Syrian rue, HBWR, and San Pedro (maybe?)

Where to begin!? I had a pretty crazy experience two nights ago and I’m posting it here only because I hope it may be of some benefit to this audience. I’ve been lurking around these forums for the past two months or so now and this is my first post. Perhaps reading all of the posts on these forums have influenced my experiences to some extent, I’m still wondering by how much.  My experiences so far have been pretty limited, just small doses of mushrooms, Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds (hbwr) and san pedro in the past, nothing too crazy. This is going to be a pretty long and detailed post, but if you have ever considered taking any of these in combination you may be interested. As a disclaimer upfront I DO NOT RECOMMEND for anyone to try this! I had some great insights and very positive parts which I will get to, but I also had some very scary/negative moments, too. I’m sure there are better things to consume! If you do try it…good luck! Always keep in mind that the potency of natural products can vary greatly. I bet it will be the first and last time you do it!  Anyway I’ll start with the preparation:

Preparation:

The plan was to make cactus resin with two 12 inch cuttings and split this between myself and my girlfriend, I planned to take 1.5g Syrian rue with this cactus because I had done a 12 inch cutting before (not with the resin method) and I wanted something a little more this time.  I’ve read some posts that said MAOIs are bad with cactus because of the tryptamine content, but Syrian rue is a reversible inhibitor so it should be fine and also I wasn’t actually going to be consuming any cactus flesh with the resin method (does that even help?). Long story short, I fell asleep while simmering down the resin and I burned almost all my cactus resin. L I thought for sure I had carbonized and inactivated any active ingredients in this cactus at this point, but I had such high hopes that I foolishly didn’t give up and started to capsulate the mostly burned resin anyway.  The plan was to go for a short backpacking hike and camp overnight in some safe beautiful wilderness with no one else around but my girlfriend. Since I burnt the cactus and I figured it wouldn’t work, I took along some hbwr that I had lying around.  My girlfriend, perhaps being a little more cautious and smarter than I am, as many females tend to be about such things, decided she didn’t want to consume burnt cactus bits (go figure!?) so I ended up consuming all of it. I don’t give up easy.  I ate those capsules along with 1.5g Syrian rue in capsules. I figured nothing at all would happen. I live with people that don’t understand why I would want to do anything like this and I don’t have many opportunities to try such things without others around. I was being inpatient so I decided I’d also crush up some hbwr (8-9 seeds), my girlfriend had about 6 seeds as well without any Syrian rue. I’d tried about 5 of these seeds once before and it wasn’t too intense so I guess the particular seeds I had weren’t too powerful so that is why I took 8-9 seeds. I also took a yohimbe capsule to try to counteract some of the lethargic and vasoconstriction effects of the hbwr. Normally I would think mixing these three things together would be really stupid, but I really honestly thought that the cactus would do nothing, actually I’m still not sure if it did, but I can tell you something CRAZY happened. By the way I consumed all of these capsules within an hour.  Here are the details:

Experience:

I’m a person that gets nauseous and vomits fairly easily so that is why I capsulated everything.  Amazingly I had no problems eating these capsules because they had little to no taste.  I tried a 3g Syrian rue once before and I threw up just from the taste, but no problem with these capsules. After consuming the capsules I was feeling fine and I made some loving to my girlfriend ;-). We then went for what would normally be a short 1.5 mile hike to a swimming hole. After about 1 hour after consuming all the capsules, while walking along the path, the initial stomach discomfort which I had thought that I had avoided started to come on strong. Lethargy started to set in. I’m in pretty good shape and 1.5 miles is normally nothing but walking became quite difficult for the both of us.  I could feel in my stomach something was going to happen so I just kept telling myself that I’d be okay over and over.  Finally we got to the swimming hole, but I still wasn’t feeling good in my stomach. I had a voice in my head (my own voice I guess?) warning me not to come back here (meaning don’t take these substances again and come back to this state of mind). Obvious foreshadowing perhaps?

I then realized that I hadn’t eaten much at all that day so I ate a Cliff bar and while eating that Cliff bar I started to feel much better. This is when I had my first real positive insight. I was sitting by a steam staring down at the ground looking at all the insects go by and OH MY GOD there is so much life here I never noticed. Of course I noticed insects before intellectually, but I FELT it this time.  I’m not a very emotional person at all, but I could feel all the life around me. I can understand how people like nicely mowed lawns, but this is SO much better, so much diversity of life, people with those nicely mowed lawns just aren’t looking close enough! I was only staring at about a 1 sq. ft. piece of ground, then I looked up and noticed how small that plot of land was and how small this stream was, and how small this park was, and the earth so small in the universe.   WOW! I’M ALIVE. It’s one thing to say this or know this, but another to FEEL IT, I cried a little with joy and I was feeling great! This was probably the best part of the whole day. I then proceeded to wade around and swim and lay around on rocks much like a sea lion. I could interact with other sober people along the trail and I’m sure they thought I was just a little weird but sober. I was still feeling very lethargic. My girlfriend was feeling lethargic too but not like me. Finally we decided we would make the “long” trip back to our tent for the night. We really had to psych ourselves up for this 1.5 mile hike because of the lethargic effects and slow breathing. We were still feeling good at the start of the trip taking it slow and all, but part of the way through I just had to stop all of a sudden because of a feeling in my stomach and sit on a rock in a stream.  My thoughts turned to my grandparents that had just died within the past 3 years. They were the first people that I lost that were close to me as an adult. I stayed by my grandmother’s bed for the last two weeks of her life, she could no longer eat food and just wasted away. By the way, she raised me almost as a mother at times. I now knew THIS is why I took these substances, because life and death are just so…ineffable and my own mortality was really thrown in my face when I lost my grandparents. I broke down and cried, but it felt good to cry. I was feeling a bit better after this and continued on. If this trip ended here, it would have been a good experience overall, but…

