Hi all,

A strongly recurring theme for me is the following pattern:

I take in a scene, whether CEV or OEV, and as I begin to divert my attention somewhere else I see something terrible happen just in that moment where I've already made the decision to look away. It is startling and upsetting, but there is nothing I can do except try to remain calm as I know that becoming agitated will cause a chain reaction of 'upset' leading to panic.

I have come away from it all with the 'moral of the story' being that we have to accept that when terrible things happen outside of our control, we have a responsibility to try to 'absorb' the pain rather than react to it violently so as to minimise the overall pain experienced. Me lashing out to distract me from seeing something horrible will disrupt others, and the chain will continue.


A couple of examples of this:

Being shown around a space while being shown things on cards, a card with something horrible on it is 'snuck' into the cards not in the rhythm of the rest of the experience creating this jarring feeling of it interrupting

Amidst OEVs where the world is filled with beings, just as I am turning my attention away one being violently attacks another



I wonder whether this is a common 'trope' of the experience - with the difficulty of grasping progression of time I imagine it is...

One aspect of the hyperspace experience is overcoming fear. Of course, there is fear that serves a purpose, but most of it is just cobweb, things we create ourselves in our minds and become entangled. So you can pause and inspect the experience. What do these visions represent and what is just smoke and mirrors?

Try to keep an open mind. Things in hyperspace are rarely appropriately stated to be what they seem, and what we think is bad there may not really be to the beings there. And it sounds like they're playing with you a little bit. It could also be highlighting a parameter in which you think and observe, ie, perhaps you tend to see things negatively through the subconscious or "peripherals" of your mind.

Learning to "be" with what makes us uncomfortable is invaluable both inside and outside the space. I personally deal with mild paranoia which has made its way into my DMT practice. But engaging, and continuing to push myself with DMT immediately translates to my "real" world experience.

One love

Blessings!

I am so interested in the discussion of what contributes reality and how to frame experiences with psychedelics and other psychoactive drugs in this context.

Voidmatrix, I inferred from your reply that you believe that experience when on dmt is influenced by sentient beings… is this the case? I don’t disbelieve this, indeed I think that there is indeed cosmic sentience that we can, potentially, interact with. I’m more inclined to agree with your other guess, that this is more a psychological tendency that I am able to observe at a very deep level.

I am really taken with the concept of fundamental ‘things’, building blocks that can be perfectly expressed no matter how they are experienced. Let’s say, for instance, that ‘love’ is a fundamental, and it always looks a certain colour, always takes a certain shape, sound, feel - any sense we have. The awareness of these building blocks is… consciousness? Anyway, the next step up from discrete archetypes is mixtures and patterns, and I am more interested in the recognition of these basic patterns than literalist interpretations of the experience. More or less the same, I suppose, as a common thread in dream analysis.

Also, philosophically I believe that if something feels ‘bad’ then we have to trust ourselves that it is bad. Without this basic ‘safety catch’, so to speak, we lose all objectivity as we can no longer trust ourselves. I have to ‘know’ that hurting myself in consensus reality is bad, or I might allow a compelling metaphor shrouded over reality to persuade me to hurt myself.

Love!

Well no. I entertain all possibilities: it could all be a byproduct of our own minds, actual contact with something external to our sense of being, a blend between the two, etc. The appearance of these entities can influence the experience as we'll tend to have some reaction which is the cause for the effect of the mental trajectory. No one knows what's going on in hyperspace, so it's best to entertain all possibilities, imo.

Also, how many times have you thought something was bad and it turned out to not be so or was the breeding ground for something good, which makes it not really bad if something good came from it?

And casting a judgement on something removes us from objectivity. So we're already not purely objective. Our interpretations are largely subjective, and the same subjective experience for large subsets of people is intersubjectivity and not objectivity; a million people can be wrong and one person can be right. Context dictates many things for us with our limited minds and senses.

Hyperspace seems to transcend many of the parameters that lead to our real-world judgments and conclusions.

Assess the presuppotions that lead to the assumptions that create your position.

One love

Edit: This post (and the thread as a whole) may illuminate more on my position and statements above.

Edit: I also slighlty misread your post, seeing "don't disagree," as "disagree." Was in a little bit of a rush

in my experience, psychedelics in general seem to have a trickster sense of humor that can come off as a little sadistic at times.

