So I've been a lurker around here for a couple months now, learning extraction teks, ingestion methods, exploring other people's journeys and impressions, and getting a feel for the community. I have to say I really like it here! I visit every day and can't seem to get enough... So I thought I would say hello to everyone and share an experience with you all. It wasn't my first journey into metareality, but there were some firsts about it... including my first "report." I'm not generally good at introductions or talking about myself, but I will, before sharing my night's journey, say the following:

I have struggled, I suppose, with the question "who or what am I?" for a few years. I also like to keep to myself. I always have. I described myself as a "loner" in an essay in the 3rd grade before I even knew what the word meant. I find a certain comfort in being alone. I'm sure there are reasons for that, but I won't go into them. I only bring it up because it seems critical, to me, as to why I am at this site and why I am so interested in the psychedelic experience. I thirst for insight into myself, into others, into the world around me, into the nature of reality... but I feel a certain limitation in my ability to achieve that insight through typical day-to-day life. I wake up, work, eat, sleep, exercise, read, etc. as everyone else does, but how can you see and know what "the box" is or looks like if you are always contained within it? That is kind of a lame reference to "thinking outside the box," I suppose, but really it's a cliche for a reason! If you are always task-oriented (gotta get this or that done, or do this thing at 3 this afternoon) or focused on the day-to-day things, then I think you lose track of the deeper meaning behind everything and everyone. The bigger picture becomes fuzzy as the pixels themselves engage in a sort of mutiny, distracing you. A balance amongst all levels of detail, I think, is important in order to really pick up on the magnitude and meaning of something. I long to get closer to that very personal realization of meaning, without resorting to any kind of dogma, which in my opinion seems to circumvent that personal realization in favor of a "communal" realization that seems more like self-hypnosis through repetition than a realization, even if the meaning behind the dogma were to be the ultimate truth. I am not trying to offend anyone here who may hold certain religious views. Hopefully that's understood. I don't hope to uncover "the truth" through psychedelic experience, I hope to prepare myself, through my journeys, to be open to any truth that decides to present itself to me, either through the psychedelic experience or normal waking consciousness. As I learn more and more, I truly hope that out of that will grow a comfort to expand in my own life a little, and be less of a loner. To unite with others to a greater extent and, I hope, share the joy of life!

So, that was a longer introduction than I expected to write, but, there it is. If you're still reading... maybe you'll put up with a little bit more of my rambling My experience this evening:

I had some laundry in the dryer, which was keeping me from going to bed. My roommate had just returned from his typical Sunday church activities and we talked about finishing unpacking and getting a couch and how un-holiday-ish our apartment looks without any tree or decorations or Christmas lights of any kind. Well, being sort of lazy bachelors, that's just not a big enough deal to really do anything about, but I digress. It was a nice chat, so I decided that since he was sprawled on the floor, like he is prone to do at any given time (I've found him sleeping half under his bed while looking for something), falling asleep, I would load up my GVG with a pinch of spice and see what the spirits were up to.

The experience crept up on me, and at first I was just standing there in the living room looking into our kitchen. I'm not sure why. I felt that distinct feeling of coming up, and at the time I was thinking, "this is JUST like when I stand up too fast and feel like I'm gonna blackout." I always enjoy that feeling... it's like a mini-trip in and of itself. Every point in my visual field seems to be its own point-source of light (which in physical terms isn't too far off) that I am accutely aware of, like the ultimate reality is sneakily hiding behind everything and ready to jump out and yell "BOO!" Well, I realized I wasn't going to be able to stand for much longer, so I crashed on the floor, too. It was a swimmy feeling I had, and a light on my ceiling that I glanced at was making purple copies of itself behind my eyelids and adorning various imaginary things, like what seemed to be a spider on a web or something. But then it took a Christmas-y turn! There were a few elves (not the McKenna machine elves, they were cartoonish elven impressions with green elf hats with the dangly white ball at the end) who seemed to take those copies of that purple orb and they seemed to be attaching them to things inside my mind... like my mind was a present they had opened for Christmas and they were playing around inside it. It was like they were hanging these orbs on the axons of my neurons... decorating my brain for the season It was funny to me!

