Smart guys please chime in: are eye floaters following shrooms microdose caused by the psilocybin, or does it just make them visible?

[Waynish]

It makes me feel less trapped in those mental prisons.

Ya drugs are fun, hence why so many use them

 

[worrywart]

Ya drugs are fun, hence why so many use them

Nah man. I've taken my fair share of drugs, and most of them don't do anything for my OCD.

 

[worrywart]

Which country is that? Likely that Haidut ships there.

Brazil, unfortunately. I've bought some Idealabs products in the past.

 

[worrywart]

Most people are have their own "mental prison", coming in many ways and forms and weights. Mine is a methaphorical spiral going downwards.
According to this study ( Neural mechanisms underlying psilocybin’s therapeutic potential – the need for preclinical in vivo electrophysiology ), it seems that, if I were to microdose, my spiral would flatten a bit.

Do you have 5 minutes to read it and chime in, in relevance with your experience with it?

If you describe by your own words what you feel and how microdosing makes solves it, someone with more experience/knowlegde on the topic might(maybe not today) join the conversation and add the info you possibly need.

Alright. Great little study there. I was going to quote it and then comment but that would be too much work. I just typed all this stuff and will break it down under titles for readability.


My neurosis is like a videogame map

The downward spiral is a classic way of depicting depression. My verbal IQ is higher than my spatial-mathematical IQ. I'm autistic and slightly schizophrenic, in other words. I tend to think in words. But words are only clumsy tools for describing reality. I tend to think in chains of syllogisms. One image that does emerge for me is a metroidvania map. Metroidvanias in case you don't know them being those sidecrolling games where there's only one gigantic stage you have to traverse and the maps consist of a bunch of interconnected rooms and halls and corridors. And each syllogism is a room leading to another syllogistic room and it's a linear (if tortuous) path from room to room until I fall into the spike pit of despair and catatonia.


The will to truth is a dangerous a thing

I saw a thread on another forum where a lot of guys who were good at math were venting about a similar problem. They jump from conclusion to conclusion until they arrive at a fateful conclusion about reality that is so terrible they lose their will to live. I got very good grades as a kid, but my chaotic home situation ruined that when I was in 6th grade. Maybe if I had studied high school math my neurosis would have assumed this kind of shape. Hannah Arendt talks about this in an essay. The lonely man who thinks too much and inevitably arrives at some idea that leads him to despair. Nietzsche said the "will to truth" is a dangerous thing. The eagerness to stare at the ultimate layer of reality, to uncover the grisly truths.


Top down vs bottom up thinking; my own chain of fateful syllogisms; psilocybin loosens its grip

But I'm getting carried away. The way the study characterizes neurotic thinking as "top down" and healthy thinking as "bottom up" sounds very much like my experience. My mother is German and I think my neuroticism is partly because of that. A friend of mine was once in Austria and he said the dudes there would wait for pedestrian lights to turn green even when crossing the street at 4:00 AM, no cars in sight. Kuehnelt-Leddihn says Northern European Lutherans are scrupulosity-ridden Pharisees while Mediterranean Catholics are more likely to end up in heaven even if they belong to the mafia. Well, I have scrupulosity. I live in a third world country and live on a very modest income but I feel guilty for pirating movies and books. And here we have a chain of syllogisms beginning with Christian metaphysics and apologetics, followed by biblical rules and ecclesiastical verdicts about the Christian's relationship with civil law, and winding up deep into the maze of my country's byzantine legal system. And my sadistic superego keeps running these syllogisms in my head like an overheating computer. It's not my real self doing this, my real self is just observing the entire ordeal. It's my false, neurotic self that is doing it. But I can't stop it from doing it.

Well, the psilocybin somehow silences this merciless, autistic, robotic, hyper-logical superego. I can still hear it running in the background, throwing endless accusations my way and backing them up with adamantine logical arguments, but I simply stop caring. The superego loses its grip on my self. I don't feel anxiety when ignoring it.