I can relate to seeing images like the 'cards' example you gave-- where your attention is intensely drawn in to something that seems really important, then the matter at hand changes in such a way that's just a little too weird, or way too weird. I've had bait and switch imagery that was down right vicious in deeper experiences and the vibe I got from the energy or intelligence I was interacting with was more or less like, "HA! I BET YOU'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE"

I think that the frequency that entheogens tune us in to just has a sense of humor that is alien beyond our comprehension. To be honest, it's something I haven't always enjoyed; but once I 'got it' that I was kind of being gamed, toyed with or tested by the frequency, entities or my own mind or whatever I REALLY started to love the sort of crazed prankster humor.

Thanks for sharing the cards experience! It took me back to a few of my own curve-ball trip memories

Void always has a good point of view on this subject. In a thread a little while ago he suggested to another member the phrase "that scares me" instead of "that's scary" definitely helps to view the experience through a neutral looking glass

*all that to say that it does get really gnarly in there sometimes! not always so easy to grin and bear it

Thank you kindly my friend. I just try to help the best I can

To add onto the trickster and gaming nature, when they play tricks on me I try to play along with them. If they got me, I respond with that sort of vibe and response that one has with a sideways grin, telling them, "I see you, I see what you're doing," while other times I concede with, "okay, you got me." It's a way of surrendering to the experience that allows us a bit more agency in the experience.

One love

I believe keeping an open mind is one virtue and learning to listen to the vibes is another and they can compliment each other. That is, if you listen to your vibes and keep an open mind, you can assess whether the vibe you got was right.

Also, getting a bad vibe is somewhat different from feeling scared. You can feel scared because of your insecurity or because someone tries to scare you on purpose. On the other hand, learning to stay calm and not giving in to the fear actually enables you to stop, sense the vibes and assess the situation.

That being said, sometimes things happen so fast in the hyperspace that you have to act on instinct. Developing a good instinct is a virtue on it's own.

A lot of wisdom in these posts! Nice to see misreading making an appearance, I'll be doing a lot of that don't worry!

I think I tend to agree that it's useful to make a distinction between something being 'bad' and something being 'scary', and that this distinction in and of itself is something that can be meditated upon; how many times removed from actually experiencing something bad do we have to be before we can comprehend it from a distance? How much do you have to risk falling into the trapdoor to confirm that it is indeed a trapdoor?!

This is really difficult stuff to articulate! I have very little philosophical education so I'm sure this is a scratchy version of something well thought out elsewhere, but if we are to define these archetypes of 'feeling', I think we can do that objectively - in that we can propose that they exist, and that bad things begat bad things/'good' things never require 'bad' things to have happened for them to exist. And, of course, I seem to innately have a sense of 'good' and 'bad' as part of my biological imperative, so I am aware that I am interfacing with these archetypes through the subjective lens of my human experience.

To clarify, the distinction process that pointy hat mentioned is more about the claims we make about the space vs ourselves, eg, instead of "X in hyperspace is bad/evil/ negative" perhaps, "X makes me feel uncomfortable, scared, etc."

A personal example: recently I came across some "dark" entities, and I jumped to conclusions about them, making internalized statements about them being nefarious, negative, etc. In the moment of doing this, they started giving me gifts and weren't actually how I judged them to be. Temperance is key

Philosophy is my background and ongoing study, so if I may be of assistance, let me know

One love

Super interesting! I think I understand what you're saying, and that you learned a lesson about prejudice and fear?

It's fascinating to me what 'ourselves' is, what 'hyperspace' is, and what 'feelings' are. It's very difficult to disengage feelings from our value judgements about them (ie being 'happy' is 'good', being 'sad' is 'bad', and the extent to which we should is a question I'm really interested in. If everything we experience is subjective but everything that leads to our experience is objective, does that mean that consciousness = experience = subjectivity?

There is a point of no return - death - that is a line that we can't readily cross to understand it from both sides. To create a system of reasoning, surely we have to have objective concepts of 'good' and 'bad' - or to disengage the words from our judgements about them, 'leads to further awareness' and 'leads to death'.

Living with depression can make this a difficult question to answer, but why aren't we all better off dead? I have (as a human) a biological imperative to stay alive. I believe this is synonymous with saying 'I have an objective to stay alive'. I think building up a system of these objectives and placing them in the 'good' pile defines what 'good' is: an objective essence that is incompatible with 'bad'.

I would love a deeper cosmic understanding of these essences, to experience (what I assume is, based on the increasing intrinsic beauty of going up in dimensions from one to four) the amplification of them in increasing dimensions.

Thank you for your offer! What am I grasping at here, philosophically? Who should I read to flesh out my ruminations?

