r/RationalPsychonaut

For those who don’t know, Soma is the sacred drink passed down from ancient Indian texts like the Rigveda. It was offered to the gods and described as giving whoever drank it immense strength, euphoria, inspiration, and even immortality. Because of that, many researchers and people interested in the occult have long speculated that Soma was a ritual drink made from some psychoactive plant.

The most famous theory has been Amanita muscaria, but it doesn’t really fit. The Vedic texts talk about pressing the stalks to extract the juice and describe the stems, which doesn’t match a mushroom at all.

Lots of other candidates have come up over the years, like Sarcostemma, but the big problem was that they didn’t produce a strong enough psychoactive effect to match the descriptions.

But after reading Stanislav Grof’s books, I think I’ve finally found the most convincing candidate: Ipomoea asarifolia, a type of morning glory that contains a decent amount of LSA, which is very similar to LSD.

It’s a climbing vine with strong psychoactive properties. It grows in India, and some people even suggest it might be native to southern India.

I believe the reason this plant has never been seriously considered as Soma before is that discussions about LSA have always focused only on the seeds. But recent studies show that LSA and related compounds are also accumulated in the stems, roots, and other parts of the plant. In communities like r/LSA, a lot of people say that using the sprout tek (germinating the seeds) makes the effects noticeably stronger.

If this is true, it’s honestly mind blowing. LSA has been right under our noses the whole time, yet it only became properly known after LSD was discovered. Such a weird twist.

Albert Hofmann’s story is really interesting too. After he discovered LSD, he later identified the lysergic acid amides in the Mexican Ololiuqui seeds. To him, it felt like coming full circle. LSD wasn’t some completely new synthetic monster. It was more like a modern chemical version of something ancient. His research on Ololiuqui was a return from LSD back to the old sacred plants.

One more thing (I can’t personally guarantee this is true, but it’s interesting): the famous guru Muktananda apparently said he knew what Soma really was, and that it was a climbing vine. Stanislav Grof mentions this story but doesn’t name the exact plant. He just subtly hints by saying something like “Ololiuqui type morning glories are also vines.”

Firstly, I appreciate anyone who takes the time to share their experience. I’m not claiming to know anything. I’m just explaining my thought process so you understand where I’m coming from. This isn’t a CMV and I’m not arguing the aphorism is undue. I’m skeptical of how it’s used, how it shaped my own interpretations, and I want clarity so I don’t overapply it.

I see this aphorism plastered everywhere. I don't know what it means apart from, "stop taking psychedelics, you don't need them anymore". The question is in how that inference was made in the first place.

The only time it ever made sense to me was after one particular trip, and like many trips, it had a lot of different parts and different experiences, many of which were ontologically unsettling and unpleasant, but one of the "lessons" was: the search never ends, and there’s no ultimate truth waiting at the end of it

I wrote the story in this comment if you're curious.

I stayed away from shrooms for 10 months because I thought I "got the message", so I "hung up the phone". The message I interpreted was something like "stop taking mushrooms, there are no answers to be found, only fear to be felt". This was not my first "bad trip", nor was it even close to my worst (for reference, my worst one was thinking I had to kill myself to end the simulation and its suffering, but when I sobered up, I just felt like, "damn, that was so powerful and my whole perspective on life has changed for the better"). I think a combination of the fear and the "there is no real end or truth" combined together to connect me to the aphorism.

Anyway, I ended up doing a low dose trip a couple weeks ago with my buddy, and that trip was really awesome, and I even had a few insights I've since integrated into my behaviour / worldview. So looking back, that whole “I got the message” thing I felt 10 months ago, now feels like total BS and it feels like I just shoehorned that aphorism onto the closest experience I had, because that aphorism is everywhere in psychedelic spaces, so it was the first thing my brain grabbed onto as an interpretive lens.

Then today, I read a brief discussion (will post it right below in italics) and it got me thinking about the super subjective, abstract nature of the aphorism and how: what if it collapses a whole spectrum of phenomenological experiences into one vague phrase? And whether the phrase is so overapplied that it becomes a template people unconsciously force themselves into?

--------

Person 1: It's like Alan Watts said about psychedelics : Once you get the message, hang up the phone.

Person 2: He was quoting Ram Das.

Person 3: Both are kind of full of themselves, Watts especially was. He had multiple failed marriages, was barely present in his kids lifes and died in his 50s from alcoholism lol, he clearly didn't get the message.

The real secret is the phone doesn't exist, you're talking to yourself. You probably shouldn't hang up unless you can stay on the call when sober, enlightenment is a journey not a destination. Anyone telling you about it has probably already forgot it. Even Jiddu Krishnamurti didn't really embody it and struggled with materialism, ego and uncontrolled lust, even though he absolutely experienced non-duality when sober, what he described as "the process" in private journals that came out after his death.

Person 2: So because Watts is a flawed messenger, we should stay on the phone even after we get the message?

Person 3: I'm saying Watts clearly didn't get the message. There is no "phone" everything you experience on psychedelics is created by your own mind. You are talking to yourself

---------

So I want to ask you guys, you who all have felt like you've "got the message and hung up the phone", what was that like? Was it an intense fear? Was it a realization the psychedelics were a crutch for you? Was it a realization you weren't integrating anything? Was it something like, "I found the cheat codes to life"? What was it? How did you make the inference that the message was to never do psyches again? I don't know. I can imagine it being so many different things and I imagine there will be a large array of different experiences that caused the inference.

Thanks to again!

An article on psychedelic horror, looking at films such as Midsommar, Mandy, Climax, and Altered States, how they depict bad trips and psychedelic cults, what other aspects of the psychedelic experience could be portrayed through the lens of horror, and if there's a risk that some of these films feed into stigma surrounding these substances.