Section One: Introduction (What, Who, And Why?)

What is tripping?

Tripping is deliberately altering your state of consciousness for a sustained period using psychedelic drugs. But if you didnt know that, you honestly probably shouldnt be reading this.

Whats tripping for?

Achieving mystical ecstasy? Self-Discovery? Sensual Pleasure? Aesthetic enjoyment? Problem-solving? Psychic exploration? Discovering God Within? Discovering the Universe Without? Creative inspiration? Personal growth? Adventures close to home? Dissolving the Ego? Laughing it up? Changing yourself? Changing the world?

Yes. All of the above. And none, if none is your thing.

Its not for everyone

And the first thing to say is that tripping isnt for everyone, and if it isnt for you, then thats nothing to be ashamed of or upset about. There are plenty of other things to do.

If you are someone who has suffered from serious mental health issues, then it it may well not be for you. It may be just the thing for you, but you should probably only try it with help from a trained psychedelic therapist. At some point we will try to make resources available to help people who may find themselves in that situation. For now all we can safely say is that its probably best avoided, and you might want to see what information is available from fully-legal sources such as the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

How do I know its for me?

If youre reading this already then you probably have an idea. If you dont then wed recommend some classic reading on the subject of psychedelics. Perhaps read Jay Stevens book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream and Jim Fadimans The Psychedelic Explorers Guide and see if you think thats a world that you might want to be part of.

Some People Just Dont Like It

Most of the advice we will offer here we think applies to most people who might want to trip. But none of it can apply to everybody. And one phenomenon we should mention straight away is that there are certain people who just dont enjoy tripping. We have never really been able to figure out a pattern to this or seen any very convincing one in medical studies. In our experience about one person in 5 just does not get along with psychedelics and will probably only find that out by trying, and those people will normally have an experience which doesnt scar them for life, but just doesnt feel good to them.

Based on wholly anecdotal experience - we would say that of people whose first trip experience is negative, slightly more than half are people who are just never going to have a good experience tripping, while slightly under half are people whose first trip wasnt well planned, or got derailed, or were unlucky in some way. But those people will generally have a pretty good sense that it could have gone better if circumstances had been different. If you have a bad time and dont feel like youre in the second group, then we recommend leaving it alone, unless something changes.

Which Drugs?

Most of what we say here will apply to experiences using LSD or any of its ergoloid analogues, psilocybin, mescaline, and possibly also DMT at low doses. What we are talking about here is really classical psychedelic experiences using the so-called classical psychedelics, of which LSD is usually considered the most typical example. What we are not discussing so much here is shamanic type experiences such as those typical of higher doses of psilocybin or substances incorporating DMT such as ayahuasca.

It is certainly true that there is not a clear distinction between them all. One way to think of this is to imagine a kind of continuum running from the classic cosmic bliss trip, with a decidedly Hindu or Buddhist character to it, associated with the golden age of LSD in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and the more spirit journey type of trip associated with indigenous Amazonian DMT practices. Half way along this continuum, one finds the traditional practices of central American peoples, using peyote and psilocybin.

To explain a little more what we mean here:

At the cosmic bliss end of the spectrum, the tripper experiences a sense of oneness with the universe, feel both calm and ecstatic at the same time. They probably only get this feeling for occasional moments, in between other feelings and perceptions, unless they are very practiced at sustaining it.

On the spirit journey, they have more profound hallucinations and more of a sense that they are communicating with other beings and entities - deities, machine elves the great mushroom spirit, or whatever.

There is no clear-cut rule about the use or effects of certain drugs here. But we will say that this handbook is mainly for users of classical psychedelics (psilocybin, LSD, mescaline), because in fact there is still relatively little in the way of good information available about how to use those drugs, and what is available is real old, - whereas there is now a wealth of up to date information available on shamanic practice, online and offline.

We will say that we would always recommend users to seek out high-purity substances. For example, low-purity LSD can produce rather unpleasant physical side effects, in particular, which are not dangerous, but can detract from a trip.

How Much?

Dosage is always tricky. Lets use LSD as an example, but you can apply the same principles to any substance, although the amounts will be different.

The classic psychedelic dose has been considered to be around 250 micrograms of LSD or equivalent ever since the 1950s. This was partly because thats how much Hofmann took on his first trip. But Hofmann himself came to consider this an overdose, and later recommended 175ug as the ideal dose.

Body weight makes a difference as it does with any drug. Some people feel that 100ug of LSD is more than enough. Others dont feel theye really got there on less than 400.

Some people think its better for your first trip to be on a lower dose, because if it all goes wrong then it will be less extreme. Others think that lowering the dose doesnt do anything to prevent bad experiences and is more likely to lead to a frustrating experience as the subject finds themselves not quite getting it because the dose is too low.

