Here is a brief essay I have written that I would like to share on What DMT Has Taught me About Death. Here's hoping for a better 2011!

Psychedelic use has put me in direct touch with my spirituality. I was a stone-cold atheist for many decades until I found my main ally/sacrament, N,N,DMT.

One year ago I would have told you I was 100% certain that at death the individual consciousness/self completely dissolves and joins (for lack of a better term and due to my desire to keep this concise) the All-One.

These days I'm less sure. One thing psychedelics have made me directly aware of is how much humans (and I in particular) identify with our bodies. Dissociate from or loose sense of your body and the ego/self looses its' anchor . . . .

Some really crappy things happened to me a long time ago. I think about death A LOT. It comes up in almost every single psychedelic experience I have. I feel that psychedelic use, DMT use in particular, is great "practice" for death.

One thing psychedelic use has been teaching me recently is that it does NOT matter if we (our consciousness) just ends when we die or if there is some continuance in some way. It does not matter because I cannot affect it. Whatever it is, on this side of things (life) it is completely unknowable. It just IS. DMT use has crumbled all of my resistances, it has laid all of my fears wide open for vivesection-like examination. I SURRENDER!

It doesn't matter, because even best case scenario, as far as I can see, whatever of our soul/essence continues after the death of the physical entails, it is nothing like this linear experience of our blessed, conscious lives. What matters is to understand exactly what my signature says. To understand that our lives are limited and every breath of every day is an exquisite blessing. Relish every second.

It has taught me about the ultimate acceptance. Christians often say something like, "Blessed be the will of the Lord" in trying to find acceptance in their lives. I have been feeling something deeply similar lately. Come what may, I am blessed, I am thankful and I accept. When it is my time, it is my time. It has been a very interesting ride. I hope that when the ultimate test comes, tripping or not, I can go out accepting, loving and smiling.

Thank you DMT.

I would like to share a vision I had recently, when I looked at life and death, I saw the two things which we think of as quite seperate, as only one thing: as one continuous circle, and let me tell you, it was *utterly* perfect.

By the way, your signature is very inspiring.

DMT (and the other conventional agents ie LSD/psilocybin/mescaline) can certainly shed light on this sometimes disconcerting certainty we all face.I personally like the perspective gained on death/spirituality etc gained by the dissociatives especially K and of late methoxetamine.

Without getting all preacherman here, I subscribe to a monotheistic view of things and none have my experiences under any substance has caused me to change my perspective.

A number of years ago, when I was eleven and relatively depressed, I came to the conclusion that death is nothingness in every possible way. The closest psychedelic experience I've had to that was when I did three whippets in a row while blazed. I was dead. And I came back and valued life even more than before.

Excellent Pandora, excellent. That is very close to what I experience as well.

Great read brother!

I too have found DMT has opened many thoughts into the after life for myself. I'm still pretty set on the consciousness dissolving into the All-is-One point. They only uncertainty I have is whether our actions on this plane of existence affect us or are carried with us after death.

Some things I have learned that consciousness is a gift, and I thank the Universe/God/Creator etc that we all are alive and awake during this time.

A man has but one life and one death. Beyond that nothing else really matters. Use your death as a councilor and by doing so, it really put things in perspective. "If I died today...would 'X activity or label' really matter?"

Everyday is an unfolding process where death is but one step in the giant, infinite chain of consciousness.

~Peace and love brothers and sisters

KwisatzHaderach, you mean sister

And yeah pandora, very well said! I can definitely agree with you on this, that DMT seems to put us face to face with this mistery and this is deeply humbling, but ultimately we just dont know what happens and it doesnt really matter. Also I really agree with KwisatzHaderach that the notion of death can be a great ally because it helps puts our daily life in perspective. This is a very common idea in many eastern/muslim philosophy . Later I'll see if I can find a few of the sufi poems and quotes related to death that I find really special.

Anyways, thanks for sharing your views, pand, very nice topic

Nice findings, i just want to ask you about this quote below because i don't think that the view that individual consciousness ends on death & merges into the 'all one' is an atheist view at all, remember the goal of Buddhism, attaining full Buddhahood, is to stop being reborn. So having your individual consciousness end upon death is actually the highest goal of life. That's what all of Yoga/religion is really ultimately about.



I feel DMT can give us access to past incarnations, even future incarnations, so one can catch a glimpse of the bardos, the birth/rebirth realms, so you can see how individual consciousness can continue after death, but the finality is losing individual consciousness into the ocean of the Self

IMO death is the greatest contemplation next to contemplating the Self

Excellent Pandora, I too began this journey as an atheist
with no spiritual belief system to speak if other than
The beautiful things I observed in nature . My experiences with
Dmt have completely changed my view if everything .
Among many things is the idea that our spirits or essence
Of who we are continues on in some form after biological
Death .

On 8/2/2009, feeling burned out, desperate and ready to try anything to breakthrough the blocks and mid-life crisis I was mired in, I tried my DMT extraction. On 8/10/2009, I had the most profound breakthrough of my life. It was a 5-minute conversion experience. I was 41 years old. I had spent 35-38 years as a hardcore atheist. I often write something like hardcore, stone cold, brook no BS (etc), card carrying (literally!) atheist/skeptic.

The only folks MORE surprised by all of this than myself were those who knew me closely. All of us were convinced if there was ANYONE on this Earth who could not be converted by charasmatic personality, texts or drugs (so many had tried over the decades) it was me.

The above 2 paragraphs are a bit of background - that is why I had been a stone cold atheist but one year ago I was 100% positive that at death we dissolve into the All-One.

Cool, sounds like quite the transformation, makes me really happy to hear someone could have such a profound experience on DMT, i've felt its potential & had great experiences with DMT, what some would describe as a breakthrough, but i wouldn't describe any of my experiences as a breakthrough as of yet.

I highly recommend finding ways to experience 'this' sober aswell, meditation, yoga, satsang etc...

Peace

I've always been a believer in God- as far back as I can remember- almost like I was born that way. I was raised in an atheistic household, had no "churching" as a young person. My faith in God has always been a built-in part of my intuitive sense. Although I have always believed in an after-life, nothing could have prepared me for my first DMT experience where a completely alien and mind-bending reality was super-imposed over my reality as a darkened room was bathed in light!

In that moment, it felt as though God was "showing" me the verities of my spiritual essence, of my spiritual body, of the after-life and of the potentialities of the spiritual dimensions. Even though my faith in the after-life was strong, now I knew BY EXPERIENCE that it is actually the real real-deal! : )

My contribution in this discussion is to emphasize the impossibility of God taking the gift away. The gift given is not taken back. We may physically die, we may reincarnate, we may merge back into Primal Unity, but the gift of being is irretractable. Even the goal of Buddhism is not about a "snuffing-out" or loss of consciousness- it is more about release from ego-identification and a return to omniscient awareness. The Giver wants to share the boundless joy of existence with everyone- the Giver of the gift doesn't want to take it away. the Giver wishes for all the receipients of the Gift to say "thank-you". And smile. At least, in my humble opinion. : )

Pandora,
I too have been perplexed about our existance as long as I can remember. I grew up in a Church going family and kinda fell in line with it as well. Although being a bit more pragmatic than most of the "sheep" I have often wanted to stand up and yell "you can't be serious".
In recent years the history of Christianity has come to light and I realized there was a lot more than what had been written or accepted as the Bible.
Most obvious thing is that History belongs to the winners. In this case Constantine (a life long pagan) in 325AD assembled the Council of Nicea to adopt an "authorized" cannon/Bible.
As they went through the known gospels and writings what they chose became Gospel & what they tossed was declared heretical. From the most fundimental point of view it is hard to imagine that Jesus chose 12 disciples all whom wrote a gospel yet only 3 of those gospels made it to print. The other writers of the New Testament had never met nor had 1st hand knowledge of what they wrote. One of 2 things are true: Jesus was an idiot and chose 9 liars out of 12. The other possibility is that the orthadoxy at the time only chose what fit into thier doctrine. My guess is the latter is true.
That being the case in my opinion, leads me to want to read whatever remains of the writings that existed in that 1st century. Most of what you read makes what we have been led to believe topsy turvy. When I read these writings, a great of light is shined upon the the things that made me want to yell "you can't really believe that".
All of the above being said, I am thinking/hoping that what is seen behind "the curtain" is a glimpse of what exists and has existed since before our birth. Maybe we have access to some memory that is otherwise unavailable?
I am going to include a link to what is known as the Apochrypha of John. It is a vision John had shortly after the death of Jesus. For me this fills in the blanks in regards to creation as well as to the nature of the creator of the "known" universe, who appears in the Old Testament as an angry & vengeful God.
There are many more writings that are equally interesting reads.
http://www.gnosis.org/na...ng-Iintroduction-SRJ.htm