Here comes the paranoia. Poison oak is everywhere! Or is it? Do I even know what poison oak looks like? I knew some friends that got poison oak pretty bad and I didn’t want that, I was sure I touched it with my hands and then put my hands all over my body! Oh no! There actually was poison oak around, but I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with it, maybe because it could hurt me? Finally we make it back to camp and rinse off in the stream in case of poison oak. Still feeling so lethargic….and now a new paranoia…Ticks! I saw tick and they must be everywhere! I didn’t want to get some lifelong lyme disease and those little ticks could be anywhere…even in the tent, damn it. I must have really been annoying my girlfriend at this point. After these paranoia events, it amazingly got more intense and worse! (By the way I didn’t get poison oak the whole weekend, but I did find a tick on me the next day and it was no big deal, Ha!).

Feeling so lethargic all day we didn’t have energy to cook dinner so we just survived off trail mix and cliff bars somehow (not a good idea I know). Now the sun is setting and it must be about 6-7 hours into the trip, and now it starts getting really intense!? How? After so much time?! Clearly I’m not very experienced with such things. I started telling my life story to my girlfriend and having all sorts of interesting insights, but I can only talk very slowly and breathe slowly. This combination of substances is probably really bad for this reason. When I would stop talking I would all of a sudden have some mild but interesting visuals. The fractal tree branches that I can see from my tent ….I can control them! I know that makes no sense, but I could move them around any which way and make them fat or thin…weird. I could see images of zig zag lines or maybe a face in the tree shadows. It was almost a full moon so there was a lot of light. I could hardly move much or even dress myself because of the lethargy at this point.  It was really strange…I could somehow move my consciousness around outside of my body (that is an inaccurate description but I can’t explain it in words).  I could best describe this experience as the state right before you fall asleep, but permanent and I was fully conscious of it! Also my jaw was moving a bit and I thought this must be because of the hbwr.  At this point my girlfriend had gone to sleep…and somehow it had occurred to me that I had these new “mental” powers because I was dying/DEAD. I was breathing so slow and I could only talk so slow just like my grandmother when she was dying. Hell, maybe this combo CAN really kill and I was just damn lucky to survive. Yes I’m an idiot for taking these substances together I know! I felt like that cop on the internet that ate some drugs and called 911 to say that time is moving really really slowly and he thinks he is dead. I bet he ate what I ate! What if the only reason he lived is because they pumped his stomach! Awful thoughts to have far way in the woods.  I know this was a stupid thing to do, please learn from my experience. I used to think that the cop story was really funny, but now I feel compassion for him. Interestingly I wasn’t terrified or afraid of death (as I would normally be), but it was like I was blending in with my surroundings/fading away. Then I couldn’t feel my pulse (because I can never find it anyway) and I had to keep waking up my girlfriend to tell me that I was alive. This was not pleasant at all, but not as terrifying as it sounds. I didn’t mind if I faded into whatever this universe is, but I would just feel really bad for dying out here and having my girlfriend and family deal with it.

I then decided that worrying about death is stupid and I was just going to think about something positive (sex actually), shallow perhaps I know. All of a sudden, maybe I willed myself out of it or it started to wear off, but I was feeling much better. I still couldn’t sleep most of the night with all the animal noises being so loud and interesting to me.  I did sleep a little and woke the next day to be pretty much sober, but with some afterglow effects maybe. Right now as I write this I’m feeling 100% sober and totally back to normal. Having had a “near death” experience, I can understand people’s suffering a little more now. I know all I want to do with my life is to help people, help them enjoy their precious life and ease their suffering. I'm really going to put effort towards doing this now, too. There were some more insights I had, but wow this post is way too long.  In conclusion, I had some great spiritual experiences, but did I almost kill myself? MAYBE!?! Would I ever do it again HELL NO!  

By the way what do you think really happened to me?  Did the san pedro do something at all? Was there some small amount of DMT in the san pedro and I had a mild DMT trip? Was this all just HBWR and Syrian rue? I have no idea.

One final comment: a lesson I’ve learned is that it is usually not in your best interest to say or for that matter write anything that isn’t both truthful AND helpful.