I have read a lot of trip reports where beings or gods present themselves on the spice. I have also seen a person off of the "spirit molecule" saying he thought that these images were brought out because of your beliefs.

I am an Atheist and my beliefs are focused around the good of man and living by "the Golden Rule."
And I have never exprienced any beings during a trip.

The question is do you think the beliefs you have impact what you trip or do you think it is more universal?

If you haven't seen them, you haven't gone deep enough.

Try caapi+changa.

I was an atheist, now I am far from it.
I've written extensively on this topic so I'll keep this post simple.

This is a very important question.

I came here atheist and in a sense still am to the "old ways," but am not to the "new ways." It depends how we define god. If comparing one entity to another "god" means an entity which is all knowing, all powerful, all encompassing, and all good; then god certainly exists. To a baby, god is defined by it's parents; to a Christian, god is a collective social/historical cultural idea. To me through spice, god is a collection of super powerful alien cousins watching over us making sure we will become responsible members of a galactic society.


Our species is currently on a path of exponential growth. We already have godlike abilities compared to our ancestors; extrapolate this into the future, and our grand children will have similar abilities over us. Likely other species have already followed this path for a looooong time and are ethically bound to help us through it.



this has been a recent revelation to me the past few months.

While I dont believe in the traditional god of the old testament, ie. old man with a beard or "in his image" crap, I do think there is a higher intelligence at work here. I did not go into my experiences with preconceived notions of any "religious" overtones...If you havent experienced entities during a trip then you arent doing something right...lol...I often have a hard time remembering or putting my memories into words...I have seen things that the word beauty doesnt come close to describing...Thanks for throwing this question out , it should be a good thread...

Much L&G

blueskine,

Once again, your post is meaty for the jaws of my mind.

IMHO I believe the answer to your question, strictly in discussing smoked spice, is both.

I came into this as a hard-core, cynical, burned-out life-long (over 40 years) atheist, even card-carrying for awhile. A very strong belief in science, rationality and what I called direct or experiential evidence. I had never seen any of these things in any Earth-bound religion. The Universe seemed too huge and amazing to encompass anything more than a vaguely deist kind of belief system. If there was a "God" it was simply "God" because it was so much more advanced than we are ("The stuff we call physics, . . . they used to call magic." ). If it created the Universe and set the laws of physics and mathematics into motion then it did so 15 some-odd Billions of years ago and had long ago moved onto creating other and newer things/Universes.

If it existed, It was not concerned with us. Why would it be? Who are we? Clever, carnivorous, violent, ape-like beings who have only recently developed culture, existing on the outskirts of the unfashionable arm of a very run-of-the mill "spiral" galaxy, existing in an unimportant location in the overall Universe. And where did people get off thinking that this magical being was passing moral judgement on them? And would continue to do so after death?!? Pure inrrational insanity.

I also came into this as a tremendous fan of all things science fiction and several decades of actively feeding this hunger.

So I began having a lot of trips with distinctly science-fiction types of themes in them. It was really kind of neat and made me begin to think that human sub/un/consciousness was much more than we ever suspected.

But, also, early on, something outrageous happened. I still wake up every damned day and check my core self to see if it is still in place - it is and has been since August 10, 2009. My conversion day. Of all the people crawling around on this miserable little planet, who would have thought I could finally be converted to a belief in the human soul and it's ability to in some form/manner maintain a type of consciousnes after the physical death of the body.

People have tried to convert me my entire life. Oh, how they have tried, when I showed them a hint of my tortured soul. They were so well-meaning. They were so deluded. I have taken a decent quantity at high doses of various drugs in my lifetime. None of these people or substances ever touched this core atheism until DMT, not even when I saw OEV "spirits" on LSD and Salvia Divinorum trips.

I have never met Godlike beings (some sci-fi type machine things that have come close though) in hyperspace. Other than once being given a particularly nasty gift by some trickster entities, I have never sensed any kind of moral judgement there. It is beyond all of these earthly concerns. My personal conversion had to do with launching from my body so damned easily and going to a place I can only describe as mystical, All-One, beyond life, beyond death, information/synesthesia saturated. I could tell this place/experience (or something vaguely "similar" ) were what awaits us sentient (and perhaps all other life) beings after death. It was more of a feeling rather than interacting with a God(ess). I used to say I thought my left temporal lobe had been fried, but I honestly think it is so much more than that. A blessing, a healing blessing, a huge privelege and a real responsibility too.