Then, the images started to wind down and I resumed talking to my roommate. My voice felt full and robust and the vibrations in the floor from my vocalizations were like the vibrations in a massage chair. Relaxing and stimulating at the same time. For some reason they were very noticeable now.

It was a nice experience. Not overwhelming... seemed even a bit threshold in its nature, but very satisfying and optimistic.

I haven't smoked around anyone before, I usually do it at night before bed, or once in a while in the morning before work (that is a mind-melting time to venture into hyperspace), so I wanted to keep it fairly light. Probably a good choice. I had a really topsy-turvy experience about a week ago where my ceiling opened up into a wormhole wherein I felt like I glimpsed infinity that was adorned with neon-colored glyphs emblazoned upon geometric shapes that were spinning and grinding and colliding and mirroring themselves. I am not so sure I would want to experience that with anyone else around.

Anyway, I hope this hasn't been too dull of a read for you... if you've made it this far! I look forward to continuing to explore the Nexus and the wealth of knowledge and good spirits that seem to abound in here.

Cheers!

Welcome to the forum, sir.

Welcome to the Nexus!

welcome to the nexus.... you study the forum. much respect. i like a homework person... nice intro .. hope you find all you need.

Thanks, fellas!

Understood. Greetings friend, your introduction is most intelligent and thought provoking! I feel "dogma" wears many hats or should I say masks? Since our mortal birth, we are bombarded with many variations of dogmatic indoctrination. To a very significant degree, everything we learn from our parents and society falls into, "self-hypnosis through repetition". By such a broad definition of dogma, I imply that such perceptual understanding of reality as we are gradually trained to conceive of it, is intricately woven by the larger human collective. But is it real or imaginary?

Much of this mental conditioning is quite useful knowledge, geared towards ways to successfully navigate more reasonably on this earthly plane. Autism serves none of us, for when we find our consciousness seated in a physical body, the path towards earthly harmony is paved by integration. I personally had to learn the hard way and while it has been a life-saver on many levels, it is ultimately, as unreal as any illusion the mind can fabricate. That being said, it is very, very useful conditioning to learn to integrate... but in the process, we lose awareness of THAT which existed within our consciousness before the conditioning so solidifies individual self. :idea:

As we often find through NDE, OBE, psychedelics of deep mediation... reality is the construct of thought. Whose thought? My thought, your thought, our collective thoughts interacting? This can lead one to ponder your inquisitive statement, "who and what am I?" Any and all thoughts define our existential parameters, by creating a witness to the phenomena of all of this existential stuff we perceive.

It appears that we lock our mentality into this material dream we find our consciousnesses existing within. It is both our home and our prison, eh? Just a matter of perspective for each of us, right? So if our subjectivity undergoes a dramatic shift in awareness, one by which we access another realm of being, altogether... is it not wholly the result of a tremendous change within our mind and it's innate capacity to comprehend new levels of reality? One relative Truth supplants another relative Truth.



"The Truth" is one of those elusive ideas, which the closer we get to... the further it recedes. Again, one Truth becomes supplanted by another, within the interiors of any conceptual scenario or paradigm, thus insights are revealed through a spike in our development of concentration. By holding this degree of concentration we frequently are faced with a confrontation with The Void, wherein all that we have been programmed to recognize as solid (as in contemporary theory), a potentially formless expanse.

I feel such a pause in our contemplative investigations leads us back to ourselves. Your earlier point about "who or what I am", strikes a harmonious note to my ears and syncs with what I have found through my own practice of the core of self, seemingly, of all selves... what I believe is a pure singularity of awareness.

If I may follow up with one more idea, it would be that we are each of us, alone in the universe. Yet, behind our isolation is an interconnection which can be labeled in any number of ways. I prefer to see this interconnection as a lovely tapestry of thought-forms, whose only Truth is that there is no Truth. In other words, when the mind is stopped and conscious-awareness persists to perceive... such an awakened point in this grand infinitude is revealed as an all-pervasive and insubstantial force.

