I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately... the idea occured to me one lonely night at the tail-end of a mescaline trip.
As I layed there with my eyes closed, cruising my imagination...
I began to think about ayahuasca and the jungles where the brew was originally concieved.
And then, I began to form this 'notion' based on what I've heard about ayahuasceros and they're experiences with DMT...

There was all these conceptions of the 'spirits of the ancestors' and 'beasts of the jungle'.
I've even heard about them recieving premonitions from ayahuasca about when and where to hunt the next day.
So... there was always this heavy jungle theme with them, involving animals and mother nature and things that directly reflected their life.

And so... i tried to compare these experiences to some of my own.
And of course, for the most part... there was virtually no correlation.
I mean.. there had been times here and there, where I had fallen into a vision of hands beating rhythmically on drums or swirling patterns of elder-trees stretching out towards the sky; occasional jungle-related visitations yes, but... nothing really in comparision.

Looking at this... I began to wonder...
how much does the imagination and our own accumulation of perception and experience affect our visions on ayahuasca and N,N-DMT alike?

-Can our life experiences help or hinder the DMT experience?
-Is DMT entirely random? Is it from a source that is completely unaffiliated with reality?

I dont want to take this discussion very much further, in fear that it might become too open-ended and thus, unanswerable. But let me just flip the coin for a moment.

Again, to contrast the 'old-school' devotees to this medicine vs. the modern-era westerners:
-Is it likely that ayahuasceros have visions of intricate, technological matrixes?
If they've never seen nor experienced the rising complexity of the technological-era and this 'organism' that has developed...
is it likely possible they could envision it? [like many of us have described having happened]

I could go on and on with these questions and contrasts but hopefully this is enough to see what I'm getting at here...

-Is DMT and the experiences it propagates - entirely objective, or reversely, sujectively so?
-Are our experiences fuelling the rockets that take us into hyperspace, similarly to the way dreams are secretively nibbling on reality??

I would LOVE to hear what people think.

bigmack,

Whew. Big questions.

I think that if there's any one theme that seems to run through all shamans who make use of these substances, it's that of removal from the constraints, dogmas, and restrictions of whatever society they are a part of. Like McKenna's idea of an extra-environmental, shamans are 'in the world, but not of it', capable of looking outside their own perceptions.

How far any given person takes this will vary, I think. A shaman with a society that places expectations upon him or her is going to, by necessity, have to stay somewhat connected to that place and people, including its mythology and iconography. So it's probably quite likely most of that shaman's trips will have themes which are familiar and in keeping with the mythological background.

Do I think someone who had never spent any time around high technology could have have a vision of the impossibly detailed 'alien tech' type landscapes which sometimes occur on these trips? Yes, absolutely. I don't think what's happening in these trips is 'random', but I think it implies a dimension of experience and interconnectivity that we can't yet envision. What fascinates *me* when I take Ayahuasca is how much of what I see is impossible for me to describe in any clear way, has NO analogs with anything in my experience. That suggests to me that we're dealing with something where we have no idea what the heck is going on. The very machinery that's doing the explaining is taken apart, and that's just eerie.

As to whether the experiences are objective or subjective...I think it's a hallmark of DMT that it's impossible to tell. It's become a cliche- 'The Inside is the Outside', but that's how it seems. Our very definitions of the boundary between Self and Other go out the window.

In short, it's spooky stuff, and seems just about impossible to nail down in a 'it is this, it does this' kind of way. At least to me.

Thanks for the response Thesmorphia, I forgot I had made this post!! =x
I think you rapped up alot of my questions pretty perfectly, although I'm still in debate as to how significantly different a westerner's vs. shaman's visions might be.
I like what you said about removing dogmas, constraints and assumptions - and it's something that I've always tried to follow for myself.

As far as this paragraph goes:

I thought that was just brilliantly articulated.
I know it's been stated and re-enstate time and time again on this forum - how ineffable and truly unparalled the visions of ayahuasca are...
but what I find really truly amazing is what I'm about to describe to you now...

For the longest time, I had felt as if the errieness of DMT/ayahuasca was far too great to ignore.
At times, it had taken me so far... I had felt alienated.
Even those who had shared the power of ayahuasca like I had, I felt alienated from in the incommunability of our experiences with one another.
My initial perception led me to believe that I was being prepared for some sort of 'unnerving eventuality' which was to come after life here on Earth.
So i'd go about my life slightly tormented by the idea that these 'things' I had been seeing on ayahuasca we're in fact, awaiting me after all my accumulation of apperception here in was over.
So essentially, at first it was disturbing and errie even, to know that there was this ultra-dimensional manifesto going on and reaching out to us.

But something changed over the years of using this substance - my feeling for it and of it.

My first year: I was under spell by it, deeply moved by it.
So much so that even the slightest disturbance would sprall me into a dissolution of function and character [in reality]. It was all too much for me.

