FleeceManeLion said:

Maximum benefit is subjective. There is no singular goal everyone is trying to reach with shrooms.

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PrimeNumber said:

Let me ask a more focused question then: If I'm trying to resolve my depression, would I be better off taking microdoses or heroic doses?

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Well that's easy - it takes a serious dose to accomplish it.  Not a "heroic" dose - this is a stupid name - but enough to do a complete brain reset.  What that amount is you'll have to discover by experiment, which is the best way to find out anyway.  I've tripped a huge number of times AND I have bipolar II and it works for me every time - resets to the good part of the cycle.

So my advice is just do what you think is significant dose, see how it goes, wait a week or two, increase it a bit (twice the dose = 4 times the effect usually so use some caution), see how that goes and what it does, and so on.  You'll get the answer you want eventually.

For me a serious dose is one that brings on OEVs during the comeup.  Anything less and I'm not really satisfied.  But I'm willing to try microdosing when my new crop comes in because I've never tried it in an appropriate fashion before, and hey, maybe it really is good for something.

PrimalSoup said:

So my advice is just do what you think is significant dose, see how it goes, wait a week or two, increase it a bit (twice the dose = 4 times the effect usually so use some caution), see how that goes and what it does, and so on.  You'll get the answer you want eventually.

For me a serious dose is one that brings on OEVs during the comeup.  Anything less and I'm not really satisfied. 

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PrimeNumber said:

When you say OEVs during come up, do you mean the usual swirly ceilings and carpet, and moving wood grain, or something more fractal?

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TMckenna said:

The walls, such they may be, are crawling with geometric hallucinations

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That was for DMT but it works for mushrooms too - it's how to spot what generally develops into a fully realized trip IME. 

If my shower turns into a transdimensional portal on the comeup I just know it's gonna be fun.

If you're gonna do this you'll want to standardize your dosages.  Ideally grow them yourself and consume them fresh (or better as tea).  At the least powder dry fruits and mix thoroughly.  Otherwise variations in potency can screw up your attempts to find the best dosage...

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I'm curious whether or not this heroic dose, ego-murdering threshold must be crossed to get maximum benefit.

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I think there is probably more than one threshold you can cross on a mushroom trip. A beneficial experience which feels mystical and profound can involve crossing a threshold where you seriously begin to question your assumptions about reality, but it does not require a full-on 'ego-murdering' dose.

I think sometimes people downplay the sheer insanity of the kind of dose where you know you are headed for oblivion. I find that these doses pass through paranoid delusions on the way up to the peak (the wrath of God, alien enslavement, a complete breakdown of your belief in everyday reality) and then the gradual comedown from whatever transcendence you experience at the peak can take you through extremely manic states of grandiose delusions (I am God, I am dead, I control the universe from behind the scenes, my trip is of vital importance to save humanity).



The kind of transcendent experience you can get at the peak of these trips is something quite incredible, but it sometimes feels like a kind of sacrifice where you burn in the fires of the trip and have to die before you can come back, having fallen through the floor of whatever assumptions previously grounded your reality. You experience an illusory death and reach a viewpoint from which your life seems to be an illusion aswell.

I mean this is the kind of thing you can be up against:

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It is dose dependent. It does not vary amongst strains or names. It is one thing. You do not have to name it because it is within you.

I have been here before. It feels a lot like dying. It feels like the skin is being blasted from your bones. Except you are hallucinating the bones. There is nothing. Plains of despair and windswept misery. When you have abolished yourself. When you wake up within your misery and question your plans. When you fall asleep within yourself and have to do this to wake up. Then it becomes frightening

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I'm not sure what lesson you can draw from a trip where you 'die and become God' other than to marvel at the power of the drugs you are taking. I guess what I mean is that the core experience of some kind of mystical, universal consciousness underlying reality (which seems to be a regular feature of psychedelic trips in one form or another) can be slightly undermined if the trip surrounding it is so insane that you cannot take it seriously.

Either you shift into a Philip K Dick kind of distrust about the nature of reality, you dismiss large parts of the experience as delusional or nonsensical, or you start to wonder whether the Gods and aliens are in fact really down there....

I guess the only way to make sense of it all is from a more buddhist perspective; that you are having the illusory nature of reality powerfully demonstrated to you. From a scientific viewpoint regarding the nature of reality / consciousness, it is an equally crushing demonstration of the fallibility of naive realism.

And from a mystical standpoint... well I guess these trips leave their mark, a subtle sense of the beyond that lingers long after the drugs have worn off. You may not believe, but you know...

Aldebaran said:

I'm not sure what lesson you can draw from a trip where you 'die and become God' other than to marvel at the power of the drugs you are taking.

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Vibe_Enthusiast said:

Well from this post. I would be classified as the "entertainment" spectrum.

To each their own. There is no "right" way to do anything.

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I would point out that the people doing the research at Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London both have their subjects lay down on a comfy couch in a comfy room with eye shades, headphones with a soothing playlist, and one or two therapist trip sitters that sit by and offer support if needed.  They also report little, if any, bad trips or other incidents like HPPD, perhaps due to careful screening of participants, but perhaps because their method is one way to do it "right."

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What I was trying to gently point out is that the microdosers and the large dosers both talk about relief from depression, but I never hear that from the 1.1-4.9 gram people.

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it's undeniable that some methods of using mushrooms are more likely to be beneficial than others

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