r/Psychonaut • • 17h ago

AMA on Tuesday 27 October about psilocybin with Alexander Lebedev, MD, PhD: ego dissolution, hard trips and psychosis risk in r/PsychedelicTherapy.

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3 Upvotes

r/Psychonaut • • 6h ago

Timothy Leary was born 106 years ago today. I think the “Leary set psychedelic research back 40 years” story is wrong.

16 Upvotes

I’m Joe Moore, co-founder of Psychedelics Today. I wrote a piece on this, linked at the bottom, but here’s the argument.

You’ve probably heard some version of it: Leary scared the public, research died for decades, and the lesson for everyone else is to stay respectable. Michael Pollan has said it was Leary who turned the psychiatric establishment against LSD. Carl Hart said Leary’s antics set hallucinogen research back 40 years. These are people I respect, and Hart is one of the sharpest critics of the drug war out there. That’s kind of my point. Even the critics repeat it.

Leary made real mistakes. Harvard colleagues raised serious concerns about participant safety, weak controls and researchers taking psilocybin during studies. Doblin’s 1998 follow-up found the Concord Prison Experiment’s claims about reduced reoffending didn’t hold up.

But Leary didn’t control Congress, the FDA, university budgets or drug companies. A few things the Leary story leaves out:

  • US drug prohibition goes back to an 1875 San Francisco ordinance aimed at Chinese immigrants. Racist claims about cocaine and Black people, and anti-Mexican prejudice in the marijuana campaign, did a lot of the building after that.
  • The 1962 drug amendments made it much harder to prove a drug works, and psychedelic therapy fit badly into trials designed to isolate a drug’s effects. People usually knew what they’d taken.
  • Historian Matthew Oram found federal agencies kept funding some LSD studies after Sandoz pulled out in 1966, some into the mid-70s. He puts more weight on testing problems and fading psychiatric interest than on any one person.
  • Schedule I in 1970 didn’t technically ban research, but it stacked registrations, inspections, storage rules and paperwork on every study. Researchers still describe those costs today.

The part I care about most: the Leary story quietly teaches the field to distance itself from religious use, counterculture and any experience medicine can’t explain. I don’t think people should need a diagnosis to justify exploring their own minds. And winning acceptance for psilocybin while other drug users still get punished keeps the worst part of the drug war intact.

The people who enacted and kept prohibition made choices. I’d rather hold them responsible than keep blaming Leary.

Curious where people here land. Is the Leary story fair, partly fair, or a convenient scapegoat?

Full piece with sources: https://psychedelicstoday.com/2026/10/22/timothy-leary-drug-war/


r/Psychonaut • • 12h ago

Feeling 'high' without taking anything?

7 Upvotes

I've been glitching a ton lately without really taking any drugs yet, but everything has been getting crystal clear, like I was in a bad trip that's finally ending, as the life of being 'sober' was just a bad trip, I'm not really planning on taking anything, but I realized that everything is inside me. And I guess Psy-trance music was always free to use here. :P


r/Psychonaut • • 13h ago

10 years of chronic exhaustion, dead pharma, and my last card: Why I am heading into absolute darkness and silence

11 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I want to share my thoughts. For the past 10 years, I've been living in a state of a completely dead battery—a deep, hollow exhaustion. Over this time, I’ve tried and tested so many things. From antidepressants to the strongest nootropics, alongside countless medical tests and checkups—yet not a single hit. Physically, as it turns out, I’m healthy. It took me 10 years to get as close as ever to a breakthrough—or rather, to its most likely explanation.

Needless to say, advice from friends and relatives like "smile more," "hang out with friends," or "get some fresh air"... yeah, if only it were that simple. I tried. Unfortunately, there is simply no inner resource for that; it feels like asking someone with broken legs to go dance salsa.

My trips with psytrance, unfortunately, didn't provide the expected therapeutic effect. I can assume that music prevents the brain from going deep into the subconscious to pull out the "garbage" I need to experience, discharge, release, and let go of. Any external stimuli are just crutches. The brain clings to sounds and narratives, preventing the system from reaching the core of my stagnation—I noticed this especially during brief pauses between tracks.

So, I’m planning to play my final card—my ace of trumps. The stake is EVERYTHING.

