outlandish

Do you intend to take 400µg of LSD, 1P-LSD or ALD-52? Because 400µg of any of those substances should be a good and very strong dose. But 400µg of ETH-LAD is probably too much, and 400µg of AL-LAD will be a little less than really powerful. I've heard of psychedelic guides/facilitators/tripsitters, there are a few around in my city, but I'm not sure how common they are in other parts of the world. I couldn't agree more with @iTommy's recommendations.

It's interesting to note that some form of fasting is a part of nearly every spiritual practice/religion. Lent, Ramadan, Yom Kippur. Theravada Buddhists do intermittent fasting during meditation retreats, various Hindu sects practice various fasts.. and so on.

Yes 1-1.5g is perfect for a fest, much better than boozing. Good idea to break it up into 3 doses too. Be warned that it won't get you into a similar vibe as your drinking friends though, it will make them look like chimpy-clowns, but as long as you don't take things too seriously that should be fine. You'll be going to a higher level and they will be going down a notch, but you can have some laughs with them and meet in the middle for sure.

@Mikael89 No I know you didn't say alien, I was just jokingly referencing the meme there, you know, because .. aliens. The real core reason I locked that thread was because UFO is not a topic that is included in Meditation, Consciousness, Enlightenment, Spirituality, nor is it a topic that is included in any of the other sub-forum (or I would have moved it to the appropriate sub-thread). If it matters to you, I actually came across that same video clip yesterday or something and found it very intriguing. It's just not the sort of thing we focus on here.

Also because when you speak in a second language, you are coming in with a different way of using that language, vs. a native speaker - because of influence from your mother tongue, or other languages, or quirky vocabulary that you've picked up during learning the new language. So to native speakers it can look very fresh and interesting. I became decent at Portuguese for a while, and people often thought I was really well studied at it. But it was mostly an illusion because I was directly converting words and structure from English, Spanish, French and ended up using vocabulary that's rare in Portuguese. This made me sound more eloquent, but it was really just the product of me squeezing expression out of my particular limited resources. Another factor is that when using a non-mother tongue, the words come out more slowly, and this buys more time to build a thoughtful sentence.

Yes, a lot of those people went to the Very Famous University near Boston, and the Very Famous Technology School near there. haha. Funny how this discussion has veered lol sorry @Flatworld Crusades, interesting though.

Yeah I never noticed you weren't a native english speaker until this thread, good chameleon. I really think Spanish would have made a better lingua franca for the planet, but here we are.. At least english does away with gendered nouns and has simpler conjugations.

@Mikael89 if you feel that thread was unjustly locked, feel free to contact another mod and make your case. I don't mean that facetiously at all. I wouldn't object to it being unlocked, I just don't see how it's related to the purpose of this forum. It get's into the territory of one of the things that's explicitly not allowed on this forum: Discussing conspiracy theories. Anyways, cool if you're just dropping it. Respect Yes, discussing that alien will be much more fruitful.

I know what you're saying, don't be upset, there is no perfect justice especially when it comes to internet forums. In this case, this thread slips under the radar because it has the pretence of tying it in with philosophy. Your thread was just a UFO sighting report, which isn't anything to do with Meditation, Consciousness, Enlightenment or Spirituality.

The Americans I met were in California (agreed it's an amazing state), but a lot of them were coming from elite colleges, very privileged families, and yes many originated from the East coast. My hunch is that amongst this group of people, it might have been a residue of some class-ism/caste that exists in the USA. I wouldn't call my friends there racist at all, but I think they might have come from a culture that in their parent's generation looked down on Spanish as a "lower" language - a prejudice which I think in their case they have transcended. I can kind of understand basic French but that stand up was way over my head. Dutch seems like it wouldn't be too hard for English speakers to pick up. Not that I speak it, it just sounds a bit closer to English than any other language.

I've always been surprised how many people in the USA learn French. It seems like the logical language to learn would be Spanish, but so many people opt for French. It's a lovely language, but Spanish is so much easier to learn and more widely spoken, especially in the americas. Good choice with guy #2. Nurses are cool.

Oh yeah Kauai had a lot of tourist and military helicopters too, munitions tests, military jets doing exercises. A really jarring juxtaposition against all the natural splendour. Nonetheless, it's a really beautiful and bountiful place. @Thabit Al-khateeb I'm really glad you liked it! What a great snapshot into an unusual and inspiring life.

Yeah you have to rent it for a couple of bucks or buy it, via the link. I ended up with a promo code to watch it for free but can't remember where I got it from will update here if I find it. @kieranperez @Leo Gura

No I don't mean identification with the self. I mean raw unwavering unconditional love, to a degree that it rare or absent in all other arenas of human interaction. The kind of love that you can't will into being. I sense that you aren't a parent. People who haven't had kids have ideas like like this; once you've had children you'll know what I'm talking about. There are many instances in history where children have been taken from their parents in order to raise them in "higher" environments. This happened in Canada, NZ, Australia with First Nations people (in the USA they just wiped them out for the most part). It also happened in Victorian England with mothers and families deemed unfit to raise children. Children were placed (with the best intentions!) in group settings to be raised by experts, away from their parents. It has never gone well.

