PsiloPutty

I think they are human beings with beautiful potential, just like any other human. I try to not assume, guess or judge anything about someone, especially using arbitrary criteria like how much money they have in the bank.

Are you still thinking about a mushroom journey? I left you a long post in that thread from last week.

I'm happy the way things turned out, so I think I'd just smile at the old me, give me a comforting hug, tell me that everything will be OK and leave it at that.

Good post there, and it makes a lot of sense. I'm excited to have this new meditation outlet. I look forward to it every day.

I've been doing ~40 minutes of Vipassana meditation a day for the past couple months (started with 20 mins) and I can already see that this is going to be a part of my life now. Given its hopeful permanence in my life, I want to do it correctly, which leads me to a few questions. 1) Let's say you're meditating and a thought about work pops into your mind, and it's a thought that stirs up a little twinge of panic. With Vipassana, are you supposed to: A) Whisper "feeling.....feeling" in your mind, wait for the thought/emotion to leave and then return to breath focus? or B) Whisper "feeling....feeling" in your mind, actually examine the emotion and label it (fear, dread, despair, etc) and then wait for it leave before returning to breath focus? 2) Is it a bad idea to use the Vipassana technique to fall asleep at night? It does work for me, but if it's going to eventually interfere with my daytime meditation time by having my mind associate meditation with falling asleep, I obviously will stay away from doing it at night. 3) If I've been into my meditation for 20 minutes or so and become conscious that my posture has slouched some from my starting point and it eventually becomes a bit uncomfortable, should I keep coming back to the label of "feeling....feeling" when the back pain fires again, or should I just take 1 second to fix my posture? Thank you for reading.

Thank you again to everyone who posted. Great information all over in this thread, but it does underscore to me the fact that too much reading, researching and parsing is probably not a good idea for a novice, because it would in a lot of cases discourage them from pursuing the activity after getting overwhelmed in details and conflicting ideas. I think I remember watching one of Leo's videos that talked about the dangers of too much academic research, especially without a solid practice foundation already built up. I'm an obsessively curious person, though, and my method is usually exhaustive research, so it might be a challenge to just roll with it on my own, but I feel really good after my meditations, so for the time being I don't think I can be screwing things up too badly. A good point was made about not labeling pain as "pain." Maybe just labeling it as "feeling" would be a more neutral descriptor.

Well, shoot. Now I'm confused because I thought the labelling aspect was an integral part of Vipassana. I'm not actually whispering anything. I edited my opening post to make that clearer just now. Thank you for posting!

Space, thank you so much for using your time to help me. I'm now getting a sharper idea of why we label. Like the first fella said, I'll learn a lot at my first Vipassana retreat, which is in May.

It's my pleasure! I'm happy to have found it and given it a chance.

Thanks, brother. Yes, I meant that I whisper the labels to myself in my mind, not aloud. I do have a week-long Vipassana retreat scheduled in May and I'm looking forward to it, even though the thought of all that meditating is intimidating to me, mainly because it's still fairly foreign to me and I've never done more than 45 minutes a day. Thank you again for your time. It helped!

Synchronicities come to me when I'm on the right path in life. I think of it as the universe whispering to me and showing me that life is as close to genuine magic as anything my earthly mind can embrace.

Damn, are you smoking your cannabis or eating it? What you describe sounds like the wild confusion people sometimes get from eating cannabis. That's rhetorical; I know you said that you smoke it, but that's not a common reaction from smoking it. I'd either give up the pot entirely, or refrain from doing it before meditating. And no, you're not going to die from cannabis.