What is this card? A trip in absolute, silent stillness, free from any external stimuli. Just isolation and a direct confrontation with what has been accumulating under this concrete slab for years.

Am I scared? Yes, of course I am. I’m not a machine, and certainly not a superhero. But I intend to go in there to give the architecture of my nervous system a real chance—a lever for at least some progress. My sole intention is complete surrender. I don't know what will be waiting for me there, but I will try my hardest to drop all my shields and throw away the steering wheel.

It’s terrifying to think that this last card might not work—how do I live after that? I don't know. It’s the chilling horror of someone who has bet everything and is left with no backup options. But I realize that this fear is also part of my armor, holding everything inside with steel cables as thick as ropes.

I’m not expecting miracles or hoping to heal in a single session. I’m simply creating conditions where the psyche has no room left to escape—no anchors, just my own subconscious.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on this, and feel free to ask any questions.

strain- P6TE 3,5-4g


r/Psychonaut • • 20h ago

Shroom and Ket Flip report and the entity i met

1 Upvotes

So to start on Oct 20th 11:30pm i took 2.4 grams golden teachers, they kicked in around 12:00 am i laid down in bed with my speaker above my head and turned off my lights, the first hour was nothing special, decent amount of visuals and still very aware of my existence, at 12:55 i decided it was time to take a bump of ketamine(i ended up doing two) i laid back down and waited until around 1:10 i started flipping.
I had turned my led on and started listening to tame impalas and sza new song for GTA(tight ass song btw) as i laid down and stared at the ceiling two large pitch black holes appeared and started fish lensing around my ceiling, my gfs skin and my bed started to feel like warm buttery leather as time slowed to almost a halt. I was dumbfounded as i expected something wayyy different, this was like a whole new drug, i started having the intense visuals of an ego death while somehow feeling like my ego had not dissolved in the slightest. I felt an urge to sit criss cross on my bed, i wanted to become a boulder in the wild, and stay like that for thousands of years. At around 1:30 it started to get serious, The popcorn on my ceiling started dripping down and formed into a series of white symmetric geometric pillars made of smaller pillars, they spiraled and spiraled until they turned into a large orb made of tiny blue shapes. The orb connected with more pillars slowly turning into a humanoid figure. The moment the entity had formed it pointed at my water bottle and said “drink”. I jumped up and scared my gf because i was so amazed. I never thought i would meet an entity, let alone from ketamine, by now it would be about 1:45, i lay back down and get ready as i realize this is only the beginning. The rest of the night was full of wonder with so many incredible hallucinations, auditory, visual, and touch. Best combo ive ever had 10/10 probably wont do it again though


r/Psychonaut • • 1d ago

can 2cb pills be split with a pill cutter for even doses? first time tripping on it

0 Upvotes

I might be acquiring some 2 cb dot pill. Can these be split with like a pill splitter for even doses? Can I cut it into quarters? The pills are supposed to be 20 mg each and very good quality from reports.


r/Psychonaut • • 1d ago

450µg LSD Ego Death — Words, Sounds and Reality Disintegrated Into Pixels. Has Anyone Experienced This?

9 Upvotes

450µg LSD Trip Report — Reality Disintegrated Into Pixels, Complete Ego Death and a Holographic Collective Consciousness

Substance: Star of David LSD

Dose: 3 tabs advertised at 150µg each (450µg total, unverified)

Date: 3–4 April 2021

Setting: At home, mostly alone in my bedroom

I've experienced some intense psychedelic effects before, but nothing quite like this.

During this trip, I experienced something I still struggle to describe: words, sounds, objects and even the information that made reality understandable seemed to disintegrate into holographic pixels. I lost my identity, experienced myself as pure awareness, believed I'd died and eventually found myself in what appeared to be a collective consciousness involving people from my life.

This is my attempt to reconstruct what happened. Some timestamps are confirmed by photos and Messenger messages; others are estimates because my sense of time completely disappeared.

  1. The beginning — 9:05 PM to 10:52 PM

On Saturday, 3 April 2021, I took three Star of David LSD tabs, advertised as containing 150µg each.

At 9:05 PM, I photographed the tabs on my tongue. At 9:06 PM, I messaged a friend:

"3 tabs down the hatch."