Honestly there in no right or wrong answer, but all other things being equal, most experienced trippers would probably recommend just going for it with a dose of around 250 for a person of average adult male weight, adjusted somewhat for body size. Be careful - different people seem to be more sensitive than others irrespective of body size. But all other things being equal, across a population, body size will affect sensitivity as it does to any drug. Based on our experience wed probably say that a very small framed woman will only need about 150 ug to get the same effect as a an average sized man with 250ug, and a very large framed man will need maybe 300ug to get the same effect. But really you just have to start somewhere and play around with it until you find your perfect dose.

As we say, these actual amounts would only apply to LSD. To figure out the equivalent amounts for other drugs, look up dosage information on a website such as Erowid. But as a very rough rule of thumb, let 250ug LSD = 2.5g of dried psilocybin cubensis mushrooms.

Tripping Should be Fun

Tripping isnt for just one thing, but whatever its for, it should be fun, or there isnt much point.

The first thing anybody figured out that tripping could be for, was experiencing a kind of mystical rapture. When the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD in the 1940s, and accidentally dosed himself with 250 micrograms, most of the experience was pretty scary to him. But the good part, that made him want to explore this substances possibilities further, was the sense of cosmic bliss that he enjoyed, once he calmed down a bit.

We will be talking a lot here - A LOT - about mystical raptures of different kinds and what they might all mean. But not quite yet.

Now, if what you want is to experience is mystical rapture, blissful union with the cosmos, then tripping can surely deliver that. But yoga and meditation will deliver it more reliably, efficiently and permanently. But to get there that way, you need to train pretty much every day for a couple of years at least. Acid will get you there now, if you use it right, and it will get all your friends there too without them all having had to spend two years training as well. Like the Beatles sang: Show me that Im everywhere, and get me home for tea. Which overall just makes it more fun - at least in the short term.

Another use for tripping, dating back to the 50s, is as a kind of therapeutic or diagnostic practice. We will talk a lot more about that too. Tripping can be profoundly useful and very powerfully used in these ways. But for now we would simply like to point out again that there are other kinds of therapy and other ways of diagnosing problems. They are generally less fun than a good trip and less unpleasant than a bad one. So if youre going to use tripping for one or more of those purposes, then it should be fun too - or else there really isnt much point (and it probably wont be effective). There are people who endure grueling, difficult trips which are not fun at all because they think its somehow good for them. We are skeptical that this has much value. If you dont enjoy it, its probably not a good idea to do it.

And with or without the pursuit of mystical rapture, tripping can make a walk in the park, a camping trip, a day at the beach or a day lounging around listening to music all just much more fun than they otherwise would have been. In fact it can be all of the above at the same time. It can also make them exciting, and scary, and profound and instructive and enlightening and joyous and unnerving all by turns. And that is all part of the fun.

We dont say all this about how it should be fun in order to trivialize the experience. Not at all. Fun is good. Yoga is fun. Climbing mountains is fun. Theoretical physics is fun. Coding is fun. Construction work can be fun. Lots of things can be both difficult and rewarding and life-changing and life-affirming and still be a lot of fun.

Fun doesnt have to mean silly, although it probably has to mean that silliness cant be forbidden. Every experienced tripper knows what its like to be sitting under the bodhi tree one moment, then cracking up at some funny thing your friend said the next. And thats all part of the fun.

Thats why the overriding purpose of this handbook will simply be to help folks enjoy their tripping. Well be delving into the deeper mysteries of higher consciousness - dont you worry about that. But the one thing we can say for sure about tripping that we think always applies is - if its working, then it makes delving into the mysteries of higher consciousness hella fun. And thats why we love it.

Get Woke

All that being said - there are also other ways to have fun that dont involve the deliberate dissolution of your whole sense of self for a day. So why do it?

In the 60s and 70s it was often said that psychedelics promoted higher consciousness. We think this is true. They dont necessarily produce higher consciousness. But they do promote it. That much we will say we truly believe. But what does anyone even mean by higher consciousness.

This phrase can be used in a few different contexts. But actually, it pretty much always ends up meaning the same thing.

In a classic mystical sense, it can mean waking up to the higher reality of existence, which generally means becoming aware of the fact that you are part of the great continuum of existence, made of the same stuff as the stars and breathing the same oxygen as the water of the deep blue oceans.

In term of relations with other people, this means becoming aware that it is your relationships which others that always make you who you are, and that you are related in some way to everyone at every moment, even if the ways in which you might be connected keep changing.

In terms of politics, it means becoming aware, in a sense that you might have known before, but never quite felt (or possibly the other way around), that the systems of oppression that keep us all down, through poverty, racism, misogyny, prejudice, militarism and general alienation, all work to try to keep us constantly fixating on ourselves as individual selves or as part of tribal groups, ignoring the ways we are all dependent on each other, and are all always changing. It means realizing on some level that the fact that we are all dependent on each other is a great thing. Its the only source of any real power to make the world the way we want it that any of us will ever have.

And that this isnt a drag - its a fact to celebrate and to be ecstatically happy about. Were not alone.

