Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 14:17:04 -0600
From: Thomas Ray <tray>
To: shura@netcom.com
Subject: some questions
Cc: tray@nhn.ou.edu

Sasha:

I am writing to ask your help with a report that I must complete by
March 25.  I have received a grant of five million yen from the
Human Information Sciences Laboratory (HIS) in Kyoto, for a seven-week project
titled: "Investigation of Bioinformatic Approach to the Human Mind"...

Effectively, the report amounts to a proposal for future research,
which HIS wants to fund.  I plan to propose a study of phenethylamine
mechanisms of action.  The central motivation for the study is to
understand how different materials produce qualitatively different
effects, and from this knowledge to develop an understanding of the
architecture of the human mind.  To make my case for the validity of
this approach, I present evidence that different materials have
different effects.  To make this understandable, I am preparing a
simple list of distinctive materials and their effects:

MDMA		empathy, insight
DOET		cognitive creativity
2C-E		fantasy
2C-B		gustatory, tactile, sexual experience
Aleph		inflation, paranoia, selfishness
TMA		anger, hostility, megalomania
????		aesthetic sensibility
????		satori, oceanic experience

I want to ask you to help me in the preparation of this list.  I have
the following specific questions:

    1)	The Japanese have a special interest in the oceanic experience,
which they call satori.  I would like to include satori in the list, so
could you help me to associate a material with it?  I realize that there
is probably no material that reliably produces oceanic experience, but
what material(s) do you associate with the oceanic experience?  If you
wanted to help someone to have the oceanic experience, what material(s)
would you think of?

    2)	Effectively, I want to ask the same question about the deep
appreciation of beauty that often occurs, the aesthetic sensibility.
What material(s) do you associate with the deep appreciation of beauty?
If you wanted to help someone to experience the deep appreciation of
beauty, what material(s) would you think of?

    3)	At this point my list is very short.  I would like to lengthen it
quite a bit.  Nobody knows the diversity of the phenethylamines like you.
Could you add to the list for me?

    4)	Please share with me, any thoughts you have about both the specific
list that I show above, and the whole concept of such a list (the concept
that specific experiences are associated with specific materials).

Thank you very much for your time.

Tom Ray


Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 01:25:14 -0800 (PST)
From: "Alexander T. Shulgin" <shura@well.com>
To: tray@nhn.ou.edu
Subject: phenethylamines


Hi Tom:

Congratulations on getting a nicely funded grant from the HIS in 
Kyoto.  The "Bioinformatic Approach to the Human Mind" sounds 
like quite a topic, but it has the feel of something that you 
would be well qualified to do.

...  

Thanks for confirming on the phone that the grant you are going 
for should be on the phenethylamines -- this excludes some of the 
areas that are unique to the tryptamines.  You had sent the 
following outline:

     MDMA		empathy, insight
     DOET		cognitive creativity
     2C-E		fantasy
     2C-B		gustatory, tactile, sexual experience
     Aleph		inflation, paranoia, selfishness
     TMA		anger, hostility, megalomania
     ????		aesthetic sensibility
     ????		satori, oceanic experience

The MDMA entries are excellent.  An interesting added detail is 
that it is not a psychedelic but almost more of a stimulant.  The 
energy is there, the total recall of the friendly personal 
interaction not only with another person, but also with the inner 
person (the unconscious) with which there is rarely easy 
communication.  This is its value in psychotherapy.  But no 
visual goings-on, no sensory distortions.

With DOET, I don't recall the creativity thing...  An unusual 
property is its extremely long duration, very much like the halide 
counterparts DOB and DOI.  

With 2C-E, yes, there is fantasy, and retrospection and, to a 
certain degree, the pace of the mental synthesis is taken over 
by the drug.  With LSD, you are bombarded with serious, 
important, personal questions, and you can wallow around with 
them.  With 2C-E, you aren't given question #6 until you have 
answered question #5.  There is no social interacting.  Stay by 
yourself, address the questions as they come and, maybe sometime 
later, you may be allowed to have dinner and talk to others.

2C-B is right on the money.  Tactile, sexual, touchy and feely.  
A remarkable compound to include with this one is the iodine 
counterpart 2C-I.  It is a pretty much even split -- about half 
of the experimenters prefer 2C-I to 2C-B, and half the other way 
about.  Be aware that 2C-I has recently become commercially 
available (largely underground) in Japan, but they do not allow 
any exportation...

Let me take the TMA before the ALEPH, as there are multiple 
things with the latter.  TMA did indeed have the overlay of 
hostility, and some of the early subjects (largely interviewed by 
Claudio Naranjo) were rather aggressive and somewhat angry under 
its influence.  Such a total difference from the warm and 
peaceful homologue, mescaline.

