined unless at least a strong dose has been consumed and can be described as finer and more zoomed out than other traditional psychedelics but just as detailed. In comparison to LSD I would describe them as quite similar but far less digital and vectorized.

Scenarios:

Scenarios are the main all enveloping component of any moderate – strong LSA trip and are completely unique to this substance. The hallucinations, entity contact and general scenarios on all other psychedelics that I have tried stem from the imagery within the visuals eventually becoming intense and elaborate enough to form into full on three dimensional hallucinations but this is not the case with LSA. The hallucinations all seem to stem from a state of wandering vivid daydreams that get increasingly intense. These scenarios have a completely different feel to them and can be broken up into 3 different levels of intensity:

1. Vivid daydreams – the first level is a state of wandering thoughts and extremely vivid daydreams, these are more felt than seen but felt in detail. An ability to visualize concepts and have them appear in your minds eye is present, these often appear as perfectly normal but other times they appear in elaborate psychedelic forms that are partially embedded within closed eye visuals and anything can be visualized be it people, places, objects, whatever.

2. Murky breakthroughs - this second level is where things start to get really strange, during states of sedation trippers enter spontaneous breakthroughs into short elaborate scenarios. These scenarios can be anything but are often extremely nonsensical to the point that they are difficult to recall and translate into English but realistic enough to include sound and 3D hallucinations. These are just like intense versions of the dreamlike states experienced when on the verge of falling asleep.

3. Defined hallucinations – finally on the third step these effects have become so intense that they become a full on psychedelic hallucinatory breakthrough similar to that of any visionary psychedlic. This can be described as the usual extremely intense psychedelic imagined landscapes, Entity contact, hallucinations and scenarios.

These scenarios at level 1 and 2 can be controlled simply by daydreaming in a way that I have not found on any other psychedelic making for a crazy sort of lucid dream / trip during these states of alert sedation. If practiced I am certain that the trip could be controlled almost entirely.

In Conclusion:

LSA goes just as deep as LSD, Mushrooms, Ayahuasca or any other psychedelic you just need to find the right dosage and extract it correctly.

I may just be going crazy or something and I’ve been debating whether or not to post this since I was never sure if these ideas fit on this blog or if they are formulated enough for them to genuinely make sense but I’m going to post this anyway as it’s a theme that’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the more I trip.

The idea that “we are all one” is thrown around quite a bit in the popular culture be it through philosophy, eastern mysticism or general stoner talk and most people have heard similar statements somewhere but despite this people rarely bother to define what exactly it is that they mean by this statement in simple, clear cut terms without using vague analogy’s and bullshit mysticism so this short article right here is an attempt at describing my very basic understanding of exactly why it is that all people seem to think we are completely one with the universe and what that even means. So be warned, I may be about to try and write philosophy while high.

First of all to explain this I’m going to have to talk about the distinction between the body and the self and where the self lies in order to help me explain this fully. Most people feel that who they are as a person is not their body or its unconscious functions but instead the few parts that they have conscious control over i.e the thoughts that they think and the decisions that they make using them but if you analyze this a little closer it quickly becomes apparent that it is a completely arbitrary distinction since although you are conscious of your thoughts after they have been thought you do not have any kind of control over the decision to think them in the first place. For example lets say you consciously choose to reach out your left hand, it may feel like you decided to reach out your hand but did you decide to make the decision to reach out your hand? No, of course you didn’t, it just happened unconsciously in a way that is just as “out of our control” as your beating heart or breathing lungs.
We are not simply just an ego trapped inside of a body but are infact the whole body in itself, every tiny cell, neuron and synapse of it. Just because these things are not performed by the limited conscious faculties of your brain does not mean they are not performed by you as the everyday distinction that we use simply doesn’t make sense when analyzed closely.

Now that we’ve established that we are not our ego and that the distinction between the mind and body is completely arbitrary I’m going to talk about the distinction between the Self and the Other which is something that is thought by most to be yet another obviously clear cut line. It’s generally considered that the self is you as a person and the other is anything that is not physically a part of you or your body but lets think about this for a quick moment, say we were to try and accurately describe in every way a person who is casually walking across a room. If we were to do this in any level of real detail we would need to start describing not just the person and the way in which they are walking but also the floor beneath their feet and the way in which it interacts with the person making the two things one system of behavior as you cannot describe any system accurately without also describing the interactions it has with the other systems around it and of course the systems around those. But it does not stop at people walking and it certainly does not stop at the floor. All things in existence that interact with anything else all define each other as the physical laws of this universe simply do not allow for any truly independent systems or an obvious place in which we can put a “cut-off line” this extends indefinitely across the entire universe making it all one unified system of behavior as opposed to a serious of separate unrelated events as to truly know one thing you must know all others.
In simple terms this means that although you are a part of the universe the universe is also a part of you as every single component of this reality is something that we are equally as intertwined with as we are with our mind and body.

These two deeply embedded illusions of separateness are the result of the fact that our ego cannot see from the vantage point of anything but itself and that we are all raised into a lack of understanding of the implications of some basic logic.
The use of the ego as a concept is still an obviously useful symbol for communication and language in much the same way that the abstract concept of your name is but the problem however is that we seem to naturally forget that this is all it is and begin to take the symbol too seriously.

This is what I think people are talking about when they refer to being “one with the universe” and it is not a drug induced experience but a simple perception switch that I’d highly recommend, one of the biggest reasons people feel like aliens in this world is because they automatically designate themselves as seperate without even considering the alternative. There is no difference between the self and the other as assuming everything I just wrote makes sense, conscious beings are not separate, they are the universe looking into itself. The universe is writing this article through me on one end and reading it on another end through you.

TL;DR - The distinction between the mind and body is completely arbitrary and the distinction between the body and the rest of the universe is also completely meaningless. Therefore everything is you and you are everything.

“and if I am my foot, I am the sun.”