Psychonautica020 OUT NOW

[dopefiend]

In the 20th installment of psychonautica, Max Freakout talks about a recent podcast by kmo about meditation and psychedelics, and the recent dopecast Amsterdam meetup. Then in response to listener emails, Max talks about salvia divinorum addiction and safety issues, the importance of 'set' in the outcome of a psychedelic experience, the medicinal use of various psychoactive drugs, entheogenic plants as a 'trojan horse' to Western societies from shamanic cultures, vaporizing DMT successfully in a herbalair vaporizer and the 'afterglow' of the DMT breakthrough. Topics raised in the psychonautica forum are also discussed, such as smokable DMT extracts, cultivating Salvia Divinorum and exotic strains of psilocybe mushroom, ayahuasca analogues, the chemical similarity of psilocybin to DMT, the distinction between mycophobic and mycophilic cultures and finally the relation of psychedelics to sexuality. Email Maxfreakout@dopefiend.co.uk leave comments, Skype us, and join the ever-growing Psychedelic community hanging out at the forum (http://www.thegrowreport.com/Forums/../).

Playlist: Kruder and Dorfmeister - High noon; Legion of Green men - Beyond the borderless

Direct download: Psychonautica020.mp3 (http://media.libsyn.com/media/dopecast/Psychonautica020.mp3)

[dopefiend]

Another beauty of a show! I have a few points to make on this:

HerbalAire and DMT: The HerbalAire does have the option of an additional bag inflation unit, but I'm guessing that the guy who emailed probably just used the standard unit, which has a very small teflon tube from which you inhale, so it really makes it ideal for vaporizing stuff that carries a risk of quick condensation (like DMT). The Happy Vappy is almost identical, so that'd work too.

Salvia cultivation: from the stuff that I've read, Llama may have salt build-up in his salvia plant and the soil it's in. You need to leech the salt out by over-watering for a while and allowing the excess water to drain. Full details are on sagewisdom.org (http://www.sagewisdom.org), that's where I got it from.

Ayahuasca: Shaman or no shaman?: Interesting point about how mushrooms are almost always taken without expert supervision while there is a common belief that ayahuasca isn't as effective without a shaman. The points you make about tourist-shamans being dodgy is a good one- there are many so-called "chicken shamans" in south america jumping on the bandwagon, but as I understand it, a true curandero can help you get much more out of an ayahuasca session than these characters and can make it far more worthwhile than a solo home-style trip. Though I have no experience of either, I just gleam all that from my reading on the subject!

Finally, if there are any czechs listening they're probably gritting their teeth in anger! Czechoslovakia no longer exists since the Czech Republic became independent many years ago!

Great stuff max, I'm a fan of your solo shows, so don't fret too much about your internet connection gripes!

[Podders]

Hey Max,

Great podcast again man, as a keen mycophile I'm reminded of my time in Liguria, northern Italy, I know one place where you can eat EIGHT courses, each course mushroom/fungus based.

Liguria is the most heavily wooded "county" in Italy and has excellent food.

Big lovers of fungi here in Spain too, my neighbour will often drop me a carrier bag full of tasty fungi, add olive oil, lots of garlic and ground black pepper and you're in heaven.

[Xochipilli2012]

Max, mi Hermano!

Great show! I appreciate the advice about mimosa hostilis - I have zero experience with plant-based DMT. Mine have always been with lab-produced stuff, and those were many years ago. For the first 4 or 5 tries, I had sub-crossover experiences, and they were pretty cool. And I'd have to agree with you--unless you know what a full-blown DMT space breakthrough experience is like, you could still be pretty impressed with what a low-dose of DMT can do. But...as you well-know, nothing compares to the DMT-breakthrough. Really high doses of shrooms have had moments that came close, but kissing cousin DMT's world is a mystery all unto itself. I encountered Terence's Alien Dreamtime about 10 years after those experiences, and the "not giving way to astonishment" stuff is so right on.

FWIW, Ronin Ayahuasca is something I made up. I should have been more clear about that. It is more likely that I'll be experimenting with that before I ever get to the Amazon, but I respect what Dopefiend has read and what others more experienced have said--that a really skilled curandero could bring something special and important to the experience. On the flip-side, there may be something to bringing structure and/or ritual motifs into a mushroom experience that could be a of great benefit.

