hi,

i am new here as a poster, long time lurker. it is a good place with good people. You have built a stong community. It is really good to see. I hope I can add to this.

The main reason I haven’t posted before is because I haven't felt that I had anything to bring to the community. I am pretty adept at reading faq's and following instructions, and have always found the answers by searching, research, experimenting and having a smart chemist friend.

I am quite ocd about harm reduction and lab practice, sure the chemicals might not be super poisonous, but they are dangerous, a lot more dangerous than say cooking food, or food ingredients. I feel they should be treated with the appropriate respect. there is no need for sloppyness.

I am posting now because of some strange things i noticed. I started a thread in the help section about it, i think it could be the basis for a hydrocarbon free / non polar solvent free extraction. I stubled upon it completely by accident. I don’t really have a

I am a pretty positive person and i do computer security for a living. I was also planning on writing some stuff up on how not to incriminate yourself, via metedata in photos, etc. and on staying anon on line, but i haven’t checked what’s already here and what is allowed. I will though.

i am in my 30's and i dont take drugs anymore. not for any real reason other than i dont want to get put in a cage or lose my job. I have a lot of previous experience though I have an alright chemistry background, but I am better at physics and maths, as you will probably come to see. I really enjoy understanding why and how things happen.

i hope thats enough to give you an idea of what I am about. I look forward to hopefully adding something positive to the forums.



thpthial (pronounced special...)

Happy to have you. Welcome to the nexus.

Sounds like you will fit right in around these parts.

You say you don't do drugs any more. Have you ever done DMT or is it something you want to do or do you just have a intellectual interest in the compound?

Cheers

thank you, glad to be here



I hope so.

and yes i do _say_ i dont do drugs - nah i really dont. honest. smoke a bit now and then, drink a bit, but nothing really. I probably would again though if it was legal.

Heh, I have done _lots_ of dmt, and extracted lots as well. i used to do too much drugs. thats not cool

-- I know I am admitting to previous crimes here, and that isnt cool, but if this gets read out in court or something, I know I wont have been arrested for/with any drugs or the such. it will just be this statement - and as everyone knows everything people post on the internet is true and honest

I have quite odd views on it to be honest. My views might be controversial with some, i am not trying to be. they might also seem contradictory. they probably are. im not too sure how one gets ones views. i try to think them out and address logical fallacies in them though if i can. if I cant i call them beliefs.

my opinions and ideas are always subject to change. - like life really.

I like trying to be objective as possible about things and can sometimes play devils advocate a bit too hard.

I will try to outline a bit of my previous 'history' with recreational drugs and a little of what i think. i hope this gives you some insight.

so i have always grown up with the idea that lsd is this mind bending substance that could make you hallucinate so hard that you become one of the many urban legends. this was never my experience. I always found that the visuals were alright but it was more like a mental illness than 'fun' or 'enlightening' i did try very hard though and did quite a lot of acid. i did really stupid things like take 600-800ug and stuff. i cooked my head for a couple of years and left it alone.

i got involved with the dance scene and then pills. at this point i was still pretty amazed with drugs in general and not too bothered about analysis or potential for theraputic use, self development, possible spiritual enlightenment, etc.

ketamine kinda changed that for me and i started calming down (the criminal justice act also had quite a bit to do with it)

i got sick of ketamine, it promises so much, gives so little and is so so ugly. but it had shown me the way to not 'recreational' drug taking and hedonism but to the possibility i could use drugs to find out more about my mind and body - a bit like computer hacking for the mind. i still hold this philosophy, and have a real passion for pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics but i am nothing more than a blind amateur in these fields. (i read about them a lot though)

so i was drug free for quite a few years.

i then accidentally stumbled upon dmt and thought why not. the rest is history.

ultimately though i have done ounces of dmt and seen some amazing places, felt some amazing things ... things there will never be words for... things that I think changed my life and outlook.

saying all this though and in relation to myself only. i cannot speak for others dmt is such a personal thing. i do not now days believe there is any spiritual enlightenment to be had from it. nor do i believe that their are any external influences or inputs i am suddenly picking up on. I think I am interfering with an essential part of brain function [like strausmann says in DMT the spirit molecule - it might be replacing serotonin as a neruo transmitter] and it is just getting 'battered on drugs' and dmt was just triggering a 'spiritual receptor' in the brain, like there are receptors that make you happy. it is an illusion of what is, it still might be what is, but dmt is just an illusion, like a mirage.

that last paragraph sounds a lot worse than it is. i am not a skeptic and i would love for there to be more. I am not saying it doesnt do those things, just it is my current belief that for me it doesnt - this is based off my experience. i do not judge people who do think that it could or does do those things. it is your life enjoy it

Its just there is so many other weird and wonderful things happening and we can get somewhere with experimentally with these. it makes dmt really quite frustrating. it so hard to experimentally do anything with dmt, i cant even describe the trip to myself and i was the one who had it!

I really hope that makes sense.

i have seen too much on dmt for my mind to have been making it all up. yet i feel i have to come to the conclusion that it must have been.

heh, just as well this is the essays forum i tend to write long posts.



thp.

I'm sure you will be just fine. Just about everyone alive has done something illegal.... but it is good to have a little healthy paranoia I suppose.



First I'd say that I think all of this is an illusion. I mean what a universe with matter eating black holes and all were the normal laws of phisics break down...or what with the quantum entanglement and particle wave duality that changes based on human observation. Honestly it all seems to be pointing to a grand illusion to me!

As for DMT and other drugs. I'm not really sure what I think about them. Obviously they act as neurotransmitters and interact with our serotonin receptors and even partially with dopamine and nor-epinephrine receptors as well. What I find the most interesting is that entire worlds can be created from what should be nothing more than a random scrambling right? I mean we flood our brains with these drugs and new realms open up. Our brains are amazing organs of perception. I wonder is the perception we have from our normal neurotransmitters ratio's the only right perception? It is obviously the perception that we all evolved with after all... Or is it possible that many other perceptions...and thus realities...do indeed exists and all it takes is a change of balance in the neurotransmitter concentration.

I think of it this way: Our brains has many many receptor. In the serotonin family alone there are 5HT, 5HT2, 5HT3, etc..and then subfamilies of these. The dopamine, norepinephrine, gabba, etc are similar in that there are many receptors in our brain. What if we just lump them all together and think of them collectively as our brains hardware. Next let's examine the code that makes it run. The code is the relative concentrations of the various neurotransmitters in our brain. Most of us have pretty normal levels and we call this baseline. But some people are not baselilne at all. Some people are angry or depressed. Ever come off a strong binge drink to plunge into a mini depression a few day's later? That was your GABA system trying to renormalize itself (It's probably not quite that simple actually).

So is the world we see with depressed eyes any less real than the world we see when our brains neurotransmitter concentrations are normal? So just extrapolate from there. When we ingest DMT it effectively turns on some receptors more than others...aka your brain sees it as an inbalance in neuraltransmitters. So is what we see on this drugs any more or less real than what we see when we are sober?

Just food for thought. I love to ponder this question. There is no doubt that they are not spiritual by nature though. Yet I do certainly believe people can have spiritual experiences from them...as I myself have had them.

Peace

yeah me too. and that is one of the amazing things of dmt, it suggests you can see through this illusion.

are you a nihilist? i feel tugged towards it, but it seems a bit miserable. so i am not a nihilist

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/



i cannot agree more with this - it is really fun to think about, but pretty frustration too, which i guess is why i like nihilsm.

i know its a bit over simplified but really like what you wrote above. it is what i was trying to say

take care.

thp.