now we're talkin

It has reinforced mine. I got into eastern nondual spirituality when I was a teen trying to make sense of the LSD experience. Since then its all I can find that accounts for most pyschedelic experiences. Think Ram Dass "Be Here Now"!

I think it's funny the way neuroscientists often try to explain how psychedelics work in terms of the visual effects. They focus on the fractals and other geometry. But to me, the interesting thing about DMT is not fractals (not sure I've seen any), but rather the apparent ability to see everything in the universe at once. This just seems like more than what our brains are evolved to be able to do. I mean it seems like it would take a vastly superior brain to see in this way. This, plus the psychic healings demonstrated by qi gong masters (in double blind studies: http://www.qigongresearchsociety.com/), shamans and even people on the nexus like Antrocles, and maybe even myself recently, are starting to convince me that we truly are much more than what we can imagine. But there will always remain some bit of doubt, at least while I'm sober.

Things like DMT have a way of showing us our untapped potential. We are capable of far more than we can conceive.

To be honest, DMT and psilocybin made me realize that religion is relevant to me only as far as I wish to dance around blindly in a closed system, prefabricated box reality precribed to me by some other monkey who in reality, doesnt know shit. Why would I want to do that? Religion is for the blind. I would rather see and make my own decisions.

my feels exactly.

^^Me too.

ditto

Religion is a tool....I want to be free.

however, spice has shown me that what my 5 senses transmit to my brain is only PART of the "truth"...the rest is for me to discover.

Manifested, unmanifested, we are all one.

Religion is a crutch

necessary at first but useless when you learn how to walk

and when you learn to fly, those people selling crutches can go home

I love religion it makes me lol.

I'm a bit late to the party but I want to thank everyone for their stories and perspectives. It's been an interesting read.



1992 - Care to expand on this? I take it you've been atheist for a while? What did it confirm/provide for you?
Mister - I'm curious about your opposite experience. What took you from atheism to something more divine? What level of divinity are we talking about?



I'm curious if you could expand on this. Is it just a general sense of knowing that there's more to it than we see or is it something very specific in relation to divinity?


As for my story: I haven't had a chance to experience DMT yet (finishing up my extraction now), but I've had several experiences with mushrooms that have changed my perspective. While I was already on a path of giving up my notions of understanding reality as well as I had convinced myself of, I had a similar experience as Eden in the sense that I was put on a fast track to realizing my ignorance. I'm still an atheist, but I'm much more open to question my materialist perspective. I'm under the impression DMT will continue this trend.

Safe travels everyone.

Bump.


I've been curious about this topic lately.


has DMT/psychedelic experiences changed your perception on religion/atheism?

What I've found is that psychedelics, even strong ones like ayahuasca, tend to break down barriers in the mind, but they don't usually break the ultimate barrier, which is the identity illusion...

For example, it can break down the belief that "I am this body/mind", and then what follows is something like "I AM" (universe, all, God, whatever). The basic sense of existence as something apart from the web of conditions, you see, remains unchallenged.

That which we should be taught in kindergarten (dependent origination of everything, including awareness), we are not, and so it becomes cemented in our minds that we truly exist apart from reality (though that's obviously not how we frame it in our own ignorant minds).

As I awoke from my preteen years and developed true self awareness and a bit of understanding of human flaws as well as my place in the world, I gravitated toward atheism. A good amount of this was my disgust toward religiosity that I had been steeped in my entire childhood.

At 20, I consumed shrooms (3-4g) and had an unintentional but profound spiritual moment where I had a connection with the universe and many truths were shown to me. This was my first psychedelic experience and it's been a pretty wild ride over the next 20 years with all sorts of ethnobotanicals, RCs, LSD, DMT, etc. My initial trip on shrooms convinced me to change paths from atheism to pantheism. My belief became that the universe is a living god that I am an integral part of just as is every other being and inanimate object.