I think it may be beneficial for you if you take a mutable understanding and perspective on the notions of good and bad, for nothing seems to be all good or all bad, which extends to ideas like the Yin Yang, where there is a little bit of Yang in Yin and a little bit of Yin in Yang. With careful observation we can also see how the notions of good and bad are generally contextual based off our goals, intents, perspectives, desires, etc, detracting the notions from anything objective (which is not to say that everything is subjective in this existence (only our experience of it)).

Death can be seen as a good thing for someone who is suffering in some manner that cannot be medically cured such as a terminal patient.

Also, for human intents and purposes, seeing as we are creatures of comparison, we need to notion of bad to recognize and appreciate good, which says more about us as beings than anything that we'd want to define as good or bad.

Even in biological terms, seeing something as unfavorable to survival is just that, and detracted from good or bad though we associate those terms with favorable and unfavorable.

To reiterate in simplest of terms as question; are the notions of good and bad as objective as we want them to be or is it a matter that boils down to context and perspective (which then precludes such notions from being able to be formally systematized)?

And don't get me wrong, when I'm dealing with a depressive wave (such as right now), there is a desire for "good." And though I'm aware it's a matter of perspective and context (as stated above), it's hard to apply given the nature of depression. And initially, I tend to view my depression as bad, but I seem to be able to help and understand a lot of people because of my experience and work with it, which then makes me see my depression as not as bad as I initially did. It can be a tool when we put the appropriate work in.

I'm just waking up, but two philosophers that I think will do you well off the top of my head will be Wittgenstein (specifically the Tractatus) and Socrates. Both of them are really good about discussing and exploring our distinctions of the world, especially the limits of our distinctions on abstractions (such as good and bad).

One love

Thank you for the suggestions

I think semantics might have led us down a different path, as abstracting words from their connotations is understandably difficult. The concepts of ideal language and natural language are threads I think I will enjoy picking at!

If nothing is all red, does red exist?

On reflection I don’t think I have phrased this overall question very well. I suppose the spirit of my question was about whether people recognise these patterns in their own experiences (as insight into how a dmt trip is experienced), but I am also interested in the extent to which this exact pattern is recognised and shared. I could hypothesise, for instance, that recognition on a deep, edge of consciousness level of these reflexive patterns is an effect of dmt - and that fundamentally these patterns manifest as the same psychological problems from person to person.

As a side note, is there something I’m not realising when it comes to layout of this forum or are we really stuck in 2004 here, i haven’t seen a website that doesn’t have some level of screen size responsiveness in years - difficult on a phone!

You can find "force mobile view" setting in your edit profile settings. That should help!

Thank you! Bit of a swings and roundabouts experience but im sure I’ll cope! The experience is taking me back to that distant pre-phone era of the internet in quite a fun nostalgic way 😂

Sometimes the wisdom is hidden in the ways of the old 😏

Yeah, I of the camp that hashing semantics is important if understanding is to be reached. And the nature of connotations and associations in language are so nuanced that I feel compelled to add lots of caveats and qualifiers.

What's interesting, we could both see the color that we'd both call red, but actually be seeing two different colors. Color is something that is relegated to subjectivity and we concede to in intersubjective matters.

One thing that McKenna noticed about DMT is that it doesn't change you; if you're nervous, you'll remain so until you learn to manage and eliminate it, unlike other drugs that will change your mental constitution.

One love

cards are a weighty allegory on the literal side of symbolic interpretation, even before you throw entheogens into the mix

playing cards have a lot to do with the basic pillars of society, looking at the suits and faces etc

tarot cards of course break down the major archetypes of the alchemical fool's journey, and that's just on the surface

then you have ID cards which policymen want you to identify as.. weird. well, don't forget you aren't your paperwork. anyone ever been ID'd by an entity? I kid.

hyperspace cards though.. I'd be interested playing games of chance, but who's got the time to learn the rules when the dealer keeps turning your chips into a pile of jewel beetles and the face cards are saying you'd be better off at the slot machines?

I think I know what you are saying here... but I think it's more accurate to say that our subjective experience of 'red' is a constituent part of an exquisite metaphor that we create for ourselves in our interpretation of an objective reality. The logic that governs that metaphor is intersubjective, though; to anything that has a broadly similar sensory reception, there will tend to be consensus about what red 'means'.

I don't think we could each describe a different colour as red, because it would not stand up to intersubjective scrutiny. I have heard something similar before as a thought experiment: can we know, considering that 'red' is a classification of wavelength and all the matter-related things that come with it, that we experience it in the same way as each other? I tend to conclude that it's unknowable, but the machinations of reality that combine to solidify red as a concept must be broadly objective, even if the human experience of it is so simplistic as to be trivial.

Peace!