Introductory Essay:

OK, so I'm going to be a pain in the arse and actually write a fairly thorough introductory essay, but I promise that I'll keep it under 10,000 words, OK!?

I've had a fascination of altered states of consciousness, without and with chemical assistance, since I was about 8 years old ~ nearly 40 years ago.
At the age of 13, my determination to try Cannabis (which took three years to manifest), coupled with a somewhat bizarre cunning need to cover myself and ensure that I always had a cover story for any activity or plant matter that might be discovered, led me to develop an intricate interest in herbs and the various methods of preparing herbal medicines, assisted by several herbals (books) in my mother's library. This also continued to a love of gardening, which I was able to develop in future years.
In high school, I preferred scientific subjects and so studied biology, physics and chemistry. Chemistry was especially fascinating, and I always assessed what I was learning in terms of how I could use this knowledge to produce, extract, or purify compounds that might have an interesting effect on the mind. I also developed a kleptomaniac tendency to swipe any useful-looking glassware that could be used for these purposes (of which I am not proud, but it was certainly useful to have the use of such equipment - and after all, if it had been readily available I would have happily paid for it). To this day, I assess everything that I see in hardware stores, kitchenware departments and curbside household re-usable "junk" collections with this frame of mind.
Biological sciences were also fascinating, and I clearly recall my (much respected) senior Biology teacher responding to my proposal to carry out experiment in plant psychology as being "NNN WWW, you're a crackpot biologist and a bucket chemist". Ironically, I took this to be a compliment.
Due to a family connection, I had always wanted to be an Optometrist. The thought of doing anything else never really passed my mind for the first eighteen years of my life.
And so, for my first two years at University I found myself studying Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Physiology, Biochemistry, Psychology, Calculus and Statistics. My main stumbling blocks in proceeding with Optometry were that, although had "A" grades for Maths in my final year at college, I sucked at University level Maths. Badly. This was also combined with a realisation that I really didn't want to spend my working life wearing a suit and working in a sterile, professional environment (although that has been my attire and setting for the last twenty years, as it turned on - "undercover hippy" I call it), as well as being kicked out of my student hostel at the beginning of exams in my second year for allegedly stealing compact fluorescent lights out of the elevators for the purposes of growing cannabis (I didn't actually steal them, although an acquaintance of mine had, and I sure as hell wasn't about it to narc on him). And so, following my expulsion from the student hostel with the accusation of having been "experimenting with drugs", which reduced my dear mother to tears - how could I tell her that I had only "experimented" with LSD, and was in fact a daily pot smoker? - I announced to my parents that I was done with Optometry and was going to study Horticulture instead. Much to my surprise, this was met with understanding and some enthusiasm.
I discovered the writings of Carlos Castaneda in my first year of Horticulture and proceeded to order all of his books, and got heavily into the concepts delineated therein. I seriously considered switching to a degree in Anthropology, but I simply could not see any way that I could transition from that to studying with a shaman in Central or South America, given the fact the I lived half way across the world from such cultures. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe that this was a wise decision, although I do recall that my single goal in life at that stage was not focused on money, cars, property or beautiful women, but rather what I though was the unrealistic dream of having an eclectic entheogenic garden with as many species as would grow in the local climate. I had read of mysterious snuffs (Cebil) and leaves that induced visionary states when chewed (Salvia divinorum) in University libraries, but I never seriously considered that I would ever be able to actually obtain any of these plants and grow them. How wrong I was!
At the end of my first year of Horticulture, I was given the gift of a two week Permaculture Design course by my sister for my 21st Birthday present. While I'd already had an interest in organics and sustainable farming, this took things to a whole new level. I decided to put my Horticulture degree on hold, and spent the next year studying Biodynamic Farming, with a focus on growing medicinal herbs. Perhaps fortunately, an injury at the end of that year that required some minor surgery steered me away from engaging in heavy physical work and back to continuing my horticulture degree, rather than dropping out altogether and joining a large Biodynamic farming community. However, on the Diploma course I met a very interesting Maori (New Zealand's indigenous people) guy a few years older than me - as far as I was concerned he was a Tohanga ("Shaman", for want of a better word) in training, who gave me a cutting from a specimen in his rather large San Pedro garden, which formed the basis of my present collection.
And so over the next three years I completed my Horticulture degree with Honours, in the process doing fairly well in Statistics, which was a mandatory requirement due to the need to be able to design and analyse an experiment for the final Honours year project. It has also served me well in decoding the bullshit that gets passed of as "scientific evidence" in the news media, usually in relation to the harms caused by illegal drugs. The audacity of some of these so-called "scientists" in completely distorting what should be sound scientific methodology into a pale shadow of good science in order to pre-emptively skew the results in their favour - and to publicly admit this in respected journals - never ceased to amaze me, up until about 5 or 10 years ago where I realised that the whole system (scientific and political) was basically rotten to the core, although there are many good people working in it who are doing their best.