I have a entertainment law friend in the Sacramento area of California who meets at her place once each month with a group of other "professionals" (including a couple MDs, another lawyer, a couple relationship counselor types) where a "shaman" facilitates the experience. The shaman is an American woman who has been to the Amazon and supposedly had some training there...but the fact that they all pay her $300 each for the privilege each month makes me wonder. I've been invited to participate, but I'm not sure that's where my first ayahuasca journey should happen. I'd love to hear from anyone else in the U.S. who is doing state-side work like this, and if they are paying that kind of money Maybe it's "normal" and I'm just under-valuing the total package, including the "guidance" of the shaman.

I cringed a bit when you mentioned my starting the "suggested future topics thread" because I was "getting sick" of hearing about Hoffman's ego death theory...feeling a bit like a party pooper. But you know me Max, it's true. :o That notwithstanding, I found the contributions to that thread, as you did, very illuminating. And the planned focus on self-control cybernetics should prove interesting.

The whole psychedelic sex arena is pregnant with possibilities. (GROANNNNN!!!! I'll be here all week, folks!) :eek: The idea of "little death" meaning orgasm in French was something I was familiar with from reading...and I often thought of the connection in Astrology between Death and Sex for 8th House stuff to be rather archetype-ically revealing.

Being somewhat Amsterdam-challenged, I wasn't aware of "magic truffles" until I heard you, DF, and others mentioning them on your podcasts. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I quickly learned you guys were talking about the sclerotia of P. Mexicana. Wow! Intriguing stuff... I had thought about growing P. Tampanensis (another species known for sclerotia formation) once upon a time, but never got around to it. For our amateur mycologists out there, The Shroomery has a nice article on growing these puppies (http://www.shroomery.org/8420/Psilocybe-mexicana-P-tampanensis-sclerotia). Thank the Goddess for The Shroomery! I've never had the pleasure, but you have most definitely piqued my curiosity.

More good wishes on getting the solid home internet connection sorted out. Sounds like your girlfriend's around; that's got to make the whole transition a lot more bearable. ;)

Nicely done sir!

Peace.

[TirikiteToker]

Great stuff as always Max.

I'd like to respond to your comments on Santo Daime, and ayahuasca compared to mushrooms.

I have personally experienced a Santo Daime "work" (report here (http://tirikitetoker.livejournal.com/#tirikitetoker3599)), and although it was in Japan without any Brazilian group leaders there, I think I can comment with a bit of confidence on this topic. My feeling for Santo Daime is that it is not shamanic per se. It is much more of a community or congregation of followers working through the experience together. While there are senior members of the congregation, I don't think their role resembles that of a shaman at all. As a first-timer I may have been allowed a lot of leeway in my behaviour, but my only interactions with the senior members of the congregation were receiving the ayahuasca (in a manner akin to receiving the sacrament in church), being advised as to how to move in the dance-circle, and being encouraged to get up and join the dance when I was sitting and tripping out (but they didn't push at all). The "sick-buckets" at our ritual stayed in their corners and people looked after themselves.

The main activity in a Santo Daime work is the continuous singing of songs and circle-dancing. This brings the group's attention into harmony which is a wonderful experience. There are lots of tales of group-mind, telepathy and so on, with all psychedelics but especially ayahuasca. The focus of the work is emotional healing and the group dynamic is a very important part of this. When one enters the darker periods of an ayahuasca journey, I imagine it would be harder to come through that alone than in a group, whether it was a shaman-guided group or a group-healing-oriented, music-anchored Santo Daime work.

I do feel that group-consciousness is a very important part of the ayahuasca experience. Since discovering this way of taking psychedelics - in a group, with some ritual and/or music to give a semblance of stability to guide the trip - I definitely find it preferable to solo tripping. If there was a similar traditional mushroom group experience going on I'd certainly be interested.

This is not to say that solo or non-traditional ayahuasca use can't be beneficial. I've read a couple of such reports which sounded very worthwhile. But generally speaking as ayahuasca comes from a tradition of group experiences, and most people experience it in that way and enjoy the group-mind experience, it's easy to see why most ayahuasca users would see that as the preferred method. It's probably beneficial to take ayahuasca alone, but you would be missing out on the group experience. In the case of Santo Daime, it would be very hard to have that sustained trance-inducing musical/dance experience without a whole bunch of people to keep it going.

As for the pharmacological comparison of mushrooms and ayahuasca, it should be noted that allowing DMT to get through first-pass metabolism is not the only effect of MAOIs. They also have their own psychoactive effects. The article "The Ayahuasca Effect (http://www.matrixmasters.com/blog/2007/01/ayahuasca-effect-worlds-most-powerful.html)" talks about the way ayahuasca works on the neurochemistry of the brain, and how this works to facilitate emotional healing. (BTW The author of the article describes their own ayahuasca experience - solo, at home.)