Fast forward to about 16 years ago. I tried about 200mg of DPT insufflated. I was shown what appeared to be a waiting room for the afterlife or whatever it is that succeeds life. This sort of cemented my beliefs and brought a lot of curiosity about DMT.

Now, fast forward to about 13 years ago. I came across "The Students Guide to DMT Extraction".
I had a fairly good understanding of chemistry, so bought some MHRB and successfully pulled some orange goo which I mixed with some parsley and blasted off. I was shown countless images of religious iconography. I was being shown how these things (belief systems) start and where they inevitably lead. It was an embodiment of the phrase, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The temptation was to pick one and follow but my guide in hyperspace repeatedly warned me that by following, I'm relinquishing part of what makes me me. My individuality was being threatened by the specter of convenience and comfort. This didn't really change my beliefs, but that's because I was yet to fully understand it.

Then, to last summer. I went to Peru to partake in a series of traditional Ayahuasca ceremonies. I always had this reverence for "religions" that used entheogens as the source of their spirituality. Somehow I believed that they were better since they figuratively went straight to the source. Boy was I wrong! My first ceremony brought back many of those feelings of disgust toward religion that I experienced as a preteen. It was a pretty large dose and it was very difficult for me to process what I was feeling, but it took me to some very dark places. In my head, I was dying and so was everyone else around me.

For the second ceremony, I took 1/4 of the dose that I took on the first night. I was still in a significant trip, but had enough clarity to process what was going on around me and my own feelings. This clarity allowed me to better decipher the previous ceremony. I was so disgusted with the whole ordeal that I was seething with hate. The icaros (sounded like a dying animal), the mapacho (acrid tobacco smoke), the sounds of vomiting all around me, and all the dogma and ritual that went into the ordeal brought me back to that preteen moment when I stood up and walked out of church.

I had a lot of internal conflict going on and had a few moments where I was ready to revert back to atheism and follow nothing deeper than the scientific method.

Over the following months as I was able to integrate my Ayahuasca experiences, my first DMT expereience kept haunting me until I realized that I had understood it on a mechanistic level but didn't fully take the message to heart.

In the end, I still embrace a pantheistic view of the universe, but now approach it from a more pragmatic perspective and take it with a healthy dose of agnosticism. I feel what I feel but the bottom line is that I don't know and I don't think anyone else does either.

more less DMT endogenously = all religious prophets etc, its how they got what they got.

so dont bother sweating some monk who sat in cave for weeks, when he could smoked DMT and trained there .

any avg joe can get the same stuff all those prophets, etc got they just have to look for it on DMT .

That doesn't explain the vast difference in what Buddha "got" vs. what Ramana Maharshi got, vs Jesus vs Muhammad, etc. What I said before stands... psychedelics, especially powerful ones like ayahuasca, can break down barriers and allow us to see that which our view allows. If we are bound up in self-view, we will see an expanded self, or God, or some combination of the two. If we already see thru identity intellectually as a total fabrication, a psychedelic can show Nibbana (no witness, no background awareness, just everything on its own, self-known, perfect, fluid, timeless, empty, etc.)

In my own experience, countless ego deaths with ayahuasca produced universal mind experiences, but once a friend explained to me that everything, including awareness, was dependent on conditions, a few hours of sober meditation at bedtime led to a glimpse of Nibbana that dwarfed all my prized ayahuasca ego death experiences. Since then, no desire for psychedelics. The path to release from identity (hence rebirth) is clear now.





The monk doesn't sit in a cave for weeks in order to have a psychedelic experience unless he's a very foolish monk.

The goal is to permanently overcome the identity illusion. First, you have to understand how the illusion operates. It doesn't require any special magical experience, just some logical analysis, and a desire for truth above all else.

At first, a psychedelic can be helpful for someone who is totally convinced that enlightenment is a fairy tale, because it shows them they didn't know jack about reality.

But most folks unfortunately get stuck there--either concluding that reality is beyond all comprehension, or that it is exactly what the psychedelic showed them. I myself got stuck for a few years after discovering ayahuasca, because I couldn't imagine that anyone could ever have gone beyond the ayahuasca Universal Mind ego death experiences. They seemed totally "ultimate." But that's only because I was dumbstruck by their luminosity and failed to logically pick them and ordinary experience apart.

Uprooting attachment to identity is only possible once you have initial intellectual understanding of no self. After that, it is a slow process, not a sexy psychedelic blast-off. For most, it will take at least a lifetime to fully let go of the illusion, depending on how entangled one already has become in this lifetime.

Your More Powerful then Siddhartha and any of these dead monks . Nice to see someone who isnt a zen Junkie or one with a PHD in Egoology . Awesome m8 congrats on your cool stuff . cya

Ps - btw i understand everything your trying to convey and also get translating it to written language has its inaccuracies .

DMT hasn't changed my religious views, but it has made me wonder... a lot.

The first time I drank ayahuasca it almost felt like it forced some sort of spirituality upon me, but it wasn't anything specific. No names of gods or goddesses came to mind, but rather just a feeling of something divine being woken up both inside of me and outside.

The inside feeling felt very connected to me, like a guardian angel of some sort and I assume that's why they call it "mother ayahuasca". It feels very nurturing and you can tell that even if you are going through hell at times this voice wishes you only well.

The outside feeling felt like some alien contact or better yet breaking through the layers of the matrix. Sadly most of the times I couldn't understand those visions and sounds as they were highly indistinguishable, but they were there and I assume this part is on ourselves to identify what they were trying to teach us.

Not everything in the ayahuasca experience is necessarily spiritual, but it seems as it is the main theme of this particular plant medicine.

That being said this all faded when I sobered up, but I can imagine that it would stick with someone enough so the idea of writing it down to preserve the knowledge would seem as the right thing to do. At the end of the trip you actually feel perfectly sober even if you still got strong visuals. The sober feeling and the seemingly genuine euphoria can convince someone that what you have just experienced isn't purely chemical based but there must be something more.

If that's what you chose to believe, that's just fine, but personally I don't. I've experimented with psychedelics maybe far too much so I learnt that even different ratios of plants in the brew produce very different effects, and that dosage has to do a lot too with how seriously you take what happened to you and this is not limited just to ayahuasca so I do sincerely think it is all chemical based. However chemicals have been proven to be able to evoke some very powerful states and by no means should that be underestimated.

I think the power of set and setting to influence how we trip and interpret the "meaning" of the trip is grossly underestimated and underappreciated.

Yes, spiritual leaders and icons in the past likely got some sort of DMT dump inadvertantly or through meditation or otherwise inadvertently ingested a psychedelic chemical, but in my experience these chemicals act more like an amplifier or antenna that connects directly into our state of mind via memories, fears, and expectations than a message in and of itself.

Whether one gets imagery of Christianity, Hinduism, or particle physics depends upon whether and how they have previously been exposed to such things. There is a good deal of overlap between one persons and anothers experience on DMT, but there is also a good deal of overlap in the human condition.

Of the many many many trips that I have taken part in, I would say that the most powerful and profound things that myself and others bring back are things that we already knew but underappreciated. There is definitely something to the feelings of connectedness and profundity, but I believe that it is a dire mistake to attach more meaning to it than, "This is how it feels." Logical fallacies are often started with a "feeling". Feelings are legitimate on their own and do not need a web of philosophy to make them legitimate. The feelings of connectedness, infinite love, empathy, transcendent light, etc., etc. should be self evident enough from the experience alone not to need a philosophical or religious arguement to make them legitimate.

I often FEEL like we are at a point in human history that we are outgrowing the confines of religious spirituality and something greater and more encompassing of the human condition needs to be targeted both to be more inclusive and to allow us greater mobility within the realm of spirituality.