After working in Biodynamic farming and then urban horticulture for a couple of years after graduating, I switched to the IT industry as it was frankly more interesting - at the time, all that I could think about was trying to work out an algorithm to optimise the order, and travel times between the urban gardens that I maintained - but that would required data about traffic patterns and even live data, all of which was simply unavailable at the time - at this time most people, including me didn't have an internet access account and Google maps was a couple of decades away) -and I also had a sizable student loan debt that was simply not getting any smaller.
Naturally, I maintained my interest in gardening and my ever-growing cactus collection (composed entirely of cuttings from the original San Pedro specimen gifted to me several years previously), which was augmented during the summer months with the odd cannabis seed.
As access to the internet improved, and became a necessity for my work, I was also able to access more information about my chief interests, namely entheogens and esoteric philosophy. I recall an incident where I brought our finance company's 24kpbs dial-up connection to a grinding halt due to downloading a hefty ~300MB stash of mp3s from a curious character by the name of Terence McKenna.
The floodgates were well and truly opened. With the advent of Amazon.com, I was able to order the likes of Jonathan Ott's Pharmacotheon, Ayahuasca Analogues, and later, when finances permitted - Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Errhines, and many others.
Upon enthusiastically showing my wife (who is from a very different culture to that within which I grew up) the structure of Harmine and DMT in Ayahuasca Analogues, she questioned whether she actually knew the person that she had married! She may have actually had a point, but time will tell.
In my defence, I had told her when I first met her that I used to drink Cactus juice for an interesting time, which she accepted but frankly had (and still has) not idea what it actually means to consume a psychedelic. Not that I'm complaining - she readily tolerates what she (and now my kids) think of as my eccentricities and leaves me alone to pursue these passions - as long as I fulfill family obligations in terms of participating in child rearing (which I do more than my fair share of, with delight) and providing my fair share of income - which is fine by me. I've had several other friends with similar interests who married a woman from our own culture were not so fortunate.
A few years after that, I was standing with my kids at a playground when I looked down and saw some very small brown mushrooms in the wood chips of the garden that appeared to have turned blue. I'd tried mushrooms once at university, but really had no idea how to identify them. I grabbed them, and jumped online and found a site call The Shroomery after a brief Google search. Within 3 hours of uploading photos and descriptions of the somewhat desiccated specimens and a very pale spore print, I was informed that these were active - Psilocybe subaeruginosa! I was elated - some 15 years had passed since my initial experience with Liberty Caps, and now I had an idea of what to actually look for! Not a single woodchip-mulched garden has escaped my considered attention from that moment to this day. And I found that they were, perhaps not everywhere, but to be found in a great many places, some of them incredibly public and obvious. How had I missed these all of these years? In any case, a passion for mycology was rapidly stoked, with bins filled with myceliated egg cartons filling the garage. These were not so successful as a source of wood chips of known derivation was not easy to find - and so of course it became necessary to justify the purchase of a wood chipper - for tidying up the tree trimmings around the property, of course. This also branched out into an obsession with mushroom hunting in general, including edible and medicinal species.
I found mushrooms incredibly appealing, because although I love San Pedro, the fact that it lasts for 10-12 hours make it virtually impossible to fit in with work and family commitments any more frequently than once every year or three. I've only used it half a dozen times since my kids were toddlers and demanded more attention. A mushroom trip of 5-7 hours, however - now that is manageable. While I never really found any large variability in potency of the mushrooms that I collected - 2-3 grams dried liginicolus specimens provided a day of deep introspection, even after having been frozen for a year or more - I was aware of the potential for variability based on what is presented in the literature. Therefore I decided that the best thing to do was to combine all of the mushrooms that I had gathered and frozen to date, powder them and make a tincture of them (actually boiled in ethanol in a still for 30 minutes under full reflux) . That way, they would be preserved, as well as allowing easy measurement of the dose using a measuring spoon. This preparation was useful for accurate dosing, and certainly a hit with friends with whom I shared it, but I found that having to consume 50+ ml of 95% mushroom-tasting alcohol was just too hard. The next step (a couple of years later) was to powder them and pack into capsules (by hand, using a piece of wood with the correct diameter holes drilled and a pencil, which happens to fit snuggly inside a 00 capsule). Using this method, I was able to cram up to 850mg of finely-powdered dried mushroom into each capsule.
The next step was to attempt to create a device that could fill 20 capsules at a time. Using the same flooring offcuts as previously, I drilled 20 holes - and only 3 of them fit the capsules. Having spent several weekend evenings trying to get this right, I took the easy way and simply ordered a 24 capsule plastic capsule-filling device with a tamping tool. This easily fills capsules with 500mg, although the most that I was able to cram into them was ~650mg using the tamping tool. This has since become my preferred method for dosing mushrooms; when taken with a cup or two of warm water on an empty stomach, effects are felt within 25-30 minutes, much the same as making a tea or dosing with tincture, without the unpleasant taste (although when burping early in the voyage the taste of mushrooms can be detected).