Relevant quotes:
"When someone takes ayahuasca they are taking four chemicals, harmine, harmaline, tetrehydroharmine, and DMT.... Ayahuasca is both a serotonin and dopamine agonist at the same time. The other visionary substances are generally one or the other, ayahuasca is both at the same time. It activates more areas of the brain at once by affecting GABA through more than one modulating neurotransmitter. The result is more of the brain becomes activated in a better balance than if just one or the other of the modulating neurotransmitters was activated by another single channel GABA inhibiting hallucinogen."

"It is significant that ayahuasca acts on more than one modulating neurotransmitter, that it increases neural activity in a more even and coordinated way than other hallucinogens. Because of this there is far less disturbance of the intricate processing and transfers of information between different areas of the brain. The rising tide of neural activity raises all boats, brain systems as it were. The result is all systems continue to function together in much the same way they normally would. The person hallucinates and has a disinhibited thought process, but that process remains internally coherent without serious delusional processes or breakdown of the personality. Thought and cognition of the internal and external environments remains essentially intact. With other hallucinogens the imbalances brought about by less even regulation of the GABA system produce conditions where some areas of the brain are out of processing sync with others, resulting in more common instances of delusional thinking and loss of touch with reality, which rarely occurs with ayahuasca. "

PS I have an interesting report on the way for you - I recently smoked some DreaMTime blend with a friend.

[scaredstraight]

Great stuff for sure, Max.

I'll be doing a bit of research on those 'truffles' as they sound like an amazing way to go about things for those of us with less space and even less time. Probably have a place at work (high security location of which only I have access to) that I can grow loads of shrooms, and even more 'truffles.'

Addressing the S-E-X topic is great step! No need for embarrassment as everyone does it unless their dead, comatose, or really 'FUGLY.' Nah, ugly people do it too. If you need sources, you might go to iTunes podcasts and peruse the past episodes of Sex Is Fun, Open Source Sex, Kinky Sex Radio, Fetish Flame, Polyamory Weekly, The Ropecast and the Sex History Show. All of these shows have something to offer, and if you just type in a search for 'SEX' under the podcast category you'll find a number of other possiblities that include keywords like tantra, kama sutra, consciousness, etc. Listening to these, and knowing that other Psychonautica listeners may be listening, might get you over the hump when it comes to embarrassment over the subject.;) A great number of these podcasters are willing to do interviews, and may wish to use the material themselves.

By the way, just ask if you would like any assistance in gathering sources, materials, etc. I might even be willing to do a little 'stringing' on the subject. I used to (in a former life) be a broadcaster in radio and television, and could attempt to gather some info if you tell me what your looking for. I'd wager that Xochipilli2012 might add a bit as well, if asked.

[max_freakout]

HerbalAire and DMT: The HerbalAire does have the option of an additional bag inflation unit, but I'm guessing that the guy who emailed probably just used the standard unit, which has a very small teflon tube from which you inhale,

Yes anslinger emailed me back right after the podcast came out and said exactly that, he was using it without the bag and was apparently not having problems with recondensation


Salvia cultivation: from the stuff that I've read, Llama may have salt build-up in his salvia plant and the soil it's in. You need to leech the salt out by over-watering for a while and allowing the excess water to drain. Full details are on sagewisdom.org (http://www.sagewisdom.org), that's where I got it from.

Right! i was wondering about that, the way llama described it was as if it was a really tricky problem, but ive been growing salvia for years and never had any problem at all


Ayahuasca: Shaman or no shaman?: Interesting point about how mushrooms are almost always taken without expert supervision while there is a common belief that ayahuasca isn't as effective without a shaman. The points you make about tourist-shamans being dodgy is a good one- there are many so-called "chicken shamans" in south america jumping on the bandwagon, but as I understand it, a true curandero can help you get much more out of an ayahuasca session than these characters and can make it far more worthwhile than a solo home-style trip. Though I have no experience of either, I just gleam all that from my reading on the subject!

I gleaned that distinction about shamans and ritual from Ralph Metzner, as he has written a whole book about mushrooms and one about ayahuasca

a trip with a proper shaman present is something i have yet to experience, but it didnt seem to me like there was any limit to how deep one can go just tripping alone, id like to know what the shamans actually do during the trip that is beneficial to the experience



Finally, if there are any czechs listening they're probably gritting their teeth in anger! Czechoslovakia no longer exists since the Czech Republic became independent many years ago!

:o oops :o


Great stuff max, I'm a fan of your solo shows, so don't fret too much about your internet connection gripes!

:cool: