DOSE:	12.5 g	oral	Banisteriopsis caapi	(tea)
	1.0 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis	(tea)
		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

120 lb

Psychoactives: 12.5 grams of yellow Banisteriopsis caapi vine in combination with 1.0 grams of dried Psilocybe cubensis taken orally via tea. Cannabis buds were also smoked during this experience but not weighed. No other drugs/herbs were used in the previous 48 hours except for yerba mate and Cannabis.

Previous experience: I am familiar with a wide range of psychedelic substances, using mainly cannabis, mushrooms, salvia and hawaiian baby woodrose. I also have a handful of experiences each with LSD, ecstasy, syrian rue, 2C-I and peruvian torch cactus. This was my first (and so far only) experience using Banisteriopsis caapi. I did not have a sitter for this experience, and usually do not use one. I find I let go better and can access much more profound states of consciousness when not around any other people.

Preparation and context: The month of August I dived headlong into using psychedelics. I had been in a state of semi-constant depression for the previous six months due to breaking up with someone I was desperately in love with. Eventually I decided I needed some serious entheogenic experiences to put my life back together, rediscover the lost thread of meaning and happiness. And if that didn’t work, well I wasn’t sure what I would do then. So in the month prior to this I had taken mushrooms several times and LSD, HBWR, MDMA and mescaline (peruvian torch) twice each. My last trip before this one had been three days previous with a moderate dosage of peruvian torch. It had left me feeling very balanced and maybe, perhaps, ready to venture into the world of ayahuasca brews. I had spent some time on this mescaline trip examining my pieces of caapi vine closely, and infusing them with love and energy.

I usually do not plan my experiences in advance, rather on a particular day I will just feel called to take a particular drug. This trip was no exception. It just felt like the right day to try the caapi vine. My intention was actually to make a true Ayahuasca brew. A final perusal online (as if the last four years of researching ayahuasca wasn’t enough) showed that most people used dosages of 20-30 grams each of B. caapi and Psychotria viridis. I intended to use about 20 grams of caapi and maybe 10-15 grams of Psychotria. No point going off the deep end on a first experience, I thought. I usually like to start off with low dosages of a new substance and then work my way up, as I am physically small and quite sensitive to many drugs.

An hour or so after a light breakfast (paying attention to MAOI contraindictions of course) I took a piece of caapi vine and began breaking and tearing it apart, pausing to lovingly venerate and kiss the pieces broken off the vine before putting them in a pot. I was treating the caapi with a great deal of respect, but I felt this was important. Caapi and ayahuasca is sort of like a holy-grail of psychedelics for me, so I wasn’t going to fuck around. Give the plant the respect it deserves, it surely won’t hurt. Plus I was doing everything I could to try to ensure this trip had a spiritual tone. As I was breaking up my vine, there came a point where no more would break off, no matter how I struggled. This seemed to me to be a very strong message from the spirit of the vine. She was saying to me, “Try this much now, but no more!” I truly felt this was the vine communicating with me, it was a very interesting sensation.

By weighing the remaining vine I determined that exactly 12.5 grams had broken off and been put in the pot. I put some lemon juice in the pot and filled it up with water and started it healing, then went downstairs to get the Psychotria. Then a funny thing happened, something stopped me. I heard a little voice in my head saying “true Ayahuasca with Psychotria is too much for you right now. The time is not right. Use Psilocybe instead.” Well who am I to argue? Guess I will be making psilohuasca, not ayahuasca. I weighed out one gram of mushrooms, actually it was just a single large cap. From previous experiences I knew that one gram of these mushrooms would provide a mild mood enhancing, creativity boosting experience but would not propel me into a strong psychedelic state (eg a Shulgin ++ instead of a +++).

I boiled the caapi on a low simmer for about 45 minutes until the water took on a urine-yellow colour and all the vine was waterlogged. During this time I played Gaudi on my stereo, tribal techno which incorporates Ayahuasca chants in some of their songs. It seemed the only appropriate music. I mumbled along with the music and inhaled the steam of my brew as I slowly crumbled in the mushroom cap. I turned the heat down to a very gentle bubble and let it sit till all the mushrooms were waterlogged. The psilohuasca tea was strained off, and the plant residue put back in the pot with more water and lemonjuice and started reheating.

The experience: When I first tasted the tea I found it oddly bitter but not disgustingly bitter as the cactus tea of three days previous had been. Certainly the taste alone did not seem enough to induce vomitting, and with the addition of honey and rice milk it was actually an almost tolerable beverage. I drained this cup down in about 20 minutes, at which point my second cup of tea had been brewed. This second brewing was a slightly lighter yellow colour, and I had added honey and stevia to sweeten it as well as mint to settle the stomach. This second cup of tea was actually really good, it tasted like a herbal tea I would drink when sick.

I took my second cup of tea downstairs to drink between tokes of marijuana from my trusty bong. I was only about half way through the second cup of tea and the bowl of weed was barely scorched when the psilohuasca hit me, all of a sudden, and it hit me hard. The very first sensation I had was that some very warm, open, caring person had come up behind me and placed their hands on my shoulders. If I was a christian I probably would have called it the touch of God. Being more of a pantheistic shaman, I called it the touch of Ayahuasca. I realized in an instant that the word Ayahuasca is meant to be applied to the caapi vine, as this is the true power of the brew. Caapi is an incredibly strong, powerful, consciously aware entity, as I was now learning. The second sensation to hit me was a completely enveloping, euphoric, ecstatic rush. I gently murmured to myself “ah, Ayahuasca…” as I basked in the sensation. It felt like that same warm, compassionate being was embracing me, filling me up completely with love. All this occurred in the first couple minutes.

The effects continued to climb, almost frightening due to the speed and intensity of onset. There were those feelings of “where is all this going to end?” and “boy, you’ve really done it this time!” that usually preceed a hefty experience. I took another toke from my bong, and it felt absolutely bizarre and alien, sucking out of this strange plumbing-apparatus thing. I reflected that “I may be too high to smoke marijuana”, which for a pothead like me is saying a lot. Nevertheless, I took another large swig of my tea and then proceeded to breathe in more marijuana smoke. As soon as the smoke hit my lungs, I had a sudden strong urge to vomit. Not only that, I realized I had no intention of puking in the toilet. I could feel all this intense energy swirling around in all my chakra centres. As I expelled the smoke, it came with a burp from my stomach. In my by now very high and slightly panicked state I flailed around and then made my way outside into the back yard. I headed straight to an area of dead ground by the back fence, leaned over and purged. As I heaved, it felt like all kinds of negative energy that had been accumulating in my chakras had been drawn out into my stomach. It was this poisonous negative energy that I was now expelling from my body, along with a little bit of my breakfast. Interestingly, no liquid from the tea seemed to come up. The purge was short and not too unpleasant. When I was done I immediately felt vastly better. I wiped my mouth and stared around in delight at my brightly coloured, swirling and shifting psychedelic yard. I was in a state of expanded, exploded, euphoric mind.

I decided to go for a walk to a nearby park. I did not grab a sweater before leaving, which was unfortunate because it was kind of chilly outside. The sensory enhancement and degree of euphoria I was experiencing at this point was almost like that of MDMA, except of course far more psychedelic. I pulled some fuzzy seeds off a clematis plant and had a good time running them over my hand, just feeling the softness. I would release the seeds one by one, and updrafts of wind would carry them off into the sky. I know this sounds a bit strange, but playing with those seeds was very enjoyable and satisfying somehow.

I walked over to one of my favourite spots, an area of grass planted with hawthorn trees and surrounded by bushes and spruce trees. I could see this indentation in the grass from where I had been lying three days previously on mescaline. But I had this interesting phenomena where I could see a perfect outline of where my body had been, and it seemed to be slightly charged with glowing energy and light. It was a subtle effect, and I wasn’t sure if I was really seeing it, or if it was just a depression in the grass. However, it seemed clear this was my claimed spot, and so I sat down in it. I had intended to smoke a bowl here, but was still way too high to do so. Instead I brought out these crystals I had brought with me. I often meditate with these crystals, using them to focus energy through my chakra centres, for which one crystal corresponds to each chakra. I held my blue azurite, yellow amber, green malachite and red carnelian (in that order) in my right hand and an amythest crystal and a small vial of chlorite sand in my left hand. I crossed my hands behind my head and lay down, realizing that this was the proper position for caapi brews. Lying down, eyes closed, in nature.

There was an intense energy buildup and flowering/opening of my third eye and solar plexus chakras. The energy was felt as this extremely high frequency vibrating and pulsing sensations. I could feel the caapi vine communicating with me again, speaking almost audible words in my ear. She told me “I will heal you as much as you need and can stand to be healed.” I was overwhelmed and awed at the power of this plant. The mushrooms in the brew were totally subservient to this powerful caapi consciousness. I realized why the vine had stopped me at 12.5 grams, under the present circumstances it was about all I could handle.

Eventually the caapi peak began to subside, but I was still very high in a different - and stronger - than one gram of mushrooms way. I headed back home as I was getting cold. I thought a lot about the path of my life, coming down and smoking a bowl, and realized I want to learn to practice shamanic healing. Caapi will be able to teach me a lot on this path, giving me access to never before imagined visions and realms. I was very much in awe of this plant, and decided that if anything deserves the label of entheogen it is this vine.

Another thing that surprised me was how different caapi with mushrooms was from syrian rue with mushrooms. I had taken dosages of up to 3 grams of syrian rue with 2 grams of mushrooms, and never had as powerful and spiritual an experience as this. Also, I had never noticed much nausea with syrian rue, whereas caapi made me purge and there was no question of avoiding it. It makes me wonder how much of the caapi purge is actually due to harmala alkaloids, and how much might be due to other unidentified compounds in the plant. Around four hours after starting to drink the tea I was back to a Shulgin ++. I spent a long time listening to music and closely examing each page of my Alex Grey calendar. A dinner of fish and chips went down with no problems. Residual alteration of consciousness was still noticeable a full 12 hours after this experience.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 57698
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Jan 4, 2007	Views: 35,953
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Banisteriopsis caapi (169), Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Alone (16), Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3)