Logic vs phenomenology; intellectual property is theft

Say what you will about Olavo de Carvalho, but one point he repeatedly made in his lectures is that you can't be exclusively logical when approaching reality. You need to be phenomenological, to consider the whole of reality, in all its richness and intricacies, instead of blindly chaining up arguments as we are so prone to do. The fact of the matter is that legal scrupulosity is untenable. It's impossible to live like this. The theologians who defend it are simply wrong. And they defend it because the Church is a part of a larger system. This system seeks to centralize all power in the hands of a small global elite. The world is increasingly becoming one large monolithic bureaucracy. Intellectual property laws are a part of this process. "Piracy" was legal in Brazil until 1995, when America forced our country to adopt stricter IP laws under threat of economic sanctions, lest we all pirated American software and American movies instead of buying insultingly expensive "legal copies", lest we synthetized certain medications in our own labs instead of being forced to buy overpriced meds patented by American corporations, etc.

America does this to countries all over the world. Look up the "Special 301 Report". It's economic imperialism via intellectual property legislation. Intellectual property is largely a scam for enriching powerful corporations while sucking third world economies dry. And again I'm getting carried away. The point here is this whole situation is a "top down" affair, while file-sharing ("piracy") is the "bottom up" response to this situation. My conviction is that piracy is ethical. Filesharing preserves cultural works which would otherwise be lost forever. It preserves entire cultural ecosystems. There would be no anime scene in Mexico, no metal scene in Peru, no cinephile scene in Brazil without piracy. The catalogues of legal streaming services are piss poor - and by paying for them you are enriching the very @ssholes who created the whole IP mess in the first place. And now my tone has grown angry. My train of thought barely coherent anymore. Led down another corridor of syllogisms towards a despair-inducing conclusion. But the point here is that Netflix is a tacky air-conditioned shopping mall rental place that only carries Adam Sandler movies while the Pirate Bay is a clandestine library where you will find all the Tarkovski and Kubrick and Berman films you need. Try looking for these guys' movies on Netflix or Prime or HBO. You'll find one or two titles by each if you're lucky, and we're still at the top of the cinephilia iceberg here. Try buying the massively overpriced BluRays living in a third world country. It's a joke. Intellectual property destroys culture, piracy preserves it.

All this ugly rambling is what my daily superego/neurotic/OCD rumination looks like. Substances like inositol, methylene blue and psilocybin don't really shut it off, but they enable me to ignore it. It's still there, but I stop caring. It's like a crazy guy ranting in a corner that I can just ignore.


As for the study

Anyway, enough rambling. I've barely touched the study. All the stuff about psilocybin reducing anxiety is true. All the brain connectivity stuff, novel insights, being able to concentrate during tasks without being pestered by intrusive thoughts, yes, that is my experience when I microdose. I already talked about the top down/bottom up stuff but I was surprised to find it there in the study, laid out exactly the way I experience it. It's like the neurotic thinking takes the side of the authoritarian structures that exist out there in the world, but once psilocybin shuts if off my organic, bottom up insights can assert themselves. But yeah I did read through the study and got the gist of it in spite of the abstruse terminology.


I still kinda hate psilocybin though

The part where it ameliorates the OCD symptoms is great. The part where I get visual snow, start seeing floaters and get disturbing (if mild) hypnagogic hallucinations is not. Now CBD and codeine also give me hypnagogic hallucinations, so there's that. Basically when I microdose I sometimes have these mild hallucinations before falling asleep, and sometimes they're a bit disturbing. Psilocybin is a psychedelic, after all. It's like I'm peeking into the Beyond rather than taking high doses and plunging into it. And I do believe there is an actual Beyond over there, and I would rather not mess with it. I only took psilocybin after trying dozens of things and none of them really working, coupled with my OCD getting worse than ever last year. Basically I'd advise you to try other things before trying psychedelics. If anything else worked this well for me I'd gladly take that instead of microdosing shrooms, and hopefully I'll find something that works that is not a psychedelic substance.

 

[Zellig Pliskin]

It's basically left-brain dominance. Too much logical thinking. I already explained it a bit in a long post. Chesterton's chapter on madness in Orthodoxy covers it well. The crazy guy has not lost his reason, he has lost everything but his reason. It's a common form of madness. Many guys (it's mostly guys) dig themselves into a hole this way. Chains of arguments that lead to despair and catatonia. Airtight arguments, irrefutable, inescapable.

Same thing here. Prisoner in my own mind. Idealabs has Lisuride by the way.

Recently I’ve started taking allopregnenolone.

 

[Zellig Pliskin]

The will to truth is a dangerous a thing

I got very good grades as a kid, but my chaotic home situation ruined that when I was in 6th grade.