Around 40 minutes later, I went for a shower. I remember spending approximately 10–15 minutes there, and something incredibly strange happened: I couldn't properly distinguish between being wet and being dry.

I think I may have dressed myself while still wet because I couldn't understand the difference anymore.

By 10:40 PM, the effects had become extremely intense. I messaged my friend:

10:40 PM: "Wtf"

10:40 PM: "Yeah I'm tripping so hard haga"

10:41 PM: "I was watching that and zoned out"

10:52 PM: "And yeah the video was trippy hahaha."

These are the last clear timestamps before my memory becomes fragmented.

  1. Losing approximately two hours inside my closet

Around 11 PM, I decided to sit inside my bedroom closet and completely zone out.

I wasn't deliberately trying to meditate or achieve ego death. I just wanted to sit there and become absorbed in the experience.

My awareness of time became fragmented. I believe I remained there for roughly two hours, although I can't confirm exactly how long.

When I eventually came back to ordinary awareness, I was drenched in sweat, physically sick and extremely confused.

I couldn't understand why I was inside my closet or what I'd been doing there.

I struggled out and made my way to bed.

That's when things became almost impossible to comprehend.

  1. Reality itself seemed to disintegrate

Lying in bed, I began experiencing something far beyond the ordinary LSD visuals I'd known.

Reality seemed to disintegrate into holographic pixels.

It wasn't just the objects around me. Words, sounds, information and the meaning behind things seemed to break apart.

Even my ability to understand what I was experiencing appeared to dissolve.

It's difficult to explain because I wasn't simply looking at pixelated hallucinations. It felt as though the underlying information that made reality understandable was coming apart.

Eventually, I completely lost my sense of being human.

I didn't know who I was.

I believed I was dying.

Then I experienced what I can only describe as nothingness or pure awareness.

I had no ordinary sense of possessing a body. Instead, I seemed to exist as awareness or light.

I remember pressure building whenever I became aware of something, followed by the sensation of shooting through holes. This happened repeatedly.

At another point, I seemed to exist as balls or ball-like forms. I could move by imagining the floor tilting, almost as though thought alone controlled my movement.

I also remember practising different emotions. A mirror appeared to copy my emotions rather than simply reflecting my physical movements.

My phone repeatedly turned on, but I couldn't recognise or understand it.

Ordinary objects and concepts had become completely foreign.

  1. My mum, timelessness and unconditional love

One of the most emotional experiences involved my mum.

I perceived her as a colour or presence within what appeared to be a holographic ceiling.

Communication didn't seem to involve spoken language. Instead, I experienced a powerful connection through awareness and emotion.

I remember a feeling or message along the lines of:

"I have always been here for millions and millions of years, and I will always be here watching you."

There was also an overwhelming sense of "I love you."

It felt timeless, as though this connection had always existed.

Eventually, parts of my surroundings began becoming recognisable again.

I remember seeing my television reflected in a mirror and interpreting it as an enormous computer.

My reaction was:

"Wow, I have a PC."

I was rediscovering familiar objects as though I'd never encountered them before. I still didn't properly understand who I was.

  1. The drop of water — I believed I had died

Around dawn, I experienced an image of a drop of water merging into an ocean.

To me, it represented my individual existence dissolving into something much larger.

I interpreted it as death.

Then I had a terrifying thought:

"Wait, I died. Shit, I killed myself. Mum's going to find me dead."

I genuinely believed my mum would discover my body.

The fear felt completely real.

  1. Sunrise — The holographic collective consciousness

Around sunrise, everything changed again.

I began experiencing what appeared to be an enormous holographic collective consciousness.

People from my life appeared within it: family members, friends, teachers and other familiar people.

They seemed to exist as colours, symbols, emotions and forms of awareness.

Communication appeared to happen through thoughts rather than speech.

I believed everyone could see my thoughts and react to them.

My sister seemed to make jokes. My friends seemed to respond to things happening in my mind.

Even Adam from PsychedSubstance appeared, and I believed he had died too.

At one point, I exclaimed:

"Yes! Yes! It all makes sense!"

I had an overwhelming feeling that I'd finally understood something fundamental about existence, even though I couldn't explain what that understanding was.