You're very welcome. I love talking about this. Yeah, if 2g didn't do much, I'd just say the heck with it and go with the famed "Heroic Dose" which is 5g, but if 4g sounds less frightening, then do that. Whatever method you use, do it after fasting for 6 hours. Food in your stomach will delay the effects and increase your chance of feeling nauseated or throwing up. Some folks love doing mushroom tea, but it never works as well for me as actually consuming the mushrooms. I got fed up with the tea method after raising the dose again and again and still not getting the effect of eating them, so I'm done with that intake method, but there's not much to it: heat up 1 or 2 cups of water (however much you'd like to drink), put the hot water in a coffee mug, finely grind up your bone-dry mushrooms until it's fine like baby powder in a coffee grinder, empty out a couple regular tea bags and then add the mushroom powder to the empty bags and let them steep in your mug of hot water for 20 minutes, squeezing the bags from time to time to ensure that the actives in the mushrooms are getting into the water.....and drink it. That's straight mushroom tea. The method I've found to work better than any other is to grind up the mushrooms as described before, put them in an empty coffee mug, add 2 ounces of real lemon juice, stir it up a few times while 20 minutes passes.....and drink it all down at the 20-minute mark. This is called the Lemon Tek method. It's nasty-lookin' shit, with a taste to match, and you might have to do it little by little to keep from gagging, which is why I keep the volume of what I need to drink to a minimum. The lemon juice activates or potentiates the psilocybin, making the trip start faster than other consumption methods. It's thought that the citric acid in lemon juice converts the psilocybin into psilocin, a process which would happen in your body anyway, even without the lemon juice, but since the lemon juice does it while the mushrooms are in the mug, your body doesn't need to bother with it, thus making the effects appear faster. I always do my psychedelic journeys alone at home. If you have a very trusted friend who's willing to sit in a different room and only tend to you if you call out for them, that's OK too. You definitely want some privacy, though. I talk outloud, chant, sing and all sorts of shit that would be disturbing to a sober person in the house, especially if they're unfamiliar with seeing someone on a therapeutic dose of psilocybin. Having a newbie tripsitter is NOT advised. It would be a new experience for you both, and you want at least one of you to have an idea of what's going on. "What to do" during a trip: I like to meditate in the dark after I drink my mushrooms, and I keep doing that even while I can feel the trip starting. Don't worry about not getting deep enough into meditation; if you're like me, you'll be too jazzed up to get as deep as during a regular meditation session. The point is just to calm your mind in preparation for the experience. When it becomes difficult to continue meditating after the trip starts, because of what I'm seeing (eyes always closed), hearing and feeling, I talk to the mushroom, expressing my gratitude, asking for its help, its guidance and frankly, its mercy. Might be kooky to do that, but I'm not at all convinced that mushrooms aren't a doorway into another dimension, accompanied by some kind of alien intellect. It's not necessary to believe what I believe as far as the alien intelligence goes, but you DO have to surrender yourself to it and acknowledge that you're in the direct presence of something that has it in its power to beat you up mentally if you're too cocky about it and try to exert control over it. That's what I like about the higher doses - they automatically put you in the passenger seat. At low doses, your ego is very much intact and it is petrified to relinquish control. Low doses can be a lot more challenging than higher doses for that very reason; your ego can fight and kick around and cause something of a rotten trip. Your ego is ushered into a waiting room in some ways during a 5g+ trip, and you are more apt to just lay there and surrender, which is when the mushroom can stretch out and do the driving. That's not to say that you for sure won't have challenging periods on a therapeutic dose; you sure may, but it's all a part of it. It's Yin and Yang. When I have a rough time, I fall back on Terence McKenna's advice of sitting up in bed and chanting or singing. It oxygenates your brain and can really free up a mental log jam. The last trip I had, I got stuck early on, started chanting and even after I felt better, I kept up with the chanting for 2 full hours because it felt so good and needed for some reason. I didn't know from one moment to the next what sounds were going to come out of my mouth. It was as liberating and cathartic as anything I've done in my almost 50 years on earth. Anyway, your fear is normal and GOOD. It signifies that you're serious about it and that you understand that you'll have to drop the reins and surrender to something very different than you've ever experienced. Again, you will still be you afterward. Even while it's happening, you'll still have the ability to go to the restroom, drink water and such, although you should stay in bed as much as possible. If you're like most people, the trip comes in waves. There will be times when the surf's up and all you can do is stay put and absorb what it's showing you, but there will also be low-tide times when you can go pee, drink some water or whatever for a couple minutes before the tide returns. I usually have 3 solid hours of heavy tripping before it begins to leave, but don't plan on leaving the house or doing anything too normal for 6 hours. If you can summon the courage to do this, it'll likely rank among the most important, and profound activities you have ever engaged in. The potential for personal growth in such a short timeframe is completely unparalleled. All it takes is true courage, curiosity and an explorer's sense of adventure. I sure wrote a shit of a lot there. I hope you read it all and find it useful.

Have you watched any of Leo's talks on the topic on YouTube? I've found them tremendously helpful to get the ball rolling and to come back to when I feel myself slipping back into being the person that society and culture want me to be. Any hell yes, the poster above mentioned meditation, which is one of the biggies. Leo also has a number of great meditation videos, if that's something new to you.

I was thinking Dennis and Terence McKenna had another brother. I was curious to hear what his method of mushroom ingestion was. Anyway, free bump for your thread.

Lynnel, what's your experience with psychedelics? I hope it's fair for me, based on what you've posted, to assume that you haven't done them often or in non-recreational doses. Unless you've got some mental instability going into it, you're EXTREMELY unlikely to get stuck in some kind of foggy purgatory. They certainly can change the way you think about yourself, your past, your problems, other people, the world and life in general, but we're talking about slight nuances in cognitive changes here; you'll still be "you" when it's over. You won't be stuck in the matrix. Since you mentioned that you're researching psilocybin mushrooms (one of my passions), what dose are you contemplating? If personal growth is the intention here, let's rule out just taking a recreational dose of 2 dried grams or less. It's possible to gain insight on those lower doses, but for myself and most other folks who are doing it for more than funny thoughts and cool colors, the potential pot of gold lies in the 3 to 6 dried gram dose. It may look and sound like quite a bit, but stay conscious of the comforting fact that millions upon millions of human beings have taken that dose before you and come out the better for it. Also, if you're a newbie to mushrooms, know that they're almost always kind to 1st-timers, especially if your set and setting is positive and calm. It's hard to not fret and bog yourself down beforehand with what-if scenarios, but it's like getting on a rollercoaster for the first time; you can talk yourself out of it, but after it's over, you'll be glad you did it, you'll realize that you displayed a rare and genuine courage, and you'll learn something about who you are. If you have any questions, ask away. Like I said, this is one of my passions, and I've obsessively researched the topic and I apply the knowledge and practice to my own life often.