Wow. I think I’m in a similar boat as you. I don’t have OCD but I have extremely rigid mental complexes similar to what you describe.

Like you I’m also Christian and there’s this constant frustration of having to police my own actions and thoughts and strive for moral perfection and grace through my own efforts. “Overheating supercomputer” is a nice of putting it.

I’m pretty sure it’s made clear in the New Testament that our own good works cannot save us, and we cannot become graceful through our own efforts.
There is a version of Christianity where people don’t realise this and I think this results in the schizophrenic “Christianity” where people are constantly struggling to conform themselves to whatever they imagine grace to be like, in spite of the temptations of the flesh.

Some good advice I think would be to just loosen up and be what you are truly like, even if it’s bad. God regenerates us when we spend time in the Word and pray. We depend entirely on Jesus to bestow grace unto us, it is through Him that we will actually become “better people” (more Christlike) by nature. We should not struggle and suffer to try and become better people, we ought to trust in God and have His nature grow in us.
This is what I think is God’s desire from reading the Bible and studying eastern orthodox theology, that through faith we spontaneously do good works.

Maybe you are ashamed of your previous posts about struggles with masturbation but I just wanted to say that I can also relate to that. I had POIS (post-orgasmic illness syndrome) between 2019 and 2021. Not OCD like you but more physical in nature (albeit with horrible mental effects too).
Although I am lucky to have fully recovered from my illness thanks entirely to this forum (and God) I still have trauma from masturbation and I am too ashamed to even leave my flat on days that I give in to my libidinal urges.
Part of the reason I take androsterone daily is because it completely erases my libido.

In an earlier post you said you wished that sex didn’t exist. I personally wish there was like a “switch” where you could enable sexual desire at will when needed (like with a partner). Sexual desire is pretty useless otherwise. It’s distracting and there is an incredible amount of evil in the world caused by sex; human/child trafficking, rape, degeneracy, emotional damage etc.

Even disregarding the spiritual nature of chastity and God’s demand for purity it’s just practical to reserve sex for marriage or a relationship that leads to marriage. It has been empirically proven that divorce rates are lowest, and marriage satisfaction is highest when a couple are exclusive to one another and they are each other’s firsts.

 

[Zellig Pliskin]

We depend entirely on Jesus to bestow grace unto us, it is through him that we will actually become “better people” (more Christlike) by nature. We should not struggle and suffer to try and become better people, we ought to trust in God and have his nature grow in us.

Romans 7:19-25

19 For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

20 Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

21 I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.

22 For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:

23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.

On another note, if you’re trying to address mental illness, it seems that pregnenolone, serotonin antagonists (lisuride, 10-methoxyharmalan, cyproheptadine), high dose niacinamide… and maybe allopregnenolone/5-alpha-DHP could be of use.

I think at the absolute depths of my physical/mental health I developed slight OCD along with delusional thoughts and mental illnesses. In my mind at the time truth and “truths” had to be in threes/triune form just like the trinity of God… and each unit of the trinity had to be in a hierarchical order. It’s embarrassing and sad to look back on how crazy I was at my worst. Such is the nature of serotonin overload. (Thanks ashwaganda and fluoxetine).

 

[worrywart]

Thanks man, I appreciate your posts and I'm glad my rant resonated with someone. I've certainly been told to just loosen up before (by a pastor no less), and it's probably the kind of advice I need.

Sam Vaknin recently posted a video where he says OCD rumination is a form of dissociation stemming from trauma, and that the cure here really is to stop thinking:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wayGwQYatQ



It seems like I scared Diogo away with my schizo rant there, but that's okay.

 

[Waynish]

Stop OCDing over your OCD and let go. The people that OCD people pay attention to about OCD expertise are the least expert at understanding it. Perhaps you must have to go into a less intellectual field of work - perhaps just for a while.

 

[tasfarelel]

Basically when I microdose I sometimes have these mild hallucinations before falling asleep, and sometimes they're a bit disturbing.

Just to add to this - the principle of microdosing is that you take a dose small enough to NOT cause any hallucinations. And here everyone's threshold is different - therefore, just half the dose you are taking now (or even less) and see if you still get long term relief. Key is longterm / if you have some days once in a while where the undesired think patterns come it's ok / let it be. The microdosing should help you learn how to deal with that, and some months later you may not need it anymore.