Some particularly strange interactions involved people I knew.

One friend seemed to react to my thoughts using a clown emoji. He moved around like a ghost, shouting:

"Eeee! Eeee! I'm a ghost!"

He also joked:

"You get the joke? Because it's not funny."

Another friend communicated through symbols, including a dentist symbol that reminded me of an old conversation we'd had at school.

One of my teachers appeared as a ghost-like form of awareness, performing upside-down circular loops while screaming.

The entire experience was surreal, strangely humorous and incredibly convincing at the time.

  1. My nanna's game — Realising I was alive

One of the most unforgettable moments involved my nanna.

She appeared within the holographic reality, and we seemed to be playing a guessing game involving stacking blocks.

Every time I answered correctly, the tower grew taller.

It felt playful and familiar.

Then I asked:

"Wait, am I dead?"

My nanna knocked the entire tower over.

It felt almost as though she was joking with me.

Somehow, that moment made me realise something extraordinary:

I wasn't dead. I was alive.

After believing I'd died for so long, the relief was overwhelming.

I began remembering my real life.

I remembered having a job at Woolworths. I remembered that I had a future.

Things I'd previously taken for granted suddenly seemed incredibly precious.

I was overwhelmed with happiness simply because I was alive.

  1. The following day — "I died and came back"

The effects gradually faded throughout the morning.

On Sunday, 4 April 2021, at exactly 12:08 PM, I sent my friend a Messenger message:

"I died and came back."

That was approximately 15 hours after I'd taken the tabs.

Those five words were the simplest way I could describe the experience.

I hadn't literally died, but subjectively, it felt as though my entire identity had been destroyed and I'd returned to ordinary existence.

Final thoughts

More than five years later, this remains one of the strangest experiences of my life.

What fascinates me most isn't simply the ego death or believing I'd died.

It's how language, sound, meaning, information and my entire understanding of reality seemed to break apart into holographic pixels.

The experience moved from confusion and terror to pure awareness, what felt like collective consciousness, and eventually overwhelming happiness at being alive.

I understand these were subjective effects experienced while under LSD. I don't consider them proof of an afterlife, actual communication with other people or a literal shared consciousness.

But I've never stopped wondering why my mind produced those particular experiences.

Has anyone else experienced LSD ego death where not just vision, but words, sounds, meaning and the very structure of reality seemed to disintegrate?

I'd be especially interested to hear how others interpret experiences like this.


r/Psychonaut • • 1d ago

Has anyone found their life purpose?

32 Upvotes

​

After years of tripping and introspection, I still didn't receive the answer of what my life purpose is.

Does anyone want to share their experience of finding their life purpose? Or does a life purpose even exist? Because I don't fully believe in it either. During my research journeys I also learned about the Buddhist concept of no-self. So maybe the whole idea of a life purpose is just another illusion. I don't know! Maybe I am just feeling lost in life and loosing motivation to do anything. That's why I am chasing a strong motivation, like a life purpose, so much.

What do you think? What are your experiences?


r/Psychonaut • • 1d ago

Taking advantage of a forced break?

0 Upvotes

I'm going overseas for a little over two weeks soon, which means I'm going to be fully cut off from my daily weed & (prescribed) adderall habits, and no psychedelics either. The hardest I'll have is alcohol, and I'm going to try to go easy on that to keep my energy up.

I'm not generally good at self-restraint, but I'm not risking a crime on my honeymoon, so this is a rare opportunity for me. Anyone have any tips for getting the most out of it, in terms of a mental reset? I'm going to have lots of down time on trains and such, and I'm going to lots of spiritual sites; I'm hoping to do some meditation and self-work. Would love to hear from anyone else who has taken such a break and gotten something out of it.


r/Psychonaut • • 1d ago

What are peoples thoughts/experiences of 4mmc

1 Upvotes

Just been offered some and never tried it.


