DOSE:

oral

H.B. Woodrose

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

I am interested in psychedelics not so much for their ability to delight, but for their ability to open us beyond the usual limitations of everyday awareness and allow us entrance into and connection with what we might refer to as the Gaian Mind, the fabric of collective consciousness. I became interested in LSA as a legal and readily available alternative to commonly known psychoactives. My conclusions about its efficacy follow. Each of these sessions was conducted alone.

ONE. After removing the outer shells, I crushed five HBW seeds and steeped them in hot water for about 2 hours. During this time I prepared self & space with a little meditation, reading, quiet reflection, and focus of intent. At the time of ingestion, in the early evening, I had not eaten for at least six hours. Shaking the seed-mixture in a sealed container yielded a cloudy gray-white tonic. I drank the mixture, seed-bits and all, followed by a cup of hot herbal tea.

I soon felt the first flickers of psychoactivity, but within thirty-minutes my stomach was grinding itself into a cramped knot, lending to periodic waves of mild nausea. I lay down, almost fetal, calmly observing the sensations. After about a half-hour of fluctuating, immobilizing discomfort, I decided to eat a banana, and immediately began to feel better. Well, yes. Then I vomited. But when I next looked in the mirror, I saw my pupils almost visibly dilating, saucer-wide and glittering a little, accompanied by a crookedish grin, suddenly surprised to find myself in the loopy first frames of psychedelic phase-shift.

The house was bright, mirage-like, and I was so relieved to be beyond sickness, so joy-buzzed and so hungry that I ate an immaculate bowl of honeyed cereal. Feeling much better, I sat to welcome an intensifying trip, but none came, only minor shifts in uneven waves. Hoping to potentiate the experience, I began to smoke shisha (arabic tobacco) from our hookah, which was lovely and leveling, but did little for the mildly unsettling trip, despite attempts to focus with music and intent. Finally I gave up on this spiritual orientation, smoked a bowl, strapped headphones, and relaxed into mind set to circus – the LSA and cannabis definitely harmonized, though not to any exceptional degree. The night ended tranquilly and I slept soundly.

TWO. A year later, hoping for better results with the concentrated substance, I prepared an alcohol extraction, as described elsewhere on Erowid, with 20 seeds. I took half of the resulting LSA-tincture as a shot on an empty stomach, and sat to meditate. Again I soon noticed those first flickers, but within thirty-minutes felt flatly sick. I patiently lay down for a half-hour, then abruptly got up and vomited. I immediately felt fine, with no stoned or sick feeling to speak of, just a little looseness, slightly psychedelic, as if I’d just had a few drinks. This sensation faded within the hour. Finished with the “experiment,” I went for a walk. The timing was fortuitous; I ran into a friend who urgently needed a place to stay, which I was able to provide, and what followed was an unusually synchronistic evening, suggesting that these substances/spirits sometimes work in strange ways…

THREE. Two weeks later, the remaining alcohol tincture had completely evaporated, leaving a greenish residue that I rolled into a little pellet—assumedly an LSA-pill. I took it in the evening, not expecting much. After a half-hour I’d noticed no onset, but began to feel incredibly tired, and decided to cash in early. I fell asleep quickly. An hour later, when I woke up, I was tripping.

With increasingly awareness, I slowly emerged thru several dream-hallucinations. I was the bed of a stream, each pebble, and could feel the water running over me, illuminating me with tactile colors… I was the water, could feel the pebbled stream-bed as I flowed, as I melted continually yet never dissolved… I was a thousand life-streams, or one life-stream, flowing through individual forms, and as I awoke I drifted through as many as twelve distinct persons; their faces were my face, their bodies, the shape of the world in their minds—men, women, of different ages and ethnicities, different times… I had trouble placing exactly who I was among them all, until I emerged into the lucidity of lying half-naked in the summer’s heat, and remembered the LSA I’d taken. Initially I panicked. I still felt exhausted, and now disoriented, reacting, thinking: I’m not ready for This! I can’t do this Now! I don’t have the energy to take this trip! I’m not prepared! But wisdom won me over as I acknowledged that this was the reality of the present moment and I was going to have to roll with it. So I settled in for what became an absolute ordeal…

Though I was very careful in making the extract, it is clear that it was toxic as well as psychoactive. I laid awake for most of the night, mildly tripping in a half-dream that resembled a fever-state because I felt so stomach-sick. I drank water continually, but found it difficult to piss or vomit, though I wanted to. My body seemed to be having trouble flushing the substance thru. I felt that I was being challenged to observe the present moment with equanimity, and accepted this, reflecting on why I had subjected myself to such unnecessary suffering in an alleged attempt to alleviate suffering in the liberation of experiential understanding. Though perhaps I did achieve some measure of that, after all.

Early in the morning I was finally able to drink some tea and sink into an uneasy sleep for a few hours, before I began the next day, ground-down and full of humility.

CONCLUSIONS. What these three experiences reveal is that H.B.Woodrose is not an ally of mine. It may be for others. This significantly diminishes the few positive aspects of the plants’ psychoactivity. Perhaps further exploration will yield new means of potentiating LSA, but until then, I am convinced that it is largely a waste of effort. As Terence McKenna has articulated, psilocybin mushrooms offer the safest, most effective psychoactive compound on the planet.

Most people never travel. They simply transport the mad loop of their brain's thoughts from place to place. To truly travel is to stand on fields of yourself where you have never stood before.
--Speed Levitch

Pleasure alone is merely a temporary indulgence, a subtle distraction, an anesthetization while on the path to something higher, deeper, lower. Eternity lies beyond.
--Toni Bentley

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 50528
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 14, 2006	Views: 29,294
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H.B. Woodrose (26) : Alone (16), Retrospective / Summary (11)