Well, this is my experience and I must therefore measure my words carefully, as such a plane of being is funneled through each individual soul and as such, may or may not be universal in it's meaning and translation. I speculate that it is a force of intent. Who can say just why said force appears to have intent? Admittedly and obviously, it is a projection of my own thought process but it FEELS so right to me. An impression that lingers...

And in the act of the saying of this idea, as you wisely suggest, such a Truth is lost in the labyrinth of subjectivity and personal semantics. No words can aptly describe this plane of being but it can be touched directly through our immersion and despite our cognition being dissolved by said "force", thus facilitating ego-death, awareness blossoms exponentially. Even when thought becomes so still as to become total emptiness.

Still, even when the fragile human ego is temporarily frozen in such an entheogenic trance state, perception abides. For myself, and I must emphasize that it is an hypothesis (like any other hypothesis, subject to interpretation), there is indeed a central hub of Universal Mind and it is through self that we are able to isolate this center and unite our individual mind and being, within the Oneness. Theoretically, mind you and it is only my opinion on the nature of existence. After all... Who or what am I?

IMO, this is one of the gifts psychedlics freely bestow to those who seek more than just endless conceptual constructs, built upon humanoid theories of chaos and random occurrence... or in direct counterpoint, a Divine interior to the multiverse we are each born of.

I have yet to find any plane of consciousness where awareness ceases looking out for thought-form, substance and a central fulcrum of self. I feel this is clearly reflected in our exploration of our own consciousnesses. Meaning, through our efforts to awaken beyond the mirage of this dream of our sentient existence, we interphase with another force seeking to perceive itself, within all self.

This is not a dogmatic declaration, as I am not really sure anything we conceive of has any Ultimate Truth to it. It is perhaps a mirror in which we gaze at ourselves? All of us in different ways? That beatific pause in the stream of our thought process. I know, I know... philosophically, reality does not exist without a witness to define it's parameters but from this side of the looking glass, a yearning for more that what meets the mind's eye is desired. So too and in IMO, even The Great Void is itching for substance, form and reality. but that is merely my impression from my internal entheogen induced voyages.

I honestly don't know why this insubstantial force initiates quantum fluctuations, nor is it important for me to believe I do. No one knows and that is perhaps one of the only Truths which survives the shift in focus, which we refer to as "tripping". I just keep gazing into the unknown mystery of life in sheer wonder. In the meantime, I enjoy discussing these ideas, however un-provable and essentially hypothetical, they indeed are.

And I would like to heartily welcome you to this esteemed fellowship.

It's true, dogma is universal, all- pervasive. We are so immersed unit that we fail to see it. A great example is our language- just ask Orwell! What words we have or don't have help define what we are able to think and perceive. I've always been impressed by how thoroughly our language avoids the realities of transcendence and inner realization- so thoroughly that we can barely talk about these subjects without sounding like wacked-out mystics. There is a huge aspect of our larger reality that language steers around almost completely. That's why it's so crucial that we have forums like this where we can collectively work out an appropriate lexicon by which to comprehend and share our experiences.

As a visual artist I am particularly interested in what we can accomplish via visual language. It's striking how meaning-rich tge visuals of the DMT experience are- when I go into these spaces, it's like everything I see is tagged with a specific linguistic intent. As many of you are no doubt aware, this stuff is fiendishly difficult to bring back verbatim and express as art- at this stage, even though there is some great visionary art out there which expresses many aspects of the experience, I think that as a whole, the journey toward a full graphic fluency of the DMT language is still in its infancy.

Terence McKenna once proposed that visionary artists get together once a year to have a conference where the latest breakthroughs in visual linguistics could be shared, discussed, re-synthesized. Such a conference us unlikely to happen for practical reasons, but much of the same intent could be realized at forums like this.