r/Psychonaut • • 1d ago

May I stay open without more doses

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0 Upvotes

r/Psychonaut • • 2d ago

Experienced ego-death in the k hole and it was amazing

11 Upvotes

Last night i set up well for the hole, light instrumentals on my bed before the big hit, just laying there and letting it take me away. Its still hard to put it into words but i really got folded into the universe, i felt like a shape or some geometric concept, i will probably ponder on this all week but this was an absolute 10/10 experience, beautiful in a way that i could not imagine before


r/Psychonaut • • 2d ago

Report from 1400ug LSD trip

0 Upvotes

My first real LSD trip report — Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 edition
Alright, I don’t even know where to start because I’m really new to posting this kind of stuff on Reddit and talking about my trips. But I feel like this is one I need to get out there before I forget half of it. 😂
Long story short — and I’m going to try REALLY hard not to let my ADHD take the wheel here:
I woke up around 3:48 AM. I had already told my homie to come over because Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 had just dropped on Netflix at 4 AM.
So naturally, I thought, “What’s a better idea than watching this while tripping?” 💀
I dosed around 4:23 AM. My friend wasn’t tripping; he chose his own substance for the night. I had mine.
By the time the peak started hitting around episode 2, I realized VERY quickly that watching this show while tripping was either the greatest or worst possible idea. 😂
NO SPOILERS, but holy shit.
The psychological elements of the show were hitting me on an entirely different level. Even the intro music sounded alive. I genuinely felt like I was inside the guitar being played at the beginning. It wasn’t just something I was hearing — it felt like I was experiencing the sound from inside of it.
Then around 6:48 AM, my homie unfortunately had to leave for work.
And this is where I made the decision that I absolutely would NOT recommend to anyone:
I decided to take 10 MORE hits of LSD after already dosing earlier.
Yeah.
Looking back, that was a terrible decision. 😂
I also took a dab off my Carta and continued watching the show. I think I made it somewhere around episode 4 or 5 before everything completely changed.
I experienced what I can only describe as a breakthrough.
I’ve had intense mushroom experiences before, but this felt completely different. The out-of-body aspect of it was something I wasn’t prepared for at all. It felt like I had completely disconnected from my normal sense of being grounded in the world.
For what felt like around two hours, I was absolutely gone.
I remember feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Everything was happening at once, and I couldn’t figure out how to properly ground myself. I had basically launched myself WAY deeper into the experience than I had initially intended.
And weirdly enough, the thing that finally helped snap me back into reality was seeing an airplane fly overhead.
Something about seeing it in the sky gave my brain a reference point — something real, physical, and outside of everything I was experiencing internally. After that, I slowly started finding my way back.
About three hours later, I was back down to a much more manageable level, and honestly?
The rest of the trip was fucking amazing.
I’m still feeling some of it as I’m writing this, although I’m at the point where I could probably sleep if I really wanted to.
But holy shit.
What an experience.
And if there’s one thing I want people to take away from this:
If you weren’t planning on taking a much larger dose, don’t suddenly double, triple, or quadruple down because you feel like you’re ready for more.
I learned VERY quickly that there’s a point where you realize you’ve gone way deeper than you intended, and getting yourself grounded again can become extremely difficult.
I definitely should have done more preparation and had more grounding techniques ready before pushing myself that far.
I’m not saying the experience was entirely bad — far from it. It was probably one of the most intense psychedelic experiences I’ve ever had. But there were definitely moments where I realized, “Oh shit… I am WAY too deep right now.”
So yeah.
Watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2.
Respect psychedelics.
Don’t make impulsive decisions with your dose halfway through a trip. 😂
And maybe have an airplane available for emergency grounding. ✈️💀
Anyway, thank you to anyone who actually sat here and read through this ADHD-fueled ramble of a trip report.
I hope somebody gets something out of it — whether that’s watching the new Cyberpunk series, learning something from my stupid dosing decision, or just enjoying the story.
Much love everybody. ❤️
Stay safe, stay grounded, and stay trippy.
🌌🍀✅


r/Psychonaut • • 2d ago

alien encounter on psilocybin?

14 Upvotes

I took 2 grams (roughly) of bluey vuitton mushrooms, there very potent people say over 2 times as potent as normal Cubensis strains. I heard shahmanic drums consistently in my trip, I remember seeing "love" on the ceiling in a hippy font and right before I was peaking I looked out the window and the branches of this tree started forming geometric patterns and there was a light in the middle of the triangle, I remember a sense of awe and a little bit of panic, then my vision started being consumed by this black void and I saw I believe 2 aliens, they were staring at me, it happened for a split second before it dissappeared super fast. Im not sure what happened,


r/Psychonaut • • 2d ago

Stan interviews Hofmann - Hunting for recording!