Wow, must shut down rant. I guess my point is what you take in can easily affect the content of your trips, BUT DMT is chock full of all kinds of interesting surprises. Thus, I do believe some aspects are almost universal, it is just that different people may interpret them differently (i.e. exposure to a mystical type of experience). Hope this helps.

Peace & Love,
Pandora

Very few of the entities SWIM encounters on Spice journeys reflect the beliefs she held before the Spice. I gather, from fairly extensive readings, that a strong biological basis exists for whether one attributes personality/intelligence to experiences. Some schizophrenics attribute intention to every occurance, some autistics cannot form an implicit model of mind. Michael Persinger's research with the "God helmet" also suggests that 3/10's of the general population don't have specific types of religious experiences (Richard Dawkin's actually falls into this category).

More times than she can remember, SWIM has had experiences on journeys that suddenly made clear what a religious text referred to. Other times, she has had an experience that made no sense, and then found a text that spoke to it so perfectly.

Once she encountered Christos consciousness on mushrooms and it said things to her, almost word for word, that she would not read until two years later, in the Gnostic gospels. Was it really there? Perhaps some resonance with a future self in a similar psychedelic state could result in the information transfer.

I think that beliefs generally fail spectacularly when attempting to explain the entheogen phenomenon. Like "it" enjoys giving us the finger as often as delighting us. To quote Peter Carroll:

was raised catholic, but became atheistic/strong-agnostic at about 13, first trip saw a blue multi-armed god-like entity not unlike Shiva or Vishnu from Hindu avatars and believe me the pictures and accounts don't really do it justice, but I'm still an atheist/strong-agnostic, I respect the spiritual experience now as valid, but still see no reason to believe in any kind of theology, I couldn't really draw any conclusion from the experience, I suspect similar experiences may have led others to believe in god/s, maybe even lead some to invent belief systems around the experience.... the validity of the experience is still a difficult question to answer, but this could've been alien or plant spirit or some aspect of humanity as much as it could've been a omnipotent creator of the universe... the most interesting aspect was that I had a spiritual experience taken from a faith I knew nothing about, I mean I have no interest in Buddhism or Hinduism, it seemed like a very unlikely experience. Then again I've seen Christian angel type things on mushrooms, I suspect these are just ancient archetypes.

i feel like when cultures belief systems change and evolve into the next stage of theology or religious interpretation, thats the social software that had been downloaded since birth and thats what we have to relate a spiritual experience to. like when native americans and indigenous tribes have spiritual experiences they relate them to the spirits of the plants, skies, and animals. when one of us who had a christian experience we relate it to what we learned in the bible. however after using psychedelics i came to understand that all the stories you hear aren't necessarily true or false, but metaphorical understandings of mystical happenings. i think that folks of a purely religious persuasion, having no outside influences like we do, take it to literally, without developing that personal understanding. in essence all religions are the same, however understood differently. having some of that background hasn't influenced what happens in my trips, but allows me to see what the text said, but in a different format. a new understanding that creates my own relationship to a spiritual realm. after using DMT all of my beliefs had been thrown out the window. its hard to explain to someone what it means to me, but thats the point in religion, to develop you're own relationship.

I would say that I am a very experience person and I have never had an experience on hallucinogens where I have felt the presence of another being or spirit. I would say that on spice I felt watched or thought that there was something behind the visions, hidden.

I have tried to have the experience of another presence because, I felt that if the being is just me it would be an aspect that hasn't surfaced. That may be an acess to something I couldn't in a "normal" state of consciousness. I guess the only thing to do is take a deeper dive to the other side.

I'm an ex christian, not through childhood but from the ages of 19 till about 27. I had a major religious experience while out my nut on valium lol. I thought i had received all the answers and had sussed out what life was about. Of course i was wrong, even though an lsd experience brought me as close to the biblical god as you could get. I was the type of christian that still did drugs even though i was a firm believer in the holy trinity, i was basically living the christian ideal. I could do anything and it would be frogiven. Typical christian ideaology. I now understand that religion in the classical sense is merely a money making false report of the historyof the universe. Once i came to this conclusion and im now what you could call "a believer in life" I believe that the soul is immortal like everuything else in the universe, it cant be destroyed but can be changed into something new. I would imagine "god" being an all powerful beast that is everything, but i dont see it like the christian way anymore. Now that ive discovred dmt i shall let you all know once i breakthrough if my preconceived ideas of what immortal being would feel like are correct. Ive been as close to whatever god is a few times so im hoping dmt can get me closer to god the real god.