To actually do anything in the world we always need other people. So needing other people isnt something to be afraid of. We live in a world today that often tries to make us afraid of that. Overcoming that feeling that your need for other people is a kind of weakness and a source of fear can be one of the most liberating and empowering results of good psychedelic experiences.

Enlightenment means waking up. Perhaps the greatest power of psychedelics is the way they allow us to experience directly the fact that waking up is actually hella fun, that getting woke is both the biggest thrill and the only path to inner peace, that raising our consciousness is not a chore but the greatest joy there is.

The Spiritual Path and the Psychedelic Helicopter

Another important use that many many people have found for psychedelics, is to help them along a spiritual path which will not be limited to just playing around with psychedelics. As the earliest modern experimenters with the substances quickly found, nothing is more guaranteed to help you have a good trip than developing some prior expertise in meditation, yoga or similar energetic exercise (such as chi-kung). Right from the start, it was obvious to psychedelic pioneers that what the drugs did was to induce a psychological state somehow similar to the states described by mystics in many different traditions, but that it also produced profound psychological effects very quickly, which could be much easier to handle if the subject already had acquired some training in techniques drawn from those traditions. Thats all still true.

One very common experience for trippers is to feel that a good trip has given them an intense, temporary experience of a state of consciousness which years of meditation, yoga or other spiritual practice might also give them in a longer-lashing and more profound way. Many find this to be a great help in inspiring them to pursue such a path, when it might otherwise seem grueling and potentially pointless. As someone once put it - psychedelics can show you the prizes that wait for you along your spiritual path.

Alan Watts famously said about this relationship between psychedelics and spiritual practice - when you get the message, hang up the phone. By this he meant that there was no point dwelling for long in the zone of psychedelic play - once youve let the drugs show you the prizes - get on your way on that path to true enlightenment.

The Black Panthers reputedly had their own version of this advice: keep taking LSD until you achieve revolutionary consciousness - then stop.

Thats certainly good advice for many seekers. But others have found that psychedelics remain a useful tool for a very long way along their path, inspiring them regularly to keep going, and helping to diagnose problems as they arise.

As someone else once put it, a good acid trip can put you high up on the mountain, but its up to you to decide if you want to walk down into the valley below.

What this means is - psychedelics can help you see what an enlightened state of consciousness feels like, temporarily, but its up to you to decide if you want to take up some spiritual practice that will help you experience those states in more controlled and permanent ways.

Perhaps a more strictly accurate metaphor would be to say that a good trip will fly you up to the top of the mountain in a helicopter, let you spend the day picnicking there, and fly you back down again - but if you want to build a little home up there, you have to make the hike yourself on foot. But you can keep taking the psychedelic helicopter up and down the mountain as often as you need to, if it helps you figure out the best route to hike, get a sense of the territory, and avoid coming obstacles. You can even keep using the helicopter once youre on your hike- it will drop you back at the point from which it collected you, and as long as you find it useful to be able to scout out the next bit of the path, you can use it as many times as you like. And you may get to the point where you really dont need at all - but taking a little flight now and again might still be fun.

The Body and the Mind

Most discussions of psychedelic experience refer to it more or less entirely as a psychological experience. But every tripper knows that the experience is physical as well as mental. Psychedelics produce body high (good) and body loads (not so good) - they never affect the mental state only.

In fact we can go much further than this. The fact that psychedelics work at all shows that the body and mind are not separate entities, but part of the same complex bundle of experiences. The brain is consciousness. The nervous system is suffering and bliss and everything in between.

How exactly to understand the relationships between physiology and consciousness? This remains one of the great scientific mysteries of our age. Neuroscience is only in its infancy when it comes to really addressing this question. Indian, Tibetan and Chinese traditions have a complex set of models of internal energy current flowing through the body which tries to explain it. These models may or may not have any real scientific validity, but they can provide very very useful maps of this territory for trippers. In future additions to this handbook we will examine all of these approaches and others in much more detail.

Psychedelics can make you acutely aware of your body, in good and bad ways. This can be useful when diagnosing when something about your physiology is causing you discomfort in way which you may not have been conscious of. It can by joyful as you realize that just this lump of flesh that is you, is capable of experiencing transcendent bliss, simply by dropping its guard against the rest of the cosmic flow. It can also be kind of distracting if it gets out of hand. In practical terms the main thing to remember is that you will have a better trip the more physically relaxed and comfortable you are - and this is an absolutely cardinal rule of tripping to which there are no exceptions.

Experienced trippers can learn to deal with physically uncomfortable situations - tuning out the tight uncomfortable sensations as your cold wet jeans stick to your legs and constrict your waist, as your empty stomach rumbles while the wind and rain lash your face, by tuning into just how beautiful that tree is, even in the storm. But in general, physical discomfort is always best avoided while tripping.

In fact just keeping that golden rule in mind can be very useful in guiding a successful trip.