1 Upvotes

Does anyone know where I can find Stan's interview with Albert Hofmann?


r/Psychonaut • • 2d ago

5 meo DMT and MDMA

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0 Upvotes

r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

psychedelic trip in a dream?

2 Upvotes

I had a very strange dream last night. I was preparing psychedelic "oatmeal" for a party I was hosting. Had some people I dont really know in reality over and we were all chowing down on this oatmeal. The music was groovy I had this sense of the trip coming up like a mushroom trip. Like I actually felt it in the dream! And then I had this realization, " oh shit i have people over so i have to clean my bathroom" so I go to the bathroom of my dream house, I am scrubbing the whole floor, better than I ever scrub my bathroom in waking reality ;) and I can feel the trip coming up, just giggling to myself, racing the clock before I am too high to care about my bathroom

I woke up with after my imaginary landlord showed up mad about the noise

What? This is some "inception" type shit I have never felt high like this in a dream, so interesting. Anyone else?


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

Extreme success followed by persistent anxiety and hyper-arousal after repeated psychedelic use — anyone else?

14 Upvotes

About 2.5 years ago, I had my first mushroom trip during a particularly difficult period of my life.

That experience changed everything.

I suddenly felt euphoric, motivated, and full of purpose. Over the following year, I began using mushrooms almost every 1–2 weeks.

Mushrooms single-handedly put me on a spiritual rocket ship that sent me to the f*cking moon.

My ambition skyrocketed. Within roughly a year and a half, I ran two full marathons, multiple half marathons, competed in HYROX, continued lifting heavy weights, and nearly tripled my business.

I felt unstoppable. I genuinely considered it the best year of my life.

Then things started going downhill.

Over the past year, I’ve gradually developed persistent anxiety, fatigue, poor sleep, and increasingly poor recovery from exercise.

My later mushroom trips became increasingly uncomfortable, often producing intense health anxiety, paranoia, and uncomfortable physical sensations instead of the euphoria I’d experienced before.

I’m not even entirely sure whether what I’m experiencing now is anxiety. It feels more like my body is constantly producing adrenaline or stress hormones, even when there’s nothing particularly stressful happening.

I frequently experience this uncomfortable sensation of adrenaline in my chest, even when I’m sitting still. My tinnitus becomes particularly noticeable at night, my eyes twitch, and I feel exhausted and overstimulated simultaneously.

It’s almost like I’ve become anxious about feeling anxious. The physical sensations make me uncomfortable, which makes me more anxious, which makes the sensations worse.

The anxiety makes it difficult to sleep, and the lack of sleep seems to make everything worse.

Strangely, these symptoms are often most noticeable when I’m resting and temporarily improve during exercise.
I’ve also become unusually sensitive to caffeine and THC, which I’d previously tolerated without issue.

Looking back, I think my ambition became increasingly unhealthy. I spent well over a year pushing myself relentlessly, both physically and professionally, while experimenting with various substances.

I suspect some combination of psychedelic use, prolonged stress, and insufficient recovery may have contributed to my current condition.

And the strangest part?

I genuinely value the life I’ve built. I have so many things to be grateful for, yet sometimes it feels like there’s a wall of anxiety between me and everything I experience.

I’m planning to step away from recreational substances, significantly reduce my training demands, and prioritize recovery while seeking medical evaluation.

I want to learn how to experience ordinary life without constantly needing to enhance it.

Has anyone experienced something similar following repeated psychedelic use? Did you eventually recover? What helped?

I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences.


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

Theory: MK Ultra never ended. Modern Psychonaut culture is the world's largest un-consented mapping protocol.

75 Upvotes

Think about this logically for a second.
When CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MK Ultra records in 1973, we were told the project was "discontinued because it was ineffective." But historically, whenever the intelligence apparatus claims a psychological operation "didn't work," it usually means they refined it, compartmentalized it, and pushed it deeper underground.
Here is my theory on why MK Ultra is secretly still active and why modern psychonauts are actively executing Phase II of the project without knowing it.