With ALEPH, there are two of them that deserve inclusion in your 
grant, but they are very different.  

Let me zip back to your comments regarding the oceanic state or, 
in the Japanese culture, the satori state.   This is what I 
relate to, as the plus four state.  You are everywhere.  Your are 
all-powerful.  The world out there is totally under your control.  
You are in control of all things in all places.  My first 
awareness of this possibility was with ALEPH-1 which is discussed 
a bit in Chapter 14 of PIHKAL.  But the mind-blowing exposure to 
this state of consciousness was with 2C-T-4 in which I described 
the total control of the world about me in Chapter 41.  Exciting, 
and frightening at the same time.  I enjoyed the experience, but 
I certainly didn't want to stay there in bliss, and began looking 
forward to getting out of it all.  It was a true pleasure to be 
aware of the beginning of the drop-off of the drug's effects.  
Ann and I repeated the experience some time later. and neither of 
us had this oceanic experience, even thought we used the same 
dosage as before.  

I had had a second satori exposure, with 2C-T-4, and some of the 
wet details of this are in Chapter 41, in PIHKAL.  Dramatic, 
exciting, and again not wanted to be repeated.

A most important drug, a phenethylamine, that is not touched upon 
in this collection, is mescaline.  This simple compound brings 
together the properties of the intense appreciation of color 
(made complex by the fine definitions of many unexpected shades 
and variations) and the love and tenderness of things that appear 
to be magically beautiful, whether they are or are not in real 
life.  If you see them that way, then they are that way 
regardless of any objective, sober disagreement.

These are my thoughts.  I hope that they are of use to you.

Sasha

Annote: I just HAVE to add to all the above -- and also referring 
to your letter, Tom -- that it must be understood that such 
events as a plus-four experience (or satori or bliss-state or 
samadhi) cannot be properly tied to ANY specific drug, or for 
that matter, to any drug at all.  And my experience of a plus-
four is different from Sasha's, and from everyone else's, of 
course.  And 2C-B is as cosmic as it is sensual.  Depends what 
you want -- and need -- from the experience.  Only one drug can 
be relied upon, in 98% of sessions, to give insight without self-
rejection, and that is MDMA.  The rule to remember is that, 
ALWAYS, the experience comes not from the drug, but from the 
person taking it...
     Blessings -- Annski  

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 09:57:17 -0600
From: Thomas Ray <tray>
To: shura@netcom.com
Subject: various
Cc: tray@nhn.ou.edu

Sasha and Ann:

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.

Sasha, I want to invite you to add tryptamines to the little list.
If the list could be significantly expanded with their inclusion,
that would motivate me to include them in my study.

Also, my list included:

     ????               aesthetic sensibility
 
Could I conclude from your comments on mescaline, that it could
replace the ?????:

> A most important drug, a phenethylamine, that is not touched upon
> in this collection, is mescaline.  This simple compound brings
> together the properties of the intense appreciation of color
> (made complex by the fine definitions of many unexpected shades
> and variations) and the love and tenderness of things that appear
> to be magically beautiful, whether they are or are not in real
> life.  If you see them that way, then they are that way
> regardless of any objective, sober disagreement.

Or, taking it another way, what one or two word description would
you attach to mescaline, in order to be able to include it in
the little list?

Also:

> With ALEPH, there are two of them that deserve inclusion in your
> grant, but they are very different.
> 
> Let me zip back to your comments regarding the oceanic state or

You never finished what you were going to say about the ALEPHs.
Which two were you referring two?  Please share your thoughts on them.

My comments on cognitive creativity with DOET are based on Snyder's
papers.  Perhaps I am making too liberal or "pop" of an interpretation,
but that is what I concluded from the papers...

Tom Ray

Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 11:26:01 -0800 (PST)
From: "Alexander T. Shulgin" <shura@well.com>
Message-Id: <200203161926.LAA23140@well.com>
To: tray@nhn.ou.edu
Subject: Alephs, etc.

Hi Tom:

You are absolutely right!  Something happened half way through my 
last letter to you (a car came? the phone rang?) and I never 
finished the Aleph thing.  

One of them is Aleph 1, which was one of my two ++++ experiences.  
You were speaking of the oceanic experience, the satori 
phenomenon, which I feel pretty much equals my ++++ definition.  
You are on top of the world.  You are in complete control of 
everything.  You are in a total bliss state and immune to 
everything external.  Beautiful and quite scary if you were able 
to be scared.  And surprisingly, rather happy to get out of it 
and have it behind you.  This was written up in Chapter 14 of 
Pihkal, on page 80.  Also, check the Chapter 41 in Pihkal, page 
428, on 2C-T-4.  This was the other ++++ experience, written out 
in some detail.