And so we come to 2018. In 2013/2014 I became aware of an organisation called Entheogenesis Australis (EGA). Given the fact that some of the key presenters at the most recent EGA event are Nexus members, they will know of this organisation. EGA was holding a conference in Melbourne, which is a few hours travel by air for me. Whilst keen to attend, it conflicted with a long-standing group with an interest in metaphysical theory and ritual of which I am a member which only meets once every three months (on the same weekend as EGA) , and due to obligations within the group during ceremony I decided that it would be inappropriate to attend. I was under the assumption that the EGA conference was held every year on the first weekend of December, but did not investigate any further. In mid-2016, our group decided to change the timetable of meetings, notably meeting more frequently during the year, but most importantly, removing the December meeting. This meant that attendance at EGA would finally be possible! I therefore hit the EGA website, and found 2017 would be the first EGA conference held for three years. I waited impatiently for the initial "early bird" ticket release to be announced. The press releases were clear: Places would be limited! It would sell out! I could not bear to miss this opportunity. I had already ascertained that a fellow member of the aforementioned group had also partaken of Ayahuasca and Mushroom rituals, and was very interested in attending the conference to meet like-minded people.
And so, when the announcement that tickets were on sale was finally made, two conference tickets along with accommodation and catered meals were promptly purchased. Over the next few months bus and plane tickets were also procured. It was actually going to happen! A chance to find The Others!
As mentioned previously, while not sharing my passion for psychedelics, my wife - and also children - were aware of this. One of my favourite podcasts is Lorenzo Hagerty's (recently joined by Lex Pelger of Psymposia) "Psychedelic Salon" which, along with Eric Osborne's "MycoMeditations" and Jonathan Thompson's "Psychedelic Parenting" podcasts I have listed to when driving to and from work, as well as when playing taxi service to my young teenage children for the last few years. These podcasts have helped me to retain some semblance of sanity in an otherwise somewhat crazy business environment (which, it must be admitted is intellectually stimulating and pays my home loan) when I have not been able to partake of the sacred medicines for extended periods of time, and have raised some interesting questions from my son (now 15) about the just what all of this means, from which i have never shied away, whilst also been careful to answer the questions that are being asked, providing some additional information (especially when it comes to the role that politics, including western religion, have played throughout the ages in suppressing direct experience of the Divine), without offering more detail than is being requested. This, I believe (hope!), has led to a relationship with my children such that when (not if) they encounter psychoactive drugs, they will not simply believe what their friends are telling them, or what they hear from public education propaganda (I have made it very clear that while some of what they are taught may be true, it is only a small part and most certainly will not represent anything like an holistic view of the situation), they will come to me as a trusted authority on the positive and negative impact that drugs can have on one's life. I have some younger relatives who share my passion (although I did not initiate them into psychedelics and their breadth of substance experience is likely far wider than mine, especially in terms of synthetic/designer compounds) who my son idolizes and are other exemplary examples of how these compounds can be used to enrich life, rather than abused for purely hedonistic means (although I also have made clear to each of these relatives that, my opinion, there is absolutely nothing inherently "wrong" with getting high - as if they needed me to tell them that!)

And so I made no secret (within my immediate family - my siblings and surviving parent are a completely different matter) , that I was attending my first psychedelic conference at the end of 2017.
This event was truly mind blowing and heart opening. I found myself in the presence of over 500 beautiful people from extremely varied walks of life, ranging from teenage years to 70+, each of whom it was just incredibly effortless to start (or join) a conversation about our mutual passion - psychedelics!
Naturally there were several lectures and workshops given by some key members of The Nexus, which I arrogantly assumed would be of mild interest and of no practical value, given the fact that I already knew the theory of A/B extraction, and had in fact already successfully performed this on San Pedro cactus several years previously, as well as extracting what I considered to be a reasonable yield of near-pure Salvinorin A from some 10kg of home-grown Salvia divinorum leaf.
I was left deeply ashamed at my arrogance (perhaps arrogance is not the right word - I certainly did not think that I was superior in any way to anyone there, but simply that I did not really have much more to learn). I learnt so much in those brief sessions, and fortunately took verbose notes.
The fact the people had the guts to stand up in front of a group of people and share their experience, and ask for others to share their experiences and questions was incredibly humbling to me. By the end of the three day event I felt as though I had fallen in love not with a single person, but with an entire community of souls - in short, I had found The Others, the Tribe whom I had sensed, but desperately missed for all of these years. When I returned home, I felt desperately homesick, and have spent the 7 weeks that have elapsed since then reflecting on everything that happened, and trying to integrate it.