My second year: I began to enjoy it. I didn't use it like I would a mushroom or mescaline. I saw a specific sophiscation and elegance in it.
The ability of ayahuasca to truly rack my bones and break me down to a cellular level was no longer a pain to me, but rather a cause.
The errie aforementioned transfused into something gorgeous - I wanted to see more and more. So I made the brew more and more.

My third year: I had one of my most trifling trips.
Almost as bad as the time I overdosed on 35 grams mhrb and 5 grams rue [first time I did ayahuasca, long story].
And this took me right back to year one, complete dissolution of character and inability to function.
But the second time around was different because I realised something.

The machinery of my mind was not entirely unable to explain the vision of ayahuasca, for it had been doing it all along... only my consciounsess couldn't.

Being disintegrated of personality... being faltered of ableness function... being robbed of my own words and thoughts...
this is what ayahuasca was telling me *I believe*. This was the one percievable communication between the barrier.
That we are all part of something greater. Something of utmost entanglement that overstands the individual.
Our personality, our thoughts, our apperception is entirely exclusive to the life we're living, and beyond that... is something exponentially more wonderous.
And so now, coming up on my fourth year, I try to be peaceful. I try not be so critical of myself, I try to be empathetic of others.

I'm not disturbed by the errieness of ayahuasca - only excited.
I'm convinced that what will come after my time here on Earth is deeply entangled with DMT...
I feel like there's a Universal Love stretching out beyond even the Universe itself.
These are what those impossibly detailed, transformation visions seemingly represent to me - like a metaphor or the epitomie even, of Love.
So as you've said... yes, the unspeakable aspect of ayahuasca has certainly spooked me... at first into a over-cautioned, disfunctional state.
but what I find truly amazing, is over the years... What it has really done is spooked me into finding a deeper affection for love.

L O V E

The answer is yes, Ayahuasqueros who have spent their whole lives in the jungle do in fact have technological visions. It's not all serpents and panthers. My theory, (speaking as someone who hasn't taken Aya) is that the jungles are so dense with life that the spiritual interchange is exceptionally potent, and if one collects their plants from the jungle, and drinks in that jungle, they will commune with that jungle. Drinking Pharmahuasca in Manhattan makes one less likely to commune with jungle spirits, I would wager.

Regarding the ultra-dimensional agenda, I'm constantly tempted to speculate on something so unfathomable. My favorite theory is taken from Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles'. The premise is that there is, in fact, a hyperdimensional (meaning 5th and upwards) realm of unbounded spiritual energy, an ecology of souls where all places are here and all time is now. A timeless world of imagination. The timelessness is a caveat, though. Nothing grows in a timeless realm. Time is the dirt in which new spirits are grown. My own smoked DMT experience was one of being uprooted, as if my nervous system were a root system, and there was a budding plant that was "Me" growing in that world. We are being grown.

I'll have more on this later.

Interesting thread... I have often wondered about my own visions and how they've been influenced by my growing up in the digital era. Did the hippies in the 60s see Milk Drop type visuals like I have, or did computer graphics add a lot to the nature of my own visuals?

On enough mushrooms, I have very pronounced South American/Aztec patterning emerging from everything I look at for more than a second. Many people do. Has this got something to do with my education and exposure to the media?

If someone familiar with technology, but who have never seen Aztec art still see it on shrooms?

Terence McKenna was an art history major, and he was able to invoke mushrooms into producing cascades of imagery that each fit within established styles/movements. He could say "Art Deco", and he'd be bombarded by sleek, rounded forms and buildings/furnishings that matched perfectly.

Then he said "surprise me", and witnessed a completely new yet completely coherent visual style. It's as if each art movement is like a frequency on an aesthetic spectrum, and you can tune your senses along a dial of stylistic algorithms.

All earthly possibilities are accounted for in the higher dimensions. Ideas are more real than things. We condense matter around ideas. The chair you build can never be 100% exactly like the perfect chair that exists in your imagination.

Earthly existence is like training wheels for godhood. We learn basic rules of cause and effect, time, space and energy. We apply those rules to help us cope with the illusion of separation. In doing this, we are perfecting our souls. Hercules is an apt metaphor. He was half man, half god, and while on Earth he lived his life and developed a "character", a set of attributes that were so pure, Hercules became a whole concept, eligible for godhood.

This is the principle of the Future Buddha, the Golden Self. Your purpose is to decide the ideal version of you, and strive toward it. Each reincarnation is an experimental session for developing desired traits and shedding undesired traits. You can break free of the cycle once you've decided who you want to be, and exhausted all possibilities in this realm. You then take your ideal Earthly self, and apply it to the transcendent realm, which allows for further development within a new set of parameters. If you were a Greek god, which principles would you embody? Imagine yourself as a mythical summation of all that you consider good, and endeavor to live those principles at all times.

On psychedelics, we can commune with those who have already gone through this process, "ancestor spirits". They are pointing the way, helping us get through the journey they themselves went through long ago.

this. all you need is love~

Respect, my friend. That was beautiful. Your words have really resonated with me. Thank you

Yeah, im definetly convinced there's some sort of contribution from consciousness when diving into hyperspace.