Yeah honestly I can't see how it would ever be a good idea to take children away from parents and raise them by experts. That's been tried a lot in the past and has never gone very well. You can't spontaneously recreate the unconditional love that parents naturally feel for their children.

This is the scenario in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World too iirc. Instead of birthers there are technological "wombs". Lower caste children are created for manual labour by adding a bit of alcohol to the growth tank. Children are raised in group nurseries by expert caregivers. It's a pretty interesting thought experiment to read.

Wow this thread was really going off the rails, I'm impressed to see that it's swung back on track. Yeah I really notice the heavy male presence on this forum too, and am a bit uncomfortable at times with the overbearing sausage fest on certain topics. I'd love to see us men leave a bit more space in the discussion for women, but not sure if there's practically any way to encourage or nudge that behaviour, aside from bringing it up from time to time in threads like this. It's always really nice to hear the ladies' voices on here.

Nice report @kieranperez ! Good work in your trip, you didn't shy away from anything. @Shaun yes you could have a trip like this on mushrooms, but it really depends on how you attune to the trip and flow with it, and what material you have to work on. There is so much interplay in psychedelics - LSD didn't give him this trip directly per se - as in the content of kieran's trip wasn't contained within the blotter tab. The drug facilitated the headspace that allowed this trip to happen. Mushrooms could do that too, but it would be different; you can't step in the same river twice.

I haven't done salvia, but I get the sense that their similarities are superficial. Salvia sounds a lot more disorienting, terrifying and hallucinatory than 5-MeO-DMT. They affect completely different receptor sites on your neurons as well.

@ColdFacts could you do us all a favour and re-read your posts before you submit? It's a bit difficult to read your writing. Clean it up a little bit please and thank-you! Yes you make a very important point, maybe an insight on psychedelics is a delusion. It's a valid question to ponder and ask yourself after a trip. That's why it's really important to take plenty of time for reflection and integration after a trip, and ask yourself whether that thing you experienced, saw, thought is a valid insight, or just noise. You seem skeptical of the mystical stuff that people experience on psychedelics, and fair enough, a lot of that is pretty far out. I'd like to offer you a very down-to-earth example of psychedelic insight, in hopes showing you that they can indeed bring extremely useful insight. I had to sell my house, and we interviewed 3 realtors to do the job, A, B, and C. Realtors A and B both said we could get the same price for the home, but C thought we could get $120 000 more than A and B. She seemed like a bit of a crazy flake, and I thought we would have problems listing it so high, and that the sensible thing to do would be to go with the consensus and get realtor A or B to work for us. When I (luckily) took a mushroom trip a few days later it became very obvious that the personality and vibe of realtor C would actually be able to pull this off, and that we should go with her. We did, and came out 120 grand richer for it. If I had taken sleeping pills instead, I wouldn't have had that insight. But that kind of thing is the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah I was thinking that you could argue suicide is an ego-survival strategy for the reason you just explained @Inliytened1

@ColdFacts No I'm not saying that you said we had a perfect sense of reality. You don't need to be so defensive, I'm not attacking you. Your previous message simply said that: "No professional in either science or human physiology will agree on anything you said". My underlying point was that we don't perceive a perfect sense of reality, which is something that I'm quite certain almost any well educated professional in science or human physiology would agree about. Therefore I argue that your statement that "no professional in either science or human physiology will agree on anything you said" is incorrect. I'm not trying to say that psychedelics give us a better perception. It's a different perception. It's a different and extremely useful mode of experiencing reality. It's like a telescope. No one would say that a telescope is a better way to look at the world. It's just different and extremely useful for looking at the stars. Analogously, psychedelics are extremely useful for looking at the mind. If you don't believe it, that's fine, no one is going to force you to take psychedelics!

Suicide. Or complete, full ego death.

Which part(s) do you think they disagree with? I have a pretty strong science background in science myself (technically I am a "Scientist" professionally), and most of my friends come out of the sciences. I'd say that most anyone who's studied biology, the brain, perception is aware that as humans we don't somehow have a perfect sense of an objective reality. Common optical illusions are the easiest way to prove this point.

@ColdFacts Unlike anaesthetics, psychedelics don't stop information from entering your brain. They open your brain way up and amplify the information entering your mind, reduce filtering conditioning, and categorizing. It also amplifies connections between different thought-areas and reveals or enhances underlying patterns that you normally unconsciously ignore. On the side of caution: Psychedelics can show you patterns were there are in fact none, which you could mistake for being objectively real. They can leave you over-exposed to negative or unsafe environment, or amplify negative thought patterns if you go choose to dwell on them. This is why everyone talks about the importance of set and setting. And why psychedelic experiences need to be tempered with plenty of sober reflection and integration. Yet we know from experiments in perception, optical illusions, cognitive bias, that our default mode of consciousness is flawed and we there is no such thing as undistorted information processing. Our brains/minds/egos distort information and interpret it as convenient to its near range survival, full stop. Psychedelics consciousness isn't superior to the default mode crafted by evolution over the millions of years that built up to modern homo sapiens. It's just different, and many of us find it extremely useful and productive to occasionally turn down the egoistic categorization of reality, lower the filters, and turn up the inputs.