And so I come to the Nexus to seek, share and synthesise information on the growth of plants and fungi, their extraction, purification and use, and the implications of the effects of their ingestion with those who count themselves amongst its members.

There are some projects that I am interested in collaborating on with the Nexus community which I will expand upon in future threads, as follows:

(Quantitative) Comparison of Peyote grafted onto San Pedro vs those grafted and then cut to grow on own roots for 0.25, 05, 1,2,3,5... years

Extraction of harmala alkaloids form Peganum harmala roots:
AFAIK - and also based on questioning of the main Nexus representative at EGA - there has been no work carried out on the extraction of harmala alkaloids from P. harmala roots. The (accepted scientific) literature on this matter is somewhat sparse, and an extraction performed on limited quantities in the last month indicate that this is an area in need of further investigation. This ties in with the next project:

Vegetative propagation of Peganum harmala:
Due to the climate conditions in which I live, I have had no success obtaining seeds from plants that I was able to grow from seed some 10 years ago. While the use of a greenhouse may enable this, I do not have one, and will not in the near future. However, I had some limited success (20%) in rooting P. harmala cuttings some years ago (as documented with these rather sad looking specimens at Erowid - roots can be observed growing from the bottom left specimen). Unfortunately, the cuttings that rooted successfully evidently did not have sufficient time to accumulate sufficient root reserves in order to survive the winter die-back of aerial vegetation. I feel certain that the use of a propagation chamber with 18+ daylights hours (viz a Cannabis "Mum" box) would enable cuttings to build sufficient reserves if allowed to grow for 12+ months, but this is yet to be tested. The single subsequent attempt at making cuttings failed due to a mite/fungal infection that took hold within two weeks; necessary preventative measures were not taken, and must be delineated before proceeding further (next Spring!).

Root division and layering are variations on this theme. I have attempted root division on one occasion with a specimen that had no aerial growth due to excessively humid conditions resulting in total bud/shoot death (this attempt failed). Layering is being attempted this season on 3 stems. At this stage, my focus is on keeping the plants alive, as I have a very limited number of living plants at this stage (!)

If you've been able to read this far, you will have gathered that I am keen to see many questions answered, and am very keen to collaborate on anything that that aids in what I see as the Entheogenic Reformation.

As at the time of writing the first draft of this essay, I had not yet experienced DMT. However. by yet another bizarre synchronicity since attending EGA I met up with a friend whom I had not seen for about a year, who laid 0.25 mg DMT on me. Such is life! I have made a couple of cautious reconnoiter missions on the doorstep of this space, but am waiting to complete my (root and seed) harmala extractions and purifications so as to (hopefully) be able to potentiate the limited amount that I currently have at my disposal.

I expect that it will be at least a year until I am able to take advantage of the Phalaris and Acacia seeds that I am yet to (hopefully) germinate, and so it will be some time until I am able to harvest and extract from them - but a year passes quickly, and I fully intend to be ready and well-practiced at the requisite techniques, even I simply end up with a quantity of freebase caffeine in the meantime!

And so I humbly submit that the members of this community may accept me into their midst, so as to share ideas and experiences from a range of and - to borrow from an older tradition to which I belong - to further the aim of the diffusion of light and the advancement of science.

So there is it - my introductory essay, all in less than 4,000 words! Hopefully someone managed to wade through it without falling asleep.

I am so happy to greet you upon your arrival. It's obvious that you have the makings of a valued and key Nexus member. This is exciting.

I also have a teen and wife who I am open with about my passions. My wife is interested in using psychedelics for healing, but isn't quite ready yet. She only knows how to use them recreationally from experiences as a youth. She can't seem to break out of that mindset. If I could just get her to sit still, be quiet, and listen to herself and the substance, I think she'd be fine. We are going to try a cactus experience together soon. A difficuly proposition for me as I've only tripped alone (except a couple changa sessions) during my second, serious psychedelic phase.
I think it will work out.

You have good taste in podcasts too

I hope to make it to some psychedelic conferences here in the US, sometime soon. I'm so glad you got to meet some Nexus members. I hope to do the same some day. This community of people has changed and enriched my life. It is a special place. I think someone with your disposition, education and passion will fit right in.
Welcome to the Nexus.

Upvoted!

Thanks both of you for the kind words.
@Mister_Niles, definitely make the effort to get to a conference - it WILL BE a life-changing experience! And definitely take your wife, if not your teen as well.