This is a great thread - as our dearly beloved and deeply respected Pandora says, meat for the jaws of the mind ...

I've been an acolyte of science and it's drunken uncle, science fiction, since I was a boy, growing up in a country that professed itself to be Christian while perpetrating one of the great crimes against humanity of the 20th century - apartheid. I lost faith in religion, but never lost the sense that there was more to life than this, Horatio ...

What I love about science is the great discoveries. Relativity. The Origin of Species. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. DNA. Quantum Entanglement. Jungs Archetypes. Chaos Theory. They are all counter-intuitive, perception-shifting discoveries, massive leaps in our collective consciousness.

And yet science is also often a 'confederacy of idiots', and as Max Planck (who's measure of time we are all intimately familiar with) once said, "Science progresses one funeral at a time". There are sacred cows, theories carved in stone, careers built on theses, and this structure often prevents real progress and the leaps of the imagination that only a scientific approach can deliver.

So religion failed me, and science failed me: and yet, I've delighted in science and seen first hand the amazingly transformative and healing power of faith.

The first time I went to hyperspace, it all made sense.

I was right inside the gap between faith and science, and it was wondrous, endless and structured. Is it heaven? Hell? The place we go when we die? I really don't know. But I do know it is a realm of unbounded possibility; an infinite fractal ballroom where the Impossible and the Unknown dance to the music of colour; it's a definite, coherent reality I can tune into with my psyche, when it is percolated in spice.

And it is populated by Others.

Another saffa 88?

For sure, china! Lekker!

Haha lekka lekka bru, pleased to me you china

aangename kennis, meneer ;-)) Are you in za now? I lived in P-town, jozi and cape town, but been gone for years now. Miss the read earth, man...

I think it's important to point out that atheism shouldn't be linked science in this context, a few other posts on this thread have veered into religion vs science territory, first religion and science are not mutually exclusive, it's a tired debate, but also you don't have to be a scientist to be atheist... to be an atheist is to believe in nothing in particular, you know the old argument we're all agnostic to everything, if your Christian you're effectively atheistic towards all other gods, thor, wotan, etc.

Its true that science and religion talk different languages, and of course science and faith are not mutually exclusive. But they are two approaches that many people use to try and understand the big questions, like why are here, how did this all happen and what it's all about. So I disagree that its a tired debate; just a very busy one.



I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation of atheism or agnosticism. An Atheist is someone who believe there is no god; it doesn't mean someone who believes "nothing in particular". Christians are not atheists, because they believe there is a god. That they don't believe in other interpretations of the nature or character of that god does not make them atheists. If you believe there is a god, you are not an atheist, you are a theist.

As I understand it, the term 'agnostic' describes someone who doesn't know whether there is a god or not; So I don't know what you mean by 'agnostic to everything'.

Great post Pandora. It's interesting how many people take something like Holy Communion in the Catholic Church to be their "communion" with God. I am sure the vast majority of them who engage in that sacrament feel no hint of cosmic power or universal consciousness. It is a pale and weak unification with God, even among the devout. Imagine if they ate their wafer and actually had a DMT type breakthrough. I too was an atheist, and after such intense experiences, I have shifted my question from "Is there a God?" to "There is SOMETHING there!" Unfortunately, language cannot wrap itself around deep psychedelic trips and all we can do is point and stare and exclaim, "There is something, something! Beyond that hill!" I don't know what it is, but it seems just as real as reality and it transcends everything.

You will not be taken to places you're not ready to see. And you will not meet entities you're not ready to meet. That's my understanding after 16 years of using psychedelics. I think most atheist are not ready to meet/experience/realize this thing some call God.
Just my 2¢.

Christian's are not atheists.... yeah. You kinda took my words out of context there, you realise that sentence kept on going??.

I was referring to a popular point made by atheist writer Richard Dawkins, where he talks about the use of the terms atheist and agnostic. He talks about how Christians know exactly what it's like to be non-believers in all other gods, but that just like so called 'atheists' they are really strictly agnostic. He's objecting to the use of the word athesist, because there is no special word for not believing in fairies or not believing in santa claus, etc.. it's a common line in atheist literature, thor, wotan, flying spaghetti monster. That's what I was talking about but yeah, I'd rather not write about stuff outside the thread subject...

I already know what an atheist is and what agnostic means, but thanks for demystifying it for me!