The other Aleph entry that you might be able to use in your grant 
application, is Aleph-4.  Some hints of the negative are given on 
pages 468-469 in Pihkal.  A strange, emotionless, state.  I 
remember one of my early trials where I simply sat and tried to 
reason out just why I could feel neither pleasure nor anger at 
anything or towards anyone.  The compound is a strange one, 
inconsistent in effects, and perhaps how you act out from it 
might depend on where you were, going into it.  I don't know how 
you might choose to classify it for the Japanese!

And, yes.  Mescaline would serve very well as a aesthetic 
enhancer...

Good luck with your application!

Sasha

Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 00:17:11 -0800 (PST)
From: "Alexander T. Shulgin" <shura@well.com>
Message-Id: <200203180817.AAA22784@well.com>
To: tray@nhn.ou.edu
Subject: tryptamines

Hi Tom:

This is going to be a fast communication, written pretty much off 
the top of my head.  I know you are facing a deadline, but then I 
am taking off at 7 AM tomorrow morning...  So this has to be sent 
out to you tonight.

Tryptamine.  I trust you want to include them into you grant.  
The original text was all phenethylamines, and this a whole new 
ring system.  Is it a second half?  Do you hope to integrate 
structural aspects of the PEA's and the T's into a single 
argument?  As you well know it is quite a different world, and 
knitting them to together might be a challenge.  Let me assume 
that the combination is what you want, and bounce off of you some 
things that come immediately to mind.  I will emphasize 
tryptamines that stand out with unusual properties.

DMT.  Check out Strassman's book on the spiritual molecule, for 
the intense experience his subjects had with this compound.  It 
is not orally active and it is very fact it is best experienced 
by being smoked.  Strassman did all of his by injection.

5-MeO-DMT.  This is also not orally active, but is even faster in 
onset.  It's unusual property is the speed of onset.  You take 
one hit and you are out of communication with the outside world 
almost immediately.

DPT.  This is the tryptamine that the Temple of the True Inner 
Light used in its religious ceremonies for communication with God 
(or was it Jesus?).  The Fed's couldn't prosecute them under the 
analogue law since there was no Schedule I drug that allowed 
communication with God, and so it did not have the properties of 
a Schedule I drug.

DIPT.  This is the compound that completely distorts the harmonic 
integrity of the music being listened to.  It is not the slowing 
down of everything (proportional integrity by just with lower 
pitch) but a true subtraction of cycles from a note, leading to a 
harmonic chaos.  An oboe does not sound like an oboe.  This has 
been independently confirmed by a separate study using a sine 
wave generator as the signal source and perfect pitch musicians 
and the experimental subjects.

5-MeO-DIPT.  This is the orgasm enhancer.  At full dosages, it is 
a weird and not widely acceptable psychedelic, but at mini-doses 
(such as 6 milligrams, where there is little if any mental 
effects) there is an extreme enhance of orgasm (in the male, but 
not the female).  There is no enhancement in getting there, but 
once there it is remarkable.  And if co-administered with small 
additions of Viagra (15 milligram) there is an unexpected synergy 
that reduced the needed 5-MeO-DIPT to about 4 milligrams.

4-HO-DIPT versus 4-Acetoxy-DIPT.  These two compounds should have 
been identical in their action if, and only if, the acetoxy ester 
is hydrolyzed to the free phenol before entering the brain.  But, 
the acetoxy is fasted acting, and more potent, thus it is 
reasonable that it is uptaken directly into the brain as the 
acetyl ester.  This plays a tight game with psilocybin, an ester, 
and psilocin, the free phenol, both being active.  But which is 
the actual active compound?   With psilocybin I suspect it is the 
free phenol; with 4-OH-DIPT I suspect it is the acetate ester.

5-MeO-pyr-T  Another compound totally out of order with its 
companion analogues.  Almost all of the N,N-disubstituted 
tryptamine are active up there in the area of a dozen or so 
milligrams, but this pyrrole causes intense poisoning at the 1 to 
2 milligram level.  And psychological complications also down at 
that level.  That structural twist added an unexpected property.  
The suspected psychedelic response has had a toxicity response 
superimposed upon it at a much lower level.

And do remember, if you are bringing the phenethylamines and the 
tryptamines into the same arena, that LSD is both a 
phenethylamine and a tryptamine.  All in the same molecule.  I am 
sure that there are other tryptamine weirdos, but right now I 
have to get by back-pack packed and be ready to get out of here 
at 7:AM in the morning.

I hope this helps.  No.  Maybe this will provoke, instead!

Sasha