1. The "Truth Serum" Delusion vs. The Real Objective
In the early stages, the government was obsessed with finding a literal "truth serum" or absolute mind-control switch to force compliance. They quickly realized that brute-force interrogation with classic psychedelics like LSD just shattered the ego or made subjects unreliable, catatonic, or chaotic.
They didn't fail; they realized they were asking the wrong question.
They realized that to truly control or predict human consciousness, you don't break the mind in a isolated lab room—you map the human subjective experience at scale.

2. The Geopolitical Controlled Leak
If intelligence agencies genuinely wanted to erase a chemical or substance from the face of the earth, they could easily enforce it or suppress its precursors—look at how aggressively Research Chemicals (RCs), Bromo-DragonFLY, or specific synthetic analogs get tracked down, banned, and dismantled when they aren't useful.
Yet, classic psychedelics and entheogens managed to spread to every corner of the global map. Why?
Because the "Hippie Movement" of the 60s wasn't an operational failure that slipped out of the lab; it was an open-field deployment. They needed a massive, diverse sample size: different geographical locations, different cultural backgrounds, different neural baselines, and different psychological environments.

3. The Digital Grid as the Ultimate Data Harvester
Back in the 1960s, analyzing trips was manual, slow, and limited to physical logs. Fast forward to today:
Trip reports on Reddit (⁠r/Psychonaut⁠, ⁠r/LSD⁠, Erowid)
Online forums, podcasts, and digital trip logs
Biometric data tracked by smartwatches during trips
We are literally handing over the most detailed neurological, perceptual, and narrative mapping of the human psyche in history. Every time someone posts a trip report describing "entities," ego death, or altered spatial perception under specific doses, they are contributing a data point to a global behavioral model.
They don't need to put you in a dark basement with headphones anymore. The psychonaut community voluntarily maps the parameters of human consciousness in real-time, under every possible variable.
We thought we were exploring the cosmos and liberating our minds. What if we’ve just been crowdsourcing the baseline dataset for the next evolution of psychological architecture?

Change my mind.


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

What if you are someone in pain?

5 Upvotes

If you are someone who suffers from like migraines, soreness, tension headaches, muscular pain, etc. How would shrooms affect you? Would you be too distracted to notice, or worse, would it completely you dial in on the pain? Im curious how much your physical state affects your experience on psychedelics.


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

My 🍄‍🟫Trip Taught me

24 Upvotes

I was on a trip yesterday and what the wise little voice was teaching me when I closed my eyes and showed me is that there’s YOU as an individual, and then there are all these thoughts and urges floating around you like little clouds or bubbles. And just because you experience them doesn’t mean they define you. But because you’ve gotten so used to entertaining certain thoughts or acting on certain urges, you start identifying with them and thinking they’re YOU.

And really my biggest takeaway was realizing that just because a thought or urge pops into my head doesn’t mean it has any power over me or determines what I do next. I used to almost treat certain thoughts or urges like instructions, as if having them meant I was inevitably going to act on them or dictate how my day will go. But NO they’re literally just thoughts and urges, nothing more like how paper is just paper. They can still be there, floating around being annoying asf, and I can STILL choose to do something completely different. I don’t have to wait for them to disappear or even fight them. The thought isn’t the boss, the urge isn’t the boss, YOU ARE. You can experience something mentally without having to identify with it or act on it. And that realization genuinely changed how I look at my own mind and self. I love mushrooms, greatest teacher of mine.


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

PF wash?

1 Upvotes

How does it compare to the diamond? Is it worth trying?


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

A History of Magic Mushrooms | Andy Letcher - Divergent States

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divergentstates.buzzsprout.com
1 Upvotes

r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

LSD time capsule storage?

3 Upvotes

I know it will naturally degrade over time, however im thinking about including a sheet in a personal upcoming time capsule project. So far im thinking: Vacuum seal with a silica moister absorbing packet, oxygen absorbing packet and stored in amber glass or a foil bag.
Any other suggestions?


r/Psychonaut • • 3d ago

What's the safe and responsible maximum number of times you should trip on mushrooms per year?

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1 Upvotes